New Carthage Must Be Destroyed!
Some of you may be thinking, "Why Russia? Why now?"
I know what Glenn Greenwald thinks.
“[I]t’s used to avoid confronting the fact that Trump is a by-product of the extraordinary and systemic failure of the Democratic Party. As long as the Russia story enables pervasive avoidance of self-critique – one of the things humans least like to do – it will continue to resonate no matter its actual substance and value.”
There is a grain of truth to that, but it isn't the whole truth.
The demonization of Russia began before the Democrats lost in November. It began even before the primaries started.
Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday compared Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine to actions taken by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler outside Germany in the run-up to World War II.
In fact, Obama was imposing sanctions on Russia long before there was trouble in Ukraine.
What's more, this isn't a case of only Democrats hating Russia. Many Republicans do too.
"Everybody knows they have done it," said McCain, adding that Putin is "a threat to the world order" that's been in place since WWII ended.
Shawn asked Graham about Americans who doubt the threat from Putin.
"You doubt at your own peril. ... Learn from history. Don't repeat the mistakes of history. Any time in Europe, [when] you let one country grab land by force, you'll live to regret it," he said.
Yes, there is history to learn from here, but it isn't Nazi Germany history. It's the history of Ancient Rome.
Between the second and third Punic Wars, famous statesman Cato The Elder would end his speeches on any subject in the Senate with the phrase ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam, which means "Furthermore, it is my opinion that Carthage must be destroyed".
He didn't say this because Carthage was a real military danger. Carthage had been neutered in the second Punic War and was in no position to stop Rome from expanding its empire.
Carthage obediently paid Rome 200 silver talents every year for 50 years, and gave Rome no reason to attack.
Finally, Carthage was attacked by its neighbor, Numidia. Carthage raised an army to defend itself, but was promptly beaten by Numidia.
Rome used the paper-thin excuse of Carthage’s decision to wage war against its neighbour without Roman consent as a reason to finally destroy Carthage.
Which they did. Completely.
Roughly 3/4 of Carthaginians were killed or starved in the siege. Every single one of the surviving 50,000 Carthaginians were enslaved. Carthage was systematically burned for 17 days; the city was wiped from the face of the Earth.
Russia is the New Carthage.
The Rome of our time is Washington, Russia is Carthage, and today’s Cato the Elder is US Senator John McCain, whose quest for conflict with Russia is unbounded. Indeed, for Mr McCain the belief that Russia must be destroyed has been elevated to the status of a self evident and received truth.
There are several actors with several motivations, but in every case the trick is to make Russians 10-feet tall and with a military the U.S.S.R. would envy.
In early April, a battalion of senior military officials appeared before a Senate panel and testified that the US Army is ‘outranged and outgunned,’ particularly in any future conflict with Russia. Arguing for a much bigger budget for the Army, they claimed that, absent a substantial increase in funding, the Russians would overtake us and, even scarier, ‘the army of the future will be too small to secure the nation.’“The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! And before you know it, Brooklyn will be renamed Putingrad.
“Of course it was pure coincidence that, shortly after these alarm bells were rung, a piece appeared in Politico magazine purportedly showing that the Russians were breathing down our necks: it revealed a ‘secret study’ – revealed for the first time! – that supposedly detailed Russia’s deadly new capabilities as demonstrated in Ukraine. Included in this potpourri of propaganda was the assertion by none other than Gen. Wesley Clark, former presidential candidate and well-known Russophobe, that Moscow had developed a tank that is for all intents and purposes ‘invulnerable.’
The Russian military budget is just over a tenth of the size of the U.S. military budget.
While money is a huge part of this push into a new Cold War (albeit with a tiny enemy), there is an ideology behind it that is just as important. Cato the Elder knew it.
It's called Power.
The Pentagon has released its “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015,” June 2015. http://news.usni.org/2015/07/02/document-2015-u-s-national-military-stra...
The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are independent. In other words, the norm is dependence on Washington.Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.” In other words, their independence is out of step with the neoconservative Uni-power doctrine that declares independence to be the right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes any other country being independent in its actions.
Empires are self-justifying.
Comments
The US created the current Russia from the ruins of the USSR
Thanks CB, for the overt and covert context. n/t
Mobsters, all of them.
