CNN‘s illustration of a possibly “completely mad” Putin. Or maybe he just opens his mouth when he talks.
“Has Russian President Vladimir Putin gone completely mad?”
That’s the lead of a news analysis (2/11/15) by Matthew Chance, CNN‘s senior international correspondent in Moscow.
Here’s a better question: Does CNN care whether it’s viewed as an outlet for crude anti-Russian propaganda?
Chance claims that his opening attack is a “question…actually being debated in serious circles.” His first example of this is an offhand remark supposedly made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to US President Barack Obama that Putin is “in another world.”
Common sense tells you, of course, that when people say someone is “in another world,” they don’t generally mean that they are actually psychotic. For what it’s worth, Merkel’s office said she hadn’t meant to imply any such thing, clarifying that her point was that “Putin has a different perception on Crimea.”
Chance says Merkel’s comment was made “a few months ago”; actually, the conversation between the NATO leaders happened on March 1, 2014—about two weeks shy of a year ago—and was the subject of a propaganda cycle at the time (FAIR Blog, 3/12/14). Which raises the question of what it’s doing here as exhibit A that currently a serious debate going on over Putin’s mental health.
But Chance’s first example is about six years younger than his second—and final—piece of evidence that Putin’s sanity is “actually being debated.” This is a 2008 report from a Pentagon think tank that supposedly says “the Russian leader may have Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism.” Yes, CNN suggested that possibly having Asperger’s Syndrome is evidence that one might be “completely mad.”
It should go without saying that Asperger’s is not associated with delusions or irrational behavior; indeed, CNN itself says this diagnosis from a distance “may account for his apparently high degree of control.” (USA Today, which obtained the Pentagon report, says it suggests Putin’s “behavior and facial expressions reveal someone who is defensive in large social settings.”) And “experts told CNN they were skeptical of the reliability of the Asperger’s claim.” Nevertheless, Chance presents the Defense Department’s seven-year-old psychological speculation as half of his evidence for his proposition that whether Putin is “completely mad” is a current debate in “serious circles.”
Clearly, genuinely serious circles do not include CNN‘s Moscow bureau.
What McClatchy DC‘s Mark Seibel (3/5/14) had to say at the time about the original propaganda campaign around Merkel’s “another world” remark is worth repeating:
In the world of propaganda, successfully portraying your adversary as being crazy, without any rational backing to his actions, makes it unnecessary to try to understand the complexities or sensitivities of the issues. If Putin is crazy, then that’s enough. We needn’t think any further about what he has to say.
That seems to be the point of the remainder of Chance’s article: that the political positions taken by Putin are “completely mad,” or at the very least the actions of “an enigma.” For example, there’s “his unflinching support for rebel separatists in Eastern Ukraine, despite their alleged excesses,” which are said to have “plunged Russia’s relations with the West into their worst crisis since the end of the Cold War.”
This Ukrainian woman’s house was hit by a rocket, apparently launched by the side one can support without questions being raised about your mental health. (photo: Human Rights Watch)
No mention of whether “unflinching support” for the Ukrainian government in Kiev, despite its own “excesses”—which include “arbitrary detentions, torture and enforced disappearances of people suspected of ‘separatism and terrorism,'” in the words of the UN high commissioner for human rights (12/15/14), and “indiscriminately rocketing civilian areas,” according to Human Rights Watch (Washington Post, 7/25/14)—raises the question of whether Western leaders are “completely mad.”
Putin’s backing for the rebels shows he is “determined to get his way in Ukraine,” writes Chance. He explains this means autonomy for southeastern Ukraine, recognition of the Russian language there, and a buffer zone—”but Putin may actually want much more.” “A large hint” as to what this might be: Putin told an Egyptian newspaper (Al-Ahram, 2/9/15), “Promises of non-expansion of the NATO to the east have turned out to be hollow statements.”
Putin is referring to statements like US Secretary of State James Baker’s 1990 assertion at the Kremlin that there would be “no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Baker later insisted he was only promising that NATO forces within Germany would not move into what was then Soviet-dominated East Germany; Putin, understandably, reads it as a US double cross.
Putin’s statement to the Egyptian paper is the quote upon which Chance hangs his analysis that “a solution to the Ukraine crisis, then, may involve ruling the country out of any future NATO membership, however unpalatable that may be to some in the West.” CNN‘s Moscow correspondent then warns, on the basis of nothing other than his own say-so, that “the bigger problem, though, is that this may not end with Ukraine”:
Putin’s ultimate goal may be to tear up the post-Soviet assumptions about what Russia will tolerate, and permanently change Russia’s relationship with the West.
How dare Russia’s president try to change Russia’s relationship with the West? Why, he must be completely mad!
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I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you, that CNN would hype up the news. Please tell us something we don’t already know. With that said, it is valid to wonder if Vlad isn’t just a little batty. It typically goes along with being a strong arm despot.
