Americans like to say: ‘if you can’t beat them, join them,’ but this advice has been forgotten by the pointy heads in Washington. The last thing they want is to join Russia in solving the world’s dire problems. Since that makes them look pretty bad, they are looking for every possible way to peel support away from a country they claim is America’s enemy.
The alternative media has been denouncing the mainstream media for its coverage of Russia ever since the US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, with Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe who was videoed handing out cookies to the protesters in the Maidan. Anyone who happened not to see those picture would probably have heard her in a phone call with Ambassador Jeffry Pyatt discussing which of her proteges would make the best Ukrainian Prime Minister. When Pyatt suggested the Europeans might not agree to her choice of ‘Yats’ (Yatsenyuk), she was heard dismissively declaring ‘Fuck the Europeans’!
Today the airways were full of talk about the possibility that Russia would be banned from taking part in the up-coming Olympic Games in Brazil, on the pretext that the IOC has ‘definitive proof’ — in the words of a spokesman — that the Putin government was complicit in the doping of its athletes going back to 2013.
Two things strike me as strange: the first is the fact that the Russian doctor and former lab head who apparently faked test results now lives in California, were he heads a laboratory.
The second thing is that sports fans are less likely than other people to be up on foreign news and international politics, while they are passionate about sports news.. These people are bound to make up a sizable portion of any electorate, so someone in President Obama’s foreign policy team probably decided to target them instead of consumers of hard news. Sports fans have probably not followed the Ukraine coup, or even the NATO buildup on Russia’s borders, much less recently trotted out claims that Russia ‘invaded’ Georgia in 2008, when in reality it was the Georgians who shot at Ossetians across the border, forcing Russia to intervene, and providing an excuse for NATO to move its tanks right up to Russia’s borders.
I will be very surprised if it does not eventually turn out that the Russian doctor who heads a lab in California, is not just being rewarded for his cooperation but was actually recruited by US agents. If the US can get the sports fans behind them when they attack Russia, that will be a significant chunk of the public.
Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook.