Wishful Thinking at its Best

Report: Russia's right wing is egging on Texas' secessionist movement

By John-Henry Perera | June 23, 2015 | Updated: June 23, 2015 11:46am

A Russian newspaper conducted an interview with Nathan Smith, a representative of the Texas Nationalist Movement, who just happened to be in St. Petersburg for a right-wing convention in Spring 2015.

Google Translate is a little rusty when it comes to the Cyrillic alphabet, but Smith's interview is more or less a repeat of everything we've heard before from pro-secessionists: Why should we be part of a union that takes but never gives back? U.S. policy is bad for Texas. We can do better on our own.

Politico writer Casey Michel notes that Texas' homegrown movement is delicious for Russian right wingers who blame much of the country's ills on the U.S., particularly after the recent sanctions on the country following the Crimean invasion in 2014. It also plays well with the country's long-term strategy of destabilizing the west.

"Cheered primarily by Igor Panarin, a former KGB agent and head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's diplomatic academy, the theory posits that a fractured United States, akin to the Soviet Union's demise, would disintegrate entirely, with nearby nations hoovering the assorted states."

The Russians cannot possibly be this stupid...can they ?


Although I see where the Russian's are coming from in the current tensions with the West, although I understand their point of view regarding maintaining influence in their backyard, and although I agree with much of their criticism of NATO, I think there's one thing they maybe misunderstand: Much as people throughout the world may harbour some distrust of the United States and its motives, including many in the West, and even in the United States itself, they don't necessarily hate the US.  And many of them share that distrust of America with a desire to be American themselves.

Russia, on the other hand, isn't exactly beloved by many of its neighbours, to say the least (never mind how the rest of the world sees the country, fairly or not), and for the many states that left the Warsaw pact and/or the Soviet Union after the latter's collapse it was very explicitly a question of liberation from what they saw as a decades-long* oppressive foreign influence.  An opinion that would be held in many of those countries by a clear majority.


The occasional mutterings of discontent in states like Texas, Alaska, Arizona, or wherever in the US, are little more than a temporal political protest, usually against the particular policies at one point in time of one ruling party.  The Texans aren't going to secede today any more than the so-called 'blue-states' were after the Bush-Gore decision in 2000, however much gnashing of teeth there may have been at the time.


And yet, even if the Russians aren't stupid enough to think that a secession of Texas or any other American state is remotely likely, they sure do put an awful amount of money and effort into their anti-Western  and Western-targeted propaganda outfits, possibly the jewel in the crown of which is RT (formerly Russia Today).  RT is a well-financed, slick media outfit, staffed with many Western presenters, that just so happens to specialise day after day after day in reporting on stories that make the West (The US & UK especially) look bad (some more justifiably, some less)

And there's an audience for the type of thing they cover.  An audience that occasionally includes me for that matter, well aware of the propagandistic agenda as I may be.  And there's a fair number of mid-level media-personalities in the West (usually either of the more slightly radical lefty or the more libertarian political persuasion) that flock to work with RT, eager as they are to get any coverage of opinions that they know are increasingly locked out from the mainstream corporate-media in the West.

But the vast majority of people in the West don't care what those individuals say, don't watch RT, don't read Sputnik or the Moscow Times, and won't be touched by the comments of Putin's keyboard-armies on the pages of the Telegraph or the Indy or on CiF on the Guardian.  The criticism of the West (some of it justified) never quite reaches them, whilst daily they absorb the news & the jokes from the mainstream media that reinforce their inherited view of Russians as inherently evil two-dimensional cartoon-villains.

I suspect that the Russian government just fundamentally hasn't come to terms with how to either successfully manipulate or to interpret public opinion in the age of social media.  And I don't really know why, other to assume that it's that age-old question of no-one wanting to tell the emperor that he may have ever-so slightly imagined his own attire.

Whatever.  We're all be dead soon if we keep the idiotic wargames up at the current rate.


* Or more.