Michael Brenner on Anti-Putin Frenzy

Note: Eric Zuesse has been rescheduled for this Friday. -KB

International Relations professor Michael Brenner discusses his new article "Why the Unhinged Russophobia and Anti-Putin Hysteria?"  It begins:

"Among the many oddities of the Ukraine affairs, the most astonishing is the frenzy of hostile passion directed at Putin, Russia, and everything Russian. Nothing close to this has been seen since World War II when Hitler and the Nazis were Satan incarnate...The first thing to be said on this score is that the passion and drive have come from American elites. There has been no great wave of popular outrage, no mass demonstrations, no blood-curdling calls for revenge and punishment. No post-9/11 national trauma. Instead, the fury is generated by our government leaders (Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, Harris, Pelosi, Cruz); from the media world’s clueless news presenters cum propagandists, from the demonically possessed editors of The New York Times who have discovered the thrills of ‘yellow journalism,’ from the likes of Peter Gelb, from the scores of Nobel Prize winners who in concert have lent their weight to the crusade; from the university presidents presiding over pious vigils who are thankful that the spotlight is shifting away from the innumerable scandals they are paid hefty sums to whitewash; and Gold Medal to the IOC who ban crippled athletes from competing in the Winter Paralympics because their passport says ‘Russia’.  All are hugely self-satisfied. None of them ever blinked an eye as the United States for 20 years has killed, maimed, starved, and tortured hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria et al in exercises of brutality that have left the country’s security in a more precarious state than when the onslaught began."

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