HomeArticleMattis: Putin Is Trying To “Undermine America’s Moral Authority”

Mattis: Putin Is Trying To “Undermine America’s Moral Authority”













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  • I wanted to read Alex Ross’s piece in a somewhat recent New Yorker about Hitler’s borrowing of racial ideas from the U.S.A. I have liked Ross in the past and he is fairly good writer, but when I got to the reference to the “Soviet menace,” the magazine (which someone gives us — I wouldn’t spend a penny on such junk) went into the recycling bin. The Soviets NEVER menaced the U.S., whereas the U.S. invaded Russia after the revolution and did everything possible to undermine the Soviet Union. I am SO SICK of American self-righteousness — it is obscene and evil.

    • Stalin was evil, and my Polish grandmother nearly had a stroke every time his name came up–he was responsible for ordering the murder of a lot of Poles during/after WWII. He treated his own people badly too.

      from Wiki:
      “Despite his strengthened international position, Stalin was cautious about internal dissent and desire for change among the population.[538] He was also concerned about his returning armies, who had been exposed to a wide range of consumer goods in Germany, much of which they had looted and brought back with them. In this he recalled the 1825 Decembrist Revolt by Russian soldiers returning from having defeated France in the Napoleonic Wars.[539] He ensured that returning Soviet prisoners of war went through “filtration” camps as they arrived in the Soviet Union, in which 2,775,700 were interrogated to determine if they were traitors. About half were then imprisoned in labour camps.[540] In the Baltic states, where there was much opposition to Soviet rule, de-kulakisation and de-clericalisation programs were initiated, resulting in 142,000 deportations between 1945 and 1949″

      The “We had to do it because they did it first” narrative is alive and well now–DT used it to justify his zero tolerance policy, saying Dems forced him to obey some law he made up. History is remade hourly these days.

      • Stalin was horrible, but this is called “blowback.” We suffer from many of the effects of foreign wars through our returning psychologically damaged veterans if they are recruited by our domestic police forces. But many times they end up homeless and mistreated.

        I don’t know if you knew this but the US is doing something similar to our vets after they return to the US, tracking them and gaslighting them if they step out of line, in a program called “Operation Vigilant Eagle” revealed in a Huff Post article in 2014:

        • that’s terrible…I know that when my brothers returned from Vietnam whatever they were experiencing was purposely ignored–they had to “suck it up” and shut up.
          I am talking about justification for an agenda here, not blowback. Finger-pointing, distortion, alternative fact-making. Having an agenda, be it immoral as hell, and kicking up dust to obscure what they are doing long enough to get it done. Although apparently DT complained that “his people” loved the zero-tolerance policy, so why should he stop it. ai caramba

      • What lot of Poles?

        “2,775,700 were interrogated to determine if they were traitors. About half were then imprisoned in labour camp”

        Complete BS. The data was declassified and analysed by historians a long time ago. Yes, there was an increase in the number of imprisoned in the Gulag after the war but these were the members of the ‘Vlasov’s army’ and Ukrainians that collaborated with the Nazis.

        There was no more than 20,000 Poles nor more than 10,000 Balts in the Gulag.
        The Poles that were deported were colonizers, co called ‘osadniki’, the veterans from the Soviet-Polish war that were given land after the occupation. The indigenous population on the occupied territory didn’t have any rights, even education on their native language was denied.

        • Really? What about the Katin Forest Massacre?

          • What about it?

            Pure Goebbels’ propaganda.

            Those Polish PoWs were killed by German weapons, the Soviets didn’t use that caliber, they had their shoulder straps, markings and documents on them. That was strictly forbidden by the strict NKVD rules. No PoW were allowed that.
            Another thing, these PoWs were imprisoned in multiple camps and only in those that were captured by the Germans were killed, nowhere else.
            So, the Soviets used their well famous time travel machine to check what camps would be captured…
            The Soviets captured 250,000 Polish PoWs, they armed them and gave them a chance to fight the Germans but they refused to fight on the Eastern front and went to Iran.

