By Norman Solomon
June 15, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" -
No
matter what happens at Wednesday’s summit between
U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President
Vladimir Putin in Geneva, a grim reality is that
Democratic Party leaders have already hobbled its
potential to move the world away from the
worsening dangers of nuclear war.
After nearly five years
of straining to depict Donald Trump as some kind of
Russian agent — a depiction that squandered vast
quantities of messaging without electoral benefits —
most Democrats in Congress are now locked into a
modern Cold War mentality that endangers human
survival.
In the new light of
atomic weaponry, Albert Einstein warned against
“the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.”
But the concept is
flourishing as both parties strive to outdo each
other in vilifying Russia as a locus of evil. Rather
than coming to terms with the imperative for détente
between the two countries that brandish more than 90
percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, the
Democratic leadership at both ends of Pennsylvania
Avenue has been heightening the bilateral tensions
that increase the chances of thermonuclear
holocaust.
Biden has excelled at
gratuitous and dangerous rhetoric about Russia. As
this spring began, he declared on
national television that President Putin is “a
killer” — and boasted that he told the Russian
leader that he has “no soul” while visiting the
Kremlin in 2011.
It was a repeat of a
boast that Biden could not resist publicly making
while he was vice president in 2014 and
again while out of office in 2017.
Such bombast conveys a distinct lack of interest in
genuine diplomacy needed to avert nuclear war.
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Meanwhile, what about
self-described progressives who see themselves as a
counterweight to the Democratic Party establishment?
For the most part, they remained silent if not
actively portraying Russia as a mortal enemy of the
United States. Even renowned antiwar voices in
Congress were not
immune to
party-driven jingoism.
Diversions
Never mind that the
structurally malign forces of corporate America —
and the numerous right-wing billionaires heavily
invested in ongoing assaults on democracy —
appreciated the focus on Russia instead of on their
own oligarchic power. And never mind that,
throughout the Trump years, the protracted
anti-Russia frenzy was often a diversion away from
attention to the numerous specific threats to
electoral democracy in the United States.
Two years ago, when the
Voting Rights Alliance drew up a list of “61
Forms of Voter Suppression,”
not one of those forms had anything to do with
Russia.
Capacities to educate,
agitate and organize against the profuse forms of
voter suppression were hampered by the likes of
MSNBC star Rachel Maddow, whose extreme
fixation on Russian
evils would have
been merely farcical if not so damaging. Year after
year, she virtually
ignored a wide
range of catastrophic U.S. government policies while
largely devoting her widely watched program to
stoking hostility toward Russia. Maddow became a
favorite of many progressives who viewed her show as
a fount of wisdom.
Progressives — who are
supposed to oppose the kind of “narrow nationalisms”
that Einstein warned against at the dawn of the
nuclear age — mostly steered clear of challenging
the anti-Russia orthodoxy that emerged as an
ostensible way of resisting the Trump presidency.
Routinely, many accepted and internalized the
scapegoating of Russia that was standard fare of
mainstream media outlets — which did little to shed
light on how threats to democracy in the United
States were overwhelmingly homegrown, rooted in
corporate power.
Now, on the verge of
the Biden-Putin summit, U.S. media outlets are
overflowing with calls to confront Russia as well as
China, pounding on themes sure to delight investors
in Pentagon contracting firms. Leading Democrats and
Republicans are in step with reporters and pundits
beating Cold War drums. How much closer do they want
the Doomsday
Clock to get
to midnight before they call off their zeal to
excite narrow nationalisms?
It scarcely seems to
matter to anti-Russia zealots, whether “progressive”
or not, that the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists began this year with an ominous warning:
“By our estimation,
the potential for the world to stumble into
nuclear war — an ever-present danger over the
last 75 years — increased in 2020. An extremely
dangerous global failure to address existential
threats — what we called ‘the new abnormal’ in
2019 — tightened its grip in the nuclear realm
in the past year, increasing the likelihood of
catastrophe.”
Far from the maddening
crowd of reckless Cold Warriors, the American
Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord released an open
letter last
week that made basic sense for the future of
humanity:
“The dangerous and
in many ways unprecedented deterioration in
relations between the United States and the
Russian Federation must come to an end if we are
to leave a safer world for future generations. .
. . We believe that the time has come to
resurrect diplomacy, restore and maintain a
dialogue on nuclear risks that’s insulated from
our political differences like we did during the
Cold War. Without communication, this increases
the likelihood of escalation to nuclear use in a
moment of crisis.”
It’s a sad irony that
such clarity and wisdom can scarcely be found among
prominent Democrats in Congress, or among many of
the groups that do great progressive work when
focused on domestic issues. The recent
fear-mongering over Russia has been a factor in
refusals to embrace the anti-militarist
message of Martin Luther King’s final year.
In the United States,
the political context of the Biden-Putin summit
should have included widespread progressive support
for genuine diplomacy with Russia. Instead, overall,
progressives went along with Democratic Party
leaders and corporate liberal media as they fueled
the momentum toward a nuclear doomsday.
Norman Solomon is an American journalist,
media critic, activist, and former U.S.
congressional candidate. Solomon is a longtime
associate of the media watch group Fairness &
Accuracy In Reporting .https://www.normansolomon.com/
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