by John Freeman for the Saker Blog

I don’t get it. I’ve been watching the hysteric reaction of the news media, the MIC, the Deep State, the Zionist neocons, and politicians on both sides of the aisle to President Trump’s new detente with Russia, and I’m left wondering why the prospect of peaceful coexistence with a nuclear-armed superpower is seen as a bad thing. After listening to the usual drivel on the idiot box, which includes accusations of treason in the executive ofﬁce, you’d think they actually want an adversarial relationship with a country that our own generals acknowledge could annihilate us and end the world as we know it in the process.

I’m told by these mad dogs that Russia “has something on Trump”, that Putin is a “thug” who murders political opponents, that the evil Russkies  “annexed” Crimea, and even that they somehow stole our election, all without the slightest shred of hard evidence to bolster their claims. Yet this never-ending stream of Russophobia has been somewhat successful in the sense that propaganda always works on the gullible, as Goebbels, Orwell, and Huxley could all tell you. Plus, of course, there are plenty of folks who are paid very well to imagine Russia (or North Korea, Iran, or China) as our mortal enemy, and are only too happy to take train loads of cash from the rapidly shrinking private sector to prove it. Thus, following the money: if there is no enemy, there is no military-industrial complex.

Yet still I’m perplexed, because I have to say in my own little slice of life it isn’t Russia that has threatened me at all. No, instead, it is my own government that violates my rights every single day, and nary a squeak about this is heard from the elites among the MSM, academia, or what passes for an intelligentsia in this country precisely because they are not personally affected in any demonstrable way by these policies and/or because they are in fact part of the power structure themselves, and thus keep pointing the ﬁnger at the enemy without while allowing the enemy within to quietly but efﬁciently destroy our families, our jobs, our schools, our communities, and our churches.

After all, it isn’t Moscow that takes one quarter of my annual income as taxes paid to Caesar. No, that would be Washington, DC. It isn’t the KGB (FSB) that spies on my household and tracks all of my web communications. No, that’s the NSA. It isn’t isn’t the Supreme Court of Russia that tells me that you cannot have a cross on the White House lawn (while a menorah is A-OK), or that my children must be bused across town to achieve some kind of racial balance, or that a bakery must make a cake for a gay “wedding”. No, that’s our own homegrown “justices”. It isn’t the Russian State Duma that has devastated entire economic and social strata of our society through the implementation of open borders immigration policies, H1B visas, and free trade ideology. No, that would be our US Congress. It isn’t the Russian Ministry of Finance that has devalued the dollar by 96% since its inception. No, that’s our Federal Reserve Board. It isn’t Russia that has militarized its police to the point that there’s hardly any difference between the local constabulary and a mechanized infantry platoon. No, that would be, you guessed it, the USA. Nor was it Russia that used Israeli “advisers” to teach those cops how to crush its civilian population just as effectively and brutally as the IDF does Palestinians.

This is a process that has been going on for decades now, and it will continue so long as we believe that they are telling us the truth when they invent a new “monstrous” threat to Our Way Of Life, whether it be from Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddaﬁ, Slobodan Milosevic, or Kim Jong Un. It isn’t that these are necessarily nice guys-far from it. It’s that they represent no more a threat to you and I personally than Freddy Krueger, and the “danger” these “monsters” represent to the USA is based on theater so absurd and preposterous that even the smoke and mirrors of the Wizard of Oz seems quite realistic in comparison. If we only had the sense of Toto, we wouldn’t fall for it over and over again, like a dog who doesn’t get that he’s being tricked. Yet every single time we go to war with people we don’t know for reasons we cannot fathom we prove that we are worthy of the contempt of the oligarchs that rule us, who play us like cheap violins. Meanwhile, the ﬁgurative rape and pillage of our own “homeland” (and oh, what an Orwellian phrase that is) continues apace.

So the next time some “expert”, “think tank”, PAC, military ofﬁcer, professor, politician, or info- babe tells you that Russia (or North Korea, Syria, Iran, etc, etc) is a “threat”, think about the last time any of those countries interfered in any way in your day-to-day life. Yes, sure, our rulers will have all kinds of maps, charts, and pictures designed to scare you into believing that any minute now our so-called adversaries will nuke us ’til we glow. They’ll have frightening anecdotes told by nefarious “unnamed sources” about the horriﬁc atrocities committed by these terrible despots “against their own people”. They will look you in the eye and tell you with absolute certainty that the security of our nation, and possibly even Western Civilization itself, hangs in the balance, and that if we do nothing now, millions of innocent lives, including women and children, will likely be lost, and the blame for that will belong to us.

When that happens (and happen it will…again, and again, and again) just remember-it was those very same people who told you that Iraq had WMDs and that they never spied on the American people. Recall the Bay of Pigs, 9/11, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Know that both Osama Bin Laden and the Washington Post were (are) CIA assets. Remember the murder of US citizens at Ruby Ridge, Kent State, and Waco, among many others. Think about all those lies, deceptions, blunders, assassinations, and treachery, then decide for yourself who you think is the bigger threat: Russia, or Uncle Sam?

John Freeman is a writer based out of Florida who has written for Chronicles magazine, the St Petersburg Times, and Country magazine.  His blog is  He was formerly an army officer and automobile executive.