Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin made quite a splash. The Russian President, while perhaps a bit verbose and detail-oriented for Westerners’ sound bite-addled ears, came across (to me, anyway) as much more reasonable, and well-informed, than the vast majority of American politicians.
While I’m out on the fringe politically, apparently I was not alone in my perception for once, and a lot of Americans were noticing the sharp contrast between Putin and our homegrown politicians. I think that prompted our intelligence community to decide that something needed to be done to overcome the possibility that a significant number of Americans might generate some good will towards Russia, and that such good will might become a socially acceptable position in this country. The first wave of Rcounteroffensive came in the form of various corporate news outlets running dismissive stories about the interview. Next thing you knew, US-supported “opposition leader” Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison at the tender age of 48, and so of course the Ministry of Truth, through all its various media sock puppets, got to call Putin a “murderer.” Then Russia had an election, which our corporate press called “fixed,” since Putin polled about 86%,. Then, to ice the cake, a few Russian states, or “regions,” as they call them, decided that private clinics would no longer be able to perform abortions, so our media could trumpet “RUSSIA CLAMPS DOWN ON ABORTIONS!!!” THAT was sure to alarm any liberals who were still sitting on the fence!
But, when you look a little closer, these tropes don’t just start to come apart. They melt away.
First, let’s look at the Russian election, through the lens of US regime change instrument “The National Endowment for Democracy.” The NED has a polling organization inside Russia. After all, they need to have accurate information about what the Russian people think if they are going to try and influence it. It’s reassuring, in a weird sort of way, to find out that at least one agency in our government is not running purely on ideology, aka “wishful thinking”!
Anyway, here’s what the NED’s trusted polling numbers on Putin show: his approval rating is around 86% How much of the vote did he win? About 86%. QED, it was an honest election, and US media headlines saying otherwise were lies.
Second, let’s look into abortion in Russia. Here’s some context. With the exception of the twenty years between 1935 and 1955, abortion has not only been legal in Russia, it has been provided, for free, by the country’s national health service. Because it is free and includes three paid days off for recovery, many Russian women consider abortion their primary method of birth control. I can understand the reasons for that. Using condoms requires disturbing post-coital reverie in order to dispose of the little thing and its load of gooey human pollen. Creams taste bad and can irritate tender body parts. Birth control pills are mood-altering, and are filling the waterways around big-city sewage discharges with female hormones that have been found to be causing altered sexual expression in the fish that live in the water. So hey, just let it all hang out, and if you get pregnant and don’t want a baby, just have an abortion-
But I digress….so, Russia, a country with less than half the population of the US, has far more abortions per capita than the US, and each of those Russian abortions comes with three paid days off for the patient, on top of the government-funded abortion. In other words, it’s far more expensive to the state health care system and to private employers than other, less drastic, forms of birth control. Unlike the US, there is no Russian movement to limit access to pre-conception birth control, or even the morning-after pill–which is available for around $5, otc. That’s comparable to US prices. (While “the pill,” condoms, and other birth control methods are widely available, their relatively high cost is not covered by the national health service.)
Furthermore, Russia, like other European countries, is experiencing a birth rate below the replacement level–i.e., their population will drop at the birth rate they have–and would like to turn that around, so the country is increasing its support for mothers/families and children. That, too, is different from the US, where those banning abortion are basically saying “tough bleep–shouldn’ta bonked him” to the women they are forcing into motherhood.
From a “deep green perspective,” I would fault Pres. Putin for not accepting that lowering Russia’s population would be good for the planet, as would be the case for any other country’s declining population. But I understand the considerations that would make one country lowering its population a risky choice if its neighbors didn’t lower theirs. It’s the same as it is with disarmament; any country that unilaterally disarms is at the mercy of the countries that haven’t. In Russia’s case, while there are 144 million Russians, only five million of them live on the East side of the Ural Mountains, in deep Siberia and along Russia’s border with China, which has a track record of moving its population into “underpopulated”/ecologically fragile places like Tibet and Xinjiang, and may have its eyes on Siberia.
Another deep green criticism of Russia–and Venezuela–meets the same conundrum. Both countries are using oil revenue to fund social programs for their people–but really, it would be to the long term benefit of the people of those countries, and the whole world, to leave their oil in the ground. But, because the multinational corporations that use the US government as a front group would like to get their hands on that oil and pump its proceeds into the bulging pockets of the one percent, Russia and Venezuela need to keep selling oil to fund something else–their ability to defend themselves against American greed and military power. As the Titanic tilts ever more perilously, we can’t head for the lifeboats because we are too busy fighting over the deck chairs. OK, far enough afield–back to abortion in Russia.
I found an article on the abortion question at the Russia Today website that quotes two legislators who seem to be saying rather different things. The legislator featured in the story basically says that “banning” abortion will only drive it underground and make it less safe for women–a practical approach that I wish the Russians would apply to cannabis use and same-sex intimacy. The legislator quoted at the end of the short article, on the other hand, says abortion should only be available in cases of medical necessity or sexual violence. So, it sounds like there is a bit of a debate going on. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has weighed in with “Abortion is murder!” While he carries a fair amount of weight in Russia, the country is not a theocracy. As it has in this country, such an absolutist view may mostly serve to energize those who disagree with his sentiments. Takeaway: abortion is accepted and supported in Russia, and the move to make it less available comes hand-in-hand with increased support for mothers and children.
