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The New Apologists for Vladimir Putin — on the Right and the Left
PJ Media ^ | March 15th, 2014 | Ron Radosh

Posted on 03/22/2014 2:58:38 AM PDT by No One Special

We live in strange times. The Cold War is over, yet when it comes to Russia seeking to maintain its control of Ukraine, a new group of apologists for Vladimir Putin has emerged. Once again, the group in the West supporting the hegemonic attempts of control of Ukraine by the authoritarian Putin regime is made up of stalwarts on both the Right and the Left.

Support for Putin on the Right comes from the paleoconservatives led by Pat Buchanan, the editors of The American Conservative, and the writers for the website Anti-war.com. The entire group comes from the precincts of what historians call the Old Right, a phenomenon that harks back to the old isolationism of pre World War II conservatives and the large group they organized, the America First Committee.  Their motivations have been succinctly summarized by James Kirchick.

A new concern has been added to the traditional non-interventionist trope. They are favorable to much of Putin's growing domestic positions on issues such as the growing repression of gays in Russia, actions which they also look kindly upon and wish were social policy in the United States. Opposition to gay rights is combined with support for Putin's attempt to build what he calls a Christian Russia, and concern for what Buchanan sees as something greatly lacking in the secular United States.  In his book Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan titled two chapters "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America." He seems to be saying, "If only we had a leader in the United States with the vision of Vladimir Putin." Indeed, he asked in one column, "Is Putin One of Us?" His answer, as you have undoubtedly guessed, is yes:

Nor is [Putin] without an argument when we reflect on America's embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.

Our grandparents would not recognize the America in which we live.

Moreover, Putin asserts, the new immorality has been imposed undemocratically.

The "destruction of traditional values" in these countries, he said, comes "from the top" and is "inherently undemocratic because it is based on abstract ideas and runs counter to the will of the majority of people."

Does he not have a point?

 

As he bluntly says, America is not the nation "we grew up in," and Putin sees Americans as "pagan and wildly progressive," a statement with which Buchanan obviously agrees.

On the Left, leading the charge that the neo-cons are again trying to push us into war — a charge they assert whenever anyone makes an analysis with which they do not agree — is The Nation magazine and its writers and editors. And the number-one supporter and apologist for Putin is the historian of modern Russia, Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York University. In the past two weeks, he has been on Fareed Zakaria's TV program, on CNN, and on whatever other media outlets call upon him.

In Cohen's cover story in a recent issue of The Nation, of which his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel is both publisher and editor-in-chief,  he claimed that American media coverage of Putin and Russia is "less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War." According to Cohen, Putin has worked to support American interests in stabilizing his nuclear-armed country, assisted U.S. security interests in Afghanistan, Syria and Iran, and has magnanimously freed over 1000 political prisoners.

Evidently, Professor Cohen does not acknowledge that in Syria, for example, Putin has managed to box the U.S. into working with and bolstering the Assad regime, to which Russia constantly gives new battle-ready helicopters, and which to this day has brutally seen to the horrendous deaths of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, all brought down with Russian assistance. We are somehow supposed to believe that this is in our security interests.

Along with Putin, Cohen depicts the demonstrators in Ukraine as hardly "right-minded oppositionists," but in reality as a group whose politics are never examined and which, he implies, is most likely made up of far-Right extremists and includes fascists and anti-Semites.  He believes that  "a new Cold War divide between West and East may now be unfolding, not in Berlin but in the heart of Russia's historical civilization." The now ousted president of Ukraine is depicted by Cohen as presiding over a real democracy, and not anything like what he believes are the false portrayals by the  historian Timothy Snyder, whose articles in The New York Review of Books paint a not-so-rosy view of the old Yanukovych regime.

To Cohen, the crisis arose only because NATO expansion in Eastern Europe forced Putin and Yanukovych to rightfully protect Russia's national interests. Moreover, U.S.-funded groups in Ukraine were interfering with domestic politics by bringing NGOs to fund democracy promotion, while trying to put provocative missile-defense installations in countries like Poland, meant to "subordinate Ukraine to NATO."

