Hey, Parents: Meet Neo-Soviet NYU, Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen
Not surprising: following the passage of the Magnitsky Act — which penalizes Russians who were involved with the brutal torture and murder of a human rights attorney — supporters of Vladimir Putin’s KGB dictatorship criticized Americans for supporting American values in Russia.
But would you be surprised to learn that one of those minions is not just an American citizen, but a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton?
Professor Stephen F. Cohen — husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of ultra-liberal The Nation – has been speaking up for the interests of Putin and Russia’s KGB. Writing at The Nation itself, he called the Magnitsky Act a “sanctimonious blacklist without due process” supported by a “feckless foreign policy elite”. (Do note: the Act was adopted by both houses of Congress in landslide votes with virtually no opposition.) Cohen claimed that Russia is far more democratic that the U.S. because “the Russian media were filled with heated controversy over the adoption ban,” while there was no such controversy over Magnitsky. (Putin’s response to the Act was to ban American adoptions of Russian children.) Cohen called American journalists “cheerleaders for a new cold war.”
This is not new behavior for him — Cohen has been bashing the U.S. media for reporting on Putin’s neo-Soviet crackdown for years now.
Politics truly makes odd bedfellows: Cohen and his wife’s publication are aligned with the likes of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan on this issue — two of Putin’s strongest supporters in the U.S. But Cohen’s take was truly neo-Soviet: he trashed the Clinton administration for giving birth to the new cold war, and he stated that Obama has “surrounded himself with Russia advisers, including Hillary Clinton, wedded to the twenty-year-long approach” that calls for cold war.
Cohen then directly wrote for the Kremlin itself, on its Voice of Russia website where he maintains a blog and is also routinely the subject of the Kremlin’s “journalism.” Any American parent thinking of sending their children to Princeton or NYU ought to find this worrisome: NYU itself got into the act, publishing his article on its website.
Following the Soviet and Nazi models, the falsehoods in Cohen’s analysis are difficult to document simply because there are so many, and his delivery is so propagandistic and shameless. Cohen does not give one example — not one — of Russian mainstream media (all national TV stations and all major circulation newspapers are Kremlin-controlled) challenging the Kremlin’s adoption ban, as he claims they did. Of course, none of them actually did challenge Putin’s decision to bar American parents from adopting in Russia, and polls show that the Russian people overwhelmingly supported that move.
I am truly shocked, shocked! Another self -loathing jew. Waxing nostalgically for return to the days of the Bolsheviks.
re: Afghan vet-when the Bolsheviks set about destroying Judaism and Zionism in the USSR they utilized the Evsekskia, Jewish party members, to do the dirty work.
re: Yeltsin-he was not a democrat but a deliberate transitional figure designed to bridge the path from Gorbachev to Putin. His resignation from Russia’s presidency following his re-election led to Putin’s rise. His resignation from the Communist Party in July 1990 reflected the strategy presented by Yeltsin in a speech to that CP Congress of creating a multi party system in which “one of another of its factions” would become a “vanguard party”. That is, Yeltsin was the democratic window dressing for a restructuring of the Soviet Union with the KGB maintaining control and the communist party replaced by an “alternative” among competing parties; in the current case Putin’s Unity party. Yeltsin’s democratic credentials were further burnished by the August coup, a Soviet provocation, that was stage managed to appear to bring democracy. No one explains how Gorbachev under house arrest could be allowed to broadcast to the West nor why Yeltsin’s lines of communications were never cut when he was on top of the tank (let alone why he wasn’t shot). The coup was theater designed for Western eyes, excited that the USSR had “collapsed” and democracy installed. Yet here we are facing a Russia who everyone forgets is really Russia: Commonwealth of Independent States, armed with fifth generation deployed nuclear weapons, a reviving naval arm, state control of media as noted by our correspondent. The key to the theatrics was two fold: to integrate Russia into the Western economic system eg G-7(the league of industrial democracies)becomes G-8 to get the West especially the US to disarm; ie the peace dividend. This process is accelerating under Obama but began with Bush senior and Clinton.
The article was very good and Leib’s comments were especially thought provoking. I had never heard or read Leib’s interpretation of the August Coup and Yeltsin’s and Gorby’s parts in it. A great conspiracy theory and quite possibly true.
One point about the article. Please supply some references to back up your contention that Paul and Buchannan are fans of Putin. After all, you excoriate Cohen for asserting things without proof. You don’t want to do the same, yourself, I’m sure.
Or as Gorby once said the train will be put on “new rails”. Interpretation: still going in to same direction but with a new track. Perestroika Deception. Read It.
Stalin had Walter Duranty, Putin has Steven Cohen.
Vladmir Putin is a KGB thug, first, last and always.
There must be something in it for Cohen like there was for Duranty.
Or else he’s simply nuts.
I’m not shocked at all, especially if this guy is married to Katrina Vandenwhatsis. She’s a red-diaper baby and has been an shrill, useful-idiot Soviet apologist her entire adult life. Not surprising at all to see she married within her own ideological colors (meaning: RED).
I wonder how much money he gets from the Russians. That Voice of Russia blog might be a way to funnel money to him. Perhaps an unregistered agent of a foreign power?
People here should also remember that this is the same guy that, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the old USSR, was on Charlie Rose practically every other night proclaiming that the SU would last forever because it had the rock-solid backing of the Russian public. Rarely has a supposedly really smart academic and “intellectual”–especially one who was/is? supposedly a specialist on Russian affairs and the old SU–been so wrong. After the fall of the Wall he pretty much hunkered down and disappeared from public view. Now, it seems he has latched onto Putin as the means to begin his public rehabilitation.
So he’s a True Believer and not just a paid mouthpiece?
Have always wondered why John Batchelor (John Batchelor show) gave Steve Cohen air time.
A Left-Wing professors a two major (and expensive) universities. How can this be?
Since the 1960s many universities seemed to need to have at least one Marxist faculty and many had more than one in their economics, political science, and sociology faculties. Glad to see Cohen has retired, but his, and their, progeny are everywhere, and still “publishing” in Monthly Review (check it out, it’s the same crap from 50 years ago).
are cesspools, to where all the filth and offal of jew-hatred flows as unto a vast reeking sewer
What you have is a squirrel looking for a nut. He has the ties, ideological and personal to the Russia, and is hoping to turn that relationship into something useful to him.
His technique is to show Putin etal that he is their friend, and is on their side. With that proven loyalty he hopes to reap some benefit in the for of MICE (Money, Ideological satisfaction, Compromise, and Ego). He wants to be their agent, but where the has gotten anything is not clear.
Ever since I first saw him on the Macneil-Lehrer report back in the 1970′s he has always said the same thing: The Russians never do anything wrong unless the USA (usually Republicans) make them do something wrong.
One small note — “emeritus” is the higher-ed term for retired.
Another left wing Jew tearing into America! What a shock!
Married to an elite Obama water carrier, editor of the Nation, the Sviets’ mouthpiece of N.y-the Nation, Ms. Van Der Heuvel comes from a well of movie moguls’ family, a dilettante chasing a sturdy microphones, and deep thinking Lefties are both a relic from the tired Sixties, playing with other people”s money, living off the wealth made by others, a fine way to freeload, what real life experience do both bring to the discussion? How to leach?