WHEN THE AMERICAN WERE IMMERSED IN OPERATION "PAPERCLIP" THE KEY THEME OF JUSTIFYING THE OP WAS "THE RUSSIANS DID IT TO"... WHICH CAN BE EXCUSED ON THEIR PART FOR HAVE BEEN HATED BY THE WEST AND THE GALICIANS (NOT TO MENTION THE TURKS) SINCE RUS IN 1100...

Although she understandably questions the morality of the decision to hire Nazi SS scientists, Jacobsen balances her judgment with an understanding of the perceived threat of the Soviet Union under Stalin and the communists’ dialectical determination to prepare for total war with the West. The Soviets similarly captured and used German scientists for their own defense programs. That side of the story is not covered in this book.

CIA WEBSITE: Intelligence in Public Literature

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America

Annie Jacobsen. (Little, Brown & Company, 2014) 575 pp., endnotes, bibliography, index.

Reviewed by Jay Watkins

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without fighting russophobia…”

         Gus Leonisky

Russophobia from Charlemagne to the Ukraine crisis

by Urs Graf

The Geneva politician and journalist Guy Mettan does not follow the mainstream. He describes the events of our time with prudent objectivity and without distancing himself from people.
  His books are still not published in German language. There is an English translation of the first edition of the book “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria” (2017, Clarity press). The following text is not a translation, but rather a reproduction of the new edition of the French book according to the reader’s (Urs Graf) understanding. His own comments are marked in square brackets.
  In my presentation of Guy Mettan’s book the analogy (contre-mythe) of the fairy tale of Snow White is missing: The beautiful Russia, who is always in danger of being fatally tricked by her jealous mother (Europe).

In his 2023 reissued book “Russie-Occident. Une guerre de mille ans. La russophobie de Charlemagne à la crise ukrainienne” Guy Mettan explores the question of how it was possible that in our western European countries an anti-Russian sentiment so quickly could get out of hand, right up to the willingness to marginalise everything Russian. This went so far that in France the tomb inscription of Queen Anne de Kiev, a granddaughter of King Vladimir, who married French King Henri I in 1051 (p. 116), was changed in 1991 at the instigation of the Ukrainian ambassador in Paris. From then on, “Anna, Reine de France, princesse de Russie”   was to become “... princesse d’Ukraine” (p. 242), even though that name for the borderland did not exist at that time.

“Divide and rule”

Mettan’s journey through the chequered Russian-European history makes it abundantly clear that on the basis of the UN Charter of 1945, by respecting the dignity and equality of all people and peoples, many things would have taken – and could – a very different course than the disastrous one that is now being initiated. He shows that the current hostility towards Russia is based on an age-old resentment that the “West” has never come to terms with because it has instrumentalised it for power politics – regardless of the facts. Our attitude is characterised by a double standard: Hypocrisy and dishonesty in the judgement of Russia’s history compared with that of the Western powers through the centuries.
  Long before the Ukraine war, for example the reporting in the case of the plane crash near the German town Überlingen or the massacre of schoolchildren by Caucasian Islamists in Beslan show disdain towards the Russian people. Even major sporting events such as the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 Football World Cup 2018 in Russia were also distorted by Russophobic media. Disrespectful comments and even gross untruths were published even after corrections from [the few remaining] Western sources and were generally not retracted.