He is angry that at the Sochi Olympics, the U.S. sent a low-level delegation, which infuriated Putin because it included "retired gay athletes." How dare the United States do such a thing, knowing that Putin believes gay people should have no rights? What Obama should have done was go to Sochi himself, "either out of gratitude to Putin, or to stand with Russia's leader against international terrorists who have struck both of our countries."

Professor Cohen,  we all remember, was sad at the demise of the Soviet Union. He hoped it would not collapse and that it would remain in existence under the leadership of his beloved Mikhail Gorbachev. The last Soviet leader, Cohen believed, would have created a democratic communist state built in the tradition of the purged and executed Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, of whom Cohen wrote an admiring biography.

The liberal columnist Jonathan Chait gets it correctly. Writing about those he terms Putin's "pathetic dupes," he singles out Stephen Cohen and accurately calls him "a septuagenarian, old-school leftist who has carried on the mental habits of decades of anti-anti-communism seamlessly into a new career of anti-anti-Putinism. The Cohen method is to pick away at every indictment of the Russian regime without directly associating himself with its various atrocities." It is not surprising that Cohen is frequently a guest on the Kremlin's TV propaganda outlet, Russia Today, just as he would have been welcome on Soviet stations in the Gorbachev era.  In a recent radio interview, Cohen writes:

I can’t remember any Soviet communist leader being so personally villainized, that is we wrote bad things about Khrushchev, about Brezhnev, about Andropov, but we disliked them because they represented an evil system. We didn’t say them themselves were thugs, murderers, assassins, which are words that we attach to Putin.

I think Professor Cohen should look a little more, because I recall plenty of people referring to the Soviet leaders as "thugs" and worse.

The truth is that Cohen analyzes Putin just as he analyzed the Soviet Union, for which he always apologized. In an interview in the new print Newsweek (not online), Cohen said:

We hit Russia's borders under Bush because NATO was in the Baltics. Then we had this episode in Georgia in 2008 because we crossed Russia's red line in Georgia. We've crossed it in Ukraine. I don't understand why people don't see this. That if you send, over a 20-year period, a military alliance which has it's political components  – includes missile defense, includes NGOs that get money from governments but are deeply involved in politics in those countries, includes the idea of revolutions on their borders — then eventually you're going to come up against a red line that, like Obama, they're going to act on.

It's the old apology for the Soviet Union by the Communists and fellow-travelers brought up to date to explain away Putin. Stalin and his minions in the West used to explain every Soviet action as a fault of "capitalist encirclement," to which the poor USSR had to act to defend itself. So Cohen believes now we "went a bridge to far" in Ukraine. Putin had to act to defend the just national interests of Russia.

As for the suppression of gays in Russia, Cohen points out they were suppressed in America when he grew up. Moreover, he says that 85 percent of Russians believe homosexuality is a disease or a choice. And there is no popular support in the country for gay rights. In other words, we may not like it, but one has to respect the feelings of the Russian public, and not inflict our values and decisions on them. He goes on to say "it's not our concern," and sarcastically remarks: "Are we supposed to form a brigade and go there and liberate Russian gays?" That is, my friend the historian of Russia Louis Menashe puts it, "reminiscent of turning back criticisms of the USSR with: “What about the Negroes lynched in the South!”

Once again, leftists like Stephen Cohen join with paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan in opposing a stand for democracy, and in charging critics of Putin with unfairly and aggressively opposing Putin's supposed just and necessary policies. When will we learn the lessons we should have learned from the past?


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: putin; russia; ukraine
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To: what's up

Oh Please... I didn’t say anything about South America, and as far as Eastern Europe and the Baltics are concerned, they ARE in NATO, so if there are any red lines, that’s it. The Ukraine is not a NATO member, nor is Crimea. We have no stake, we do not have the lift, our forces are overextended, worn out, and troop morale is in the pits.

