About that 'Russian Menace'

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 2:28pm

If you listen to the American media you'd think that Russian troops are on the march and America is in imminent danger.
Just consider this article from today.

U.S. lawmakers pushed for more aggressive steps to counteract the Russian “menace” on Tuesday, despite Trump administration officials insisting current sanctions were having an effect and vowing to impose more economic pain if Moscow does not change its behavior.

Scary, huh? Or how about this one.

The top U.S. diplomat for Europe is warning that Russia is attempting "to break apart the American republic" and that making that threat about U.S. politics "would be a gift to Putin" and "the most dangerous thing in the world we can do."

There's only one little problem with this rhetoric: it has nothing to do with reality.

Take for example Afghanistan, where our troops have been dying for 17 years.

Representatives of the Afghan Taliban plan to take part in peace talks in Moscow next month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.
Lavrov told reporters in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on August 21 that Russia had invited the Taliban to the meeting, scheduled for September 4, adding that "the initial reaction has been positive."

We've never been able to get the Taliban to the peace table.
As you can imagine, the U.S. rushed to seize the opportunity for peace.

Russia's Foreign Ministry has criticized Washington's reported refusal to send delegates to Moscow-hosted peace talks on Afghanistan after Interfax quoted a U.S. State Department spokesperson as saying the United States would not take part in the September 4 meeting.
A statement from the Russian ministry on August 22 said Washington's "refusal to attend the Moscow meeting on Afghanistan show Washington has no interest in launching a peace process in Afghanistan."

"We have learned with regret from the United States Department of State's statement that the Americans will not take part in the Moscow" meeting, the ministry said. "Admittedly, this step does not cause great surprise."

I meant we rushed to reject the chance for peace, because why would we want that?
But Russia is the danger.

Or how about Syria, another warzone that our troops are in.

Delegations from the Syrian government and the political opposition have arrived in the Russian city of Sochi for talks on the war in Syria, which are spearheaded by Russia, Turkey and Iran.
The meetings, which began on Monday and will end on Tuesday, are held within the framework of the Astana diplomatic track, which is sponsored by the three nations and is separate to UN-led efforts in Geneva.

You know who isn't in Sochi, or in any peace talks of any kind? The U.S.
And what about our close allies that we would do anything for, Israel?

The Russian military said Tuesday that its forces in Syria will help U.N. peacekeepers fully restore patrols along the frontier with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, reflecting Moscow’s deepening role in mediating between the decades-old foes.
The Russian deployment in the area has also highlighted Moscow’s growing clout in the region, where it seeks to balance the sharply conflicting interests of Israel and Iran.

“The Russian flag is the guarantor of peace and security on that land,” said Lt. Gen. Sergei Kuralenko, speaking to international reporters on a trip to the area organized by the Russian Defence Ministry. He noted that Russian and Israeli officials have maintained regular communications, adding that “operations by Russian military police help ensure the security of Israel.”

"guarantor of peace and security on that land.”
"ensure the security of Israel.”
Who's that? Russia, the 'menace'.
Not the U.S., who drops a bomb on another country every 12 minutes.

Tags:

Russia

Peace

Vote

Comments

Submitted by HenryAWallace on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 3:08pm

What hack that affected the election? The Obama adminstration

told us not a single vote had been affected by hacks that allegedly were the responsibility of the Russian government. Please don't tell me that Obama, whom dembot posters on other boards have already elevated to sainthood, lied to America about this supposedly important issue of national defense.

BTW, where is the PROOF?

Submitted by CB on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 4:06pm

I want to know why Brennan,

@HenryAWallace
as head of the CIA during Obama's presidency, completely failed to protect the country from Putin's election manipulation. The man should be tried for treason and shot. This crime of the century happened right under his nose. He is the one person who is directly responsible for Trump's victory over her Heinous.

Submitted by HenryAWallace on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 4:25pm

Again, what Russian election manipulation and where is the proof

@CB

and, if there indeed was Russian election manipulation, why did Obama say not a single vote had been affected (by whatever the hell the Russian government supposedly did).

Submitted by CB on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 4:41pm

You want proof?

@HenryAWallace @HenryAWallace
Hillary lost. Need I say more?

(Just being facetious)

Edit: Actually Brennan said he has proof but can't reveal it because it is 'classified'. What is remarkable is the number fuckwits on the street who believe this BS. I doubt the PTB believe it. They are just punking the rubes for political gain.

