Collective West OBSESSION with Putin Serves A Clear Purpose | Katrina vanden Heuvel

Putin = Trump = Hitler = The Devil. Easy! Why don’t you get it, you Putin-Apologist! The Russians must pay you to say this! (This = anything sensible about the NATO-Russia conflict and the Ukraine proxy war). While this simplistic and infantile way of reasoning is on the one hand clearly a psychological outgrowth of the logic of war that can colonise the brains of even the smartest intellectuals and turn them into bloodthirsty warmongers, this line of argument that has been pushed at least since 2016—since Trump so dramatically beat Neocon-in-Chief Hillary Clinton—also serves as a convenient excuse for all and any domestic failures in Collective West countries. In case of troubles, just blame Putin. The devil in the Kremlin will make all your sorrows go away. The dynamic of mass-psychology in the West has reached a perverse level at which not only advocacy for deescalation is blamed as an act of treason, but the decrepit state of domestic economies is pinned on the enemy, which only reinforces calls for the ’necessity of fighting’ the imaginary devil at the gates of the shining city on the hill. But the obsession goes even further than that... This is part 2 of an interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Part 1 here: Katrina vanden Heuvel is an icon of US journalism and publishing. She was for decades the editor in chief and a pillar of the progressive magazine “The Nation”. As such, she was pivotal in giving alternative voices a place to speak, especially when it came to US involvements in wars. I consider her and her late husband Stephen F. Cohen as giants of US public peace work and realism in international relations. Katrina has been writing about US domestic and foreign policy for 40 years and she is also a member of the American Committee for US-Russia Accord, that has for many years been pushing for better relations between Washington and Moscow.