We do not have any way of stopping Putin from taking Ukraine if he decides to, and he just might, but we should not make idiots of ourselves by issuing warnings with nothing to back them up.

Putin can play around in South America a bit, but he really has few military options the same way we have few military options in the Black Sea. He doesn’t have the lift or the forces to project in that area of the world.

We need to be thinking clearly about what we can do, what we should do, and what we must do. And right now Ukraine is not on those lists.


41 posted on 03/22/2014 3:10:29 PM PDT by Ronin (Dumb, dependent and Democrat is no way to go through life - Rep. L. Gohmert, Tex)
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy

An obstacle is something to be removed and this is what Putin wants to do to America. We are the main target of an entity that sees only vassals and enemies. Putin’s grandfather was Stalin’s cook and Putin is trying to rehabilitate Stalin. What do you think the world would look like if there was no America at the end of WWII to counter Soviet expansionism? Do you not think it’s possible Putin likes Stalin’s vision? They lost Cold War I. Maybe they will turn Cold War II hot. Do you not think it’s possible they have first strike plans that only take Putin’s say so to implement? Putin is a psychopath who does not deserve respect, admiration or understanding of any kind. If our political class will not oppose him, the American people along with the rest of the world’s people should.


42 posted on 03/22/2014 3:28:55 PM PDT by No One Special
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To: No One Special

The late communist regime is just familiar. The Czars before it were just as menacing, and justifiably so. Putin has tried to embrace all of it, Czarism as well as their Soviet past.

That is, were Putin a Czar, he would likely be behaving in exactly the same way. The German expression holds true: “Russia remains Russia.”


43 posted on 03/22/2014 5:10:18 PM PDT by yefragetuwrabrumuy (WoT News: Rantburg.com)
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy

Exactly. A lot of people say that Putin was KGB, therefore he was a Communist.

The fact is, Putin is about power, it’s not about ideology, he would have served the Czar as faithfully as he did the Soviets had they still been in power.


44 posted on 03/22/2014 5:12:40 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: cripplecreek
While its true that you go to war with the army you have, I'm not sure you can always go to war with the government you have. In this case we have a government with dubious loyalties for at least 3 more years.

Some profound words there.

45 posted on 03/22/2014 5:25:01 PM PDT by boxlunch (Psalm 2)
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To: Vaquero

Putin is a Russian. Russians are either at your feet, at your throat, or intensely studying you to determine which way to move. There’s really no other way to deal with them.

Obama and his “reset” was as ill-advised and unrealistic as Carter and his support of Khomeini. There was never any realistic chance that either of them would be interested in any kissy-faced makeup because Khomeini had cultivated his resentments and hatreds for decades, while Putin had watched what he considered the mightiest and most far-reaching extension of Russian hegemony collapse into disarray and decay.

Both blamed the US then. Both had (have) firm and consistent reasons to dislike the US now, and both have separately come to the sober conclusion that the US is more useful (for any number of reasons) as an enemy than it would be as a friend.

The last is a point that Carter, Clinton, and Carter never managed to accept no matter how hard they tried. Carter thought that the downtrodden of the world would love him if he knifed the Shah. Clinton spent years and mega capital tongue kissing Arafat to get the Pallies to accept peace with Israel, and Obama? Yeesh... that putrid pussy-whipped POS has shown more flexibility than can be found in an unexpurgated and fully illustrated Kama Sutra. Is there a single US ally he has not shafted or a despot he has not bowed to?

All that brings me back to Putin, who is remarkably easy to understand if you just think like a Russian. What do Russians prize most? Respect. What do Russians desire most? Order. Is Putin raising Russia’s standing in the world and imposing order at home? Yes. Therefore, Russians not only accept and praise him, he is practically worshipped. If he crowned himself the Tzar, they would be in ecstasy.

No, America does not need a Putin, but we do need a leader. Unfortunately for us and the free world, what we have is Obama.


