(audio version of article - youtube here and soundcloud mp3 here)
What’s so bad about Vlad? Times have been tough for the anti-Putin industry lately. He destroyed ISIS in six months, kicked GMO food companies out of Russia, called out elite pedophilia in the West, strengthened his relationship with Netanyahu while Israel accused the U.S. of betrayal, and acted like the grown up and invited the children of American diplomats to a holiday party after Obama kicked 35 Russian diplomats out of America.
Contrary to the shrill voices in the media, Vlad does have a few friends. Henry Kissinger has been one for a long time. Nobel winner Alexander Solzhenitzen agreed with Putin that “immorality and vice” are destroying the West. Bill Clinton calls Putin “very smart,” a man who "kept his word on all the deals we made." We already know the head of Exxon likes him. Heck, the President-elect himself is a fan.
"Kissinger: Putin is not Stalin" according to a Huffington Post headline.
Some voices even view Putin as a moral visionary for America. "While his stance as a defender of traditional values has drawn the mockery of Western media and cultural elites,” says Pat Buchanan, "Putin is not wrong in saying that he can speak for much of mankind.” The GOP opinion leader says Russia’s leader is not a throwback: "Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm.”
More boldly, Buchanan’s colleague in the Reagan administration, Assistant Secretary of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, says “Vladimir Putin is the only leader the West has.”
How can such accolades align with all the things we’ve heard about Putin? He kills journalists, he poisoned a spy, he is an aggressor attempting to recreate the Soviet Empire. He once led the KGB. He’s worth 60 billion.
That adage about "tell a lie often enough"? It applies here. Trump famously responded in a debate to the allegation that Putin had killed journalists: “That would be terrible if he did. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has. Have you been able to prove that?”
ABC’s George Stephanoupolos asked him the same question, and threw out the name of human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya . Trump said, “I’d like you to prove it. And I’m saying it would be a terrible thing if it were true. But I have never seen any information or any proof that he killed reporters.” Stephanoupolos’s “evidence” is merely wishful. He may fancy in his own mind that Putin killed Anna, but no official investigation proved it.
Reporters cannot give specific evidence when Trump calls their bluff.
Detractors like George may distrust Russian courts, but that does not turn non-evidence into evidence. The best Wiki can do is cite Edward Snowden’s revelation that the Russian government “targeted the webmail account” of Anna Politkovskaya. Does that mean the NSA is guilty of all those murdered in the US who have email accounts?
Like many of the mainstream media’s vicious slurs, no one could provide any evidence of the allegation. If they could, you’d be hearing about it 24/7.
But what about that bald guy in a hospital bed in England who died from being poisoned with polonium by Putin? Again, it’s an accusation never proven with evidence. Nonetheless, the Alexander Litvinenko spy story was blasted nonstop on world media. Parliament's official and final investigation a year ago provides no evidence, on the record, of Putin or Russia’s involvement. Instead, we get the usual fare: secret, closed hearings from anonymous witnesses. Chairman Sir Robert Owen explained it this way: “Put very shortly, the closed evidence consists of evidence that is relevant to the Inquiry, but which has been assessed as being too sensitive to put into the public domain.”
Did Litvenenko poison himself smuggling nuclear material on the black market?
That’s right. Trust us. There’s weapons of mass destruction and our polonium stash was hacked. As a counter theory, Anti-war.com suggests the spy in question, Alexander Litvinenko, was poisoned from smuggling nuclear materials on the black market, as reported by the Independent.
“Putin aggression” is another nonstop allegation. He's invaded Ukraine and Syria and his intentions are to rebuild the Soviet empire. This accusation is so absurd, it makes an honest man want to cry for how many of the American people swallow this nonsense.