Cultural history of an enemy image

Mettan characterises ‘Russophobia’ as a state of mind (état d’ésprit). He presents it in front of our eyes by adding it to the reporting on events in Russia in this country that can only be avoided by circumventing all logic, as our opinion-leading elites do. [One could regard this as a curious eccentricity – but its consequences, the countless victims of war and the danger of the destruction of all human life, are unfortunately real. Therein lies the heavy responsibility of intellectuals]. Historically proven lies could have been corrected long ago.
  They range from the forged Constantine Donation (p. 124) from the 9th century and the 1756 forged legacy (p. 150) of Peter the Great up to the present days and impressively document the dishonesty in the West towards Russia and the effect of Russophobia, from Charlemagne to Louis XV, Napoleon, and in the 20th century from Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and George Kennan right up to the present day. Despotism, barbarism and backwardness (p.  56) remained the defining terms in the anti-Russian discourse to this day, the era of Vladimir Putin.
  Travellers from Western Europe, since the Renaissance, often described Russia as an incomprehensible foreign culture, Russians as slaves escaped from Mongol rule who dreamed of world domination. Ever since Peter the Great was able to free Russia from the yoke of invaders from Asia and Europe, he and his successors were accused of having imperial ambitions.
  Theorists of liberalism, but also socialists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and even monarchists, all equally used the cliché of despotism and backwardness with regard to Russia.
  With the rise of economic liberalism came the ideology that cultural progress could only be achieved through private economic success alone. The socialist economy of the Soviet era was therefore seen as a sign for the backwardness of Russia; post-Soviet privatization, on the other hand, finally as a sign of progress.

View of the rivals

In the 19th century, starting from France and Great France and Great Britain, the ideology of the ‘gradient culturel’, the Atlantic arrogance of superiority towards the East of Europe consolidated.
  The British utilised Russophobic resentment in their power struggle for the Eurasian continent (“Le Grand Jeu”), the expansion of their empire to India and the Ottoman Empire. The ocean power Great Britain regarded the Russian Tsarist Empire as a rival on the coveted continent. The British colonial elite used the press to a long-term, systematic propaganda campaign in order to manipulate the members of parliament, to give a free hand to the colonial barons. The much-maligned despotism of the Tsars served them as a frightening image to justify the alleged lack of alternatives of the desired British world domination.
  Meanwhile, the Anglo-American oceanic empires began to impose their supremacy on the other nations by all means (p. 212). Between 1815 and 1900 the Atlantic powers increased their colonial empires by a hundred times more than the supposedly imperialist Tsarist Empire did in the same period.
  Mettan points out the contradiction that serfdom was scourged in Russia although the colonial regimes of France, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the USA were no better in terms of oppression and exploitation. There double standards were applied. First, the press then further media up to Hollywood popularised Russophobia. This included also fantasy literature with irrational, violent, and perverse content, such as by Bram Stoker (1847–1912) the oeuvre “Count Dracula” about a Wallachian prince named Vlad, full of all the anti-Russian prejudices. Imperial politics dominated the public opinion.

Alliances and rivalries in Europe

Over the course of the 19th century, Russia was federated into the “Triple Entente” alliance by the Atlantic powers–France and Great Britain–against the emerging Germany.
  But British Russophobia remained constant to this day. It was only briefly interrupted in 1904-1917 and 1941-1945, when Russia’s services against the threat of the German Empire and later of the Nazi Empire were readily employed. On March 5, 1946, Prime Minister Churchill lowered the “iron curtain” against Eastern Europe again in his Fulton speech.
  In Germany, after long years of alliance between Prussia and Russia, this resentment only developed after the founding of the Empire. After the wars of unification, the Pan-Germanic “Drang nach Osten” (“push eastward”) conflagrated. The ideological foundations of this new geopolitics were laid through corresponding content in history and geography textbooks (p.  255), which floated in the intellectual wake of British world hegemony. “The white man’s burden” was now applied to the Slavic peoples. This mood was also fuelled by the press, where warnings about “pan-Slavism” began to appear in the run-up to the First World War.
  As a result of Germany’s humiliating defeat in the First World War, with the rise of National Socialism, cultural supremacism transformed into a nationalist-racist one. After the collapse of the Nazi state, whose campaign of extermination against the Slavic Soviet peoples had failed, ethnic Russophobia in early post-war Germany transformed into anti-communist Russophobia. The Federal Republic of Germany, within the fold of the EEC-EC, was now one of the “democracies” of the West and could stand with them against the totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe.
  With the change of 1989, the states of the dissolved Warsaw Pact joined this alliance. Their elites began to shirk responsibility by portraying themselves as victims of Russian Bolshevism, as “satellites of Moscow”. But when the Soviet Union was dissolved and its state-totalitarian form of communism disappeared, all the crimes of Bolshevism from 1917 to 1991 were blamed on the “Russians”.
  Historically, this is not tenable because the Central Committee of the CPSU was multinational throughout the Soviet period, from the Pole F. Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Cheka) to the Georgian J. Dzhugashvili (alias Stalin) to the Ukrainian E. Shevardnadze, [last Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union], to name just a few.
  In post-communist states such as Poland, the Czech Republic and especially in the Baltics, a culture of remembrance (“concurrence victimaire”) was established that was entirely limited to the victims of the Soviet era and ignored their own share in Bolshevik and Nazi crimes.

