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Stephen Cohen Has Died. Remember His Urgent Warnings Against The New Cold War. by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2020-09-21 at 15:59:25 )
Stephen Cohen Has Died. Remember His Urgent Warnings Against The New Cold War. by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
Stephen F Cohen, the renowned United States of American scholar on Russia and leading authority on United States-Russian relations, has died of lung cancer at the age of 81.
As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet, this is a real loss.
I myself have cited Mr. Cohens expert analysis many times in my own work, and his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what is really going on with the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions against Moscow.
In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Mr. Cohens death is a blow to humanitys desperate quest for clarity and understanding.
Very sad. A huge loss. Americas leading expert on Russia, Stephen Cohen, has died, aged 81. Stephen was subjected to a horrible smear campaign when he questioned United States-policy towards Moscow after the 2014 estrangement. Condolences to Katrina Nation-Bryan MacDonald September 19, 2020
I do not know how long Mr. Cohen had cancer. I do not know how long he was aware that he might not have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war, which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.
The last of the many books Mr. Cohen authored was 2019s War with Russia?, detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016 cold war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.
"You know it is easy to joke about this, except that we are at maybe the most dangerous moment in United States-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever," Mr. Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. "And the reason is that we are in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russias border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."
Mr. Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where "anything could happen" in the chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war.
"I think this is the most dangerous moment in United States of American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis," Mr. Cohen told Democracy Now in 2017. "And arguably, it is more dangerous, because it is more complex. Therefore, we-and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington,D.C. these-and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Donald Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin.
So, at this worst moment in United States of American-Russian relations, we have an American president who has being politically crippled by the worst imaginable-it is unprecedented. Let us stop and think. No United States of American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we are talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason."
"Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis," Mr. Cohen added. "Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he was not was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war."
"A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia" is that the new Cold War is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived," Mr. Cohen wrote last year. "Histories of the 40-year United States-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements, often known as detente. But as I also chronicle in the book, todays American Cold Warriors blame only Russia, specifically "Putins Russia," leaving no room or incentive for rethinking any United States policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991."
"Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized United States of American opposition to the new Cold War," Mr. Cohen added. "This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of detente were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere."
"A major factor is, of course, -Russiagate-," Mr. Cohen continued. "As evidenced in the sources I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless response to President Donald Trumps pledge to find ways to -cooperate with Russia- and to the still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an opposition party in regard to the new Cold War."
"Detente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world," Mr. Cohen wrote in another essay last year. "No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan support at home, which Donald Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take-in Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russias electric grid-to shock United States Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight."
And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Donald Trump to advance dangerous cold war escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of the political-media class. Mr. Cohen has for years been correctly predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth, even while his own life was nearing its end.
And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even more complex with the addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the United States-centralized empire has been plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions to continue to increase.
We should heed the dire warnings that Mr. Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for detente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet may well depend on our doing so.
Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us all.
"This Ms Caitlin Johnstone article and its links are here:"
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