Pity the Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
No more.
In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russophobia which had taken grip in the United States since Russia’s first post-Cold War president, Boris Yeltsin, handed the reins of power over to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has emerged much like the putrid core of an over-ripe boil. That this anti-Russian trend existed in the United States was, in and of itself, no secret. Indeed, the United States had, since 2000, pushed aside classic Russian area studies in the pursuit of a new school espousing the doctrine of “Putinism,” centered on the flawed notion that everything in Russia revolved around the singular person of Vladimir Putin.
The more the United States struggled with the
reality of a Russian nation unwilling to allow
itself to be once again constrained by the yoke
of carpetbagger economics disguised as
“democracy” that had been prevalent during the
Yeltsin era, the more the dogma of “Putinism”
took hold in the very establishments where
intellectual examination of complex problems was
ostensibly transpiring — the halls of academia
which in turn produced the minds that guided
policy formulation and implementation.
Outliers like Jack Matlock, John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Cohen were cashiered in favor of a new
breed of erstwhile Russian expert, led by the
likes of Michael McFaul, Fiona Hill and Anne
Applebaum. Genuine Russian area studies was
supplanted by a new field of authoritarian
studies, where the soul of a nation that once
was defined by the life and works of Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, Gorky, Lenin, Stalin, Sakharov, and
Gorbachev was distilled into a shallow
caricature of one man — Putin.
We had seen this play before, in the buildup to
the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq,
when the national identity of a people who
traced their heritage back to the Biblical times
of Babylon was encapsulated in the person of one
man, Saddam Hussein. By focusing solely on a
manufactured narrative derived from a simplistic
understanding of one man, the United States
papered over the complex internal reality of the
Iraqi nation and its people, and in doing so set
itself up for defeat. It was if Iraq’s long and
storied history ceased to exist.
The impact this erasure of context and relevance
from the national discourse was felt in the lead
up to the decision to initiate what was, by all
sense and purposes, an illegal war of aggression
— the greatest war crime of all, according to
U.S. Supreme Court justice and U.S. chief
prosecutor during the Nuremburg War Crimes
Tribunal, Robert H. Jackson.
My own personal experience serves as witness to
this reality. As a former chief weapons
inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998, I was uniquely
positioned to comment on the veracity of the
claims made by the United States that Iraq
retained weapons of mass destruction capability
in violation of its obligation to be disarmed of
such. When my stance was deemed convenient to a
narrative attacking a Democratic president, Bill
Clinton, I was readily embraced. However, when
my fact-based narrative ran afoul of the
regime-change policies of Clinton’s successor,
George W. Bush, I was cast aside as a pariah.
Politics of Personal Destruction
The
politics of personal destruction were employed
in full, and I was attacked for being a shill of
Saddam and, perhaps worst of all for someone who
served his nation proudly and honorably as an
officer of U.S. Marines, anti-American. It
didn’t matter that, without exception, the
fact-based arguments I made challenging the case
for war with Iraq proved to be accurate — at the
time and place where the arguments could have,
and should have, resonated greatest (during the
buildup to the invasion) — that my voice had
been effectively silenced.
I see the same template in play again today when
it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like
every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine
conflict has two sides to its story. The
humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the
citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest
argument one can offer up in opposition to the
Russian military incursion. But was there surely
a viable diplomatic off ramp available which
could have avoided this horrific situation?
To examine that question, however, one must be
able and willing to engage in a fact-based
discussion of Russian motives. The main problem
with this approach is that the narrative which
would emerge is not convenient for those who
espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based
as it is on the irrational proclivities and
geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir
Putin.
The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it
posed to Russian national security is dismissed
with the throw-away notion that NATO is a
defensive alliance and as such could pose no
threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the
presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in
the heart of the Ukrainian government and
national identity is countered with the “fact”
that Ukraine’s current president is himself a
Jew. The eight-year suffering of the
Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who
lived and died under the incessant bombardment
brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply
ignored as if it never happened.
The problem
with the pro-Ukrainian narrative is that it is
at best incomplete, and worse incredibly
misleading. NATO expansion has been consistently
identified by Russia as an existential threat.
The domination of the hate-filled neo-Nazi
ideology of the Ukrainian far-right is well
documented, up to and including their threat to
kill the incumbent president, Volodymyr Zelensky,
if he did not do their bidding. And the fact
that the former president of Ukraine, Petro
Poroshenko, promised to make the
Russian-speaking population of the Donbass cower
in the basements under the weight of Ukrainian
artillery fire is well documented.
Unfortunately for those seeking to have an
informed, fact-based discussion, dialogue, and
debate about the complex problem that is
Ukraine-Russian relations is the reality that
facts are not conducive to the advancement of
the “Putinism” dogma that has gripped American
academia, government, and mainstream media
today.
The Saddam-era tactics of smearing the character
of anyone who dares challenge what passes for
conventional wisdom when it comes to Russia and
its leader is alive and well and living in the
land of the free and the home of the brave. The
age-old tactic of boycotting such voices by the
mainstream media is in full-swing — the
so-called news channels are flooded with the
acolytes of “Putinism,” while anyone who dares
challenge the officially sanctioned narrative of
“Ukraine good, Russia bad” is excluded from
participating in the “discussion.”
‘Russian Misinformation’
And, in this
age where social media has, in many ways,
supplanted the mainstream media as the source of
choice for most Americans, the U.S. government
has colluded with the commercial providers of
the major platforms used to share information to
label anything that deviates from the official
line as “Russian misinformation,” going so far
as to label data derived from Russian sources as
“state-sponsored,” along with a warning that
supposes the information within is somehow
flawed and dangerous to normal democratic
discourse.
The ultimate sanction, however, came when the
U.S. government pressured the corporate internet
providers to shut down all Russian-affiliated
media, leading to the closure of RT America and
other media outlets whose accuracy and
impartiality, upon examination, far exceeded
that of their American counterparts.
Now America is taking it to the next level when
it comes to the pandemic of Russophobia that is
sweeping across the country, purging everything
Russian from the national discourse and
experience. Russian books are being banned and
Russian restaurants boycotted and worse,
attacked. The massive economic sanctions enacted
against Russia and the Russian people has
extended to what amounts to an erasure of all
things Russian from the American experience.
Where will this stop? History shows that America
is capable of healing itself — the national
shame that was the treatment of Japanese-
Americans during World War II is a clear
demonstration of this phenomenon. However, the
politics of cancellation which has emerged in
the American body politic has never carried with
it the kind of potential blow-back that exists
in the case of Russia.
In the pell-mell rush toward cancelling Russia
in the name of defeating Putin, emotion has
replaced common sense, to the point that people
are ignoring the fact that Russia is a nuclear
power willing and able to use its
Armageddon-inducing arsenal in defense of what
it views as its legitimate national security
interests.
There has never been a time when a national
discussion has been more essential to the
continued survival of the American people and
all humanity. If this discussion could occur
armed with the full range of facts and opinions
relating to Russia, there might be hope that
reason would prevail, and all nations would walk
away from the abyss of our collective suicide.
Unfortunately, the American experiment in
democracy is not conducive for such near-term
embrace of sanity and reason.
“Pity the nation,” Ferlinghetti wrote, “whose
leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and
whose bigots haunt the airwaves.”
Pity America.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps
intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union
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