EDITORIAL: Sergei Karaganov, Neo-Soviet Cockroach

EDITORIAL

Sergei Karaganov, Neo-Soviet Cockroach

We know, you think we're kidding. But we're not. This is really him! We swear!

Writing in the Moscow Times last week Sergei Karaganov,  chairman of the presidium of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and dean of the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs of the Higher School of Economics, claimed that the new cold war is all the West’s fault.

That’s right:  Russia bears no blame whatsoever for electing a proud KGB spy president, barbarically torturing Chechnya, murdering dissidents, wiping out free media, crushing opposition political parties and eviscerating federalism.  It’s all our fault.

It’s Russia’s version of the “reset,” showing Barack Obama exactly how Russia feels about his outstretched hand. His essay was, of course, full of shameless, cowardly, neo-Soviet lies and reads as if it was intended to be read by a clan of apes.

Karaganov writes that the Russian people “vanquished communism.”  That’s a lie. They did no such thing.  Communism collapsed of its own fetid weight and corruption, most Russians did not lift a finger to oppose it. In fact, many of them ratted out their neighbors for personal gain or just for the fun of it.

He writes that “the leaders of the United States and Germany had promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward.” Another lie.  No such promise was ever made, and two nations could never speak for NATO even if they had been made. And how about Russian promises?  Didn’t Russians promise not to go back to KGB rule?  Didn’t they promise to let countries like Georgia be free from Soviet tanks?  How can Russians expect the West to honor its word when Russia so clearly won’t?

He writes: “For all of NATO’s efforts to improve its image, many Russians now view it as a much more hostile organization than they did in the 1990s — or even before then.”  Yet he never asks whether Russia might have done things (say, buzzing Alaska with nuclear bombers every other day) to make the West fear Russian aggression.

He writes that NATO was expanded for “geopolitical” reasons, yet he never asks why the nations of Eastern Europe hated Russia so much that they were eager to join, indeed begging to do so.  Why wasn’t the new Russian government able to put their minds at ease? He doesn’t care to even try to answer that question.

Then it really gets ugly. Just look at this:

My hope is that when historians look back at Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia last summer, the Ossetians, Russians and Georgians killed in that war will be seen as having not died in vain. Russian troops crushed Georgia’s army on the ground, but they also delivered a strong blow against the logic of further NATO expansion, which, if not stopped, would have inevitably incited a major war in the heart of Europe.

So Russia was entirely blameless in the war. It didn’t attack Georgian territory, it didn’t kill civilians with illegal weapons, it didn’t threaten the democratically elected leader of the country, and it didn’t fail to silence Ossetian guns that had been shelling Georgia for months prior to the Georgian “attack.”  History is what the Kremlin says it is, you see.

And, oh yes, he’s proud of how Russia “crushed” a country less than one tenth its size.

He refers to “the farcical idea of a new Cold War into proper perspective.”  Perhaps Russians find it farcical because their coastline is not being buzzed by nuclear bombers they way America’s is, and because their government honchos get to write screeds like Karaganov’s in the English press whenever they want but Americans are denied this privilege in the Russian press.

Throughout his entire diatribe, there is not one single word about any mistakenly aggressive policy of Russia.  Russia is, throughtout, the totally innocent victim of Russian aggression, struggling heroically towards peace despite all  our evil acts.

This is the full horror of neo-Soviet reality, no different than it was in Soviet times.  Russian bigwigs are ever more totally cut off from any semblence of reality, obsessed with propaganda, lies and self-deception in the desperate hope that they can fool the people of Russia as well.