Probably not one in 10,000 Americans realize the US role
in the destruction of Russia after the USSR collapsed. Putin re-nationalized the oil companies and uses the money to pay for pensions, university education and health care.
You may (or not) enjoy the following. There is a short, politically incorrect, video by Liz Curry at the following site that explains a bit of the above.
If only world-wide,
all individuals were treated with equal respect and dignity, regardless of their origin, we wouldn’t have to compare or compete. Despite Russia affording their people more support in some ways, in others they are apallingly deficient. If I were gay or wanted an abortion, or chose to resist other injustices, I wouldn’t want to be a Russian citizen.
Have you actually checked the laws in Russia?
It is easier to get an abortion in Russia than in the US. There are no restrictions for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy or 22 weeks if result of rape. Abortions can be performed at any time if needed for medical necessity. There is a mandatory 2 to 7 day waiting period. All abortions are paid for by the state and must be done in licensed institutions by physicians with specialized training. There have been bills to restrict abortions and to stop state funding for them in 2015 but they failed to pass.
I'll let Putin answer your misunderstanding about gays in Russia. Don't forget that Russians are much more conservative than Americans, especially about traditional family values (85% of population).
Here are the people that American sanctions hurt. The sanctions have only served to improve Putin's approval ratings.
thank God for the kids /nt
Russia is an amazing country
I have been to Russia four times in the past three years and will return this fall. My goal is to learn Russian and to interview Russians to understand their world perspective.
What I have found so far is that they are wonderful people, very well educated and with an acute understanding of history. They value their freedoms (свобода). I have been very well treated as an American. They strongly like President Putin, the 85 to 90% approval rating is real. They believe that Russia must be strong in a difficult world and understand their history. Young people seem especially happy and friendly; a group of young Ballet students performed spontaneously in a square in St. Petersburg while we were watching. They are very tolerant people as Russia has a huge number of ethnic groups, and this includes tolerance of sexual preference. Listen carefully to what Putin says about freedom of sexual orientation. There are active, visible LBGT communities in the big cities.
Russia is like the US in the 1950s. About the same population, a huge land mass, endless resources and excellent science and technology, with the advantage that they have the technology of this decade.
My opinion is that if the US could ever get over the fanatical need for hegemony in every sphere that we would realize that the biggest prize in the world is Russia's friendship. We are amazingly similar. I am 100% convinced that Russians would welcome this, with the single caveat that the West would have to consider Russia as an equal partner.
I think that the book "1984" really explains the need for a monolithic state to always have an enemy. It serves so many useful purposes. Our attitude towards Russia is irrational. We would grasp at any straw to justify it. What amazes me is how the monolithic media in the US has been so successful in breeding dislike of Russia and Putin within this country. Vladimir Putin is really a strong, capable, intelligent, moderate leader, quite possibly the exact opposite of what the West has tried so hard to paint. Russia today is really all about the Russian people, I wish that I could say that about the US. Perhaps Russia, in that sense, is more of a threat to the West than the USSR ever was.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
Thank you for this excellent reply. I have been trying to
educate people for years now that their knowledge about Russia and its people is mostly false or outdated. At least the people here in c99 listen.
DKos has gone rabidly neo-McCarthyist. They are utterly incapable of realizing it was their unsuitable candidate which lost the election.
Unfortunately, the MIC, NATO and war hawks are taking advantage and fanning the flames. It shows no signs of dampening down.
Hi CB
I didn’t know about Russia's long history of abortion policies. Having listened to the Liz Curry video you posted; when at the end she spoke about morality, it appeared she was disapproving of abortion and homosexuality. I’m still not sure how to interpret the end, as it seemed somewhat conflicting to me in the context of what came before. I appreciate your putting things into a fuller context with your knowledge and personal experience of Russia. It appears that the Russian population enjoy many life-sustaining benefits, and lack in others. Hopefully, in the end, we all can enjoy more equality and human privilege.
I hope you’ll continue to offer your knowledge and personal reflections. Enjoy your next visit.
The U.S. is going to need a lot of salt....
...
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
No to Salt
We have our own here. Mine it under the Finger Lakes and under Detroit.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
I am not sure we are not set up to be Carthage this time.
