New McCarthyism: 39% of Democrats name Russia biggest threat
by Eric Zuesse
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The campaign by the Obama-Clinton Democratic Party establishment to blame their electoral failures upon Russian leader Vladimir Putin is shown in a recent Pew poll to be a great success:
LINK
Nearly four-in-ten Democrats (39%) name Russia as the country that represents the greatest danger to the United States – the highest percentage expressing this view in nearly three decades, according to a new survey.
Compared with 2013, the last time this question was asked, greater shares in both parties volunteer Russia as posing the greatest danger to the U.S. – but nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans now say this (39% vs. 21%).
The new Pew Research Center survey of 1,501 adults was conducted April 5-11, before the recent rise in tensions with North Korea, its failed missile test and Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to South Korea.
Overall, 31% of Americans, answering an open-ended question, cite Russia as the country representing the greatest danger to the U.S., while 22% point to North Korea. The shares naming both countries are among their highest dating back to 1990.
Fewer cite China (13%), Iran (9%), Syria (6%) and Iraq (5%) as countries representing the greatest danger to the U.S.
The new survey is the latest indication of growing concern among Democrats, in particular, about Russia in the wake of reports that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. A January survey found that Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to say that Russia was behind the hacks of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That survey also found that 38% of Democrats viewed Russia as an “adversary,” compared with 20% of Republicans. …
In the reader-comments there, was this exchange:
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and communism’s grip upon the world. It’s been insinuated into the very fabric of western society, very often with disastrous and telling impact, and only now the democrats are seeing the danger?
Eric Zuesse, 28 April 2017 [replying to Kelly]
In 1991, Russia ended communism, the Soviet Union, and its Warsaw Pact military alliance which mirrored America’s NATO alliance, but the U.S. continued its NATO alliance against, this time, Russia itself, and has absorbed all of the Warsaw Pact countries and all of the former USSR except Russia itself, and now stations U.S. nuclear weapons right on Russia’s borders. And you think that Russia is the aggressor?
Has the old Republican Joseph R. McCarthy and John-Birchite extremist anti-communist mania become followed now by the Democratic Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ‘moderate’ anti-Russia mania? What could be the source of this ‘moderate’ political insanity?
Discussion is invited here, of this crucial but ignored international issue, which is making an outbreak of global nuclear war, WW III between the U.S. and Russia, again very possible. Right now in the Pentagon, plans are being drawn up including options such as sending 50,000 U.S. troops into Syria, where the U.S. is an invading hostile power, and Russia is not (Russia was invited into Syria to protect Syria’s sovereign legitimate government from overthrow by the U.S.-Saudi jihadist alliance).
So, please comment here about the soaring anti-Russia mania. It’s so big, America’s voters even support adding more taxpayer-money now to the nation’s military-industrial complex than to any other part of the U.S. federal government. This would be the perfect duped public for supporting more of America’s evil invasions such as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and more of America’s invasions of Syria — just to mention a few examples, which also required a duped public. Or should Russia be blamed instead, for these aggressions by America?
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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39% of Democrats see Russia as a threat? Ergo, 61% don’t?
Don’t get me wrong, the new McCarthy religion of Russophobia is a real and potentially dangerous issue – but if 61% of Democrats still don’t buy it – that’s good, right? I get that it is on the rise and at a thirty year high – but that is because it is the M$M’s raison d’etre to commercially propagandise war. What I question why the alt-progressive-media/conscious resistance has to follow suit. Clearly, 61% of those polled are not listening to the drums of war, a few may even be listening for an alternative instead. Let’s offer them something else to listen to. The antidote and balance to war propaganda is peace. Surely it would be better to promote the values of peace instead?
“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” [MLK]
“Let’s offer them something else to listen to.” Which you can be sure the establishment will endeavor to hinder. They’ve made enormous strides in that regard lately. They own EVERYTHING and possess no compunctions about breaking rules in order to get their bloody way. Is forcing Evo Morales’s presidential plane to land against the law? No problem. Are Wikileaks’s donors legally donating to Wikileaks? No problem. We’ll just get our relevant corporatocracy orgs (PayPal etc) to shut them out. Does Ukraine owe Russia $3 billion? ‘Yes, but let’s let them renege because that way we can further our anti-Russia goals’. Then there’s Obama’s war on journalism, journalists and whistleblowers, carried on by that pile of swamp muck with orange weeds growing on it. Now it’s the establishment’s perverted attack on ‘fake news’, with Facebook, Google and others lending their weight to the anti-light effort (http://bit.ly/2qv8UI7).
We the people are outgunned.
Maybe – but if the people are outgunned – it is only because they have yet to acknowledge the universality of their nature. No gun or bomb – not even nuclear – can destroy the Living.
They own EVERYTHING – except who you are.
There is an elephant in the room and it is a bully….the US is the bully who threatens the world with its nukes. The world either has to capitulate to their hegemony or they send in democracy and humanitarian help to overcome your corrupt regime. Clearly, from the relative safety outside the US, we can see that the only way the US is exceptional or indispensible is that it’s the biggest bully the world has ever known. If you are not in the gang you are against it and you will pay for that with your economy, your resources and in the end your life. Stand up against the US and they act like a toddler having a tantrum. Thankfully there are still some adults in this world who see the US exceptionalism for what it really is but they cannot do it alone, they need the rest of the world to finally stand together against this madness and say a resounding NO to the spoilled child.
I would love to see the poll carried out in the rest of the world….would the result be very different or are we all so cow-towed to the bully now?
The problem is not Republicans or Democrats.
The problem is the United States.
