US in ‘Constant State of Neo-McCarthyism’ - Political Expert
04:07 GMT 15.03.2024 (Updated: 06:35 GMT 15.03.2024)
© AFP 2023 / VANO SHLAMOV
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On Wednesday, US media published sensationalist headlines declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “ready to use” nuclear weapons if the existence of Russia is threatened. But a deeper reading reveals that Putin was only reiterating the longstanding policy of Russia, which is shared by other nuclear powers.
The US fearmongering surrounding Russia is the result of a sort of “Neo-McCarthyism” Mark Sleboda, an international relations and security analyst told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Wednesday.
“If someone threatened the existence of the US state, they would use nuclear weapons. Putin is saying the exact same thing,” Sleboda explained. “The Western media just loves putting Russia and nukes together in the same sentence. I think it has a certain amount of scaremongering, a kind of neo-McCarthyite effect just by seeing the two words together in a headline.”
Show host Melik Abdul pointed to a panel between US commentators Candace Owens and Chris Cuomo, during which Cuomo refused to acknowledge that Putin is intelligent, Abdul said that it is emblematic of the West’s refusal to “acknowledge basic stuff.”
Putin: Russia is a unique country and you need to get to know it pic.twitter.com/9Lrjk6cwD6
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) March 6, 2024
“I mean, could we agree that Putin is intelligent?” Sleboda responded playfully. “Could we agree that Putin is a human being? [Do] we agree that Putin’s first name is Vladimir? None of these things, I guess, [can] be agreed on because we live in a constant state of hyper neo-McCarthyism,” Sleboda added, noting that the term isn’t quite correct since Russia is no longer communist.
“Maybe Russophobic hysteria” is a better term, he pondered.
“But Vladimir Putin is, obviously, an extremely intelligent and capable leader of his country. He is a thorn in the US hegemony’s side. Numerous US politicians and officials have admitted that, but in the current social-political climate in the United States, it’s simply verboten. It is forbidden to acknowledge things like that,” Sleboda explained. “Let us understand that this is a propaganda bubble that Americans have, to a large part, inflicted on themselves.”
Sleboda noted that Russia is not alone in being targeted by this type of propaganda by the US. “It’s not just Putin, of course, this is against any opponent of the US,” he explained. “A country is usually demonized to a caricature vision of one person, one leader, as it was done with [Former Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein, as it was done with [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi, as it is done with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un.”
5 July 2023, 18:50 GMT
He noted that some countries are reduced to a group rather than a single leader but the effect remains the same. “With China… It’s the Chinese Communist Party. Or in Iran, it’s the mullahs.” Ultimately, the goal is to “dehumanize the opponent and then malign it into one easily identifiable evil package in this kind of childish, Manichean representation of the world, to make things easier for the American voter to understand who the enemy is.”