Leaner and meaner is not the US. Fat and content is more like it. We exist by isolation, that is dealt with by ICBMs. Slap in face for us (US?). It could happen, we are certainly not making allies and friends to be counted on.
Daffs are nearing bloom, one month early. But major cold front, snow expected tomorrow. My broken foot and torn ligament defies the old wives' tale and hurts like hell today. Dr visit tomorrow. Getting on a month. Could be with no treatment another 6 mos. Feeling very depressed. I Shall Survive.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
I noticed some green shoots here in the Way Up North
this morning. And the birds are singing their heads off in the early hours.
Must be that global cooling that Trump is so fond of.
(Edited)
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
Nettles are sprouting in southern WI
The first steamed greens!
In general, regarding war …
Speaking for the dead …
[video:https://youtu.be/cKoJvHcMLfc]
My Daffodils popped up Feb 7
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Those in our garden area started blooming around 01/11/2017,
and are now bloomed out, but the ones along the back wall of the house have now started blooming as of maybe 02/26 or so.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Wow, that seems real early
but I'm at 45 degrees north.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
NATO/US looking to win the war Hitler started.
Not much talked about in America and the West anymore, is that the (Slavic) Soviet Bolsheviks were considered a threat to Western civilization, if not thee greatest threat, at the very turn of the 20th century (not just post-WWII). And hand-in-hand leading this foreign threat to the West were Jews. My local paper ran an article on resistance to immigration awhile back on how Americans did not want Jews from Eastern Europe because of the foreign threat they posed--Reds. The Red Scare goes back a long way given the role communists and socialists in the union movement. I have read pervasive historical documents that Chamberlain did not see the threat from Germany, but from the Soviet Union and in fact encouraged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union. I get the sense that Chamberlain thought the Germans would turn east and not toward England.
In fact, much of the current anti-Russian rhetoric sounds like the real German Nazis in their propaganda war against the Soviet Union and the Jewish controlled Bolsheviks (as Hitler saw it). Jews/Russians are everywhere undermining our society, our elections, have infiltrated Western institutions (the Jewish banker theme, only now the Russian mafia)--and they are to be blamed for all social problems. Look into an issue, and you will find a Russian/Jew peering back at you. Hillary blamed anti-fracking demonstrations on Putin, and the New York Times pointed at Putin as the cause of anti-TPP sentiments. I was reading about the Nazi anti-Jewish film called The Eternal Jew and the Nazi iconography around it. Images of Putin play off the Nazi tradition of demonization of Jews. Time had front cover of Putin and emphasized and enhanced his nose. Guess one of the trademark stereotypes of Jews by the Nazis.
It seems to me that the US and Western Europe are repeating the racist notions of the Nazis toward the Russians. Ukrainian and Lithuanian Nazis are given a free pass in their antisemitism and their profitable to them hatreds.
And now like the Nazis the West has built a military on the border of Russia that will is going past being defensive toward being offensive. It seems from one point of view, that the West wants to finish the job Hitler started.
Only no Western troops will get even close to Moscow or St. Petersburg before Putin or any other Russian leader launches nukes.
US corporations and banks gave considerable impetus to the
growth of Hitler's war machine. I doubt Hitler could have built such a powerful military without their assistance.
Nose job by Time?
I have tried to research this and cannot find a thing. Any help would be appreciated.
Sorry, I blew away reference to your post. See below.
I over-wrote in my response to you the reference number which would place my response under yours. See below for my response.
Thank You, gjohnsit, this was the best essay for me
you have written, because you covered (with all the links given, which I all read) so many issues I had missed out while being in the US the last 35 years. I didn't know too much about them and I feel now how much I needed to understand them..
I learned only now, being in Germany and seeing some documentaries, I tried to point to in this comment, but knowing it wouldn't be helpful for English only speaking folks, about the historical events during the Russina Revolution against the Czar Nicholas II, the role of the Bolscheviks and much more of the times from 1905 til 1926.
I had not really understood (being in the US in 1989) the whole collapse of the Sovjet Union and the meaning of the German reunification for the Sovjet Union empire and the role NATO played during and after the collapse. I only now learned the different events happening in the former Sovjet republics that declared their independence. The map you showed in your article I saw (well explained) in one of the German documentaries I watched lately.
