In the article pasted and linked below, Dr. Doctorow reflects what I have been saying recently (reflects is not the best verb because he has said this long before I did). Although few realize it, the West has been pushing the world toward a senseless war between Russia and allies (eg, China) and the US and allies, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia -- you know, those 2 nations that best represent freedom and democracy? Our foreign policy is absolutely suicidal and droolingly stupid. The author mentions that a full third of top US experts focused on Russia-US relations said in a poll that the WEST and not Russia is responsible for the Ukraine debacle. Yet their opinions are not included in the main foreign affairs journals. What is left is pure propaganda and never before have we been exposed to such myths and lies.
His
main point is that if the West leads us into this senseless war, it
will be a nuclear one. Is anyone paying attention? As in nuclear
winter...?
This was my point when I wrote "Trump the most likely to keep the peace." http://laiglesforum.
But
I appended that question mark because Donald Trump does not yet have a
clarity of vision to accompany his rather good instincts in this area
and could therefore be misled by the numerous Neocons who will surround
him. Dr. Doctorow addresses precisely this fact, pointing out that
without an OPEN dialogue (the essence of glasnost), Trump will not have
the input needed to make the proper decisions. Patriotism alone will not
fill the bill.
What we need is objective knowledge (my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge -- the Bible).
Don Hank
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Back to the USSR: A Call for Glasnost as We Re-think U.S. Foreign Policy
05/19/2016 01:37 pm ET | Updated May 19, 2016
- Gilbert DoctorowWriter, public speaker, conference organizer, television debater, promoting open discussion of key issues in US-Russian relations
Establishment
Democrats and Republicans have widely decried the 2016 presidential
campaign for going off script. Indeed, both candidate Bernie Sanders on
the Democratic side in his speeches on domestic policy and candidate
Donald Trump on the Republican side in his speeches on foreign policy
have blown huge holes in longstanding American-as-Apple-Pie thinking
about national priorities and our matching policies.
They
won so much attention with their statements precisely because the
traditional wisdom they have questioned was untouchable for twenty,
thirty years. In effect, on matters of great concern to the citizenry
such as the balance of power between Main Street and Wall Street, or
between one vision of America as a member of the governing board of the
world and another vision of our country as the global hegemon and
policeman, any dissent by lesser persons than these two candidates would
be dismissed as unpatriotic heresy.
In
what follows, we will direct attention to foreign policy, because the
impending failure there and our going off the cliff into World War III
has to be the country’s first concern. Come a nuclear war, which, sadly,
is more likely now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of
1962, and all thoughts about the minimum federal wage, the
sustainability of social security and transgender use of toilets will go
out the window.
The
clamp-down on our free speech about foreign policy began imperceptibly
in the name of bipartisanship in the second term of Bill Clinton when a
hybrid Neocon/Liberal Interventionist ideology fully replaced pragmatism
and common sense at the State Department under Madeleine Albright and
rippled out further to the Pentagon and Presidential Administration.
However the real throttling of divergent opinions came after 9/11 when
Vice President Dick Cheney and his minions initiated a purge of the
federal security and diplomatic services that removed all doubters.
In
this new environment emanating from the main source of funding and
other incentives, our university centers and think tanks followed the
gravitation lines and aligned with Washington. Our mass media snapped to
attention. Newspapers of record like The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The Wall Street Journal became unquestioning purveyors of the
latest press handouts from the State Department.
The
irony is that these and other mainstream media or MSM sources have
picked up the old Soviet style and use the tone and expressions closely
resembling the “Pravda” vocabulary which used the most vicious
anti-American propaganda. The language used by Soviet journalists and
commentators was so rude and hysterical that even people sympathetic to
communist causes were turned off. For those who have any nostalgia for
Soviet agitprop, welcome to western MSM.
Following
President Putin’s famous speech rejecting Washington’s New World Order
at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, the United States
unleashed an Information War that has not let up ever since. From the
Oval Office on down, we demonize the President of the Russian Federation
even as we use this one person as a shorthand notation for an entire
nation. Step by step, American mass media have been closed to those who
think otherwise. A new McCarthyism has set in.
Silence
is not agreement. As a poll of its in-house brain trust on Russia
carried out by Foreign Affairs magazine in October 2015 revealed, fully
one-third of these professionals chosen not only for erudition but also
for “reliability” went on record as agreeing or strongly agreeing that
the West was to blame for the crisis with Russia over Ukraine. But of
that third, you will see almost nothing in the articles posted by
Foreign Affairs or the other specialist journals of our International
Affairs community today.
We
are now in a situation similar to what Mikhail Gorbachev encountered in
the mid-1980s when he tried to move beyond the official ideology of
Soviet society and enter upon reform. He issued a call for Glasnost, meaning transparency and open discussion of issues that had been taboo.
The
word entered the English language back then but we had the mistaken
belief that it was a curiosity, that it pertained to specifically Soviet
conditions. Now we know better: the United States badly needs a dose of
Glasnost if we are to face domestic and international challenges that
our ideology in place has proven incapable of mastering.
And
the first thing to do is to scrap ideology in general. It is unworthy
of a nation of 300 million, with vast depth of experience and
academically trained minds. What we need is realistic talk from all
sides so that we can update our policies based on the greatest wisdom we
can muster.
The
issues of NATO expansion, overseas interventions, the hopelessness of
our state-building these past twenty years and the needless and heedless
confrontations with both Russia and China going on today and aggravated
by U.S. military encroachments on their defense perimeters: these and
other issues of foreign policy which Donald Trump raised on the campaign
trail during the primaries are too important to be left to this one
candidate, to his speechwriters and his small coterie of advisers.
It
is high time for our major electronic media including Fox News, CNN,
MSNBC, Bloomberg to open their air waves to full-blooded debate between
authoritative representatives from all sides in the American
professional community, to bring back into circulation those experts
they have blackballed so foolishly and to solicit contributions from a
new generation of critics of the status quo from the standpoint of
efficacy, not ideological purity.
The
same injunction applies to our newspapers of record: open your op-ed
pages to real debate, not merely to those who toe the Administration
line, as is the case today. Let us not be afraid, let the chips fall
where they may. This is the only way we can prepare whoever wins the
election in November to take us out of the present cul-de-sac.
Co-authored with Edward Lozansky, the President of The American University in Moscow
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