Ukraine's democratically elected President was toppled by a CIA coup. We admitted spending $5 billion on the project (see 7.50 mark). Crimea, part of Russia for centuries until 1954 when it was technically put under Ukraine, is required by treaty to allow 25,000 Russian soldiers to man the Kremlin's largest naval base, as the Washington Post explains. When the people of Crimea voted 95 percent to join Russia (spread Democracy, right?), Putin agreed. He hardly had to "invade" with 25,000 soldiers already there.
The initiator of all this "aggression" is the U.S. During negotiations to unite East and West Germany, the first Bush administration promised not to move NATO eastward. We've since added 12 countries, all east of Germany, several on Russia's border. The lies surrounding the "Putin Aggression" meme are astounding. Dig a little regarding Syria, Georgia, Chechnya, Kaliningrad, etc. and you'll find the same thing: lies from the West, which regularly initiates the conflicts causing defensive actions by Russia, which the media shills then call "aggression."
Russia is shrinking, not expanding, from it's footprint back in Soviet days.
After you knock down a couple of these flimsy accusations about Putin, the rest get easier. So Putin once headed his country’s intelligence services. So did George H. W. Bush. So what? Russia has turned from atheist to Christian and rebuilt 26,000 churches since then. Putin views things differently two decades later. As one adept observer put it, "Today's continuator of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's ideas is Vladimir Putin." And yet, this most famous of gulag prisoners "will be remembered as possibly the biggest foe of the KGB, whereas Putin was an officer in that organization. These are the amazing paradoxes of history.”
Nobel winner Solzhenitzyn and Putin were mutual admirers.
The last flimsy allegation I will mention: Putin is supposedly worth billions and motivated by money? “The first rule of propaganda is to accuse the other side of getting rich.” Instead of unsubstantiated accusations, stick with the facts on the ground from credible people: the president-elect respects Putin as does his pick for Secretary of State, the head of one of the world’s largest corporations. The head of Russia is on the record condemning ISIS and immorality. Russia has achieved a successful cease fire in Syria. Hillary got the debate questions in advance. Who cares what unproven allegations Rachel Maddow keeps shouting?
"Some will say that Putin is only acting," says James Perloff, a prolific anti-Communist and anti-New World Order author since the '80s. "If so, I say give us more such actors."
A Financial Times article quotes a monk close to Putin, Father Tikhon Shevkunov, who says the Russian leader "really is an Orthodox Christian, and not just nominally, but a person who makes confession, takes communion, and understands his responsibility before God for the high service entrusted to him and for his immortal soul."
Father Tikhon Shevkunov is known to be the priest who hears Putin's confessions.
So if all the accusations about Putin are untrue, why is he hated by some so vehemently? The reasons are several:
1. The trillion dollar weapons industry (the “Military Industrial Complex" Ike warned us about) needs a reason to keep its owners rich by the billions, and its many bureaucrats want to keep making around $200,000 or more. The MIC is “transitioning from the ‘war on terror’ to the more lucrative ‘new cold war,’" says Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran Contra stories. “The neocons and their liberal sidekicks, who include much of the mainstream U.S. news media, can guarantee bigger budgets from Congress.”
Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower's farewell speech.
To pay the bills, a new villain is needed. Osama is dead, and “stateless Muslim terrorists are not a sufficient threat” for a trillion dollar complex, says Roberts.
And there’s a reason the big media constantly beats the drum. They are closely linked to the MIC and it’s intelligence services. Thanks to Operation Mockingbird, the CIA "'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles,” according to Wiki, quoting author Deborah Davis. That was the 1950s, exposed in the 1975 "Church Committee" U.S. Senate investigation, and it has only gotten worse.
2. In a similar vein, the holdovers from the Cold War are still trying to keep their jobs and justify their existence. “When the Soviets collapsed, they did not find a new career. They simply found a new reason to demonize the Russians,” writes one blogger.
3. On a more idiological plane, true believers in the hawkish military establishment are insistent on a never-ending American “full spectrum dominance,” and Vladimir Putin threatens that vision.
