As an American who follows the political and cultural scene here and as someone who writes on Russia, I read Putin’s recent comments on western culture at the Valdai Conference with particular interest. My thoughts are that, overall, I think Putin made some interesting observations about the changes in culture that are going on in the west. However, I would argue that his understanding of the dynamics of what is going on culturally – particularly in the U.S. – is actually somewhat superficial and decontextualized. I found it interesting that he did not make a connection between these cultural phenomena and the elite interests and inequality that he mentioned earlier in his speech.

The US is in decline, not only on the world stage but in terms of the standard of living and stability that it offers its own citizens.  The elites who have benefited from decades of neoliberal economic policies, consequently gobbling up even more wealth at the expense of the majority, obviously don’t have any interest in that majority successfully organizing for policy changes that would improve their material well-being.  It is in the elites’ interest therefore to keep the majority divided and distracted by using elite institutions to encourage a preoccupation with sex (including deviance and pornography) and immersion in gadgets as well as infighting over cultural wedge issues that have become more extreme over time.  A number of these controversial policies represent the views of academics ensconced in their ivory towers with little connection to regular people in the real world.  Interestingly, their bright ideas of progress don’t always align with the views of the groups on whose behalf they claim to be advocating.  For example, the term “Latinx” was coined and is used primarily by the academic community and mainstream media in the U.S., but is very unpopular among Americans of Latin or Spanish descent. 

The mainstream media and social media platforms in the U.S. do their part to keep the pot stirred by giving disproportionate attention to sensationalist issues and not allowing a balanced and nuanced debate on controversial policies.. A small but vocal group of people – usually consisting of obscure academics, media personalities and self-appointed activists – will put pressure on those who express opinions that don’t conform to their dictums about what is correct.  Some of those who have been targeted in such a way have lost their jobs, been doxxed or stigmatized out of the public conversation. This is antithetical to the traditionally liberal values of free speech and confidence that one’s ideas are valid enough to withstand debate.

People who want to see a balanced and reasoned exchange of ideas increasingly have to go out of their way to find independent left or conservative media who give voices to people who have been tarred as deviating from the politically correct “liberal” position on a given topic.  As someone who generally considers myself an independent leftist, I want to see a range of views presented and debated. I have sometimes gained a richer insight on topics from hearing views I don’t necessarily agree with and I can at least walk away with a better understanding of why someone I disagree with sees the world the way they do, which is valuable and contributes to empathy. This is the same reason I have found value in friendships with people over the years that I had political and religious differences with. How stunted would my growth as a person have been if I had only ever associated with people I agree with on everything?

But in today’s cultural environment, I often find that when one is actually allowed to hear what these supposed heretics of “liberal” orthodoxy have to say, it turns out to simply be a more nuanced view or an acknowledgment that there may still be many aspects of an issue that are as yet unknown.  Putin uses the topic of gender as an example of the troubling trends in US/western culture. A good example on this topic recently involved Dr. Lisa Littman, a scientist who specializes in research on this subject  She received major backlash for reporting on her findings regarding the sudden change in the age and sex of gender dysphoric people in recent years and the long-term complicated effects of gender transition among teenagers. 

(We’ve seen similar censorship and shaming of qualified doctors and scientists who report findings that don’t totally agree with the rigid establishment view surrounding the Covid pandemic response.) 

With respect to transgender issues, which took off in terms of cultural prominence around 2015 after the US Supreme Court ruled that same sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, a couple of points are worth noting. First, most minority groups have to build momentum for their cause for years or even decades before they get any traction and realize their political and/or legal goals. Second transgender people have historically composed a very small percentage of the population even counting for underestimation due to taboos. It does make me wonder why this particular group is seeing such vocal prominence given to their struggle so quickly.

