The UK expels 23 Russian diplomats after hastily accusing and condemning Russia and even Putin himself of poisoning “Sergei Skripal, a former double agent, and his daughter, Yulia, on March 4 in Salisbury, UK.”
This is another in a long-running set of actions by the West’s governments that show deep antagonism, fear and even hatred of Russia. Why does this exist?
Weapons industries batten on the presence of enemies. This is one powerful reason behind the hatred. Attitudes of hatred and antagonism conform to an ideology that economically rewards influential backers and beneficiaries of the national security state. They sponsor elected politicians who receive campaign contributions and are lobbying targets. Government defense bureaucrats rotate through industry positions, think tanks and government posts. Lately, intelligence bureaucrats and agents are attempting to rotate into political positions. In a word, the system is corrupt. Personal payoffs take precedence over the security of the voters.
Voters are bombarded by media that propagate symbols that strike fear into their hearts. Almost everything associated with Russia has been turned into a symbol of strangeness and largeness that generates fear, suspicion and antagonism. Russia is seen as strange and large and to be feared. The list of symbols generating fear is very long. I am not saying these are accurate. I am saying that they’ve been hung around Russia’s neck as negative symbols.
It begins with Russia being the largest country on Earth. Their Christian religion differs from the West’s. Their language is inaccessible and strange. Their communist system rivaled capitalism. The Kremlin and its walls symbolize secrecy. Their intent was to subvert the world. They are masters at chess and strategy, sneaky. They are masters at bigness: big satellites, big rockets, big nuclear devices, big tanks, intense rocket batteries. They were first into space and first to make an unmanned landing on the moon. Their army rapes and plunders. Their cold in Siberia is great and terrifying. The bear is an animal symbol that’s scary, surely more scary than the eagle. Their cruelty is noted even by Dostoevsky and emphasized by the gulag. Something as harmless as matryoshka dolls is turned into a symbol of layers of secrecy and deception. Their drinking is large: high-proof vodka in large quantities. They are against LGBT rights. Even their novels are huge, such as “War and Peace”. They defeat the West’s invasions, both Napoleon’s and Hitler’s, partly by size alone and partly by extreme climate. Their May Day parades are huge and imposing, with huge missiles on display and marching soldiers who resemble Hitler’s regiments. They are an energy giant. Their system is seen as run by oligarchs with huge empires of businesses. Their Mafia and criminal gangs are constantly the bad guys in the West’s movies. Their secret services succeed one after another and reach into the West. Communist agents infiltrated the State Department. They stole our atomic secrets. Now they are poisoning ex-spies with dangerous toxins. The color “Red” and the hammer and sickle became symbols to hate and fear.
We could go on. It is always the same as in the preceding cliches and exaggerations. The West turns anything Russia into a caricature and cartoon symbol to be feared and hated. It would not be hard to find activities carried out in the West and demonize them in the same way, and that is surely being done by those who wish to build up hatred of the West. The West’s politicians and media have built up suspicion of Russia among voters and themselves, interrupted only briefly by the war years when Stalin became an ally and then only for public consumption. Once enough Americans have been stirred up, they formed their own anti-communist and now anti-Russian organizations that deepened the process of creating antagonism.
Russia needs to counteract a wall of negative symbols that identify it in the minds of people in the West. Ballet dancers are not enough. It needs to find some positive symbols to represent itself. It has been trying. It has been acting in level-headed ways. It hasn’t been anywhere near as aggressive as the West has been in the past 28 years since the USSR failed. Yet being a reasonable actor on the world stage has not defused the West’s antagonism, which is strongly rooted in the economic and political gains of making Russia into an enemy.
The ideology of being anti-Russia has now taken over the minds of many of those within the West’s political system and its national security and military-industrial complex. Anti-Russianism is now habitual and near-automatic. Many in the West believe in the anti-Russia symbols and exaggerations to the point that they wish to alter Russia fundamentally. Beneath anti-Russianism has grown a desire to tame and control Russia, somehow causing a regime change that will replace the existing leadership with Western toadies and puppets.
10:01 am on March 17, 2018