            • Time travel machine? You’re nuts!

          • “Time travel machine? You’re nuts!”

            That was irony, if you didn’t notice.
            There are so many other details that you surely don’t know and you won’t find them on wikipedia.

            Two of the victims from the Katyn list were found recently by a Polish-Ukrainian archeological team near Volodymyr-Volyns‘kiy. There is no doubt that they were killed by the Nazis, amongst the Jewish people, women and children. The NKVD never executed children.

            Those PoWs were also tied by a rope that wasn’t available in the Soviet Union

            • Show me your sources, please.

            • lying troll–not worth engaging a revisionist agenda.

          • When you have no argument, only thing that you could do is an ad hominem attack.


            You’ll find both the Ukrainian and Polish interpretation of these findings and both of them are anti-soviet, of course.

            And that part about the rope was about Katyn not about this finding. This format is not so good, my posts are shrinking, so this is my last reply.

            This kind of rope was not available in the Soviet Union


  • A man who earned the sobriquet “Mad Dog” for his eager embrace of the doctrine that anyone out after “curfew” (in his own country, yet) was fair game for drone attack is the last person who should be lecturing anyone on morality.

  • What moral authority?

    Find that weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq yet, that the Yankees murdered 100,000 to 1,000,000 Iraqi civilians over? Hold anybody accountable for that “mistake”?

    The US abandoned it’s moral authority 17 years ago and it’s not ever getting it back.

    • 17 years ago? Check out King Philip’s War 1675-78.

      • What are you talking about?

        I’m being extremely clear in that the United States lost all of it’s credibility by abandoning it’s moral authority, by violating the Geneva Conventions, and breaking the same internal laws the United States itself established in the wake of WWII. The US put Japanese and Nazi commanders to death for implementing torture.

        I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this. Without moral authority, you can’t lead with a carrot any more. George W. Bush destroyed the United States empire on March 20th, 2003.

        You can laugh over this, but just wait. Fascist empires last around 20 years +/- a few years. It’s not like the complicit population doesn’t deserve what’s coming to them anyhow. It’s too late to warn anybody. The next stage is censorship and repression, and finally, a complete loss of control. You can afford to be flippant a stupid for another decade, at most.

  • We heard similar noises about “moral authority” from Gina Haskal during her confirmation hearing, if you had the stomach to listen to it.

    • Like I said, it means the authority to decide what’s moral for us. They themselves believe they are above morality.

  • I think that I will take nearly any ad hominem argument as an admission of wrong, and an unworthy point. The kettle calls the pot black… does this mean that the pot is not black? No. Does it mean that the kettle is a hypocrite? Yes, but politics is inherently hypocritical. It is hard enough to get anything done or agreed on that figuring out motives is just too much conjecture (and work).
    I will try to make my point again: Putin and Trump are like Chevrolet and Buick. They are both owned by the same masters, the bankster/gangsters, yet they compete, cooperate, insult or even fight each other( in proxy wars so far) when needed to keep the profits rolling in for the 1%, and out for the rest of us. There are other brands out there- the GOP could be Oldsmobile, the centrist democrats could be Edsel.
    Yes the US is today’s World Imperial Power. I have seen nothing from Putin that would suggest that he is anything but jealous and simply covets that power. He has no more moral qualms than Trump. Why do people here constantly defend this tyrant? Because the US is worse? So what of it? If the U.S. were suddenly not so imperialistic, it would only make Putin’s aims more difficult to achieve.

  • War criminal & Defense Secretary James Mattis wants us to believe that “Putin is trying to diminish America’s moral authority, along with diminishing the appeal of the western democratic model. That our nation’s moral authority has been diminishing for at least 5 years is no secret, what with polls over the past 5 years that in 65 nations posed the question ‘which country do you consider to be the greatest threat to peace in the world today” found that the US, by far, was the nation most feared. That the western democratic model is losing its appeal is evident by the rising strength of antidemocratic forces in developed nations on both sides of the Atlantic. Again this has been gaining momentum for several years now.