46 posted on 03/22/2014 6:57:40 PM PDT by Ronin (Dumb, dependent and Democrat is no way to go through life - Rep. L. Gohmert, Tex)
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To: Ronin
Putin is a Russian. Russians are either at your feet, at your throat, or intensely studying you to determine which way to move. There’s really no other way to deal with them.

Funny how ‘truisms’ are recycled. I used to fish air out of Montauk Point NY. If the weather was bad the captain would say. ‘ This is Montauk, if the the weather is bad, wait half an hour’.
An Efriend in Oklahoma told me. ‘This is Oklahoma, if the the weather is bad, wait half an hour’.

Back in college, 45 years ago, during political discussions the ‘truism’ was. ‘GERMANS are either at your feet, at your throat, and if they're at your feet, they're looking at your throat ‘

Of course at that time WW2 was only 20+ years ago and WW1 was only 20+ years before that.

And a good chunk of the world considers the US the great satan. As far as the future if Russia in the world, we can stop there aggression a just by having a strong US. zer0 as Chamberlain needs to be replaced with a Churchill.

47 posted on 03/23/2014 4:10:24 AM PDT by Vaquero (Don't pick a fight with an old guy. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.)
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To: No One Special
What if you're opposed to both homosexuality and Russian aggression? I suppose there's no place for us.
48 posted on 03/23/2014 8:17:32 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator (The Left: speaking power to truth since Shevirat HaKelim.)
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To: raybbr; wideawake
And? The author attacks Buchanan but offers no explanation or argument to refute Buchanan's statements.

I don't like Buchanan, but he's 100% correct when he says that our grandparents wouldn't recognize the country we're now living in. I can't believe this is the same country I was born in.

HOWEVER--Buchanan's problem is that he subordinates religion to ethnic identity. To him "chrstian" means "white" (specifically northwestern European). Chrstianity is the white Judaism, whites are the chosen people, Europe (and its daughter societies) are the "holy land," and J*sus is the "kinsman redeemer" of "western [white] civilization." I honestly wonder sometimes if Buchanan is opposed to abortion or birth control among non-whites.

Buchanan seems to scorn co-religionists of different racial/"civilizational" backgrounds. This implies that his "gxd" is a national/racial/civilizational "gxd," not the Objective One True G-d. This seems not only henotheistic, but vulgarly utilitarian as well.

Now dont' get me wrong; no one on this form has been harsher on Black and Hispanic "chrstianity" than yours truly. But the point is that "palaeos," Blacks, and Hispanics are all guilty of the same thing--a national/racial "gxd" as opposed to an Objective and Universal G-d. Blacks and Hispanics have a "kinsman redeemer" who is essentially no different from Huey Newton or Che Guevara. "Palaeos" have a J*sus whose only value is as a prop for European ethnoculture.

I wish more people understood this. Some people think the only objection to "palaeoconservatism" is the Communist/hippie charges of "racism" and "bigotry." It goes much, much deeper than that. Buchanan and his Black and Hispanic opponents (the latter of whom are supposed to be his co-religionists, though neither one acts like it) share what is essentially a worship of blood and genes and chromosomes. J*sus is just a useful totem.

49 posted on 03/23/2014 8:32:03 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator (The Left: speaking power to truth since Shevirat HaKelim.)
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To: raybbr
Crimea did not have a vote.

Imagine a scenario where Mexico invades southern California, the La Raza chairwoman Janet Margula declares herself the interim president of Alta California, and declares that she will hold a referendum on whether Alta California will leave the United States.

Every loyal American rejects the authority of La Raza to even hold such a referendum and refuses lend legitimacy to the invaders by participating in an illegal referendum.

La Raza wins with 97% of the "vote."

That's what happened in Crimea. Loyal Ukrainians were steamrolled by invaders and fifth columnists.

50 posted on 03/23/2014 10:53:06 AM PDT by wideawake
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To: mac_truck

Conservative/libertarian gays? Where’s the Drudge siren on that one ;-)

(Yeah, Drudge is lettig his freak flag fly a LOT larely.)


51 posted on 03/23/2014 3:22:40 PM PDT by dangus
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