Ten years ago I had lunch with a man who vehemently insisted that Vladimir Putin was the satanic leader of an evil country and Hilary Clinton was a great American who should be President. This was two years after the U.S. government under Barack Obama, Joseph Biden, Victoria Nuland, and the CIA had engineered a coup d’état in Ukraine as part of their proxy war against Russia, bringing Ukraine’s neo-Nazis into greater power. When Russia protested this coup on its western border, Washington mocked such concerns. Every time for decades that Russia has complained about such provocative moves, the U.S. has dismissed them as inconsequential.
For years the U.S. had supported Ukraine’s killing of the Russian speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine, and finally, when Ukraine had amassed forces to invade the Donbas region, the Russian government had had enough and in February 2022 sent troops into the region to defend this area. Thus the hypocritical West played at outrage that what they had created was finally backfiring. Russia was cast as the guilty party for invading Ukraine. For years now, a full-fledged U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia has been ongoing via Ukraine, and it will become more dangerous as it continues. Nuclear annihilation becomes a very real possibility as the Trump administration continues to push the envelope, now using linguistic mind control to disguise the fact that the United States is the prime force behind the war.
Hillary Clinton had served as Obama’s Secretary of State the previous five years and led the administration’s destruction of Libya in 2011, among other atrocities. When Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi was captured, brutally tortured, and summarily executed, she famously gloated, laughed, and said, “We came, we saw, he died.”
If that wasn’t a sign of evil, nothing is. But this man and his sister who was also at the luncheon were her supporters and intended to vote for her.
When I defended Putin and Russia against the US/NATO push to surround Russia with troops, bases, and nuclear weapons, I was attacked by this man and his sister as an evil conspiracy theorist. They insisted Putin was satanic, and without saying it explicitly they were accusing me of being a “communist” sympathizer – that old canard, that I have been hearing from these great patriots since the 1960s when I opposed the U.S. war against Vietnam.
For many years, U.S./ NATO has moved military forces and bases into countries encircling Russia. This includes weapons that can very quickly be converted to nuclear use. This is tantamount to Russia doing the same in Mexico and Canada, and let’s add Cuba as well. We know what the U.S. response would be, but when Putin and his government objected and said this is a betrayal of previous agreements and a threat to us, he was dismissed as if he were a child making things up.
Time and propaganda take their toll on many people as they age, as it had for my interlocutors, who in their younger days might have been appalled by Clinton and won’t have voted for her. The anti-Russia ideology that had been drilled into them from youth won the day, however, as it popped out with rage from a demonic jack-in-the-box very deep in their psyches.
They also charged me with supporting Donald Trump in the upcoming 2016 election, which was risible since I do not vote for American presidents and Trump has always been repulsive and dangerous to me. Yet since they considered Trump to be Putin’s right-hand man as Clinton and the Democrats absurdly claimed, I was wrong twice over, somehow unpatriotic, and a “communist” sympathizer. Former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern has convincingly debunked Russiagate. See here, here, and here.
For them Putin was terribly evil, that was all there was to it, and I was defending the devil.
It didn’t occur to them then, and probably doesn’t now, that Trump is an arch-enemy of Russia and is fulfilling his role as a U.S. president by continuing the Western effort to destroy Russia through the Ukraine war now under the cover of NATOization/Ukrainization, as Richard Nixon did with Vietnamization in Vietnam. That war raged on for 5-6 years after the name was introduced to deceive the public. The current war against Russia will do likewise unless Russia achieves an overwhelming victory that can’t be denied or a nuclear war erupts and there will be nothing left to say.
I mention this incident from a decade ago because in the intervening years it has become even clearer that the deep-rooted hatred of Russia by Americans is as strong as ever, and that the U.S. government, no matter who is president, will continue in its efforts to destroy Russia. It makes no difference what changes have taken place in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union or the end of the U.S- backed Boris Yeltsin presidency in the 1990s that so damaged the country. The U.S. ruling class wants nothing less than total control over Russia. Just as in the 1960s when the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson attacked Vietnam overtly and then the Republican President Richard Nixon continued it under the linguistic propaganda of “Vietnamization” [both elected as “peace” candidates], so too the transformation from Biden to Trump is meant to deceive.
When this man accused me of supporting Trump, he was the perfect example of parviscient Americans who are poisoned by long years of anti-Russia propaganda, what Jacques Ellul in his classic work, Propaganda, describes thus:
The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long periods, for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of references, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside. The slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, requires propaganda of a very long duration.
This is exactly what anti-Russia propaganda has been for many Americans.
I also mention the incident because I recently had a very brief conversation with the man’s sister who insisted that Ukraine under Zelensky was justified in their fight against Russia. When I suggested that she did not know the long background to the U.S. effort to destroy Russia, she bristled and the conversation ended abruptly as it did a decade ago.
People do not like to be told they have not done their homework and are victims of propaganda. They would have to do research to arrive at a rounded conclusion. But the average person does not want to do research; they prefer to arrive at conclusions based on consulting the corporate mass media, which are the propaganda arms of the ruling class. And these media present an enormous kaleidoscope of historical contextless information that floats through their minds as it disappears down the screens of their digital dinguses – “like a pointillisse canvas” in Ellul words. And he was writing in 1965.
Americans’ minds have been poisoned against Russia for a very long time. It is nearly theological in scope. It even precedes the first Cold War. We might say we are in the second Cold War, but it might be even more accurate to say the first one never ended. Myths endure a long time, and the satanic-seated fears of the evil Russians and Chinese are planted deep in Americans’ psyches. The man and his sister, both in their seventies, are good examples of this..
At the core of this verbiage lies its antithesis – the delusion that the United States, as a blessed and good country, has a divine mission to spread “democracy” and “freedom” throughout the world, as Hilary Clinton declared during the 2016 presidential campaign when she said that “we are great because we are good,” and in 2004 when George W. Bush said, “Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” Such sentiments could only be received with sardonic laughter by the countless victims made “free” and “democratic” by the USA’s violent leaders. But this dualistic political cosmology – the divine vs. the demonic – is lodged so solidly in mythic Americana that when the occasion next arises – and it will – we can be certain it will be called upon to justify U.S. aggression toward Russia and the “evil” Putin.
One does not have to exalt Russia or the former Soviet Union and its leaders, nor hesitate to criticize their actions, to see how the U.S. Manichean mythology grossly distorts truth.
Professor Michel Chossudovsky, who runs Global Research in Montreal, Canada, has done much to educate the public about the long antagonistic U.S./Western hatred of Russia. Here is his brief summary on the history of US led wars against Russia and the Soviet Union. It also provides a summary of the US Project to Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map: 204 atomic bombs, 66 cities. (September 15, 1945). This latter project, formulated when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany, shows the depth of the nihilistic hatred for that country. This fear and hatred has been central to U.S. propaganda ever since and have slowly poisoned Americans’ minds toward Russia and its leaders. Thus Putin is considered by so many as the devil incarnate, even while the clear aggressor has long been the United States.
But when myths dominate minds, facts don’t matter. The parviscient crowd, poisoned by prolonged propaganda, hates Russia more than it hates war, and unless it can crack the spell it is under, it will be willing to risk nuclear war for its leaders in order to defeat the “satanic” Putin.
When ignorance is strength, conjuring foreign devils offers “salvation.”