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    Scott Ritter: 'Waging Peace': How a tour of Russia showed me that propaganda perverts reality in the Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on June 2, 2023, 9:14 pm

    - minds of Americans

    Lede: My month-long tour of the country was an eye-opening experience, and so was the
    hostility that met me back home

    2 Jun 2023, RT Op-Ed

    At the end of April, my daughter Victoria and I departed New York City's JFK
    airport, ultimately bound for the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, the first
    destination of what would be a 26-day, 12-city tour of Russia.

    ...

    I left on this adventure fully cognizant of the existence of an informational
    pandemic in America known as Russophobia, and I always believed that I was
    realistic as to the challenges that I would have to face in trying to convert my
    Russian experience into a fact-based vaccine to counter this disease of the
    American mind. However, the scale of the obstacles that I imagined overcoming
    paled in comparison to the reality that hit home literally as I stepped off the
    aircraft on our way back home, when Victoria and I were both pulled out of the
    passport checkpoint for an hours-long interrogation by investigators from
    Customs and Border Protection who specialize in travelers from designated
    nations such as Russia.

    I will start by noting that the treatment my daughter and I received was
    professional and courteous. I understand the political reality of the times we
    live in, and the perceived necessity of questioning US citizens who travel to
    Russia while relations between our two nations are at an all-time low. My
    concern is not in the conduct of the interrogation, but rather the substance of
    the foundational information upon which the questions asked of me were based. As
    the CBP officer admitted, he had interviewed hundreds of Russians after the
    start of the military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The picture he had
    of Russia was singularly grounded in the perspective of political dissidents who
    had a bone to pick with President Vladimir Putin, and the narrative that they
    painted about Russia had become gospel for the CBP. By extension, it has heavily
    influenced the overall assessment by the US government, since these dissident
    debriefings constitute a major source of the primary intelligence used by
    national security analysts throughout the American intelligence community.

    In short, my interrogation quickly became a debate between myself on the one
    hand, and a combination of Alexey Navalny (the imprisoned Russian opposition
    figure who most of the Russian dissidents support, according to the officer) and
    the Ukrainian government on the other. Virtually every point I made was
    immediately defined as "pro-Russian propaganda." I tried to impress upon the CBP
    officer the reality of Russia, today, especially concerning both the high level
    of support for, and underlying criticism of, the Russian government about the
    military campaign in Ukraine. However, in the end my arguments, and the facts
    they were based upon, were categorized as "Kremlin talking points" no matter how
    hard I tried. I left the interrogation with a new appreciation of how deeply
    ingrained into the intellectual DNA of the official US government the Navalny
    and Ukrainian narratives have become, and how difficult it will be to root them
    out.

    ...

    Upon my return home, I was able to access my email account, which I was not able
    to do while in Russia, and immediately stumbled upon an intramural discussion
    among people I respect, who possess similar professional backgrounds and
    anti-war inclinations. It revolved around the issue of whether there was
    anything more Russia, and in particular Putin, could have done to avoid a war in
    Ukraine. Some amongst this group insisted that Putin had no choice but to act,
    while others argued that there were always options short of war that could have
    been pursued.

    What struck me about this debate was the reality that, save for very few
    exceptions, the underlying analysis was conducted from an American point of
    view, with little or no regard as to what would be politically possible in
    Russia, or what the factual foundation of the problems being discussed were. The
    mirror-imaging of American perspectives onto Russian reality resulted in the
    creation of a counter-narrative that was as fundamentally flawed as it was
    factually challenged. For those who argued that Putin could have avoided war,
    their arguments lacked any grounding in Russian reality or the facts of the
    case.

    The lack of insight into how Russia functions created artificial expectations of
    Russian behavior which, when not met, generated angst among the participants
    about the irresponsible actions of Putin and his government that in turn helped
    feed an overall anti-Russian narrative. As this debate underscored, even among
    well-meaning people inclined to have an open mind about the country, Russophobia
    and an overall ignorance of the Russian reality creates pre-conceived
    intellectual obstacles which are difficult to overcome.

    The byproduct of such a fundamentally flawed approach toward understanding
    Russia is the hate-filled rhetoric of officials like South Carolina Republican
    Senator Lyndsey Graham, a lifelong Russophobe, who has crowed about US taxpayer
    dollars used to finance military aid to Kiev being "the best money we've ever
    spent" and gloated about how "Russians are dying" in the war. Under normal
    circumstances, such blood curdling rhetoric would be openly challenged by most
    Americans as unreflective of our values. Russophobia, however, is a disease of
    the mind, the symptoms of which are the termination of rational thought.
    -- Cont'd at https://archive.is/2Le7D

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