American Dissent on Ukraine Dying in Darkness
As the death toll in Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine continues to rise, there have only been a handful of Westerners publicly questioning NATO and the West’s role in the conflict. These voices are becoming fewer and further between as a wave of feverish backlash engulfs any dissent on the subject. One of these voices belongs to Professor Michael J. Brenner, a lifelong academic, Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, as well as former Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner’s credentials also include having worked at the Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense and Westinghouse, and written several books on American foreign policy. From the vantage point of decades of experience and studies, the intellectual regularly shared his thoughts on topics of interest through a mailing list sent to thousands of readers—that is until the response to his Ukraine analysis made him question why he bothered in the first place.
In an email with the subject line “Quittin’ Time,” Brenner recently declared that, aside from having already said his piece on Ukraine, one of the main reasons he sees for giving up on expressing his opinions on the subject is that “it is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.” He goes on to decry President Joe Biden’s alarming comments in Poland when he all but revealed that the U.S. is—and perhaps has always been—interested in a Russian regime change.
On this week’s Scheer Intelligence, Brenner tells host Robert Scheer how the recent attacks he received—many of a personal, ad hominem nature—were some of the most vitriolic he’s ever experienced. The two discuss how many media narratives completely leave out that the eastward expansion of NATO, among other Western aggressions against Russia, played an important part in fueling the current humanitarian crisis. Corporate media’s “cartoonish” depiction of Russian president Vladimir Putin, adds Brenner, is not only misleading, but dangerous given the nuclear brinkmanship that has ensued. Listen to the full discussion between Brenner and Scheer as they continue to dissent despite living in an America that is seemingly increasingly hostile to any opinion that strays from the official line.
RS: Hello, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case it’s Michael Brenner, who is a professor of international affairs emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, a fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS Johns Hopkins; he’s written a number of important studies, books, academic articles; he’s taught at every place from Stanford to Harvard to MIT and what have you.
But the reason I wanted to talk to Professor Brenner is that he’s been caught in the crosshairs of trying to have a debate about what’s going on in the Ukraine, and the NATO response, the Russian invasion and what have you. And to my mind, I read, I was reading his blog; I found it very interesting. And then he suddenly said, I’m giving up; you cannot have an intelligent discussion. And his description of what’s going on reminded me of the famous Lillian Hellman description of the McCarthy period as “scoundrel times,” which was the title of her book.
So, Professor Brenner, tell us what buzzsaw you ran into when you dared question, as far as I can see, you dared do what you’ve done all your academic life: you raised some serious questions about a foreign policy matter. And then, I don’t know what, you got hit on the head a whole bunch of times. So could you describe it?
MB: Yes, it came only partially as a surprise. I’ve been writing these commentaries and distributing them to a personal list of roughly 5,000 for more than a decade. Some of those persons are abroad, most are in the U.S.; they’re all educated people who’ve been involved one way or another with international affairs, including quite a number who have had experience in and around government or journalism or the world of punditry.
What happened on this occasion was that I had expressed highly skeptical views about what I believe is the fictional storyline and account of what has been happening in Ukraine, back over the past year and most pointedly in regard to the acute crisis that has arisen with the Russian invasion and attack on Ukraine. I received not only an unusually large number of critical replies, but it was the nature of them that was deeply dismaying.
One, many—most of them came from people whom I did know, whom I knew as level-headed, sober minds, engaged and well informed on foreign policy issues and international matters generally. Second, they were highly personalized, and I had rarely been the object of that sort of criticism or attack—sort of ad hominem remarks questioning my patriotism; had I been paid by, you know, by Putin; my motivations, my sanity, et cetera, et cetera.
Third was the extremity of the content of these hostile messages. And the last characteristic, which really stunned me, was that these people bought into—hook, line and sinker—every aspect of the sort of fictional story that has been propagated by the administration, accepted and swallowed whole by the media and our political-intellectual class, which includes many academics and the entire galaxy of Washington think tanks.
And that’s a reinforced impression that had been growing for some time, that this was not just—that to be a critic and a skeptic was not just to engage in a dialogue [unclear], but to place one’s views and one’s thoughts and send them into a void, in effect. A void, because the discourse as it has crystalized is not only uniform in a way, but it is in so many respects senseless, lacking any kind of inner logic, whether you agree with the premises and the formally stated objectives or not.
In effect, this was an intellectual and political nihilism. And one cannot make any contribution to endeavor to correct that simply by conventional means. So I felt for the first time that I was no part of this world, and of course this is also a reflection of trends and attitudes that have become rather pervasive in the country at large, sort of over time. And so beyond simply sort of disagreeing with what the consensus is, I had become totally alienated [unclear] and decided there was no point to it, to going on distributing these things, even though I continue to follow events, think about them, and send some shorter commentaries to close friends. That’s essentially it, Robert.