    This lessening of trust in both America’s moral authority and in the western democratic model have to do with self-inflicted damage consequent to our nation’s domestic as well as international policies , as described in considerable detail by the author. Unfortunately, the powers that be not only won’t admit to the self-afflicted nature of this loss of trust, they either won’t concede or don’r recognize that there’s already serious slippage, down the slope, that is, of that shining city on a hill. As far as they’re concerned it’s still America the exceptional and indispensable.

    Or so they say, except if they really believed this, why the worry about Russian meddling, real or not? Surely the public, out of their living experiences experiences as Americans will have enough trust and faith in the city on the hill myth so as not to be fooled by Russian meddling?

    Or will it turn out that said meddling will confirm and reinforce conclusions based on unpleasant real life experiences heretofore not acted upon? In other words, the 0.01%’s worst nightmare.

  • This is so right on that it is scary. The only problem, while more are questioning, is the fact that the majority of Americans actually believe the bullshit that people like Mattis says. And, with a nickname like Mad Dog, it’s a wonder that he hasn’t been put down yet.
    Even today I had to deal with a typical American – ‘swallow-it-hook-line-and-sinker’ – idiot.
    “The stock market is honest and above board.’ ‘All immigrants don’t belong here.’ ‘It’s fine if the government violates your civil rights’ ‘Oh and immigrants don’t have any.’
    I could go on, but I learned long ago to say my piece and move on. For some people, there is no changing their minds, nor even opening them up to considering the truth. There are the descendants of those who were protested against in the 1960s. The ‘My country right or wrong’ people. Most likely they never had the balls, as children, to speak back to their parents, when those adults were in the wrong. I always wondered whether intellectual blindness is a learned trait. I’m pretty sure that it must be.

  • Much or most of what you write about the American narrative is true. However, you weave it into a narrative that ignores central historical facts and themes. Examples; Russia’s behavior in Poland after WW 2, the Hungarian revolution, the Check invasion and oppression, the take over of Manchuria in the last weeks of WW 2. Stalin killing 20-40 million of his own people, Chechnya, the Korean war, the Berlin wall. Not to mention recent assassinations of its own citizens. Yes, America has done cruel and horrific things in many countries, but it pales to what the Russians have done throughout the ages. It would be akin to comparing what the Nazis did to what the French underground did in response. Both killed, both did things that were horrific, but the French did it in response and not nearly in the same magnitude. Historical contrast is very important when viewing these issues. It is very easy to criticize one’s own country but balance is called for. Was Russia justified in taking Crimea, perhaps, but then was Hitler justified in taking the Sudetenland?

    • What Lee Yates just did there isa beautiful example of Advantageous Comparison defense in Bandera’s Moral Disengagement Theory. Yes, the US is morally bankrupt, but so what? The Soviets or Hitler or somebody else was worse. Sorry, that is bullshit. What did the US overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran have to do with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? Nothing. And he brings up Russian Crimea, which voted 95% to rejoin Russia, an example of democracy in action.

      • The so what is this: when dealing with monsters one has to stoop as low to defend against it. What happened in Iran was Brittain’s provocation. They approached Eisenhower once previously and he refused to intervene. It was only after they convinced him that it was a Russian plot to take over the oil fields that he relented. So yes it was wrong and even monstrous but put in the historical perspective at the time, it made sense. At that time, France was in danger of collapsing and with it the rest of Europe. I am of Middle Eastern ethnicity so I too am sensitive to Western colonialization of the region. However, things are not always as simple as we would like them to be.
        I really enjoy when people lower themselves to using vulgarities because they disagree with a point of view-most flattering and intelligent.

        • Just more evasive moral disengagement.

          So the Dulles boys finally duped Ike into giving the green light to the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadegh installing a bloodthirsty tyrant that ended up destabilizing the Middle East for the next 50years and running, based on the pretext of Russia hysteria.

