America’s Real Red Scare: The Slow-Motion Collapse of the American Empire. By William J. Astore
It’s May
2001 and the Atlantic Monthly has just arrived in the
mail. I’m tantalized by the cover article. “Russia is finished,”
the magazine announces. The subtitle minces no words: “The unstoppable
descent into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance.” Could it be
that the country I had worried most about as a military officer during all
those grim years of the Cold War, the famed “Evil Empire” that had threatened
us with annihilation, was truly kaput, even in its Russian rather than Soviet guise? Sixteen
years later, the article’s message seems just a tad premature. Today’s
Russia surely has its problems - from poverty to pollution to prostitution to
a rickety petro-economy - but on the geo-political world stage it is “finished”
no longer. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has recently been enjoying heightened
influence, largely at the expense of a divided and disputatious superpower that
now itself seems to be on an “unstoppable descent.”
Sixteen years after
Russia was declared irrelevant, a catastrophe, finito, it is once
again a colossus -- at least on the American political scene, if nowhere
else. And that should disturb you far less than this: more than a
generation after defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the United States
of 2017 seems to be doing its level best to emulate some of the worst aspects
of its former foe and once rival superpower. Yes, the U.S. has a
Soviet problem, and I’m not referring to the allegations of the moment in
Washington: that the Trump campaign and Russian officials colluded, that money may
have flowed into that campaign via Russian oligarchs tied to Putin, that the
Russians hacked the U.S. election to aid Donald Trump, that
those close to the president-elect dreamed of setting up a secret back channel to Moscow and suggested to the
Russian ambassador that it be done through the Russian embassy, or even that Putin has a genuine hold of some sort on Donald Trump. All
of this is, of course, generating attention galore, as well as outrage, in the
mainstream media and among the chattering classes, leading some to talk of a new “red scare” in America. All of it is also
being investigated, whether by congressional intelligence committees or by
former FBI director -- now special counsel -- Robert Mueller.
When it comes to what
I’m talking about, though, you don’t need a committee or a counsel or a back
channel or a leaker from some intelligence agency to ferret it out.
Whatever Trump campaign officials, Russian oligarchs, or Vladimir Putin himself
did or didn’t do, America’s Soviet problem is all around us: a creeping (and
creepy) version of authoritarianism that anyone who lived through the Cold War
years should recognize. It involves an erosion of democratic values; the
ever-expanding powers exercised by a national security state operating as a shadow government and defined by militarism, surveillance, secrecy, prisons, and other structures of dominance and control;
ever-widening gaps between the richest few and the impoverished
many; and, of course, ever more weapons, along with ever more wars. That’s a real red
scare, America, and it’s right here in the homeland.. read more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176292/tomgram%3A_william_astore%2C_back_in_the_ussr/#moreAnd the same issue from an opposite perspective
Forget Comey. The Real Story Is Russia’s War on America
