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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Greenfield: Cold War is replaying itself as farce |
| 2015-05-14 |
| [FrontPage] In the Cold War days, the KGB relied on an extensive network of Communists and leftist fellow travelers for espionage and propaganda. As the motherland of socialism, the USSR could draw on allegiances from foreign leftists too in love with all the infrastructure projects to care about the prisoners building them. But the easy ideological solidarity was faltering even during the Cold War. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the temporary anti-war line demanded of Western Communists and fellow travelers put a bigger strain on the relationship than the assorted trials and executions of domestic Communists had. Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin drove away the Stalinists and left the apologists. The USSR lost its radical edge and those seeking it turned to Communist regimes in Asia and Third World terrorists. Putin has tried to rebuild a non-ideological Soviet Union leaving him with few ideological allies, but he has always excelled at turning disadvantages into advantages by focusing on a single resource. The new Russian propaganda network draws not on sympathy, but on opposition. Outside of Russian nationalists, there wouldn’t be much sympathy for his desire to carve out a chunk of Ukraine to stay in power. But the leftovers of the KGB running the country understood that reframing the issue as hostility to Western “imperialists” in NATO and the EU would win over allies who otherwise would not care about the issue one way or another. On one side are the farthest fringes of the far left, the kind who argued, that the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in Iraq were the work of a resistance movement, who are obsessed with ‘Globalization’ and the heroism of Latin American Maoist terrorists. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 They good at music too. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2015-05-14 15:54 |