2. NWO to MWO
Unfortunately for them, a re-emergent Russia makes it obvious that “unipolarity” has come and gone since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only that, unipolarity is impossible and unworkable. The history of superpowers in the past century can be summed up in three words:
Bipolarity - U.S. and Soviet Union: c. 1945 to 1991
Unipolarity - U.S: 1991- to c. 2000
Multipolarity - U.S., Russia, and China: c. 2000 to present
With bipolarity, for five decades the world avoided nuclear war thanks to MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it looked good for peace under an American unipolar world. The media hailed the definitive book The End of History by Francis Fukayama (Stanford, the RAND corporation), where liberal interventionists and neoconservatives alike could praise the new era of the triumph of democratic ideals. But it didn’t work out that way.
“Unipolarity is anarchical,” writes Yale scholar Nuno Monteira, because one power cannot "exert a positive control everywhere.” He notes that the U.S. was at war 13 of the 22 years after 1991. “The first two decades of unipolarity, which make up less than 10 percent of U.S. history, account for more than 25 percent of the nation’s total time at war.”
Reagan and Gorbachev in the final years of U.S. - Soviet bipolarity.
This should not surprise students of American history who have been taught that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The Founding Fathers divided up power in the country in all sorts of ways. Certainly this should apply to the world as well.
The driving force behind the grasp for world power after 1991 were the “neoconservatives,” identified by Wiki as American exceptionalists espousing military force "who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist Left to the camp of American conservatism.” (Scholars argue over whether “anti-Stalinist Left” means pro-Trotsky.)
George H. W. Bush called these neocon warhawks “the crazies in the basement.”
Wiki names Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as a key figure. NATO head Wesley Clark, a four star general, relates a meeting he had with Wolfowitz and later another general in the Pentagon a few days after 9-11. "I said, 'Are we still going to war with Iraq?' And he said, 'Oh, it’s worse than that.' He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, 'I just got this down from upstairs' — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — 'today.' And he said, 'This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.'”
Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz and his neocon cronies are generally credited for the militarism in the Middle East. But the ultimate goal is Russia. His “Wolfowitz Doctrine” declares:
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration.”
But Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s former Secretary of State, who angers both the Right and the Left when he meets with Putin, disagrees with the neocons. “Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium,” Kissinger wrote one year ago.
Kissinger is credited for opening up China in the 1970s, leading to that nation’s rise as today’s third superpower, and the obvious solution of tripolarity for our times. Kissinger called for “a new equilibrium which is increasingly multipolar and globalized." And he confirms elsewhere, "Any effort to improve relations must include dialogue about the emerging world order.”
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in China during the Nixon years.
Now, for those of you who bristle at words like “emerging world order” coming from the likes of Henry Kissinger, don’t let semantics bother you. Kissinger is talking about the opposite of one world government.
China is on the rise militarily and is already a peer to the U.S. economically. Russia currently struggles economically but is certainly a peer militarily. Both superpowers came of age just after the new millennium.
Trump and Tillerson could be the right people at the right time for the job of moving us peaceably from a NWO (New World Order) to a Multipolar World Order (MWO). The collapse of an empire can often be bloody, especially if the declining power keeps too tight a grip.
“It will take a remarkable and brave President to rightsize America’s goals, in order to reflect our more limited resources and rising competition from China, Russia and other powers,” according to a January 2016 National Interest article, written well before Trump was considered viable. While the incoming President wants domestic America to be great again, his rhetoric seems to align with this call to “rightsize” U.S. imperial ambitions and recognize the “limited resources” of American military might.
Tillerson’s background will be helpful for aligning a multipolar world. The oil industry has an interest in cooperation. “Exxon wants to be part of the Russian energy business,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “Therefore, as Secretary of State, Tillerson is motivated to achieve good relations between the U.S. and Russia, whereas for the military/security complex, good relations undermine the orchestrated fear on which the military/security budget rests."