U.S. President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai toast, Feb. 25, 1972. (White House/Wikimedia Commons)
RS: OK, but let me just say, first of all, I want to thank you for what you did. Because it turned me on to a whole different way of looking at what happened to Ukraine—the history, reminding us of what had happened for the previous decade, not just the expansion of NATO but the whole question of the change in government that the U.S. was involved with previously. And the whole, you know, the relation of the two powers.
And the irony here is that actually we’re back in the worst moments of the Cold War, but at least in the Cold War we were willing to negotiate with people who were very serious, ideological at least, or enemies, and had some coherence in that respect. And you know, Nixon did have his kitchen debate with Khrushchev, and we did have arms control with the old Soviet Union; Nixon himself went to China and negotiated with Mao Zedong; there was no illusion that these were wonderful people, but they were people you had to do business with. Suddenly Putin is now put in a Hitler category even worse than Stalin or Mao, and you can’t talk.
And I do want to disagree with one thing you’ve done: your retirement from this. You’re only about, what, a mere 80 years old; you’re a kid compared to me. But I remember when Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals that we’ve had in our history, or Western history, dared to criticize the U.S. on Vietnam. He and Jean Paul Sartre, and actually raised the prospect that we had committed war crimes in Vietnam.
And The New York Times denounced Bertrand Russell, and they actually said he’d become senile. I went all the way to Wales when I was editing Ramparts magazine to interview Bertrand Russell—which I did, and I spent some lovely time with him. He certainly was frail at the age of 94, but he was incredibly coherent in defense of his position; he had been a very strong anti-communist all of his life, and now he was saying, wait a minute, we’re getting this war wrong.
So I’m not going to accept that you have the right to retire; I’m going to push you now. So please tell listeners what it is that you object to in the current narrative, and on what basis?
MB: Well, I mean, it’s the fundamentals. One, it has to do with the nature of the Russian regime, the character of Putin; what Soviet objectives, foreign policy and national security concerns are. I mean, what we’re getting is not only a cartoon caricature, but a portrait of the country and its leadership—and by the way, Putin is not a dictator. He is not all-powerful. The Soviet government is far more complex in its processes of decision-making.
RS: Well, you just said the Soviet government. You mean the Russian government.
MB: Russian government. [overlapping voices] You see, I’ve picked up by osmosis this conflating of Russian and Soviet. I mean, it’s far more complex [unclear]. And he is, Putin himself, an extraordinarily sophisticated thinker. But people don’t bother to read what he writes, or to listen to what he says.
I know, in fact, of no national leader that has laid out in the detail and the precision and the sophistication his view of the world, Russia’s place in it, the character of interstate relations, with the candor and acuity that he has. It’s not a question of whether you believe that that depiction he offers is entirely correct, or the conclusion that he draws from it, with regard to policy. But you are dealing with a person and a regime which in vital respects is the antithesis of the one that is caricatured and almost universally accepted, not only in the Biden administration but in the foreign policy community and the political class, and in general.
And that raises some really basic questions about us, rather than about Russia or about Putin. As you mentioned, the question was: what is it that we’re afraid of? Why do Americans feel so threatened, so anxious? I mean, by contrast in the Cold War—I mean, there was a powerful enemy, ideological, military in some sense, with all the qualifications and nuances [unclear]. But that was the reality then; that was a reality which was, one, the focal point for national leaders who were serious people, and responsible people. Second, that could be used to justify actions highly dubious, but at least could be used to justify, such as our interventions all around the so-called Third World, and even the great, tragic folly of Vietnam.
What is there today that really threatens us? At the horizon, of course, there is China, not Russia; although they now, thanks to our unwitting encouragement, have formed together a formidable bloc. But I mean, even the Chinese challenge is to our supremacy and our hegemony, not to the country directly [unclear]. So the second question is, what is so compelling about the maintenance and the defense of a conception of the United States of America’s providential birth admission in the world that compels us to view people like Putin as being diabolical, and as constituting as grave a threat to America as Stalin and Hitler, whose names constantly crop up, as well as ridiculous phrases like genocide and so on.
So I mean, once again, I think we have to look in the mirror and say, well, we’ve seen—[unclear] the source of our disquiet, and it’s within us; it’s not out there, and it is leading to gross distortions of the way in which we see, we depict and we interpret the world, all across the board. By which I mean geographically and in terms of sort of different arenas and dimensions of international relations. And of course, continuing along this course can only have one endpoint, and that’s disaster of some form or other.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/05/06/l ... -darkness/
I posted part of the full document. It's worth the read