OK, next stop is “Putin murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny.” First, Navalny was not “the leader of the opposition.” According to the same US-sponsored polling that reveals Putin’s enormous popularity, “9% of the Russian public ‘approve of Alexei Navalny’s activities’, while 57% did not, with another 23% not even knowing who Navalny is.” One reason so many Russians didn’t like him is because he was widely known to be supported by US government money, a fact conveniently left out of Western narratives about him. As a free man and a political figure, Navalny was in no way a threat to Putin. Due to his non-political criminal activities, he was going to be in jail for a long time. and no threat to Putin.
His death came at a remarkably inconvenient time for Pres. Putin, but a remarkably convenient time for US propaganda purposes. Tucker Carlson’s interview with him was riding high. What a beast Putin must be, to think he can get away with such an evil deed at a time like this! The neoliberal press poured it on.
Now, Mr. Navalny was, I read, in poor health–quite overweight–and wouldn’t be the first overweight middle-aged guy to drop dead from a massive heart attack. Maybe he did just die. And maybe he was poisoned. Would anybody besides the Russian government do such a thing? Well, he was poisoned once before, and survived. That occasion is worth revisiting. First of all, the story kept shifting, but one version of it had him getting dosed with “Novichok” through an apparently previously unopened, fresh-out-of-the-cooler, bottle of water, one of several purchased for the group with which he was traveling. Who made sure he got the dosed bottle? There’s the fact that “Novichok” is a highly volatile gas that, if it were providing the carbonation in a bottle of water, would have almost instantly killed not just Navalny, but everyone in the room–but nobody else was affected in the least, and Navalny didn’t get sick until an hour or two later, when he was on a Russian airliner. What did the Russians do to this guy they were allegedly trying to poison? The plane made an emergency landing and Navalny was rushed to a hospital, where the doctors eventually released him to a hospital in Germany, and the Russian government, which allegedly tried to poison the guy, let him go–to a hospital that was completely out of their control and that would not hesitate to publicize any evidence of foul play that it might find. Is this how a government behaves when it’s trying to kill one of its citizens?
The Russian government, judged by its behavior rather than by what Western propagandists attribute to it, was clearly not trying to kill Mr. Navalny that time. Similar cases can be built for the Skripals and for Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector to the west who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 2006, when he was reportedly planning to return to Russia. The western press hammered home the message that these were the deeds of the Russian government, but in both cases, the alleged evidence is full of holes, but strongly suggests that it was Western, not Russian, “intelligence services” that poisoned all three in order to make the Russians look bad. Hey, the West is willing to slaughter thousands of Ukrainians in its attempt to dominate Russia. What’s another person or two? I start wondering if a great many of the murders of Russian dissidents, by and large individuals who pose no real threat to the Russian government, are actually carried out by Western agents in Russia, or their hirelings. Maybe you think that confirms that I’m nuts. But I’m not saying it’s true, I’m just posing it as a thesis. And yeah, it seems like it would be quite a trick for a foreign government’s agents to poison a guy who is in prison in deepest Siberia.
OK, let’s summarize, and contrast Russia with the US: Russia has a wildly popular President who is serving that country so well that almost everybody’s willing to just let him keep at it–kind of like FDR was in this country. Meanwhile, in the US, we’re about to have an election that, short of an upset victory by Dr. Stein or Bobby Kennedy, boils down to a choice between two guys, and the parties that support them, whose approval ratings are in the thirties, and who are clearly clueless when it comes to solving the country’s problems.
As for the availability–and cost–of an abortion, in Russia they’re free and come with three days off to recover. I don’t think there’s anyplace in the US that meets that standard.
And, as for who assassinates its opponents, or overthrows them if they are running a government, and which country seems to delight in imprisoning its citizens, the US is the hands-down winner. with at least 58 overthrows or attempted overthrows, as of 2014, and NSA only knows how many assassinations in service of those ends. Our country has occupation troops at 750 bases in 80 countries. By contrast, Russia has bases in five countries outside its borders–four of them in former parts of the USSR, and one in Syria, inherited from the Soviet Union. Russian troops are in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government (unlike the US troops who are in Syria), which asked the Russians to help them put down a rebellion that was fomented by the United States. Similarly, all of Russia’s other external military interventions have been launched to counter moves by the US to take over Russian neighbors and allies.
Because the US is so focused on military dominance, it does not spend money on social services, including educational opportunities and providing useful employment for its citizens, the result that the US has a huge and growing gap between the wealthy and the rest of us, and the highest prison population in the world, because that’s what we do with people our political system fails to provide for–so I think it’s arguably fair to say that it’s not just people like Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and (for all practical purposes) Julian Assange–all American prisoners are political prisoners–to restate that, if our society and its politics were saner, we wouldn’t be putting so many people in jail. Russia, with a population around half the US population, and a reputation in the US for a draconian justice system, has a quarter the number of prisoners the US has, and an incarceration rate about half of ours. As a prison abolitionist, I think any number of people in jail is too many, but meanwhile that’s just another sign that our perceptions of Russia have been created by calculated propaganda that carefully ignores the facts.
–So, it is reasonable to argue that the Russian government is far more responsive to its people, and thus popular, than ours, that abortion–and support for families–are more readily available in Russia than in the US, that the US is a much more violent, aggressive actor on the world stage than Russia, and you are less likely to be in jail in Russia than you are in the US., unless maybe it’s about a spliff. I hope this little essay has helped you free yourself from the American dream.
music: David Rovics, “Land and Freedom“
DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE 
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