          Was it true the Russians were really going to take over the oilfields? I never heard that story before. I doubt it very much. History teaches a different lesson. Mossadegh had the temerity to want to share oil profits with the Iranian people who owned it. Thats too much democracy for any country.

          Just like Truman was tricked into Korea. Or Johnson was duped into Vietnam.

          And so how do you explain why the CIA overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala beginning a reign of terror with genocude lasting 50 years against unarmed peasant villages? East Timor? Chile? Brazil and Argentina? Greece? Angola?

          This is just more Advantageous Comparison to justify moral bankruptcy. Sorry, sometimes things are as simple as they look.

          No I respectfully disagree. If these seem like difficult moral choices to you, I pity you.

        • Although I must apologize for not recognizing your rank as a cut above the usual G-7 troll with your knowledge of the advanced techniques of argument for moral disengagement, defending your country against the indefensible. Tough job that calls for an expert.

          You must be one of those G-12 trolls called to fill in for overtime duty on fathers day. I’m sorry your wife and kids are going to be missing you today. You can make it up to them tomorrow.

          • Funny thing, I agree that the overthrow was wrong, and horrible. I also think it was wrong and perhaps criminal when we invaded both Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of my relatives were killed by tyrants in the Middle East and much of what has happened there is ugly. But again, I do not stoop to personal disparagement. It has no place in honest debate. Same tactic used by the deplorable . Trump and McCarthy for that matter, and of course, now you. As for Mossadegh, he was truly a statesman. England owned the oil fields and he went to the UN to mediate the purchase of the oil fields at market value. The English refused and tried to convince Eisenhower that it was a Russian plot. He tried again and finally Eisenhower relented, wrongly I might add. But do remember, that Eisenhower also stopped the English and French when they wanted to invade Egypt to take over the Suez.

      • Thank You, JRGJRG. I did not know that I knew that much philosophy. What I said was more in light of current events circa the 1990s. Our “bankers” went to Russia and “helped” them get capitalism. Well they got it, and now their gangsters/bankers are just as wealthy and sophisticated as ours, or more so. Politically, I cannot really blame Putin for holding a grudge about our meddling in Russia and general promotion of Boris Yeltsin. Still I doubt that he would make it easy for us to install another Yeltsin or buy all of Russia’s resources either, so why would we make it easy for him to meddle in our country, or do what we do overseas?

        • This is what you’re doing, even if you don’t recognize it. If you understand this you will begin to understand the errors of your own ways. This is how totalitarianship develops. Read and learn.


    • Take off the blinders and fully explain how the U.S. genocide of native Americans – and the ongoing horrific treatment of them – pales in comparison to anything except, possibly, the unnecessary dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan.
      Sorry, but your dissertation of an excuse just doesn’t cut the mustard – or maybe your mother never told you that two wrongs don’t make a right. Or in the case of the U.S., dozens of never ending wrongs.
      Unless you really open your eyes and mind and understand the truth, you will never come off as anything more than an apologist for the top 1/10th of the top 1%.

      • This was a reply to William, but comes off looking as an original comment and criticism of Caity, with whom I am in complete agreement on todays article.

      • Not just the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, but remember that Gen. LeMay firebombed every city in Japan before the bombs were dropped, causing at least another half million deaths. Robert MacNamara said in an interview that if the US had lost the Second World War they both would have been tried as war criminals, and it would be right. See:

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8llS0ZkLVGA

  • Always impressed by Caitlin driving a bulldozer through lying narratives.
    We need more Caitlin’s; we need an antiwar mass movement of Caitlin’s.
    But the antiwar movement is very weak and it is divided against itself.

    In the 1990’s there was a coming together of the Chronicles paleoconservatives and the CounterPunch progressives against the US/NATO attack on Yugoslavia. But today Thomas Fleming and Chronicles have retreated and those controlling CounterPunch have explicitly rejected an alliance with the ‘right’ against the US march to war.

