Writing at the C4SS website, Kevin Carson recently criticized pro-US imperialist sentiments of journalists alleging ties between presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin
After explaining that he is not backing Donald Trump (he actually encourages voters to pick Clinton) or Putin in any way, Carson makes an argument as follows.
Self-proclaimed liberals in the US suffer from unfounded "assumptions" shared with vicious conservative ideologues when it comes to the US's place in the world. Their belief seems to be that whenever the US uses violence, it is instantly justified, and whenever someone uses violence against US interests, they are committing some form of aggression.
Whatever Russian President Vladimir Putin may have done, Carson believes, the US regime was already committing unique acts of aggression against the world and deserves a greater portion of our criticism.
In fact, Putin's foreign policy actions (not to comment on his domestic politics, which are indeed right-wing and authoritarian as Carson describes) are simply adequate measures against US aggression:
As for Putin’s aggression, it takes a unique set of blinders to call his 2008 altercation with Georgia, or his recent intervention in eastern Ukraine and occupation of the Crimea as aggression, while portraying as purely “defensive” the eastward expansion of NATO and the installation of a right-populist (and arguably neo-Nazi) regime in the Ukraine that is every bit as authoritarian as Putin’s.The aggressive behavior of Western journalists towards Russia and other apparent enemies of the West is especially criticized by Carson, who alludes to Noam Chomsky's analysis of media control.
Carson wrote, "cable news, the wire services and major newspapers of record are every bit as slavishly subservient to the foreign policies of the American state as are the official media organs of any totalitarian regime".
When reporting on international relations, most journalists work backwards from the assumption that their country's foreign policy is correct, no matter how conflicted or catastrophic it has been. This is especially evident in current Western coverage of the Syrian Civil War. Despite the West's lack of access to any effective contacts in Syria, it insists the government of Bashar al-Assad is responsible for all the violence and denies its own role in killing thousands of people.
Link: Putin-Trump Outrage Reveals Shared Imperialist Mindset
