Eric Zuesse. U.S. is the Greatest Threat to World Peace. U.S. Regime Hates Vladimir Putin

Polls: U.S. Is ‘The Greatest Threat to Peace in the World Today’

Global Research, August 09, 2017

It has happened again: yet another international poll finds that the U.S. is viewed by peoples around the world to be the biggest threat to world peace.

But, to start, let’s summarize the first-ever poll that had been done on this, back in 2013, which was the only prior poll on this entire issue, and it was the best-performed such poll: “An end-of-the-year WIN/Gallup International survey found that people in 65 countries believe the United States is the greatest threat to world peace”, as the N.Y. Post reported on 5 January 2014.

On 30 December 2013, the BBC had reported of that poll: “This year, first [meaning here, ‘for’] the first time, Win/Gallup agreed to include three questions submitted by listeners to [BBC’s] Radio 4’s Today programme.” And, one of those three listener-asked questions was phrased there by the BBC, as having been “Which country is the biggest threat to peace?” The way that WIN/Gallup International itself had actually asked this open-ended question, to 67,806 respondents from 65 countries, was: “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?” #1, 24% of respondents, worldwide, volunteered that the U.S. was “the greatest threat.” #2 (the second-most-frequently volunteered ‘greatest threat’) was Pakistan, volunteered by 8%. #3 was China, with 6%. #4-7 were a four-way tie, at 5% each, for: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, and North Korea. #8-10 were a three-way tie, at 4% each, for: India, Iraq, and Japan. #11 was Syria, with 3%. #12 was Russia, with 2%. #13-20 were a seven-way tie, at 1% each, for: Australia, Germany, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Korea, and UK.

The way that W/G itself had phrased this matter, in their highly uninformative press release for their year-end survey (which included but barely mentioned this finding, in it — as though this particular finding in their annual year-end poll, hardly even deserved to be mentioned), was: “The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%). Respondents in Russia (54%), China (49%) and Bosnia (49%) were the most fearful of the US as a threat.” That’s all there was of it — W/G never devoted a press-release to the stunning subject of this particular finding, and they even buried this finding when mentioning it in their year-end press-release.

I had hoped that they would repeat this excellent global survey question every year (so that a trendline could be shown, in the global answers over time), but the question was unfortunately never repeated.

However, now, on August 1st of 2017, Pew Research Center has issued results of their polling of 30 nations in which they had surveyed, first in 2013, and then again in 2017, posing a less-clear but similar question (vague perhaps because they were fearing a similar type of finding — embarrassing to their own country, the U.S.), in which respondents had been asked “Do you think that the United States’ power and influence is a major threat, a minor threat, or not a threat to (survey country)?” and which also asked this same question but regarding “China,” and then again but regarding “Russia,” as a possible threat instead of “United States.” (This wasn’t an open-ended question; only those three nations were named as possible responses.)

On page 3 of their 32-page pdf is shown that the “major threat” category was selected by 35% of respondents worldwide for “U.S. power and influence,” 31% worldwide selected that for “Russia’s power and influence,” and also 31% worldwide said it for “China’s power and influence.” However, on pages 23 and 24 of the pdf is shown the 30 countries that had been surveyed in this poll, in both 2013 and 2017, and most of these 30 nations were U.S. allies; only Venezuela clearly was not. None of the 30 countries was an ally of either Russia or China (the other two countries offered as possibly being “a major threat”). And, yet, nonetheless, more respondents among the 30 sampled countries saw the U.S. as “a major threat,” than saw either Russia or China that way.

Furthermore, the trend, in those 30 countries, throughout that four-year period, was generally in the direction of an increase in fear of the U.S. — increase in fear of the country that had been overwhelmingly cited in 2013 by people in 65 countries in WIN/Gallup’s poll, as constituting, in 2013, “the greatest threat to peace in the world today.”

Consequently: though WIN/Gallup never repeated its question, the evidence in this newly released poll, from Pew, clearly suggests that the percentage of people in the 65 nations that WIN/Gallup had polled in 2013 who saw the U.S. as being “the greatest threat to peace in the world today” would be even higher today than it was in 2013, when 24% of respondents worldwide volunteered the U.S. as being the world’s most frightening country.

Perhaps people around the world are noticing that, at least since 2001, the U.S. is wrecking one country after another: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Which is next? Maybe Iran? Maybe Russia? Maybe Venezuela? Who knows?

Regarding the 2013 WIN/Gallup End-of-Year international survey, you can see the nation-by-nation results here. For example, their sampling that year of 4,556 Americans found that residents of the U.S. answered to “Q8. Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?”: #1 Iran 20%, #2 Afghanistan 14%, #3 N. Korea 13%, #4 United States 13%, #5 Iraq 6%, #7 Syria 5%, #8 China 5%, #9 Russia 3%, #10 Pakistan 1%. A remarkably high 13% of Americans gave the correct answer. And, late in that year, U.S. President Obama pulled the trigger on his long-planned bloody overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s government, which was portrayed throughout the Western press as being a ‘democratic revolution’, though it actually ended democracy in Ukraine.

And the U.S. has just increased its ‘defense’ spending, which already is three times China’s, and nine times higher than Russia’s. Do the owners of America’s military-industrial complex own the U.S. government, and own the U.S. ‘news’media, to permit this rabid military to control the government’s budget, in a ‘democracy’? Is that how it happens?

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

This article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation.

