nhboy
Ubi bene ibi patria
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"Say this for Vladimir Putin: the quality of the propaganda coming out of the Kremlin has dramatically improved since the days of Stalin, the Comintern, and Pravda.
Putin’s Op-Ed in Thursday’s Times is a small, sly masterpiece of the genre. It goes without saying, obviously, that Soviet-style rhetorical tells are entirely absent. Nothing here about running dogs of imperialism, dustbins of history, or rapacious capitalism. But the essay is equally free of the tropes of the New Russia, the Russia whose embrace of rapacious capitalism is about as close as the Putin regime gets to a ruling ideology. For readers of the Times, no belligerent nationalism, no crude populism, no insecure defensiveness.
Instead, Putin and his ghostwriters maintain a consistent tone of calm reasonableness, of big-brotherly concern for a colleague in danger of going astray. The essay is almost entirely free of blatant factual finagling, with one big exception:
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack—this time against Israel—cannot be ignored.
It is simply false that “there is every reason to believe” that the poison-gas attack was conducted by opposition forces and not by Assad’s Army. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe the exact opposite. (Please note, in passing, the pious cleverness of that last sentence, in which Putin gift wraps his whopper in a beribboned package of worried concern for the well-being of Israel.) "
.....
“American exceptionalism” has a tangled history. It sometimes means merely that the uniqueness of America’s geography, origins, natural resources, and patterns of political, social, and economic development distinguish us from other countries—which, while true, is true of many countries, Russia included. As deployed at home by Christianist nationalists and some neoconservatives, it means that the United States is God’s special favorite, with (pardon my French) a God-given mission civilisatrice. Or it can simply mean “We’re No. 1”—which, presumably, is why even politicians as urbane as President Obama feel obliged to bow to it.
But there’s a nice wrinkle. Back in 1927, Jay Lovestone, then a bigwig in the Communist Party U.S.A. (and later the guru of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s anti-Communist activities abroad), tried to explain to the Comrades in the Kremlin that there were reasons why America was stony ground for Bolshevism. You know, things like the safety valve of the frontier, the siren song of America’s egalitarian civic religion, the relative prosperity of American workers, and the vitality of U.S. capitalism. Lovestone argued that it might be better to try building opportunistic coalitions with “bourgeois” reformers than to go directly to violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Comintern was not pleased. On Stalin’s orders, Lovestone was expelled from the C.P.U.S.A. for what was termed, as translated from the Russian, “the heresy of American exceptionalism.” This was the phrase’s coinage, its first known use.
“American exceptionalism” was Moscow’s idea. So quit complaining, Vladimir."
"Say this for Vladimir Putin: the quality of the propaganda coming out of the Kremlin has dramatically improved since the days of Stalin, the Comintern, and Pravda.
Putin’s Op-Ed in Thursday’s Times is a small, sly masterpiece of the genre. It goes without saying, obviously, that Soviet-style rhetorical tells are entirely absent. Nothing here about running dogs of imperialism, dustbins of history, or rapacious capitalism. But the essay is equally free of the tropes of the New Russia, the Russia whose embrace of rapacious capitalism is about as close as the Putin regime gets to a ruling ideology. For readers of the Times, no belligerent nationalism, no crude populism, no insecure defensiveness.
Instead, Putin and his ghostwriters maintain a consistent tone of calm reasonableness, of big-brotherly concern for a colleague in danger of going astray. The essay is almost entirely free of blatant factual finagling, with one big exception:
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack—this time against Israel—cannot be ignored.
It is simply false that “there is every reason to believe” that the poison-gas attack was conducted by opposition forces and not by Assad’s Army. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe the exact opposite. (Please note, in passing, the pious cleverness of that last sentence, in which Putin gift wraps his whopper in a beribboned package of worried concern for the well-being of Israel.) "
.....
“American exceptionalism” has a tangled history. It sometimes means merely that the uniqueness of America’s geography, origins, natural resources, and patterns of political, social, and economic development distinguish us from other countries—which, while true, is true of many countries, Russia included. As deployed at home by Christianist nationalists and some neoconservatives, it means that the United States is God’s special favorite, with (pardon my French) a God-given mission civilisatrice. Or it can simply mean “We’re No. 1”—which, presumably, is why even politicians as urbane as President Obama feel obliged to bow to it.
But there’s a nice wrinkle. Back in 1927, Jay Lovestone, then a bigwig in the Communist Party U.S.A. (and later the guru of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s anti-Communist activities abroad), tried to explain to the Comrades in the Kremlin that there were reasons why America was stony ground for Bolshevism. You know, things like the safety valve of the frontier, the siren song of America’s egalitarian civic religion, the relative prosperity of American workers, and the vitality of U.S. capitalism. Lovestone argued that it might be better to try building opportunistic coalitions with “bourgeois” reformers than to go directly to violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Comintern was not pleased. On Stalin’s orders, Lovestone was expelled from the C.P.U.S.A. for what was termed, as translated from the Russian, “the heresy of American exceptionalism.” This was the phrase’s coinage, its first known use.
“American exceptionalism” was Moscow’s idea. So quit complaining, Vladimir."