Meanwhile, increasing poverty, worsening health and the collapse of small business continues on – affecting far more people than transgender issues – with politicians talking big to get voter support but caving to their elite donors at the moment of truth.  President Joe Biden chose not to fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage within weeks of taking office (a figure which now represents a poverty wage in most American cities with astronomically  unaffordable housing prices).  Free community college, paid family leave and lower drug prices won’t be in the much ballyhooed legislative bill after all.  But, hey, you can still get your daily 15 minutes of hate against your neighbor by watching FOX or MSNBC before you go back to online porn or shouting intolerant outrage on Twitter.  I would argue that the elites are perfectly content with this arrangement as it keeps the masses pacified while their shenanigans remain out of focus.

I think a lot of people grasp that this seems to be a look-over-there-while-I-pick-your-pocket-over-here stunt. Political and cultural liberalism in the US today is not only being used as a form of distraction, it is a very different animal from that of the New Deal era through the 1970’s. It has become more authoritarian, supporting illiberal means for supposed liberal ends.  It is also eating its own as transgender activists butt heads with feminists and gay rights advocates, people of color don’t embrace the latest terms cooked up for them by out-of-touch elite academics, and the working class is ignored and looked down upon.  The liberal label seems to have become less attractive, especially to younger people in the U.S. who are increasingly identifying themselves as independent or democratic socialist.  

I find it interesting that many opinions and analyses I’ve read of Putin’s speech – even by people I consider to be reasonable commentators on the subject of Russia – accept the idea that the policies and trends that Putin is critiquing actually represent genuine liberalism or progress.  The implication often seems to be that Putin and the Russian government may not be able to hold this back, that these attitudes and policies are an inevitability for an advanced and successful nation.  I’m not sure that is at all clear and I’m wondering if they are missing the larger point – that some of these trends, the way they are currently being handled as discussed above, do not represent true liberalism.  Moreover, change is not necessarily a good in and of itself but discernment should be used when determining whether change is constructive and should be embraced and/or to what degree a balance should be struck in the interests of pluralism.  

By Natylie Baldwin, Oped News, 10/20/21

“The Afghan government was supporting Islam but Saudi Arabia wanted to spread radical Islam into Central Asia. They also wanted to control future oil pipeline routes. Pakistan wanted to legitimize its occupation of Afghan lands stolen by the British Empire in the 19th century and control events in Kabul. Communist China wished to curry favor with the United States and expand its control over its Muslim Xinxiang province. And the U.S.? The U.S. wanted to f*ck the Soviet Union for Vietnam and roll back the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 once and for all.” (p. 110)

Afghanistan has been in the news recently due to the end of the U.S.’s formal 20-year war there. However, there is a much longer history for the U.S. in that unfortunate nation that has been caught in the middle of imperial rivalries and power plays. That history has largely been obscured since the end of the Cold War. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have entered to shed light on this history in The Valediction, a book they describe as a novelized memoir.

The book does read like a novel with a fast-paced and compelling narrative that keeps the reader engaged and wanting to dig into the next chapter to see what happens. Though the book weaves in some longer history, the main focus is on the journalistic odyssey of the authors, which started in 1981 with a trip to Afghanistan to get on-the-ground information on what was really happening in the war that had been framed in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter as the greatest threat to world peace since WWII. The Reagan administration had subsequently intensified the rhetoric against the Soviet Union about the Afghan intervention. It was convenient for both the Carter and Reagan administrations that western journalists generally had little access to Afghanistan within a month of the invasion due to the Afghan government kicking them out under accusations of lying. This led to Americans having scant information about what was really happening there.

The story of how co-author Fitzgerald said he managed to get access to Afghanistan elicited a grin from this writer. He simply looked up who the UN representative for Afghanistan was in that ancient 20^th-century artifact known as the phone book and went from there. Needless to say, after the first trip, it was clear things were totally unlike the narrative that was being pushed by the U.S. government and mainstream media.

A war in Afghanistan was, by all rational measures, not in the Soviets’ interests. There had been every indication by the late 1970s that the Soviets had wanted progress on arms control negotiations and a continuation of the de’tente policy. There have been suggestions that Brezhnev did not have consensus support in the Soviet government for the invasion. The authors and some others suspected that the Soviets were provoked into invading.

