[Peace-discuss] Good historical context from veteran Marxist

[David Green]

une 15, 2018 The Russians are Coming!
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/15/the-russians-are-coming/> by Paul
Buhle <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/dr4maye/>

Photo by Tom Hilton | CC BY 2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/>

These days we see a seemingly odd project taking place in the realms of
American liberalism: ferocious insistence that the truly outrageous Donald
J. Trump is at his worst when….making peace with our enemies! Has he been
brainwashed by Russian and/or North Korean agents, perhaps? Or is this all,
perhaps, a crude plan to place Trump Steaks in Trump hotels in heretofore
unbidden locations? What kind of madness would lessen the threat of
American nukes that keeps us all as safe as we may reasonably hope to be?

The story is old, so old that we need to be reminded of an insight offered
myself and others in the lecture classes of historian of empire William
Appleman WIlliams, more than fifty yeas ago. As he explained, US policy
toward Russia was already, in the nineteenth century approximately what it
became after the Russian Revolution. Indeed, as nearly every imperial
policy going back thousands of years: chop away at competing empires as
persistently as possible, rouse internal divisions while threatening
domestic populations into submissions with dark warnings about the evil
nature of the competitor-empire peoples.

All this acquired a distinctly modern affect with the rise of the
Bolsheviks, of course. The American newspaper headlines of 1919, announcing
that in the new Russia, women had been “nationalized,” fairly typified the
looniness of the orchestrated response, or alternatively, placed Russia
among the barbarian non-white races threatening the West and, almost
certainly, its fragile womanhood.

In their new book, *The Russians Are Coming. Again: the first cold war as
tragedy, the second as farce
<https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583676945/counterpunchmaga>,
*Jeremy Kuzamarov
and John Marciano, scholar-activists of human rights campaigns for decades,
offer details reminding us of how hard American leaders struggled to put
across the propaganda, but also how determined they have remained to keep
as much of their own aims of conquest as secret as possible. Woodrow
Wilson, adopted by the press as the great peacemaker and democrat,
naturally kept the invasion of Russia by the US and its far right Russian
agents from public eyes. When exposed after its abject failure, the project
was described as incidental, unimportant, even accidental, in the same way
that the US involvement in Vietnam would be described by affable liberal
commentators as unintentional, a good deed gone somehow wrong.

Why did they and their successors persist, across the decades down to the
collapse of the East Bloc and beyond, in the insistence upon American
innocence? And why did they persist in seemingly
<https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583676945/counterpunchmaga>fanatical
plans to overthrow or, possibly, exterminate the Russians entirely by way
of atomic or nuclear weapons? These questions are not so easily answered,
because they involve the high-wire maneuvers of powerful men (and a very
few women) evidently willing to destroy the world destined, otherwise, to
be inherited by their super-rich and super-powerful sons, grandsons and so
on into figurative eternity.

I once asked Harry Magdoff, co-editor of *Monthly Review*, why American
leaders of business and the two parties would perpetuate an ecological
acceleration downward. Harry answered that the logic was the same as the
atomic and nuclear arms race. They could not, in their own terms, do
otherwise. Capitalism, our national capitalism, must confront and overcome
all other forms of power. Peace, in the real sense of global peace, is (to
borrow a phrase from the hawkish Margaret Thatcher) Not An Option.

Thus a deliciously awful issue of *Colliers* magazine, 1951, analyzed by
the authors, drew upon intellectual celebrities far and wide to declare
Russian Communism a form of madness, dangerously infectious if not
eradicated. Leading liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had earlier declared
sympathy for Communism to reveal evidence of neurosis, the cravings of
“lonely and frustrated people” (p.128). No wonder Schlesinger was said to
have authored the legislation put forward by Senator Hubert Humphrey,
during the height of the Cold War, to incarcerate in special prison camps
thousands of Americans guilty of….being American Communists.

More to the point today, perhaps, are the curses thrown down from the
heights of liberal indignation upon Martin Luther King, Jr, after his
repudiation of the War in Vietnam. “An egomaniac…under the sway of the
Communists,” black columnist Carl Rowan called him. (p.134)  For the AFL’s
George Meany and noted liberals moving rightward, King was mostly an
ingrate. Unions had raised money for him, some labor leaders had actually
marched with him, if mainly to heighten their own prestige. And now he had
betrayed America!

A rehearsal of the US role around the world in the Cold War era brings us
sharply toward Noam Chomsky’s conclusion that the Russians had determined
to hold onto the security of an impermeable Eastern Bloc, while the
American leaders, for their part, regarded the Russians mainly as a barrier
to complete control of the Global South. This makes as much sense of the
anti-communist obsession as any other single notion, because it brings
together modern capitalism and a major source of its  blood-soaked origins:
the exploitation of race.

The final chapter begins with C. Wright Mills’s argument that a calamitous
World War III was most likely because the US could not accept the threat to
hegemony that a command economy offered to the Third World. In the decades
since the Soviet collapse, this threat has come to pass in a different
fashion, with the rise of counter-hegemonic capitalistic economies in
unexpected parts of the world. That the imagined threat would now be laid
at the door of the Russians, whose military budget is not a tenth of that
of the US, offers one more irony. As does the return of bogeyman
anticommunist rhetoric, adjusted to Islam, then specified to Shiites aka
Iran.

Kuzmarov and Marciano have delivered a powerful package of ideas in highly
readable form. Let’s hope today’s young readers, in particular, will find
their way to this book.
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More articles by:Paul Buhle <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/dr4maye/>

*Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of
an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.*
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