Cold War Rhetoric: The Kept Intelligentsia

[newthinking]

October 6, 2015
Cold War Rhetoric: The Kept Intelligentsia
by Norman Pollack

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/06/cold-war-rhetoric-the-kept-intelligentsia/


Vladimir Putin at a navy parade in Severomorsk

The American propaganda machine is working overtime. Used to a supine, quiescent Russia in international politics, convinced that sanctions and lower world oil prices are successful silent mechanisms to that end, Putin’s dramatic move in the Middle East has more than ruffled American feathers, and rather, as though seemingly confirmatory signs of Russian aggression, gives the United States the opportunity it wants and has long sought: to heighten Cold War tensions and feelings as cover for its own regularization of unilateral global dominance. Syria is not about Assad, nor about ISIS, in US policy assumptions. This is 1947 all over again, Russia qua Soviet Union and Stalin, to be contained, ultimately, crushed and dismembered. Only now, Putin is seen as more than Stalin II, and rather, a formidable, intelligent adversary who must be demonized and mentally/ideologically reduced in importance, if not obliterated on sight.

To keep America strong, we invent our own devils. The most insidious word in the American lexicon is “peace,” going back to Theodore Roosevelt and the Battleship Navy, code for softness, flabbiness, easily conquered in, even then, a geopolitical paradigm of inevitable conflict in which America must win and remain on top or decline and simply go under. More than one hundred years later, nothing has appreciably changed, the mental-set fully intact, and with the Bolshevik Revolution a ready perennial target always there and in the making by which to justify a vision of unrestrained slash-and-burn US capitalism.

World War II, FDR, and the fight against fascism, was the splendid exception to the unrelenting war on socialism, and even in the midst of war the preplanned return to business as usual once the Axis Powers were vanquished. Containment was the operative principle, no bones about it, except that its dimensions were wider than in George Kennan’s original concept, emerging as a counterrevolutionary global design to embrace Third World retardation under free trade rather than colonial principles. The world was to be ours, an oyster pried open through armaments and implemented schemes of regime change. Historical continuity is an embarrassment, but there it is: a long trail of interventions, actual and proxy wars, puppet governments, internal subversion, covert operations, carrot-and-stick propositions to surrender to American terms, all viewed as necessary, fully justifiable moves in fulfilling the rights and expectations of American Exceptionalism.

Continued:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/06/cold-war-rhetoric-the-kept-intelligentsia/