Dear Friends,
COULD CHANGE BE IN THE AIR?
The New York Times printed the following article that I NEVER would have thought possible.
Stephen Boykewich’s piece is so honest, so insightful and so challenging to the deeply entrenched NeoCon Wolfowitz Doctrine enthusiasts, it seems impossible that this article appears in print. Now in 2017, at least a decade after Putin’s speech at Munich rattled the unipolar world supporters, the whole structure is being questioned in our “paper of record” by Boykewich. Amazing.
A few days ago the venerated Foreign Affairs publication printed a long dissertation featuring the same openness, with a willingness to take a look at Washington’s demonizing Putin and Russia. It follows tomorrow.
Let’s hope these two confessional pieces will provide a measure of cover for others who have kept silent for fear of being ostracized by their colleagues.
Please send this article to your friends, colleagues and family who have swallowed the Kool-Aid of the past decade or two.
Sharon
If you have time, I encourage you to delve into the book Boykewich recommends, The American Mission and the Evil Empire, by Rutgers’ historian, David Foglesong. The history is so painfully clear.
The New York Times
March 13, 2017
Angels and Demons in the Cold War and Today
Stephen Boykewich
LOS ANGELES — George Kennan knew how to bring down the house. His lecture audiences started off skeptical about whether Russia really wanted to be remade on the American model. Then he told them about the Russian political prisoners who spent the weeks before the Fourth of July scrounging bits of cloth in red, white and blue. When the holiday came, they met their jailers by waving a sea of tiny hand-sewn stars and stripes through the bars.
It sounds like the perfect Cold War propaganda tale. But the Fourth of July that Kennan was referring to wasn’t during the 1950s — it was in 1876. And the George Kennan telling the story wasn’t the famous Cold War-era diplomat, but his distant relative and namesake, a journalist who had spent time in Russia before going on the lecture circuit in the 1880s.