In American politics the nation of Russia, especially as personified in its leader Vladimir Putin, becomes all things to all men.
To many American “leftists”, Russia is a violently nationalist country that ruthlessly suppressed minority groups. To some on the “American Right”, Putin is the second coming of Stalin who is working to subvert good old-fashioned American values around the world.
In line with the latter narrative, a certain Christian Gomez recently published an article on The New American website, the flagship of the John Birch Society, supposedly revealing that the Russian government is the real power behind the ISIS terrorist group, as well as being behind the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. The source of this “revelation” is a single, alleged and unidentified ‘defector’ from the FSB, Russia’s security service, who spilled these supposed secrets on Ukrainian television, a mouthpiece for the Washington-backed Kiev coup-junta that never misses an opportunity to slander all things Russian.
Such charges are absurd on their face; there is absolutely no evidence to hint, much less demonstrate, that Russian intelligence had any involvement in the formation of ISIS. Why Russia would want to support a terrorist entity that seeks to destabilize and overthrow its close and reliable ally, Bashar Assad of Syria, is never explained or analyzed by either the faux defector or his American champions at the John Birch Society.
Indeed, even mainstream Western media sources no longer make serious attempts to hide the fact that America’s regional allies, and not Russia, are to be identified as the sources of ISIS development and support. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and even Israel have all played a significant role in funding, arming, and enabling ISIS, Jahbat al-Nusra, and other similar jihadist factions in Iraq and Syria.
Turkey has an awfully peculiar way of “fighting” ISIS (Image: RT)
America itself is certainly in a far better position to be plastered with the charge of supporting ISIS. According to Washington’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the American government knew from the beginning of its support for the “Arab Spring” in Syria that the violent insurgency against Bashar Assad was composed primarily of unsavory, vicious Islamist factions, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda sympathizers, and even predicted these factions, if empowered, would seek to create a Salafist “principality.”
Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been stalwart in his support for Bashar Assad, recently going as far to providing air cover to the Syrian military as it seeks to reclaim the country from ISIS and other terrorist brigades. An undertaking that has earned Putin even more irrational hatred from the Western media and political establishment, which cheers on jihadists as they pillage and plunder their way through Syria.
So where did this preposterous charge against Russia originate? The faux defector that would smear Russia with responsibility for ISIS is obviously a pawn of Langley’s Ukrainian satraps, but his absurd conspiracy theory still finds fans in the West, especially among so-called American conservatives and ‘patriots’, since it fits in with a much older narrative, one stretching back to the Cold War.
During the height of the Cold War, figures like W. Cleon Skousen, a former FBI agent and an associate of the John Birch Society, and the opportunistic Soviet KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn propagated the narrative that the Soviet Union was not merely a geopolitical rival of the United States, but was fantastically successful in its quest to undermine American democracy and replace it with a communist society. Golitsyn and Cleon Skousen’s nephew, Joel Skousen, have gone as far as to claim the collapse of the Soviet Union was a clever ruse designed to lull America and the West into a false sense of security so that the “communist agenda” might continue, with no one the wiser.
Coincidentally, this non-falsifiable conspiracy theory plays well to more fringe elements of the American “patriot” movement and many Christian dispensationalists, who see Russia as the Biblical ‘Gog and Magog’ set to devour their idol, the State of Israel. It also provides a convenient scapegoat for American conservatives who are unable or unwilling to see the real culprits behind the social chaos in their country – and that their country is the prime source of both geopolitical and cultural subversion abroad.
Communist influence on American society and culture during the era of the Cold War shouldn’t be wholly discounted. In fact, the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School certainly left its mark, though often exaggerated, on the deconstruction of traditional institutions in the West. But often overlooked by anti-communist conspiracy theorists is the reality that cultural Bolsheviks like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno didn’t receive their marching orders from Moscow, a power which they disdained, but rather were assets of Western elites and their intelligence apparatus, particularly the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Nor did Bolshevism in the first part of the 20th century spawn indigenously from Russian soil, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat was helped along in its ascendancy by oligarchs in New York and London.
PROPAGANDA’S ROLE REVERSAL: “It’s only feigned reverence, obviously Neo-Soviet propaganda.”
Furthermore, its impossible to find any evidence that Russia exerts any significant social, economic, or political influence on America, or is working toward turning America into the “socialist workers’ paradise”. On the contrary, whatever minor outreach that Russians have extended to America has actually been toward Christian conservatives wishing to preserve the traditional family and other social values.
While neoconservatives and their useful idiots among the American “patriots” cynically dismiss President Putin as a Soviet retrograde and Tom Clancy villain, the Kremlin implements communist policies neither at home, nor abroad. On the other hand, Russian Orthodoxy has returned slowly but surely as a central part of Russian life, and Russian patriotism has no need for Marxist rhetoric about workers’ revolutions or the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Instead of tired, CIA-fueled Cold War narratives and covers for liberal imperialism, perhaps sincere conservatives and ‘patriots’ in America should look to the Soviet dissident, Russian patriot, and devout Christian, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a man far wiser than any ‘FSB defector’. Solzhenitsyn saw a positive, stabilizing role in Putin’s leadership as Russian culture and identity revived, and it was Solzhenitsyn who also saw that the “Euro-Atlantic alliance” was the engine of the “decline of Christian civilization.” Meanwhile, the West sinks further into its simulacrum Babylon, and its spiritually blind “defenders” will blame anyone but themselves.
Author Daniel Spaulding earned a BA in English literature from Bridgewater State University. He currently works and lives in Seoul, South Korea. He enjoys reading philosophy, history, politics, and science fiction. This article was originally published at Soul of the East.