    I wish I could share the Caitlin enthusiasm for the future but I am depressed and fearful for the future. The US public is asleep. The US is gearing up for war in Europe and Asia. Starting with Clinton each president has murdered about a million souls. They are gearing up for a bigger war in the MENA and even Eastern Europe with Iran as the major target and will likely claim another million+.

    From Jungian psychology I learned that unless the opposites come close together change (a birth out of the tyranny of the status quo) will not happen. The elites in control of the US use the fake dialectic of the major two parties to keep us apart. Those in charge of each pole of the fake dialectic derive power from defending it against the ‘other’ and see alliance with the ‘other’ as a diminution of their power (a good example is those in control of CounterPunch arguing against antiwar alliance with the ‘right’; that they are captured by their power drive is plain to see).

    Liberals (neolibs) and many progressives have walked straight into a trap set by the CIA that engineered a Cold War v2. They knew the neocons would come along. The CIA, Wall Street, military, NSA are marching to war. They thirst for their holy war. They are the supremacist ‘exceptional and indispensable’ while the rest of the world is unexceptional and dispensable.

    If the left and right do not come together in an antiwar alliance then how can the warmongering trajectory of the US change?

    • I totally agree with your comments… We must support all movements towards peace and resist all movements towards war. And we must align with liberals and conservatives, religious folks and atheists. The survival of our species is at stake. The peace movement should not be the sole province of the Left. I do believe that the CIA is orchestrating much of the narrative. MSNBC is airing rhetoric that I would expect of Rush Limbach these days. The late night tv shows turn it in to comedy. All in the name of hating Trump and turning us against Russia. No discussion of our shadowy international interventions over the years, or the perspective of how our “adversaries” view what has been happening. No empathy allowed. No in depth historical analysis. Just the drone of inflamed pessimistic impressions and implied narcissistic sociopathic motives. Donald Trump as the Ultimate Villain… A puppet show sponsored by the Deep State.

  • It’s just like you, Caitlin, to bring up such quibbles as genocide, slavery, torture, and a few others too minor to even mention. We’re talking IDEALS here. You know like complete global domination, slavish catering to the most exploitive class in human history–the stuff that makes America great!

  • I agree that the U.S. is Imperialist and has been for a long time. However, it is false that Russia opposes the US kleptocracy or represents anything other than the same bankster/gangsters that run the West. They came into the fold after the end of the Soviet Union, and there they remain, probably not too happy about it, but neither are we right. The elites from all over launder money, hide wealth enjoy power and luxury beyond our imagination. A small spat between them is death sentence for the rest of us, but they will make up and enjoy their stolen wealth again.
    The moral authority that the West or USA enjoys is a hollow thing, much like Christianity at the height of the Church’s power. But the words are still there maybe some day a true believer will come along and do something about them.

  • Forgive me, I could not get beyond the ‘undermine America’s moral authority’. I take it, Mattis means the ‘moral authority’ to starve the Yemenis to death and deny them medicine while they are dying…. aided by our French Poodle and a mad woman from the Isles! Or maybe the ‘moral authority’ of Albright when she said killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children ‘was worth it’. Or maybe it was ‘moral authority’ of Clinton, giggling over the sadist murder of Kaddafi. Some how, as an American I don’t feel ‘moral authority’ , all I feel is the pain of inhumanity.

    • No, no, no, you’re still not getting it. Let me explain it to you.

      It means the authority of the autocrats to determine what’s moral for you. They themselves are above morality, like Nietzsche taught, remember? Authoritarianism.

      Now do you understand?

