When pundits like Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow have propagated Russiagate, they’ve often added some odd messages to their statements. These messages always seem to convey a desire to hurt America’s relations with Russia, and thus to push us closer towards a conflict between the world’s main nuclear superpowers. This is dangerous, and the American people need to reject it.
In January 2017, for instance, Rachel Maddow described the political game the media would play to get the new president to militarily aggress against Russia. In regards to the troop advances that NATO had been making towards Russia’s borders, Maddow said, “Is the new President gonna take those troops out? After all the speculation, after all the worry, we are actually about to find out if Russia maybe has something on the new President?” At that moment, a graphic showed up on the screen behind Maddow which said “We’ll be watching,” a blatant sign that Maddow planned to attack Trump as “Putin’s puppet” to pressure him into continuing America’s anti-Russia policies.
It didn’t matter that these troop advancements were unprovoked, as Russia’s “aggressions” over the last decade have all merely been in response to the West’s larger policies of expansionism. Or that the charges of Trump/Russia collusion, as well as the claims of meaningful Russian election interference, are both still unproven. Dominating over Russia had become essential to the U.S. empire’s interests in the years before then, and the new president was too outside the Washington loop to support this insane policy of aggression towards Russia. So the best course of action for the empire was to attack Trump as a Kremlin agent so that he would be pressured towards following this agenda.
Since then, Maddow and other figures whose interests align with the military-industrial complex have directed highly inflammatory messages towards Russia, like Bill Maher’s monologue last year which urged Americans to “Fight back” against Russia’s fictitious attacks. And now, when the Council on Foreign Relations has non-hyperbolically reported that we are in a “second Cold War,” the political establishment is demonizing the very idea of the upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin.
It’s made no difference that Russiagate’s central propagators haven’t outright said they want a new Cold War. The last cold war was started similarly, with U.S. leaders demonizing and threatening Russia throughout the late 1940’s while claiming they were only responding to Soviet aggression. In both cases, a nuclear standoff has emerged because of this kind of aggressive rhetoric.
So America’s discourse about Russia has eroded into a cruder form of how it was during the last cold war, with Russia now seen as a totally evil presence that must be spited at every turn. In the last cold war, for instance, most U.S. political and media figures were grateful whenever American and Russian leaders met. Now any diplomacy between the countries is demonized as “treasonous.” This charge is made absurd by the fact that Putin has shown no sign of being a threat, and that he’s expressed that he wants to repair relations with the U.S.
By sabotaging these efforts towards better U.S.-Russia relations, the Western political and media class are destroying the hopes for ending some of the riskiest nuclear tensions in history. And we can’t expect the climate to improve, because protecting peace is not the goal of this class; their goal is to help the agenda of the U.S.-centralized military empire, which is acting increasingly erratic as its dominance vanishes. We can only guess how long this dynamic will last before disaster breaks out.
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