Deja Vu All Over Again

“The Russians Are Coming, again – the first cold war as tragedy, the second as farce,” by Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, 2018

This book tells a familiar story for leftists, but one that might be unfamiliar to many experiencing the 2^nd cold war with Russia and now China.  Kuzmarov / Marciano retail the history of anti-communism and Russo-phobia in the U.S. since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to now.  Nothing changes, as the basic structures of U.S. capitalism and militarism remain the same, still bent on imperial exploitation of the whole world, thus seeing competitors and needing enemies.  

The authors start their mini-history with the 1919 invasion of Russia, when the U.S. sent 5,000 soldiers into Siberian Russia while carrying out Palmer Raid deportations of reds and anarchists in the U.S., those raids run by a young J. Edgar Hoover.  This was followed by the post-war 1940s-1950s McCarthyite purges of unions, jobs and the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party over reds and “Russian agents and spies”; nuclear escalation against the USSR led by the U.S.; the bloody wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; the frequent U.S.-sponsored coups like Indonesia, assassinations, wars and death squads in South & Central America and Africa, propping up apartheid, all justified by ‘fighting the Kremlin.’  It was not such a cold war actually.

The sequence ends with the modern period, starting with open U.S. financial and political support for Yeltsin’s actions, and even at first Putin.  Then came Libya, Syria, Ukraine and now the failed Russia-Gate/ Ukraine-Gate scandals, all increasing the threat of new wars and nuclear confrontations.  Trump has just cancelled two nuclear treaties with Russia, while prior to that Obama funded a new massive nuclear arms ‘modernization.’  What was a global class war is now a competition for riches, but one of the national targets has not changed.

The authors name the few U.S. diplomats or figures that called for détente, co-existence or cooperation, but they were eventually drowned out by the urge to control Russia and its vast material riches by U.S. capitalists – especially from the defense sector, their generals and politicians.  The population usually goes along with it after the requisite propaganda offensive, demonization and fear campaigns.  Russia-gate became equivalent to ‘Pearl Harbor’ in the hysterical purple prose of the war-mongers.  At present the Democratic Party’s loyalists are even more hostile towards Russia than Republicans – quite a turn.  This new McCarthyism feeds into the lamest political conversations and commentaries.

Historically as they describe it, right-wing U.S. ‘thinkers’ considered Russia to be ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic,’ not European, hence inscrutable, tricky, irrational, violent, subhuman– any insulting stereotype you can come up with.  Instead the authors show how time and time again the U.S. is actually the aggressor – from landing in Vladivostok in 1919 to sponsoring the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently pulling Ukraine into NATO – something they promised never to do.  The latest cold war action was impeachment involving Joe Biden’s son over a delay in sending missiles to Ukraine.  Even Obama did not want to send missiles to Ukraine, but the present neo-liberal Democratic and neo-con Republican politicians have coalesced around it.

New / Old Bad Guys - The Russian Mob

The authors point out that the ramifications of Russo-phobia or anti-communism were and are never just international.  Cold wars and hot wars allow the imperialist neo-cons and neo-liberals to red-bait or treason-bait any domestic forces who do not go along with their aggressive plans, while depleting the remains of the welfare state through burning profits in Keynesian military spending.  They red and Russia-baited Jill Stein in 2016 and Sanders in 2016 and 2020.  Some would even say that cold-warism functions primarily inside the U.S. as a right-wing club wielded by both parties to impede change.  Everyone who doesn’t want to be aggressive towards another nuclear state is somehow a “Putin puppet” and can be written off.  It takes international politics off the table.

In U.S. and U.K. culture and movies, the Soviet KGB has been replaced by Russian mobsters.  A Russian accent?  Boris and Natasha?  Villanelle.  Ominous! Nyet!

This book is an interesting read that details the voluminous facts of history since 1917 supporting their contention, starting with an exposure of Woodrow Wilson as a U.S. expansionist, backed by corporations with financial interests in Russia.  And so it still goes.

Prior reviews on this subject on the blog, use blog search box upper left:  “The New Cold War” (Cohen); “Oil” (Sinclair); “St. Petersburg,” "Look at the War-monger Facts," "Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives" (Cohen); "The End of Free Speech."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 17, 2020

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