Scott Ritter: 'Waging Peace': How a tour of Russia showed me that propaganda perverts reality in the
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.
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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.
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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
Surely Ritter surely didn't need to tour Russia to see how US propaganda fools (American) Idiots
on June 2, 2023, 9:14 pm