Submitted by Dr. John Carpenter on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 10:32am

2 + 2 = RUSSIA

@CB I’d love to hear someone ask one of these RUSSIARUSSIARUSSIA people “how did Obama, who told the America people our elections were safe and secure, allow this to happen on his watch?” They can’t have it both ways. Either Obama’s people were on the case and kept everything secure and there was no Russia hacking of the election or they screwed up big time and should be answering for it. It just can’t be both.

—

Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

Submitted by Not Henry Kissinger on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 12:28pm

That's the beauty of playing the victim...

@Dr. John Carpenter It just can’t be both.

you can have your hack and beat it too.

—

The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

Submitted by CB on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 3:57pm

Putting things in perspective

Which Is More Occupied, Crimea or Afghanistan?

Let’s compare Russia's "occupation" of Crimea with an occupation that the US is not demanding a swift end to: the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan.

According to Donald Trump, the one allied victor of World War II not still occupying Germany has made Germany its slave. But according to the great anti-Trump Resistance in the United States, the nation that openly bragged about installing Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia (the same Yeltsin who subsequently installed Vladimir Putin) has been Pearl-Harbor-attacked by the same Putin via a computer or Facebook or a cable channel or a remote control device implanted in Trump’s hair or something — the details are fuzzy.

But both teams can agree on the important thing — which has achieved a growing, bi-partisan, academic and popular consensus in the United States during the past four years. It is this: the second biggest threat to peace on earth and to the global rule of law (right behind either Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, depending on your affiliation) is the 2014 vote by the people of Crimea to re-join Russia.

Ain’t agreement agreeable? Someone’s laughing, Lord, kumbaya, Oh Lord, kumbaya!

Now, the vote by the people of Crimea to re-join Russia has another, more common name: The Seizure of Crimea. This infamous seizure is hard to grasp. It involved a grand total of zero casualties. The vote itself has never been re-done. In fact, to my knowledge, not a single believer in the Seizure of Crimea has ever advocated for re-doing the vote. Coincidentally, polling has repeatedly found the people of Crimea to be happy with their vote.
...
But let’s grant for the sake of argument that the Crimean vote was problematic, even horrendous, even criminal. There is no question that Russia had military forces in Crimea and sent in more, something I believe I can non-hypocritically oppose, since I’m not the U.S. government and I advocate for the abolition of the U.S. military. Even so, how does the “occupation” of Crimea rise to the level of greatest threat to peace on earth?

Compare it to a trillion dollars a year in U.S. military spending, new missiles in Romania and Poland, massive bombing of Iraq and Syria, the destruction of Iraq and Libya, the endless war on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S.-Saudi devastation of Yemen and the creation of famine and disease epidemics, or the explicit threats to attack Iran, not to mention world-leading weapons dealing to dictatorships around the globe by the good old U.S. of A. I’m sure your average American would rather visit “liberated Mosul” than “annexed Crimea,” but should we deal with facts or slogans?
...
In addition, Afghanistan is the one nation where the United States is engaged in major warfare with a country that is a member of the International Criminal Court. That body has now announced that it is investigating possible prosecutions for U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. Over the past 16 years, we have been treated to an almost routine repetition of scandals: hunting children from helicopters, blowing up hospitals with drones, urinating on corpses — all fueling anti-U.S. propaganda, all brutalizing and shaming the United States.

Ordering young American men and women into a kill-or-die mission that was accomplished 16 years ago is a lot to ask. Expecting them to believe in that mission is too much. That fact may help explain this one: the top killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is suicide. The second highest killer of American military is green on blue, or the Afghan youth who the U.S. is training are turning their weapons on their trainers! You yourself recognized this, saying: “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghans we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.”
...
Here’s my proposal. The people of Afghanistan should hold a public referendum and vote immediately to become the 51st U.S. state. Not only would they then have made themselves seized, conquered, attacked, raped, and occupied in the bad, Russian senses of the terms. But if they sent along some photos of themselves in a note to the U.S. Congress, they’d get U.S. troops out of their country and achieve its total independence from the United States by the following afternoon.

Submitted by HenryAWallace on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 4:29pm

What mission did we accomplish in Afghanistan 16 years ago?

