January 20, 2019
By James Hitchcock
On December 25, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to rescue the teetering pro-Soviet government in Kabul. Ten months short of a decade later it announced the last of its troops, tails tucked firmly between their legs, had left the country, defeated. Armed to the teeth, the second most powerful army in the world couldn’t sway public opinion in Afghanistan, and got their asses handed to them on a plate by a third-world country mob-army with World War I rifles and a few U.S. Stinger missiles.
But the U.S.? We’ve bought Russian propaganda hook, line, and sinker thanks to the Capitalist’s generations-long attack on the working class.
This twin-pronged attack – economic and educational – has prepared Americans to be the perfect receptors of Russian propaganda.
Creating an economy that leaves workers out of the prosperity they create, and depriving them of an education that allows them to figure out why, intentionally creates anger looking for an easy target. The Capitalists historically have painted the bullseye on brown people.
But then, after World War II, the burgeoning Civil Rights movement made outright bigotry more and more socially unacceptable. And Progressive influences began to improve both the economic and educational level of the working class.
Luckily for the Capitalists, the Communists in Russia developed The Bomb. Capitalists quickly re-aimed, and began using “The Commies” as the force threatening the working class. Russia’s efforts to expand its sphere of influence and create a Soviet Union played perfectly into the Capitalist plans.
The working class, the bejesus frightened out of them by apocalyptic visions of nuclear holocaust and/or communist boogeymen taking all their stuff, put their noses to the grindstone and cranked out munitions by the millions. The Capitalists couldn’t be happier as they sold those munitions to developing nations around the world, using the same communist boogeyman as their number one sales tool.
But, like all Ponzi schemes before it, this one, too, began to teeter.
We were loaning developing countries the money to buy our munitions, so we were, in effect, buying our own stuff. And the developing countries serving as the middlemen in the arms deal between us and ourselves were concentrating on arming themselves rather than, well, developing. So their chances of ever repaying their loans were rapidly diminishing. And since they weren’t developing their own economies, they were also not viable markets for our non-military goods.
At the same time, the Soviet Union, cobbled together from far more disparate groups than the U.S. and its allies – and hemmed in economically and physically by Europe on one side and China on the other – began to show similar signs of being top-heavy, and less of a global threat.
As we approached the Reagan presidency the Capitalists realized that to to continue to increase their wealth they could not rely solely on ever increasing global sales. They were going to have to start taking a bigger share of American productivity. But they faced the twin obstacles of labor unions and a work force trained in critical thinking by Progressive improvements in public education. Luckily, in Reagan they found a tool to combat both.
Reagan was an actor through and through. With no real substance of his own, he took the Good Cowboy role the Capitalists gave him, and that he knew so well, and ran with it. He recreated the Commie Threat and poured money into defense at a time when the Soviet Union could least afford it due to dropping price of the oil that was its economic cushion.
He found the perfect opportunity to challenge unions in a fight against flight controllers. He attacked public education and promoted parochial and home-schooling to the delight of the growing Religious Right (I discuss this in more detail in “How a movement took over a party“)
Related:
The latest front in Russian infiltration: America’s right-wing homeschooling movement
ThinkProgress.org
When the Soviet Union inevitably collapsed – as much due to the global collapse of the oil prices bankrolling it as the influence of an arms race with our “Shining Light on the Hill” – American politicians, and Americans in general, took a global victory lap to take the credit. And rubbed Russia’s nose in a pile of political excrement in the process. We then, as a country, promptly forgot about our post-war global adversary.
Perhaps the Capitalists bought their own bullshit about the “commies” and thought the reason Russians hated us was the incompatibility of Capitalism and Communism, not that our global expansionism was hemming in Russia’s own global expansionism. Whatever the reason, American Capitalists forgot about the 50-year struggle for global domination between us, and quickly began making deals with their Russian counterparts, assuming wealth was the Russian Capitalist’s sole goal as well.
But Russia hasn’t forgotten. When the Soviet Union collapsed, all the Communist apparatchiks with their hands on the levers of power didn’t just disappear. They simply slipped out of their red overcoats, and used their power and influence to slip into the new, more fashionable “democratic” outerwear.
So, while the heads of the old system were cut off, the new heads were sewn onto the same body, and today’s Russia is essentially led by the same drivers who were at the wheel of its power apparatus when the Soviet Union collapsed. The country is literally led by the former Soviet Union’s top spy.
Keep in mind that Russia has a far older national identity than America. The country was struggling for global domination when our founding fathers were but a lustful gleam in their forefathers’ eyes. Russians are deeply proud of their national heritage. So Russians are not going to so easily forget the embarrassment their country – and by extension they, themselves – felt when the Soviet Union – and their dream of global hegemony – collapsed. They remember most of all the U.S. gloating over it.
You can bet that Vladamir Putin then watched with delight the American Capitalist attack on unions and public education, the very tools that powered our rise to economic global domination. With his inside knowledge of the espionage business, he knew that a less-educated, less-organized public was far more susceptible to the psychological operations spies use to sway public opinion.
He must have clapped his hands together in delight as he watched the progress of our fiscal self-castration as, funded by American Capitalists, conservatives and neo-liberals economically analphabetically waged a new all-out war on the American people in order for their funders to extract an ever-increasing cut of the country’s productivity.
As American workers’ wages stagnated, no longer able to scare workers with threats of Soviet gulags, politicians reintroduced the old brown boogeyman, couched in “welfare queen” clothes.
From there, we devolved to birtherism , and then to full-blown racism in the White House, on the floor of Congress, and the streets of our country.
My guess is that if we were to dig deep enough, Russians began funding both sides of this artificial divide 30 or more years ago.
Now that the divide is about to crack our nation wide open, that money will rise to the surface as we discover exactly what the Russians want us to: our Democratic system has been destroyed at the hands of our own politicians, who were willing to sell themselves in the ultimate political corruption: treason.