North Amerika

In the USA, the old world’s reservations about the Tsarist Empire hardly played a role. There, Human Rights only applied selectively, because blatant racism was evident in the treatment of the native Americans and the abducted slaves from Africa, as well as in the migration policy. [The immigrants were strictly allocated according to their ethnic and cultural origins. One of the lowest legal quotas applied to Russians, i.e. the number of immigrants was strictly limited. (see Rolf Winter, “Ami go home”, Hamburg 1989, pp. 157)]
  During the succession to England in the 20th century it was about militarily enforced freedom of trade across the oceans–and across the “Heartland” (p. 258). In addition to Mackinder’s old theory, Spykman added his “Rimland”-theory in 1940, concerning the peripheral areas around the Eurasian continent. What both approaches had in common was the claim to global dominance by the Anglo-Americans and the suspicion of Russia and the Russians because they inhabited this coveted land. So the Cold War started much earlier and was only interrupted from 1941-1945 during the alliance against Nazi Germany and Japan. Afterwards, the policy of containment, as George Kennan described it in an article in Foreign Affairs, continued. Based on this doctrine, which assumed Soviet Russia’s own intentions, the anti-communism of the McCarthy era was unleashed in the USA from 1945 onwards. The slogan was “for freedom and democracy against communist dictatorship”. The latter also included all liberation movements against colonial rule, which were often only supported by the Soviet Union. [Dictators in Latin America, Africa and the countries surrounding the Soviet Union, on the other hand, were considered their own “sons of a bitch”– as long as they served US interests.]
  After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, there was a short break during which the CSCE was founded in Helsinki. The final act of this conference, with its ten sections, essentially contained a confirmation of the UN Charter. However, the US administration at the time (Carter) placed the emphasis only on “human rights” and “fundamental freedoms” in order to denounce the Soviet Union for its treatment of its dissidents. The Soviet Union had clearly a propaganda disadvantage and was also increasingly weakened by the trap laid by Brzezinski in the Afghanistan War. In the further course, starting with the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the much-praised “freedom” was reduced to a brutal market-radical deregulation under the label “globalisation”.

The neoliberal turnaround

When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 the classic anti-communists saw themselves to be at the finish. Privatisation in the neoliberal style led to the plundering of state property and of state-owned national assets and to the impoverishment of the population. President Boris Jelzin supported by the USA crushed an initial uprising of the parliament in Moscow with cannons, but in 1996 with the newly elected Prime Minister Primakov he had to introduce a change in economic policy. From this moment on, the old Western propaganda started all over again. The “backward” Russia stood up against the salvation bringing globalisation.
  Old anti-Russian spirits like Brzezinski and Albright relentlessly pursued the project of the neoconservative Straussian Paul Wolfowitz, who did not want to tolerate any more rivals of the USA on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Their ideology gained great influence on the government policy from Bill Clinton, Bush jr., Obama and Trump to Biden. Presidential adviser Brzezinski formulated an uncompromising announcement of war (1997) to Russia. His bestseller “The Grand Chessboard” was published in many languages. The expansion of NATO against every promise followed this announcement. Under the banner of “pluralism” and “democracy” began a violent reorganisation of all countries that opposed the radical market liberalism of the USA, by NGOs or NATO – depending on their potential for resistance. In addition to economic pressure and military force, all means and channels of communication were put at the service of American supremacy. Military power was supplemented by a civil society manipulated by moulding of perception.