I also understood that the feelings of people from the Baltics and Poland towards Russia has long and old ethnic and tribal roots that I wouldn't have thought to be the case as they are 'bygone' for so long. But as everywhere else those ethnic and tribal feelings never go away and always are reborn from generation to generation. May be Americans have not that much understandig for it, because all those 'tribal' immigrants to the US over the decades had to put their own memories and feelings on the back burner in their minds to get along and integrate into the US. Their kids felt them, felt empathy for their parents' fate, and thus helped - unconsciously perhaps - to always be ready to stoke those ethnic and tribal fires on the backburner to light up.
I learned through Greenwald's article and the New Yorker article he talks about, that there was a difference between Obama and Clinton in the way they wanted to approach 'the Russian tiger'. AFter reading the details about that I have to say that I really would have preferred Obama's approach to prevail than Clinton's. What a disaster to begin with and in the end of it, both have had horrifying effects leading to the current situation.
I happened to have to return from the US to my home country Germany without planning it three weeks before the elections and certainly didn't expect Trump to win and truely hoped that wouldn't be the case. I admit that I couldn't quite follow those here that mentioned they were ready to vote for Trump, because of all the betrayals they knew about and saw in the Clinton and Obama Democrats. I really have a lot of empathy with the despair of many not to know how to vote or what to do, being forced into the duopoly that offers no choice at all. There is no democracy in all of it. And I would never blame anyone for the choices they made in that kind of situation.
All of the sudden I am immersed in German media coverage via documentaries that I would have never seen in the US. Lot's of "magazine books" about themes that help me understand the past from 1978 onwards. I also really didn't know enough about the Vietnam Era from the US point of views. Of course I realize also that reading similar longish reports in US magazine is a bit harder. I tend to often not finish them.
I am learning a lot and sorry to say way, way too late. But I can say that the material I read through the EB and on C99p help me a lot along the way.
Just wanted to thank you and all and also those commentators in here like CB, who posts so many additional links with explanations.
PS, well Carthage... I remember vaguely that my history teachers in seventh grade tried to incite some interest in that historical period in us kids, but as you can see, she (my teacher) failed miserably in that. Now those days are for real very bygone...
Polish enmity toward Russia
My grandfather was shipped off to the United States from Poland at the age of 17 to avoid being drafted into the White Russian army. There's mutual animosity between Poland and Russia going back 1,000 years.
IIRC it's rooted in religious differences
Poland was and is Roman Catholic, but Russia converted from paganism to Eastern Orthodox. There were probably geopolitical reasons for this, by now wrapped up in legends.
The denominations split for keeps in 1054, and there has been trouble of one sort or another ever since.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
"Explain Yourselves." lol nt
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Wasn't Carthage ruled by women at one point in
its history? Boy, bet the males hated that one. LOL Rec'd!!
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Here is the Time cover and Nazi image of typical Jewish person
Here is a popular rendering of Jews in Nazi Germany (sorry I can't figure out how to insert a picture show up undistorted so you and others can see immediately.)
http://www.danwymanbooks.com/Ewige1.jpg
Here is the Time magazine cover.
http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/2007/1101071231_400.jpg
Here is a photo of Putin from a near front angle.
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2011/09/vladimir-puti...
Now the Time cover is not obviously an exact copy, but I believe there are strong echoes in the presentation in the context of other attacks on Putin and the Russian people. The Nazi illustration in a way summarizes the criticisms of Putin: communist tyrant and motivated by greed. Putin is not a communist but much of the talk and imagery of the democratic party rabble invokes communist imagery. From the Woman's March:
https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_6544-1024x68...
I would claim that this poster, and there are many like them, echo the Nazi charges against Jews that they have corrupted German society. A Nazi wrote this about the film The Eternal Jew:
Sound familiar--it is a point of satire and humor that Putin gets blamed for everything. This directly goes to accusations that the Russians are attacking the very foundations of the West.)
Am I over-blowing it? Its it pure co-incidence? Is it taping into an unconscious cultural and historical memory? Is TOP which is one of thee most rabid anti-Russian/Putin political websites knowingly Nazis? Don't think so. Trump is pointing us at a certain type of authoritarian government, but so is the democratic party as it feeds off the fascist and racist political imagery and themes.
This revelation is recent, and needs more backing, so need just to gather up more examples.
That's what I was looking for
Thank-you!