Many readers are likely familiar with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s infamous boast in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur that, as Carter’s national security advisor, he’d helped goad the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, which he described as “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”

Central to provoking the Soviet invasion, the book argues, was the assassination of Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Indeed a good portion of the book revolves around the authors’ investigation into unraveling the mystery surrounding the murder, which uncovered conflicting reports from representatives of the State Department, the CIA and DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], and the KGB. As the authors ask:

“Who would kill an ambassador? Not a rival superpower trying to get the American Congress to sign a nuclear arms deal they’d desperately needed. And certainly not a third-world backwater desperate for U.S. aid and recognition. Only someone trying to provoke retribution. And who would want that retribution? Zbigniew Brzezinski… What was a known Russia-hater doing in the Carter administration in the first place and why had the “Peace President” elevated his role to cabinet level?” (pp. 64-65)

Dubs, who had significant diplomatic experience with the Soviets and more nuanced views, was working at cross-purposes with Brzezinski. He believed he could diplomatically get then-Afghan-leader Hafizullah Amin to move away from any loyalty to the Soviets. To further this project, he’d had fourteen secret meetings with Amin, in order to avoid sabotage by Brzezinski. Dubs thought the kind of destabilization favored by Brzezinski in Afghanistan would provoke the Soviets and was dangerous. According to an interview Fitzgerald conducted with Afghanistan expert Selig Harrison:

“…I met him [Dubs] out there that summer. He was alone and I had a long evening with him. He came out with a very sophisticated conception of what he was going to do, which was to try to make the US-educated Amin into a kind of Tito, in other words, detach him. Dubs knew how subtle an operation it had to be. He had no illusions it could be done quickly. He would still be pretty close to the Russians, but he’d have more freedom of action and it would be enough to make it safe from our point of view. He met with Amin fourteen times and quickly understood that he was not a loyal Communist. He even bragged that the Soviets needed him more than he needed them. But the trick would be to keep a back door open to American influence while not triggering Soviet countermeasures… [the Soviets] were greatly alarmed because they thought Amin might be a CIA agent. And Brzezinski was actively promoting an aggressive covert anti-Soviet Afghan policy without the State Department’s knowing much about it. So it was extremely dangerous.” (p. 74)

Though the machinations around Afghanistan were started under Carter and Brzezinski, they were continued and expanded under Ronald Reagan, who had Richard Pipes – another Russophobic ideologue with a Polish background – on his national security council. By 1983, it was becoming clear to those who had genuine knowledge of what was occurring in Afghanistan that the Soviets wanted to get out and were willing to allow a coalition government after getting rid of Amin’s successor, Babrak Karmal, whom they’d grown to greatly distrust. But the U.S. didn’t seem at all interested in a Soviet exit, rebuffing Soviet overtures to negotiate a 6-month withdrawal in which they could save face in exchange for the U.S. giving up its support for the Islamist insurgency. Instead the Reagan administration announced increased support for the extreme nihilistic Islamist insurgents that were fighting the Afghan government.

“The irony was sublime. The U.S. wanted to overthrow a Communist government that the Kremlin viewed as a middle class bourgeois disaster with no support from the population. And the Kremlin was right. Communism couldn’t exist without a working class, and Afghanistan simply did not have one. But that trivial detail didn’t matter to Washington.” (p. 86)

The authors’ efforts to get the real story on Afghanistan were not exactly rewarded by the mainstream media. Pitches to CBS and later ABC were met with attempts to significantly downplay the authors’ actual reporting or kill it since it didn’t fit the narrative established by “Gunga Dan” Rather, a narrative that the White House wanted reinforced: Soviet soldiers were all over Afghanistan, brutalizing civilians and perpetrating their own dirty little Vietnam-style adventure on behalf of an expansionist agenda. Each pillar of this narrative was contradicted by the authors’ research as well as observations and interviews with an array of individuals in Afghanistan.