The world’s only superpower

From 1989, the USA embarked on the path of so-called unilateralism. Since then, the UN has lost authority, and international law was only respected à la carte according to the interests of the only world power. Its “Full Spectrum dominance” spread across the unlimited global market. After the second Chechen war, which was fuelled by covert actions of the CIA (p. 282), the image of the violent oppressor Russia could be held up again in the US press. After the rude awakening by 9/11 in Manhattan the propaganda had to pause for a short time, especially since Vladimir Putin offered support to his counterpart George W. Bush in the fight against Islamist terrorism, even though he had warned him previously in vain of its instrumentalization.
  But in 2003 at the latest, when Russia opposed the US invasion of Iraq, the fight against “despotism” in Russia was resumed. In the Western media, opposition politicians and criminal oligarchs were portrayed as “persecuted by the Kremlin”, with US politicians such as Hillary Clinton and John McCain speaking out in their defence to great media fanfare.
  Russia was to be a subjugated supplier of raw materials, a “petrol station that believes it is a nation”, as McCain put it. With the defence against the Georgian foray on its protection forces and the population of South Ossetia, Russia began to defend itself, and by preventing the planned regime change in Syria, it definitely stood in the way of Western geostrategists.

Manual for Russophobia

In the third part of his book, Mettan presents a compilation (mode d’emploi) of the systematic fabrication of the negative image of Russia through:

• the choice of words to create a black and white pattern without obvious lies,

• the selection of sources to support the desired narrative for feeding it into the media market,

• the positioning of the initial information to predetermine the direction of the subsequent discussion,

• the creation of an emotional distance between “them” and “us” [camp mentality].

Andrey Tsygankov describes examples of media campaigns discrediting Russia, and Ezequiel Adamowski lists the linguistic elements that create a trench between “them” and “us” (p. 311ff.).
  In order to defend against this “discourse hegemony” counterstrategies are presented. The most effective of these, the “complexification”, consists of placing the events in a new context and to analyse them with additional facts from a broader perspective in which the previously ignored is included again – a titanic labour, as he calls it.
  This can be realised time after time in small areas, just like respecting alternative points of view.

Categorising good and evil

The aggressive transatlantic geopolitics continues to need an enemy image and a myth to justify it. It needs a pseudo-religion to calm people’s consciences. Just as the Pope’s theologians a thousand years ago needed the Orthodox Moscow as an image of the enemy for an identity formation for the later Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, today the “postmodern theologians” potter around the myth of a Euro-Atlantic union against the threat of the Russian “bear”. This in the hope to be able to keep up the predominance of the West against the “rest” of the world a little longer.
  A line is drawn from Tsar Ivan IV, the Terrible, via Stalin to Putin, which is supposed to represent an ancestral line of evil rulers, [while the good rulers known to exercise their power by the “Devine grace”, as it was imprinted in Franco’stime on Spanish peseta coins].
  Belief in the devil remains necessary. To illustrate the demonisation of Vladimir Putin, Mettan refers to the Google Images website, where you can find hundreds of front pages depicting his distorted portrait.
  There is a revealing parallelism here to the popular fantasy world ranging from “Dracula” to “Lord of the Rings” (p. 324): The Manichean categorisation of people into good and bad. A pseudo-religious conceit seduces those who think they are chosen to escalate war as a decisive end-time battle between good and evil, and seems to absolve them of any responsibility for the bonum commune.
  Others try their hand at the art of psychodiagnostics, by picking up on a remark of Chancellor Merkel, according to which the Russian president lives ‘in a different world’.
  All in all, Mettan documents in his book a persistent refusal to engage in dialogue, which was no longer thought possible since the abolition of the ecclesiastical index of banned books. This continues to pursue the original goal of geopolitical dominance by fuelling an irrational fear of the “foreign” Russia.
  [“Divide and rule” leads to war. – Tracing and strengthening the ties that bind people together is true peace work]. •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2024/nr-23-12-november-2024/russland-und-das-abendland-ein-tausendjaehriger-krieg

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“It’s hard to do cartoons without fighting russophobia…”

         Gus Leonisky