Professor Glenn Diesen of Norway just lately had his video channel expunged from YouTube, and two days later it was restored at YouTube, all with no actual rationalization.
One video at his channel is a dialogue of Richard Cobden’s 1836 pamphlet, which bore the secondary title:
In the video, I interview Professor Diesen concerning the lengthy historical past of Anglo hatred towards Russia, a hatred which began up within the 1830s and has persevered ever since. I sought to interview Professor Diesen as a result of he’s the writer of Russophobia: Propaganda in Worldwide Politics (2022). We focus on the historical past of Russia-hate, all the way down to at present.
Phobia means concern. Professor Diesen and I mentioned whether or not concern of Russia is actually the issue. Right this moment’s escalations have been catastrophic and danger nuclear alternate. Maybe there has not been sufficient concern of mutual destruction. Hatred of Russia, fairly than concern, appears to be the issue. That stated, the expression ‘Russophobia’ has a historical past, and we must always perceive that it’s a couple of propagandistic concern.
Within the 1830s, Cobden was appalled by the anti-Russian propaganda, and he fought it proper as much as the top of his life in 1865.
What’s fascinating about Cobden’s 1836 pamphlet is that the Russia-hate propaganda then sounds a lot just like the Russia-hate propaganda now.
And the counterarguments that Cobden made are very similar to the counterarguments now made by Diesen, John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, Benjamin Abelow, Alexander Mercouris, Alex Christoforou, and will others.
Close to the top of the video, I ask Professor Diesen to listing issues which have been blamed on Russia. He doesn’t know the place to start!
He begins to make an inventory, and it retains rising, and the gadgets on the listing change into more and more humorous, all the way down to bedbugs in France.
I additionally requested Professor Diesen: Is it attainable that the Anglo-led hatred of Russia within the nineteenth century had the impact of turning Russia away from the West, and therefore away from its classical liberal heritage, and, subsequently, making the Russian soil extra fertile for anti-liberal concepts like Bolshevism?
Cobden’s pamphlet from 1836 reveals that the Western custom just isn’t inherently hypocritical, expansionist, and anti-liberal. In reality, Adam Smith was anti-imperialistic.
Right this moment’s anti-liberal expansionist Western hypocrites give the West a foul title. No matter nook of the world a individuals inhabits, that folks just isn’t its rulers. Russians and Individuals might be of mutual goodwill, even when their respective rulers refuse to be.