Often lost in the coverage of Afghanistan and the wars that have been fought there by empires is the Afghans themselves who had their own interests. Those interests included finding ways to modernize their country and improve the quality of life for their citizens. Various Afghan leaders of the 20^th century attempted to pursue these objectives under a combination of nationalist and socialist political influences – the details of which would be shaped by the country’s unique geography and culture. But these projects were always tragically derailed by outside hegemons.

As noted in the epigraphic quote to this review, this had gone back at least as far as the British and the sabotage of Afghan society was executed by many opportunistic players during the Cold War. In an interview with Fitzgerald, China was cited, in addition to the U.S. and Pakistan, as a country that had provided training and/or arms by a former fighter for U.S.-backed Islamist terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

There are some things in the book that readers will have to decide for themselves the degree of importance and plausibility to assign to, such as certain connections made to rivalries among royal families and elite institutions from hundreds of years back. Another involves the man who is referenced in the subtitle of the book: Desmond FitzMaurice. He is described as a composite character and, interestingly, he is also the character that seems the most fantastical. It is these aspects that I imagine contribute to classifying this book as a novelized memoir. However, there are many other named people the authors discuss as providing important pieces to the Afghanistan puzzle that, along with the extensive research and contextual on the ground experience during the period in question, make for an interesting and informative read.

By Alexandra B. Hall, The National Interest, 9/6/21

Ploughshares Fund’s Roger L. Hale Fellow, Dr. Doreen Horschig, has released a new interactive report “The Biden Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review: New Policies to Prevent Nuclear War.” This report highlights the history of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and urges the Biden Administration to not only follow through on its campaign promises in regards to nuclear nonproliferation but asks Biden to “be bolder than his predecessors” to change the status quo on U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

On the latest episode of Press the Button, Horschig and her co-host Tom Collin discuss what President Joe Biden should address in the NPR. As Horschig explains, the NPR started in 1994 under President Bill Clinton and was developed to ensure that each administration makes clear their objectives and goals regarding nuclear security. Over the past four administrations, Horschig explains that “there has been a great degree of continuity in U.S. nuclear strategy even as nuclear forces and force posture have evolved significantly over that period.” She points out that across political party lines “we have had no review make a serious commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.”

Looking at the Obama and Trump administrations, both expanded nuclear weapons modernization programs. While President Barack Obama had ambitious goals at the outset to limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy, Horschig explains that he was not able to achieve them all. She states that President Biden now has the chance to “make his more progressive nuclear security agenda happen.”

Horschig dives into Biden’s “long-standing views to reduce the role that nuclear weapons play in U.S. security policy, to decrease the likelihood of nuclear war, and to oppose the development of unneeded new nuclear weapons.” She points out that “we have him on record as a senator, as vice president, and as a presidential candidate, when he has consistently promoted a more limited role [for nuclear weapons], and the NPR now gives him an opportunity to really follow through on his words.”

Up till now, U.S. nuclear policy has been focused on addressing the very unlikely threat of an intentional nuclear attack. Horschig argues that the “Biden NPR should be based on the overarching goal of preventing nuclear warfare,” but through the lens of “reducing the risk of accidental war.” This pivot in policy would allow the administration to address the greatest risk of nuclear war—an accidental attack due to “human error or false alarm, or miscommunication.” In the report she outlines that since the beginning of the cold war until today, these errors have in fact been more likely to lead to nuclear war than any credible threat of an actual nuclear attack….

Read full article here.

“Antiwar.com’s editorial director Scott Horton faced influential neoconservative Bill Kristol in a Soho Forum debate on U.S. interventionism in New York City on October 4th. After their opening statements, it became clear that Horton had the facts on his side while Kristol had nothing but platitudes. The event was a scathing indictment of the interventionist ideology that fueled Washington’s disastrous post-9/11 wars.” – Antiwar.com