Smoke and Mirrors: The Roots of Russian Revanchism
Here is my latest column in CounterPunch Magazine. The Shock Doctrine vultures are coming home to roost. The intensifying crisis in Ukraine is one of the many malign, long-reverberating consequences of the West’s decision to bludgeon Russia when it was reeling from the crack-up of the Soviet Union. Instead of giving the country breathing space, helping it find its way from the shattered socialist past toward its own new forms of civic life and economic organization, the West rushed to impose a brutal “market fundamentalism”: the now-familiar horror show of “austerity,” privatization, ruinous debt, plunging life expectancy, and rising infant