  • As was hinted at by the FBI-IG report, neither political party in the criminal U.S. government is complying with law (domestic nor international). The U.S. government system is an organized crime syndicate of liars, thieves and murders. The ruling class and the inside players of the secret government consider the common folk to be deplorable, trailer-park trash. That’s the mind-set of the ”holier-than-thou” professionals working inside the U.S. government. Whatever trust, loyalty and respect citizens had for this government has been completely squandered – and voters (not Putin) gave the FU finger to the status quo by electing Trump. The treasonous, seditious, murdering 2-party dictatorship has absolutely NO ONE to blame but themselves. The time has come to eliminate and defund the secret espionage agencies that run our government, – and which have morphed into crime syndicates. Ditto the two political parties. Until we see all the top level law-breakers in jail (i.e., Clinton, Bush, Obama), until we witness 2/3’s of the House and the Senate being purged and replaced, until we witness the complete dismantling of the FED, until we witness ALL military bases around the world being closed and our troops brought home, until we witness the M-I-C’s budget cut down to 1/4th and used ONLY for national protection, until we witness a purge of the CIA/FBI cartel, until we witness manufacturing being restored to this country, until we witness the USA cutting all special interest lobbying (in particular, Israel and Saudi Arabia), until we witness the break-up of the death grip that Wall St. and the banking monopoly has on our economy, until we witness the full restoration of the ”rule of law” in our government, – until then, it will be the absolute, open, in-your-face, tyrannical, 24/7, lawlessness of the U.S. government that destroys this nation.
    So I disagree with James Mattis, that the U.S. holds the moral high ground.

  • You’re paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying “projection” as a psychological defense. Let’s call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. They’re playing the “I’m rubber and you’re glue” game. It’s not like the assholes don’t know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don’t care.

  • Mattis didn’t realise how well he described Trump. When you look at what Trump’s regime has done since taking office last year, it ‘trumps’ [pun intended] Putin’s efforts, such as they are, by a mile. Putin could never hope to achieve so much in such a short time, if that’s what he wanted to do.

    It seems to be that every criticism levelled at Russia, and China even, is a simple reflection of what the USA is doing. Deflection. Classic ‘pot calling the kettle black’ stuff.

    All one has to do is change a few names in the narrative – replace Putin with Trump, Russia / China with USA. That’s it. Easy.


      • No, you misunderstood what I was saying. I’m not saying he/they use it as a defence, but that they don’t realise how close it is to what it (the USA) is doing.

        Believe me, I have no respect for Mattis & that mob, nor Putin for that matter. None of them deserve respect.

        I agree with you on the dirty rotten lying, too. They do know they are lying, but don’t know how close to the truth it is when applied to them.

  • No worries. We are in the “post-truth era.”
    That sounds crazy, I know.
    The plutocrats are discussing this exact topic this year at the Bilderberg Conference.

    • What’s the antonym of the prefix, “post”? You know, its opposite?

      It’s pre.

      We WERE in the pre-truth era, we’re coming OUT of the pre-truth era. Haven’t you realized more and more people are realizing their government and corporate media are nothing by compulsive liars? You notice it.

      You’re misunderstanding what the frauds in power mean by “post-truth”. Truth is a very big problem for them, because after all, they are frauds. They are scrambling to figure out how to deal with a population, that actually understands what is actually going on, and what the actual motivations for the sociopathic frauds in power are.

      They can try to delay it, they will not be successful.

      • That’s a nice positive take on it. But I think what they really mean is a new era where truth doesn’t even matter anymore, even when it is revealed. Truth is irrelevant.

        • Like I said, truth hasn’t mattered for years.

          If it did, George W. Bush and Barak Obama, and their entire administrations, would be at the Hague, looking at a sure conviction and execution.

          If truth simply didn’t matter, the press and government wouldn’t be working so hard to bury it. There is now an active attempt to censor the Internet, and there’s a full court press discredit non-corporate media reporting.

          I really don’t care what the frauds in power “mean”. If they mean “post truth” to mean “truth doesn’t matter”, look at how stupid they are to call it that! What they think it means, is the exact opposite of what it literally means.

          The government, the corporate media, and just multinational corporations have become so utterly corrupt, that they have abandoned their mandate for power. Even a typical man on the street can see it now. They really should have had some competent psychologists producing the propaganda but everybody is hired by nepotism. Same thing happened to the USSR. US is headed for collapse.

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