DEMONIZATION
Just some quotes:
“[Wars] are fought against people, 98 percent of whom are resistant to killing, and most of whom had little or nothing to do with bringing on the war. One way to dehumanize those people is to replace all of them with an image of a single monstrous individual.” – Excerpted from War Is A Lie by David Swanson.
“Words have consequences. You cannot compromise with unmitigated evil. So, once you’ve established that your adversary is a Hitler-class monster, the room for negotiation narrows, and often disappears. Thus, the charge that Ho Chi Minh was another Hitler helped drive our lockstep march into the Vietnam debacle.” – Jeff Faux – Founder of Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC
“Demonization is a tool of unscrupulous manipulators seeking to promote strife and war. It could slide us right into World War III and unspeakable destruction and human suffering.”
“Americans need to be alert to the possibility of real evil, but they also need to develop some discernment distinguishing true from false and hearsay from fact. They should do their homework before gulping down the manipulative poison of demonization.”
“According to Russian scholar and Princeton and New York University professor Stephen F. Cohen, since 2008 and becoming more intense since 2014, the U.S. political-media establishment has engaged in an ongoing demonization campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Cohen has warned: “The personal vilification of Russia’s president is propelling the new Cold War toward hot war, poisoning American politics, and degrading U.S. media.”
“Western demonization of Putin has led to the Western demonization of the Russian people, although its disciples know little of Russian culture”
Just two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, conservative Hoover Institute Scholar and frequent Fox News commentator, Victor Davis Hanson, warned President Biden to stop demonizing Putin. Demonization of adversaries severely limits diplomatic alternatives for future peace. – Mike Scruggs – Columnist and former USAF intelligence officer and combat veteran of the Vietnam War.
“Reviewing this unprecedented phenomenon—no Soviet Communist leader was so vilified personally, certainly not after Stalin—Cohen argues that demonizing Putin is gravely endangering America in four fundamental ways. Having Putinized Russia, it is demonizing Russia itself and thereby spreading and intensifying the new Cold War. By treating the Russian president as a “rogue” or “outlaw” leader, it is ruling out Putin as an essential US national security partner, which any Kremlin leader should be. By promoting anti-Putin allegations for which there are few, if any, verifiable facts, leading US mainstream media outlets, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and others, are degrading their purported journalistic standards and integrity, while preventing any rethinking of the causal role of US policy in the new Cold War. And, as a result of the latter, demonizing Putin has inspired a disgraceful and poisonous episode of neo-McCarthyism, most of it inspired by the Clinton campaign against Donald Trump (though not only) and uncritically propagated by those same media outlets.
Cohen ends by warning against the neo-McCarthyism abetted by Putin demonology. It is growing worse – David Corn of Mother Jones and pundits on MSNBC, to take an especially lamentable example – having recently added vague innuendos of espionage to the “pro-Putin” allegations against Trump, and Mrs. Clinton herself again alleging that her presidential opponent is “the Kremlin’s puppet” Such reckless charges, for which there is also no evidence, are casting a chill on US discourse about American-Russian relations at an exceedingly perilous time—some critics of US policy fear speaking out—and may continue to do so for years to come.” – The Nation in the Center For Citizen Initiatives
Please, take 8 minutes to watch this YouTube video touring St. Petersburg, Russia. This is a culture that dates back over a thousand years. It dwarfs European history in the USA. Since the administration of President Bill Clinton, ideologically impaired neoconservative “leaders” from both political parties have been terribly, and dangerously, misleading Americans with their insane belief that the US is the “exceptional” nation that must dominate the world. For the sake of “Spaceship Earth,” America must learn to cooperate with the rest of humanity. Russia is not our “enemy” and we must quit being an enemy to Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-7M1R3I5sc