The original source of this article is Global Research

http://www.globalresearch.ca/polls-u-s-is-the-greatest-threat-to-peace-in-the-world-today/5603342

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Why the U.S. Regime Hates Vladimir Putin

By Eric Zuesse

Global Research,

April 29, 2018

Here is Putin in extemporaneous discussion and interview (translated into English): See this and this.

The second of those videos shows Putin offering Russia’s billionaires the choice between being dispossessed of their companies by the Government, or else signing an agreement with the Government, promising that they will henceforth place the welfare of their workers and of the people of Russia, above their own personal welfare and wealth, and only one billionaire there, Oleg Deripaska, hesitated, at which point Putin treated him contemptuously and Deripaska promptly signed.

Here is how Britain’s Express newspaper, on 7 October 2015, described that second video (below):

It shows the 63-year-old [Putin], who has launched a blitz of more than 50 airstrikes against the terror regime [Syria’s ISIS] in recent days, directly confronting Russian oligarchs and ranting at them that they are good for nothing COCKROACHES.

In the incredible footage, Putin humiliates Oleg Deripaska, one of the world’s richest men with a fortune of $6m [Deripaska’s fortune in 2009 was actually $3.5 billion], and treats him like his personal lapdog.

It was filmed on a tour of Pikalevo, a struggling factory town where families had been venting their anger over job losses and unpaid wages.

Back when the Putin-Deripaska encounter happened, the right-wing British newspaper Telegraph had bannered, on 4 June 2009, “Vladimir Putin takes Oleg Deripaska to task”, and it placed their hostile slant on the event by sub-heading: “Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, publicly criticised his most faithful oligarch on Thursday in an attempt to deflect growing social discontent on to the country’s unpopular super-rich.” (Of course, the U.S. regime would ignore why Russia’s super-rich were “unpopular,” much less the fact that America’s super-rich were involved in these heists from Russia that had caused so much of Russia’s post-Soviet depression.)

Image below right: Putin and Deripaska

On 27 April 2018, Deripaska ceded control over the world’s second-largest aluminum-producer, Russal, and he did it because the United States regime had recently placed him and his corporations under new economic sanctions, which are allegedly focused against Russian billionaires who support Putin politically. If Deripaska wouldn’t cede control, then the sanctions-hit would be harder and more damaging to Russia’s economy, so Deripaska — in fulfillment of his agreement signed with Putin — ceded control.

In other words, Deripaska, whom Putin had actually forced to commit to placing Russia’s interests above their own, is now being treated by the U.S. regime as one of the chief people to ‘blame’ for Putin’s being in office, in Russia’s ‘dictatorship’.

This threat, by Putin, to Russia’s wealthiest (Deripaska having been one of the billionaires whom Putin didn’t dispossess when coming into power in 2000), wasn’t a staged PR event, but instead was simply the best-filmed instance of Putin’s standard policy, ever since becoming Russia’s leader: his policy that an aristocrat can lose everything if he places his interests above the nation’s interests.

This policy was the fundamental change from the prior, Boris Yeltsin, years, when Harvard’s economics department and the World Bank, during the immediate post-Soviet 1990s, came into Russia and set up the system, working in conjunction with Yeltsin’s friends, to funnel the future profits from Russia’s vast undervalued natural resources, into partnerships between Yeltsin’s friends and U.S. billionaires and affiliated investors. That American-led corruption sent the Russian economy into a tailspin, from which the new Russian President, Putin, rescued it, by laying down the law to the billionaires: that their interests were subordinate to, not dominant above, the nation’s interests. This is the principal difference between the ideology of today’s America, and of today’s Russia.

My 3 June 2014 article, “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War)”, showed, by means of graphs, that the economic depression which engulfed Russia (and which was totally ignored by the Western press) during 1990-2000, ended and reversed immediately following (when Putin came into power), and especially ever since around 2004, so that Russia’s economic growth-rate under Putin, at least the rate prior to America’s economic sanctions against Russia in 2014, was one of the world’s best and looked likely to pose serious competition to the U.S. aristocracy in the future. From the pits that were brought by the U.S. regime in Russia — including the massive heists from the Russian public — to the period of Putin’s rule in Russia, has been a sea-change, and the U.S. regime cannot tolerate it; they want the U.S. elite’s looting of Russia to return.

This is necessarily a simplified overview of the conflict between the U.S. regime and Russia, but it’s nonetheless true. In order to understand it more deeply, filling in the details during the period after the end of the Soviet Union — and of its communism, and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance mirror-image to America’s NATO alliance, till now — cannot meaningfully be done outside the context of the U.S. regime’s swindle of Russia ever since the night of 24 February 1990, when U.S. President George H.W. Bush told America’s allies that it was a lie to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev when Bush’s people had promised Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact ended, then NATO would not expand, not move “one inch to the east” toward Russia’s border — which the U.S. and those allies have since done all the way up to Russia’s border. (In reverse, it’s as if Russia now were placing its soldiers and its missiles on or near the Mexican border, and the Canadian border.) This swindle of Russia meant that though the Cold War did end on Russia’s side, it never yet has ended on America’s. The greed of the U.S. regime — and of its allies — seems to be endless, including, ultimately, grabbing Russia itself. Putin resists, and so they hate him. That’s the reality.

To the U.S. regime and it propagandists, Putin is “The Pariah” and “The West’s Public Enemy Number one”, but to the Russian people, he is the protector of their nation against the U.S. regime’s threats to Russia’s national sovereignty. More diametrically opposite views of the same man, could hardly even be imagined.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Original: https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-the-u-s-regime-hates-vladimir-putin/5638288

GHA website: http://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=767

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