This campaign for a new cold war is finding support from both sides of our corporate democracy. The bugbear of Republican talking heads, George Soros, expressed the “vision” of the Democratic wing of our Corporate State by calling for war with Russia in his screed in the February 5th edition of the New York Review of Books, entitled, “A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine.”
Among other gems of insight is this: “Europe seems to be dangerously unaware of being indirectly under military attack from Russia and carries on business as usual. It treats Ukraine as just another country in need of financial assistance…” and “Putin’s ambition to recreate a Russian empire has unintentionally helped bring into being a new Ukraine that is opposed to Russia…led by the cream of civil society…”
He warns that “Europe needs to wake up and recognize that it is under attack from Russia.”
Apparently the threat of having a hostile military alliance occupying not only neighboring states such as Poland and Czech Republic, but an historical part of the Russian empire and the later Soviet Union such as Georgia or Ukraine, is something that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow with Soros or the rest of the ruling class.
The vilification of Putin is a game without rules or consequences.
Unless Putin really is mad and orders nuclear tipped missiles to be launched as NATO troops begin the Ukraine occupation. Even George Soros might regret his words, if that should happen.
Ringed by U.S. military bases, surrounded by advancing NATO proxies, having roused the Empire’s fury by stymying bellicose threats to Syria and Iran, of course Russia is “completely mad” to defend its own historical and current interests.
And now it has to contend with CNN ‘madness’ propaganda to set the stage for … what? Deposed Haitian President Bertrand Aristide could give us some guidance on that.
Having helped engineer the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected (though admittedly bad) government a year ago, and attempting regime change in Georgia and Belarus (and who knows where else), U.S. professions of innocence and good intentions — backed by a chorus of ‘independent’ media like CNN — should win an international acting prize.
A corpress which cheerleads for nuclear “chicken” casts its bête noire as “mad”.
That’s some chutzpah, boychik.
I have to wonder if Art Glick isn’t a little batty, preferring to speculate darkly on the fantasies swirling in his head rather than on the readily available real world facts.
The DC politicians voted a whole bunch of taxpayer money to go for propaganda regarding Putin and the Ukraine.
Why are you trying to incorrctly characterize an opinion piece as a news article? Not enough truthiness today?
That would be Angela, not Andrea, Merkel.
I round Putin off at “sociopath”, and I sure hope that doesn’t hurt his feelings.
FAIR has strangely been reluctant to admit the extent of Russia’s involvement in the separatist movement, from using troops, arms and collecting prisoners of war, such as Nadiya Savchenko. We all know how much Putin hates defiant pussy, and this spills over into the propaganda out of the Kremlin on the matter:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28249884
In the age of the Inte rnet there’s no excuse for watching CNN aside from a very few shows. This is a perfect example why. Garbage “news” for people who like to think they’re being informed when in actuality they’re sunply being managed.
In the age of the Inte rnet there’s no excuse for watching CNN aside from a very few shows. This is a perfect example why. Garbage “news” for people who like to think they’re being informed when in actuality they’re simply being managed.
This seems to be an accurate assessment of the U.S. imperial approach to dominating Eurasia, following the longstanding proposals of Zbigniew Brzezinski:
Putin: Russia did not plan to wage war on anyone
President Vladimir Putin has said Russia did not plan to wage war on anyone, but that a world order where one leader tells others what they can do would not suit Moscow.
“It’s a fact that there clearly is an attempt to restrain our development with different means,” Putin said in the southern city of Sochi.
“There is an attempt to perturb the existing world order which formed in the decade which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, with one incontestable leader who wants to remain as such thinking he is allowed everything while others are only allowed what he allows and only in his interests,” he continued.
“This world order will never suit Russia. If someone likes it, if someone wants to live under conditions of semi-occupation, let him – we will never do this.”
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2015-02-08/putin-russia-did-not-plan-to-wage-war-on-anyone/
Resembles that Marketing 101 class, where it was always useful to proclaim that the competition was always wrong about everything.
Isn’t the German Chancellor ANGELA Merkel (not Andrea?)
Mr. Putin’s reading of US Secretary Baker’s statement about “no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east” was read correctly. One only has to look at NATO’s expansion since then to realized that Baker was lying and hence Putin was right. Shame on you CNN.
Art Glick: “Putin is corrupt and quite brutal”
That reads like a description of the ruling class everywhere. As an American — living in a country that is unbelievably violent and evil; see the nation’s history from its inception — I prefer to critique my brutal leaders and fawning media, leaving it to Russians to critique their leaders. If Americans would get their noses out of everyone else’s pies perhaps we could bring about some positive change in this sick society.
I am waiting for CNN to issue a breaking news story about debates in the USA as to whether American strongman Barack “Predator Drone” Obama is a mass murdering sociopath who suffers from NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), as notable numbers of people believe.
After all, what can one make of a person who has a kill list and openly admits that he is good at killing people?
In some countries, this person would be called a sociopath. But In America, they call him POTUS.