Trading with our superpower rivals rather than fighting them seems like common sense. In fact, it was a key argument for giving China its Most Favored Nation trading status in 2001. Failing to do so would cause “a road to confrontation with China,” wrote the Heritage Foundation, leading to “Beijing’s isolation.” Apparently, isolationism is a very terrible thing unless Russia is involved. In that case, sanctions are regularly meted out. For the other superpower, "China must be engaged, not an enemy.”
After a few years of unipolarism, the scholar lionized by the neocons for writing The End of History changed his views. In 2006, Francis Fukuyama said, "Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.” He called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation and stopped speaking to his previously good friend, Paul Wolfowitz.
Francis Fukuyama
A Russian journal was willing to provide yet another motive, this one more controversial, for the unusually acute Russophobia of neoconservatives. "There’s also an undeniable tribal flavor to it. Almost all neocons are Jews and specifically Russian Jews," wrote Russia Insider. This bent against imperial Christian Russia "is not entirely irrational, given the way Jews were treated by the Czars. But, there has always been a divide within American Jewry. On one side are German Jews who emigrated in the 19th century and largely blended into the ruling class. On the other side are the Russian Jews who were treated like poorer relations.”
This ethnic diagnosis may explain the more positive perspective of Henry Kisssinger, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria in Germany.
Putin, for his part, has provided no clear target of attack for those concerned about Israel’s security. “Vladimir Putin is friendly to Israel,” writes Israel Shamir, who notes that Putin supported building a Jewish museum in Moscow and personally contributed to its budget.
Shamir added that Putin gets visits more often from Israel’s ambassador than from those in the U.S. or France. At the UN vote against Russia on Crimea, Israel irritated the U.S. by staying neutral and walking out before the vote.
“Putin promised he would not allow the destruction of Israel,” wrote Shamir. “He promised to save its population if the situation should become truly dangerous."
Putin may not only be less of a threat to peace, he may be more helpful than previous U.S. administrations. “Putin attacked ‘attempts to enforce more progressive development models’ on other nations,” writes Buchanan, quoting the Russian President, “which have led to ‘decline, barbarity and big blood,’ a straight shot at the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Eqypt.”
A piece in the New York Times echoes that sentiment: “The architect of the U.S. Cold War policy, George Kennan, warned at the end of his life, in 1998, that President Clinton’s policy of advancing NATO east risked war,” wrote professor Jeffrey Sommers. “It is clear Putin never intended to seize Ukraine or the Donbass … Putin is actually the one carefully dousing those flames.”
Indeed, the hawks crying "bloody murderer" on mainstream media should consider that Americans are fortunate to have Putin today as Russia’s leader. “Putin is a moderate,” contends Irish journalist Bryan MacDonald. “The vast majority of Russians are far less tolerant of America’s behavior. [Putin’s] successor would be far more hardline in their attitude toward the West.”
Robert Parry says a Putin replacement would be someone “even more nationalistic—and likely far less stable."
Will the U.S. peacefully accept the multipolar reality of a re-emergent China and Russia?
So, is it so bad to be a Friend of Vlad? Based on the evidence—and not the shrill propaganda—it apparently is good to be friendly with Putin, a leader who has returned to traditional values, decimated ISIS, worked toward peace in the Middle East while allied with moderate Arab Muslims, extended a hand of friendship to Israel, and accepted the call for a more peaceful future through a Multipolar World Order.
Besides Lebron’s coach, Rex Tillerson is joined in the “Friend of Vlad” group by a gold medalist gymnast, a symphony conductor, a Brazilian architect, a Polish film director, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. What’s not to like?
Even Goldie Hawn is a fan of Vlad. Watch her clap for the villain (.25 mark) as that hater of all things in the West sings to her, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill."
Dean W. Arnold is a journalist in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His works have been endorsed by the Editor of Newsweek, U.S. Senate leaders, and the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, including books Hillary and Vince: a story of love, death, and cover-up, and America's Trail of Tears, as well as his screenplay "The Wizard and the Lion: the true story of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis."