Brandon Martinez / Non-Aligned Media
Alt-media simpletons and lackluster analysts believe that gang-warfare between global elites is evidence of the benevolence of some of those power players.
Hostility from the “Western establishment” towards Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is used again and again as a vindication of the latter’s altruism.
This narrow mode of thinking appeals to Messiah-minded wishful thinkers and hero seekers. If all it takes is a little bad mouthing on the part of the Western establishment – which is itself not a monolithic block, but a complex organism of different factions – to confirm a person or group’s righteousness, then these same people should instantly embrace ISIS and a whole slew of cruel tyrants around the world.
Is it not true that the Western mainstream media and political establishment have harnessed all of the resources at their disposal to provoke international opprobrium against ISIS non-stop for the past two years? Does the Western media and political elite do its due diligence in fact-checking and verifying the truthfulness of every sordid allegation against that group? Probably not. Does this media criticism of ISIS ‘prove’ that the group is good, benevolent and a real ‘threat’ to those same Western elites who so sternly condemn it? Of course not. And none of these people who claim that the somewhat hostile press climate around Putin and Trump establishes their heroic rebellious bona fides seem to be using that argument to venerate ISIS. They too, for the most part, are saying the same things about the reprehensible nature of ISIS that the Western media/political elite is saying – perhaps from a slightly different angle and with a few twists here and there.
America and Russia: Historic Frenemies
The Russians and Americans have been playing a cat and mouse game of geopolitical theater – what some would call ‘chess’ – for a very long time. Over the centuries, American and Russian elites have pretended to quarrel, and perhaps even had some legitimate disputes and disagreements at times, but when crunch time came they gladly joined forces to accomplish mutually beneficial geopolitical imperatives. In both World Wars, the US and Russia, despite differences, teamed up to squash other mutual enemies and rivals. A commenter at Non-Aligned Media astutely observed:
Throughout history, the US and Russia seem to have had an unholy alliance in which they act as opposites to accomplish an agenda. “Good cop/bad cop”… of sorts. The Alaskan purchase was in negotiations before our civil war in the middle 1800s. Less than 100 years of occupying the natives land, Russia was literally giving us more native land in hopes of an alliance. Throughout history, these two have held hands from a distance to keep the relationship hidden. They were allies in both world wars, together bringing down the Berlin Wall, and as recently as the Syrian agenda in taking away their defense and organizing a peace negotiation to allow the opposition in. Both the US and Russia have pledged security to Israel and share this as a common denominator.
The Cold War was one big farcical game of cat and mouse, where the elites of the US and the USSR profited immensely by frightening their populations into submission with scare-stories about the other.
‘The Russians are coming,’ was the constant chant of American presidents.
‘The Americans are outside the gates,’ was the rallying cry of Soviet leaders.
Khrushchev would publicly bash the Americans and highlight their hypocrisies; JFK would do the same in reverse. Brezhnev and Reagan played the same tit-for-tat rhetorical war of words. Both powers had myriad faults and duplicities worthy of criticism, but neither had much of a moral high ground over the other in their flaccid moralistic condemnations. Average law-abiding citizens, however, do have the moral high ground to censure the evils of both superpowers.
Major powers looking to consolidate domestic political control and placate the unhappy masses need and often go out of their way to look for or invent an external enemy or ‘threat’. As Orwell illustrated so convincingly in 1984, by drawing the public’s attention away from the internal problems in their own country, the political class can get away with robbery, murder, corruption and all the other malfeasances they are assuredly engaged in.
During the Cold War both the US and Russia built up their enormous military arsenals beneath the spectre of the ‘nuclear threat’ from the other, whilst never seriously considering a direct confrontation. The Cuban missile crisis was a perfect example of this kind of self-serving PR power play on both ends.
It could be said that genuine proxy wars were fought between the two powers. But apart from the geopolitical tug-of-war behind such conflicts, they produced enormous profits for the military industrial complexes of both countries. Instability is the life-blood of the war industries of the major global powers. The weapons corporations look upon civil wars as a way to expand their market shares, and all the big players want a piece of the pie.
Dialectics and False Reasoning
Even if it’s true that some members of the Western establishment genuinely dislike Putin and would prefer his departure from politics, that does not in any way make the ex-KGB chief a trustworthy, likeable or morally righteous actor. Back in the good old days when Josef Stalin was still the king of the Kremlin, similar clarion calls against the Soviet dictator could be heard from Western capitals, but that doesn’t mean Stalin was anything less than a monster who murdered millions of people.
