Russophobia/Russomania has hit a fever pitch, and seems unstoppable simply by refutation. What kind of counter-narrative could derail it is the question of moment. Not having an answer, I hope we can start working on it and maybe come up with one, or elements of one.

It’s helpful to note, as Caitlin does, that the threat is real. It is also long standing. Animus toward Russia has been seeded in the U.S. consciousness for many decades. J.F.K. used it to help get elected with his imaginary missile gap. It was a big part of Reagan’s appeal. Nixon used it to advance his career. American schoolchildren received propaganda in their social studies classes about “two worlds,” the free one and the Soviet one. The media routinely misreports news in Russia to fuel a narrative of totalitarian repression, the latest election in Russia being a case in point. Believing this or that factoid becomes irrelevant to the avalanche of propaganda that preceded it. We’d have to go back and re-write many decades of “history” — collective wisdom — to get to anything like a level playing field. The psuedo-events that are offered up officially to carry the false hate-the-enemy narrative rely on this distinctly pitched pitch, and you’d have to have the determination of a Sisyphus to attempt to move the ball toward the Peace and Rapprochement end of the field, with predictable results.

Again, I wish I knew a counter-narrative, or elements of a counter-narrative, that would be helpful in redressing Russomania. Hopefully, one will emerge from our collective efforts. That Trump has repeatedly stated that he seeks Rapprochement with Russia seems a ball important enough to keep one’s eye on, a utensil in the toolkit that should not be squandered.

All the fuel that’s being added these days to the fire most probably has something to do with the reversals on the ground for the Greater Middle East Strategy, and the role Russia and the Trump Administration has played in those reversals. Since these are reversals which have both advanced the cause of Peace and reduced the number of casualties in Syria, they should be explicitly supported by progressives.