@CB

Which Is More Occupied, Crimea or Afghanistan? Let’s compare Russia's "occupation" of Crimea with an occupation that the US is not demanding a swift end to: the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan. According to Donald Trump, the one allied victor of World War II not still occupying Germany has made Germany its slave. But according to the great anti-Trump Resistance in the United States, the nation that openly bragged about installing Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia (the same Yeltsin who subsequently installed Vladimir Putin) has been Pearl-Harbor-attacked by the same Putin via a computer or Facebook or a cable channel or a remote control device implanted in Trump’s hair or something — the details are fuzzy. But both teams can agree on the important thing — which has achieved a growing, bi-partisan, academic and popular consensus in the United States during the past four years. It is this: the second biggest threat to peace on earth and to the global rule of law (right behind either Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, depending on your affiliation) is the 2014 vote by the people of Crimea to re-join Russia. Ain’t agreement agreeable? Someone’s laughing, Lord, kumbaya, Oh Lord, kumbaya! Now, the vote by the people of Crimea to re-join Russia has another, more common name: The Seizure of Crimea. This infamous seizure is hard to grasp. It involved a grand total of zero casualties. The vote itself has never been re-done. In fact, to my knowledge, not a single believer in the Seizure of Crimea has ever advocated for re-doing the vote. Coincidentally, polling has repeatedly found the people of Crimea to be happy with their vote. ... But let’s grant for the sake of argument that the Crimean vote was problematic, even horrendous, even criminal. There is no question that Russia had military forces in Crimea and sent in more, something I believe I can non-hypocritically oppose, since I’m not the U.S. government and I advocate for the abolition of the U.S. military. Even so, how does the “occupation” of Crimea rise to the level of greatest threat to peace on earth? Compare it to a trillion dollars a year in U.S. military spending, new missiles in Romania and Poland, massive bombing of Iraq and Syria, the destruction of Iraq and Libya, the endless war on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S.-Saudi devastation of Yemen and the creation of famine and disease epidemics, or the explicit threats to attack Iran, not to mention world-leading weapons dealing to dictatorships around the globe by the good old U.S. of A. I’m sure your average American would rather visit “liberated Mosul” than “annexed Crimea,” but should we deal with facts or slogans? ... In addition, Afghanistan is the one nation where the United States is engaged in major warfare with a country that is a member of the International Criminal Court. That body has now announced that it is investigating possible prosecutions for U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. Over the past 16 years, we have been treated to an almost routine repetition of scandals: hunting children from helicopters, blowing up hospitals with drones, urinating on corpses — all fueling anti-U.S. propaganda, all brutalizing and shaming the United States. Ordering young American men and women into a kill-or-die mission that was accomplished 16 years ago is a lot to ask. Expecting them to believe in that mission is too much. That fact may help explain this one: the top killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is suicide. The second highest killer of American military is green on blue, or the Afghan youth who the U.S. is training are turning their weapons on their trainers! You yourself recognized this, saying: “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghans we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” ... Here’s my proposal. The people of Afghanistan should hold a public referendum and vote immediately to become the 51st U.S. state. Not only would they then have made themselves seized, conquered, attacked, raped, and occupied in the bad, Russian senses of the terms. But if they sent along some photos of themselves in a note to the U.S. Congress, they’d get U.S. troops out of their country and achieve its total independence from the United States by the following afternoon.

Submitted by ggersh on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 5:08pm

Grifting for Haliburton

@HenryAWallace https://twitter.com/premium_thot/status/1027532685202391040?ref_src=twsr...

Of course, Bush has now been rehabilitated by the #Resistance in an effort to appeal to suburban Republicans, so the Iraq debacle is no longer discussible in polite society..

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/200pm-water-cooler-8-22-2018.html

—

I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Submitted by snoopydawg on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 7:13pm

Hell even if Cheney said something against Trump

@ggersh

He would be rehabilitated too. This Trump derangement syndrome is the only derangement syndrome I have seen evidence of.

But I'm betting that if Trump does admit that Russia did interfere with the election and bought into every other accusation made against them then the pressure on Trump will cease. Anyone care to wager?

—

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

Submitted by ggersh on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 7:40pm

It's to late for IL trumpolini

@snoopydawg he's a goner after the midterms IMO
then we get get what we all wished for Pence -s-
boy are we fucked

The 4th coup in the US will have occurred.

Kennedy, Nixon, Dubya, trump

—

I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Submitted by The Voice In th... on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 7:58pm

Letting Osama bin Laden escape from a three sided square.

@HenryAWallace

—

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Submitted by CB on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 8:51pm

But we did kick the shit out of the Taleban

@The Voice In the Wilderness
who had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11. Those bastards had the audacity to turn down a very nice offer from Unocal in 1997 to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan to India - the TAPI pipeline. They refused the "carpet of gold" so we gave them a "carpet of bombs".

BTW, Putin is currently negotiating a new energy deal with Turkmenistan as we speak. Obviously this is just another attack on America. That rat-bastard keeps one-upping us at every turn and he even does it without bombing the shit out of those countries third world countries. Maybe we should just bomb Russia and be done with it.

Submitted by HenryAWallace on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 12:26pm

Are you sure we kicked the shit out of the Taliban 16

@CB

years ago?

I think we accomplished diddly 16 years ago, beyond perhaps inspiring more people in that region of the world to fear and hate us.

Submitted by CB on Fri, 08/24/2018 - 10:56am

They got a shit kicking

@HenryAWallace
just like the Vietnamese did. But, like the Vietnamese, they have not been defeated. In fact there are now more Afghani's who hate the US then there was at the beginning. The Taliban actually wanted to work with the US back in 2001 but The Empire wanted conquest - Bin Laden was just a convenient casus belli. This invasion was planned years before.

The country has now become another quagmire sucking in 100's of $billions. Think of the absolute pointlessness of all those thousands of young Americans who have come home in body bags, with missing body parts and/or mind fucked in the last 17 years. The highest rate of attrition from US forces in Afghanistan is now suicide.

If the US would stop meddling, Russia (along with China) would have a much, much better chance of bringing peace and prosperity to the region. But any country with important resources or geophysical location MUST be controlled by The Empire. Afghanistan has both and Washington will only let it go from its cold, dead hands. If the US PTB can't fully control any country they will destroy it, the lives of innocent inhabitants be damned.

What really pisses me off is the "left" says nothing about this. Instead, the leftist ANTIFA fuckwits are staging violent protests AGAINST free speech in a goddamn country that was built on that value - the very FIRST Amendment of the American Constitution. In my day, these fuckers would get a punch to the head and a kick in the groin.

Don't get me started on many of the mentally deranged SJW's. If I had my way, I'd send the lot of them to boot camp and then ship them out for canon fodder in one of the hell holes the neolibracons have created. Maybe then the fuckers will understand what a REAL safe place is.

rant/

Submitted by Amanda Matthews on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 8:44pm

They’ve been beating us over the head with

the propaganda that RUSSIA! is evil and out to kill us all since the end of WWII. I was born in 1949 and I’ve been hearing this shit ever since I was old enough to understand what TPTB were saying. That would have been around kindergarten. We had tables instead of desks. We shared the space UNDER there. I was scared, but some kids were so freaked they cried. Crap, we probably all had PSTD. It’s an experience that I’ll never forget. IIRC, they finally knocked that crap off around second grade. By that I mean the hiding under a desk bullshit. The propaganda and fear tactics have never stopped.

And I’ve (we’ve) been hearing it ever since. RUSSIA! Is the boogie man they use to keep us scared. Dumb asses figure since it always worked before, why mess with a tried and true scheme to keep the dirty plebs scared and in line?

EDIT: added ‘enough’

—

I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

Submitted by snoopydawg on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 11:37pm

Same shit, different day

@Amanda Matthews

—

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

Submitted by Dr. John Carpenter on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 10:39am

I grew up in the 80s

@Amanda Matthews and I remember it too, right up until perestroika and glasnost. Then, the Russians were kinda cool. I don’t remember hearing much about a Russian menace again until Putin really. I guess enough time has passed, it’s time for a Cold War reboot. Enough time has passed for people to think Russia is scary again.

—

Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

Submitted by Linda Wood on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 12:16pm

The gap between

@Dr. John Carpenter

what the average American knows about Russia and reality is frightening.

What happened with Putin is that he went to the left of Yeltsin, our boy, our Bushworld plaything, poster boy of "unfettered" capitalism, the raping of Russia. Bushworld didn't just deregulate mining and resource extraction in Russia, it deregulated everything, the abuse of labor, the destruction of education, the corruption of everything previously socialist and plunged Russia into an organized crime free fire zone. The standard of living fell to pieces and huge fortunes were made by U.S., British, and other western speculators. Putin has apparently moved to the left of that nightmare, and for that we are supposed to fear him, for insisting speculators pay their taxes and pay living wages and support social systems like education and healthcare as well as public infrastructure. For that we are supposed to go to war and contribute the destruction of huge parts of the United States in a nuclear war so Assholes like Albright and her followers can live the lives of potentates.