European left should stop embarrassing itself over Russia
Anatol Lieven | A French official's bizarre speech itemizing paranoid calamities while lambasting Trump as a 'traitor' is just staving off the inevitable | Throughout the Cold War, progressive figures and movements in Europe and the U.S. were regularly accused of being at best naïve about the Soviet threat, at worst Soviet agents and would-be collaborators. ■ This was accompanied by a constant drumbeat of officially-stoked paranoia about the Soviet menace. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union opened up, we were astonished to find not only how weak the Soviet Union and the Soviet military actually were, but that the Soviet leadership had been just as frightened of us as we were of them. ■ Today, too many on the Left are using the same tactics to denounce the Trump administration and European supporters of a compromise peace in Ukraine. There are ample reasons to condemn Trump, and ample ways of doing so; but for anyone who remembers the Cold War, the language of “treason,” “collaboration,” and “capitulation” should not be among them. And surely critics on the Left should be able to recognize that some of these politically and intellectually bankrupt European governments are generating paranoia in order to win back public support?
✅ The Drone Scare: A False Flag To Crack Down On Russia’s Shadow Fleet? (Andrew Korybko)