As we can observe, there is a genuine split in elite circles in the West about Putin. Some, like Nicolas Sarkozy and Henry Kissinger, are extremely friendly with Putin and advocate for closer cooperation with him. Sputnik News proudly reported on a meeting between Putin and Kissinger this past February – one of dozens of such get-togethers over the years – in which the two ‘old friends’ discussed the future of US-Russia relations. The article stated:
On Wednesday, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a ‘friendly dialogue’. Greeted by Putin as an ‘old friend’, Kissinger published an article the next day outlining his vision for the future of US-Russia relations. Commenting on the meeting, Russian television network RT recalled that over the years, Kissinger has held nearly a dozen face-to-face meetings with the Russian president. In 2013, Putin complemented the former secretary of state, emphasizing that Moscow always pays close attention to his views, and calling him “a world class politician.”
Sarkozy, the French neocon and Zionist fanatic who spearheaded the Libya war in 2011, has spoken highly of Putin and forcefully champions increased solidarity with Putin’s Kremlin. Sarkozy has called Putin’s record ‘positive‘ and said ‘the world needs Russia.‘ Ehud Barak, the Israeli war criminal, is a long-time fan and admirer of Putin who even modelled his 2009 run for office in Israel on Putin’s past political campaigns in order to attract Russian-Israeli voters. Netanyahu and Putin are also on friendly terms.
Others among the Western elite are more skeptical and critical. However, none of the denunciations from equally damnable Western elites proves that Putin is a ‘good man’ or has any moral compass whatsoever. Putin’s actions, like those of his US and UK counterparts, are guided solely by self-interest (and by self-interest that means the interests of Putin the politician, not the Russian people as a whole who are merely subjects of Putin’s devices). Putin’s skeleton-riddled track record of false flag terror, financial crimes, political assassinations and war crimes is what needs to be analyzed when judging the man, not what some other corrupt and morally bankrupt politicians from the West are saying about him. Mafias and organized criminals often squabble within their ranks, jostling for power, prestige and territory, but that doesn’t mean any side of a gangland dispute are virtuous.
Naturally, Western politicians and media will use Putin’s genuine shortcomings against him, but that doesn’t negate the reality of those ugly flaws. Putin and his controlled media do the same to Russia’s Western rivals. When the Bush administration was making its case for war against Iraq in 2003, they cynically invoked the past crimes of Saddam Hussein – such as his chemical weapons related atrocities against Kurds and Iranians in the 1980s – as added fuel to build up a climate of hostility towards the Iraqi strongman that would push people further into a war frenzy. Because bad people misused the past misdeeds of Hussein – and fabricated other wrongs that were untrue (WMDs, links with al-Qaeda, etc.) – to justify another calamity does not mean that Hussein was a man of impeccable character. The same goes for Bush administration rhetoric vis-a-vis the Taliban.
The world is not black and white despite how much we may wish it to be. Throughout his career Putin has proven himself to be a brutish power-hungry criminal who will do whatever it takes to maintain his hold on power. His modus operandi is no different and no less egregious than the ruthless stock and breed of thieving politicians ruling over every other major country. Recognizing this does not make one a sympathizer with or proponent of the miscreants who run the West.
If Hilary Clinton says the sky is blue, that doesn’t make it green. People who themselves are not perfect – even morally contemptible people like Clinton – are able to state true things about other deplorable people, regardless of their own inadequacies and hypocrisies. Those who seize on the opposition to Putin of some Western elites as ‘proof positive’ that he is morally good, on our side and a global messiah for the reinstitution of a golden age of peace and prosperity are peddling severely deficient logic to prop up their untenable faith in an impossible saviour figure that does not and will most likely never exist.
Idolizing a man who is in effect a mafia don shows the moral degeneration of many who view themselves as ‘alternative’ thinkers. They are so desperate to find something ‘different’ to the usual slimy hacks and charlatans of Western politics, that they are willing to embrace any thug, no matter how dirty or corrupt, so long as he is centered in the Eastern and not Western hemisphere.
This myopic, tunnel-vision thinking has led so many to embrace the Putin hero cult. One wonders when such people will generate a worship cult for the communist dictators of North Korea and China, or when it will become fashionable to heroize the savage despots who rule the African continent.