Was anyone asked if Israel was a threat to world peace?
The zionist regime lies behind virtually all the conflict in South Western Asia.
Don’t US citizens know that?
Narrative control also works by the conditionings that train the correct form of answer to present to any official attention. Overwhelming force masks in story and aligning within its form may also seem the best survival option. In other words give unto Caesar what is due unto Caesar. But sacrifice of truth is always total regardless the cover story, the self-justifications, the relative evils and ‘loss’ of awareness to other matters by which not to know what you are doing. If one aligns in purpose with a lie – then that mind operates regardless the form it takes. So giving unto True what is truly due is holding true purpose – regardless the forms it takes.
In the fear of loss of power in the world is the world subjected to tyranny under the teaching of attack and the mitigation or temporary reprieve of such attack. Then such a temporary world in its compulsive moment seems to be all there is to cling to.
Setting forth an ‘enemy’ in such a way that only the gullible fear, but the cynical join in hating, and those with ability to see and challenge the narrative power are exposed. This exposure is often enough to get them to self-censor, for to be seen as if the discordant ones is then framed within the same hate and fear as assigned the enemy.
Freedom from fear may be served by self-disgust, and a turnabout resulting from self-honesty otherwise kept hidden or pushed away, but in any case cannot be thrust upon us. The freedom fear offers calls always for sacrifice of the true. The ‘dynamic’ of fear operates mechanically to serve the wish for power under false pretences. Those who steal power must fear its loss and their own exposure. The common interest of such purpose will fight between itself as a given with ever shifting alliances, but unite as one against the exposure of the nature of the deceit by which a world of hate, masked in forms of ‘love’ operates pain as if some aspects of that are joy – such as vengeance, self-specialness and power to assign pain elsewhere.
Persisting in a wish and intent out-of-accord with the true of being is enemy to the true – not IN truth – which has no opposite – but in the mind of its intent, that believes its self stolen or withheld from That which would kill it or undo its ‘life’ – for this IS the reflection of the nature of the act of giving priority to self-specialness in wish, over the true of being.
This projection of ‘Enemy’ must be hid and hidden from, by assigning it to ‘your brother and your world’ to keep some part for your self alone and protect it against the light of true to rule a world of illusion seeking to become real and validated in truth. And each ‘seeing’ this ‘enemy’ in the ‘other’ enacts defence by which to undermine, limit and deny the other. Would could a shared reality become to the power given a lie but a shared insanity – each believing its own ‘mind-control’ of asserted narrative identity.
Hating the lie in the other is not its release from our own mind or our release from its dictate.
Loving or abiding with true is the restoration of the free and true will to the mind that thought to coerce it and became trapped in its own thought.
Where’s someone like Arthur Miller? Where’s anyone, at all? It’s shocking that at a time like this, when Russian and American military forces are literally rubbing shoulders with each other in the Syrian conflict, where Russians are facing US advisors in Ukraine, when NATO has rolled its army right up to Russia’s borders in the Baltic and the military noose seems to be inexorably tightening around Russia… that hardly a single western artist or intellectual seem remotely concerned about these disturbing development enough to acknowledge them, let alone write something about it. The seemingly unstoppable slide down the slippery slope towards war with Russia.
Why, given the consequences of such a war, which could so easily become a nuclear conflict and escalate into full scale nuclear exchanges wiping out the major urban centres with tens of millions of casualties to follow and a environmental nightmare that could threaten all life on earth, aren’t artists interested in what’s happening?
It’ not as if it isn’t an important subject, is it? Unfortunately the commercial reality is that it’s not very easy to sell it to the public, but probably more importantly the people who own and control our media, not just journalism and the news, don’t like this subject, at all. It’s too dark, too gloomy, to depressing, and where’s the silver lining in nuclear war? Where are the one liners?
Also, and this is probably a key consideration, times have changed and their aren’t that many intellectual and artistic rebels around anymore willing to challenge to raging anti-Russian bonfire which seems to be burning and raging inside peoples’ minds. Society itself, politics and relations to Russia, have become so tainted, so absurd, so grotesque, so soaked in mind-numbing propaganda almost unparalleled, so fictionalized and crazed; that writing fiction seems irrelevant because ‘reality’ has turned into fiction and we’re surrounded by it every day. Our society is a gigantic form of fiction, a form of theatre and we’re all playing roles. Life is no longer ‘real’ but a play, in the western world, another sign of the west’s decay.
Orwell’s ‘1984’ has arrived, mixed with Brave New World, and we’ve embraced it because it gives us a stage we can perform on and a worldwide audience. We liked performing and we like being watched. We’d complain if the cameras were removed from our lives. We’re no longer really independent individuals, but members of various groups that overlap, these social media sites, where we share everything and form a new whole, a new society, that increasingly resembles something from the insect world, a nest of termites or a hive of bees.
Intellectually and artistically we simply can’t face any of this honestly, directly, openly anymore, or at this time and stage; so we do it… obliquely, symbolically, unaturally.
Believing your own bullshit. Great national characteristic eh. DUH’oh
“The enemy is over there!”
The enema is the drainstream media.
There’s a madness afoot in the United States, it’s the Salem Witch Trials all over again only on an international scale. The rest of the world can see clearly that the US is the biggest threat to world peace, but US citizens mostly get their news from the complicit corporate media or Facebook, and continue to believe what they are told – they are like Truman Burbank living in Seahaven Island (The Truman Show 1998), unable to see the propaganda and lies for what they are because that’s the only reality they have ever known.
Yep, Salem Witchcraft Trials ok. Where is Arthur Miller when you need him.
Same here in the UK mate.