Sunday, May 4, 2014

Who's Scarier, US or Russia?


WHO’S SCARIER, US OR RUSSIA?

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

May 4, 2014

 

                Russia has Putin, a former KGB agent, as president.  The US has had Bush I, a former CIA Director under Nixon and Ford, as president.  Either way, one can scarcely explain the firefights between Ukrainian westerners and easterners as the working of a single leader.

                It bothers me that US media concentrate so heavily on personifying Putin as the aggressor.  From 1917 through the Cold War, to drone strikes killing innocent women and children on the other side of the planet, and contesting Russian influence in Syria and support for Iran, who has the greater global reach, who has become allied with its WWII enemy, Germany in pushing for Ukrainian integration into the European neo-liberal political economy?  Who has troops on the other’s border?

                Now that it is US Supreme Court law that soulless for-profit corporations with global private investments, the connection between US-based global corporate aggrandizement and global US military occupation and bombardment is formal US government policy.

                My parents drummed into me that “aggression begets aggression.”  Those who vilify others create resistance.  Living as I do in the primary, bigger aggressor, I wish US journalists and commentators would take a closer look at how scary we are ourselves.                                Love and peace, hal

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