Hey, Parents: Meet Neo-Soviet NYU, Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen
He does give an example of “selective” reporting by U.S. media, saying it failed to report a student strike at an obscure Russian college:
If their protest spreads to other universities, Russia could experience its first large-scale student strike in many decades, with major political consequences.
He claimed the protest was not reported because these students didn’t have U.S. reporters in their pockets the way earlier protesters did, and because the students did not criticize Putin but rather focused their ire on Obama “favorite” Dmitri Medvedev.
Cohen mentioned that the students were protesting the ouster of their rector Sergei Baburin, but didn’t tell his readers a thing further about Baburin, who is one of the most delusional figures in Russian politics. In 2007, he proposed paying each Russian citizen the tidy sum of four million rubles (Russian-language link) to compensate them for the ills imposed upon them by the fall of the USSR. That’s about $150,000 a head, enough to bankrupt not just Russia. Baburin is also a radical nationalist who vigorously opposed Boris Yeltsin, siding with those who wanted to preserve Soviet repression. How he represents some type of progressive future for Russia, only Cohen can say.
Cohen believes that the U.S. should have given Russia “most-favored nation” trading status in an unconditional manner, allowing Putin carte blanche authority to decimate Russian civil society so as to avoid a “haughty American intrusion into its political and legal affairs.” His dishonesty is quite breathtaking: Cohen did not tell his readers that Russian polls clearly show the people of Russia supported the Magnitsky Act, or that the bill was even more enthusiastically supported by the leaders of Russia’s democracy movement.
The only ones who didn’t support the measure were Vladimir Putin and … Barack Obama, who opposed it tooth and nail until his own party overwhelmingly approved it in Congress.
Cohen’s portrait of Obama as a new type of cold warrior — one not nearly fair, much less generous towards Russia — is equally deluded. He ignores that Obama handed Putin a nuclear missile treaty under which only the U.S., not Russia, had to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles. He ignores that Obama unilaterally cancelled the Bush plan for missile defense in Eastern Europe. And he cannot point to one single instance in which Obama spoke out for human rights in Russia throughout his entire first term. He ignores Obama’s hot-mic moment with Dmitri Medvedev last year in which he promised to heap more largesse on Putin as soon as he had his reelection in the bag. Cohen called Obama’s reset policy “détente”; the only accurate term for it is “appeasement.”
What Cohen apparently means: Obama isn’t yet as far in the Putin camp as he believes he can be pushed. Just like Putin, Cohen sees Obama’s weakness as a basis to leverage even more one-sided gains for Russia. He feels Obama should have vetoed Magnitsky, committing political suicide to stand up for KGB values. Cohen calls for “movement towards partnership” on the part of the United States, without ever once recognizing a fault on the part of Putin, or acknowledging that Putin’s status as a proud KGB spy hardly makes him a viable candidate for partnership.
On innumerable occasions in the past, Cohen has painted Putin as the innocent victim of American bullying. He has trashed the Russian opposition and mercilessly attacked U.S. efforts to support democracy and American values.
He even sided with Putin on the murder of dissidents like Alexander Litvinenko.
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?