FILE PHOTO: US troops cheer President Donald J. Trump as he addresses his remarks to military personal at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, November 28, 2019, © Global Look Press / White House
A Reagan Institute survey has found that nearly half of all American military households view Russia as more of an ally than a threat. Pentagon officials reckon they’ve been brainwashed by the Kremlin.
The Reagan Institute’s annual National Defense Survey measures the attitudes of Americans on all things war, peace, and politics. The latest version, published in October, has more statistics than you could shake a stick at, but to the Pentagon, one in particular stands out.
Some 46 percent of military households see Russia as an “ally,” while 28 percent of all American households share that belief. China has overtaken Russia as America’s next top enemy, according to the survey.
The think tank reckons positive views of Russia are held mostly by Republicans, which could explain the rampant Russophilia within military ranks (America’s men and women in uniform usually vote for the GOP), but the Pentagon’s top brass has other ideas.
“There is an effort, on the part of Russia, to flood the media with disinformation to sow doubt and confusion,” Defense Department spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Carla Gleason told Voice of America. The Russians do this, Gleason explained, “through false narratives designed to illicit sympathetic views.”
Are these narratives beamed into the troops’ heads via satellite? Via confusion-inducing propaganda-rays?
No, said researcher Jorge Benitez. They’re fed to America’s troops via Kremlin-sponsored hackers, pro-Russian media outlets, and even “President [Donald] Trump’s positive statements about Russia.”
“It’s dangerous,” Benitez told VOA. However, he did not expand on his work with the Atlantic Council, a virulently anti-Russia think tank sponsored by NATO and a collection of arms manufacturers.
Gleason said that the military is “actively working to expose and counter Russian disinformation.” Short of screening round-the-clock reruns of ‘Red Dawn’ on bases around the country, it’s unsure what exactly she meant.
Then again, perhaps the Pentagon’s top brass has a different understanding of love. Perhaps the military’s higher-ups express their love for Russia not by holding “sympathetic views,” but by moving their forces as close as possible to its borders and daring their forbidden lover to make the first move
There’s the China first lobby in the American elite that wants to pall up with Russia to isolate China.
“There’s the China first lobby in the American elite that wants to pall up with Russia to isolate China.”
That doesn’t make sense at all. A computer generated comment?
This article fleshes it out more:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52669.htm
<>
Perhaps if US and other western politicians, establishment military leaders and their ‘Intelligence” counterparts didn’t make such obvious and absurd statements so frequently, they wouldn’t have lost the trust of such large segments of their population.
Any alleged Russian propaganda would have zero traction if the US and western establishment weren’t such hamfisted weaselly shameless, and obvious liars (for a great example observe Elizabeth Warren, or Justin Trudeau or Gen. Alexander or Brenner or Hayden as well the utterly moronic British Establishment of any stripe). That’s why the Pentagon has missed the entire point that the cause is their media’s and government’s own actions of lying repeatedly to get their countries into war, lying repeatedly to shove poisonous pharmaceuticals, GMOs, and other products or policies bonto their populations. It’s under these conditions of increasingly incompetent and unsophisticated dishonest western MSM and Establishment that their populations are flipping on them.
Blaming these deep systemic failures on an external actors is really missing the point.
It’s true! As an American citizen I can vouch for this.
My military time is now a half century ago but I have extremely positive regard for Russia. Younger vets feel the same. And Putin! Not a morning goes by when I think: When was the last time the US had a fundamentally serious and experienced leader? Not counting Mister Rogers?
Obviously Kremlin telemetric brainwashing is the only possible answer.
How is it possible an entire US Congress and Senate can make buffoons out of themselves on a daily basis? What else but mind control? And the media zombies who enable more of the same. Clearly their thought processes have been horribly compromised by Russian beam weapons from space. At last we know who won the “star wars” program, but those guileful Volga research teams had the brains to keep it a secret. Unlike Reagan who was bragging about it before it existed and was thinking of a system that can’t exist anyway.
Without firing a shot, Russia will have the US conquered in another five years.
Except there will be a plague raging from coast to coast by then.
Franz are you accusing the Russians of turning the American elite gay and LBTQ+abc-xyz-any-genderCombo+etc? OMG! So the Russians have beam weapons that can confuse the sexual orientation and/or identity of entire demographics groups!
Or could the it be that it’s China’s fault?
That part I’m willing to concede to the God Who Punishes Greedy Traitors.
But if the Volga researchers can lend a hand, no complaints. For what it’s worth, I think the Chinese elite are just having fun watching the show, now that they’re getting insanely wealthy with industries our greedy traitors sold off to them at fire sale rates. As the Chinese elites are also shrewd, they’re shielding their own people from worst of it, or at least they try.
In fact, a former colleague of mine just got done doing some engineering in a plant near Beijing. He tells me it’s “Leave it to Beaver” time in China. The rich there are not quite so greedy and the rich there also know how China deals with traitors.
I find the topic completely hilarious.
The sociopaths and psychopaths ‘running’ the West have lost it. Some form of brain-eating disease has infected the training halls and dorms of Yale, Harvard, GWU, Cambridge and Oxford. How else can one try and understand the vile stupidity spewed by these reptilian minded humanoids.
The name Regan Institute and the Atlantic Council should say it all.
I have to admit to LMAO. I came to this conclusion 35+ years ago.
As a person born into a military family, (4th generation), born and raised on several military bases, employed in the Defense Industry, (while waiting for my OCTP, and flight training), stationed in several locations “watching the enemy”, and thoroughly programed that the “Soviet Union/Russia/CCCP/Ruskies/commies” were my dreaded enemy…. it was when my hitch was up in the mid 1980’s, that I came away thinking “wtf!!!-Ronnie ‘Raygun’ (and Thatcher) are nuts, and the Russians are not my enemy. (or the Argentines, Grenadians, Panamanians, Yugoslavs, Czechs and Iraqis).
In the 1990’s I spent a far amount of time studying the craziness of East Europa and Russia, an by 2001, when a FSB officer walked onto the world stage, I was completely fascinated by my former “enemy”. 18 years later I am still fascinated by what is going on in Russia and the East, and have come a 100% solid conclusion who is my enemy and they are not in Mockba, but lay in Warshington, London, Vatican.
DGSE
“The sociopaths and psychopaths ‘running’ the West have lost it.”
Not so much the freaks running the west, but the people of the west, themselves, have lost it. They metaphorically dropped their trousers and bent over massa’s desk. Those who psywarred them to this stage did their jobs quite well.
This is the problem.
As a current member of the US Navy (I’m enlisted active duty, finishing my last few months in the Navy), I can vouch for the post that Saker posted. I have seen many sailors, both enlisted and officer, who have nothing of either respect for Russia or see it as a very capable equal adversary to the US Navy. I too have many respects for Russia and for Putin and see Russia as a country that should be respected and never underestimated. What confuses me though is that when spoken about China, a lot of members of the US military will rather talk very disparagingly about China, complete 180 from Russia. I guess it has to do with how alien China is culturally and the fact that China has perhaps already overtaken the US as the largest economy in the world.
I was in the US Navy 50 years ago and there was a surprising foreshadowing to all this.
My first duty station was in supply, Atlantic Fleet, when a discussion of the USS Liberty came up. At that time the official story (friendly fire, mistaken identity, blah blah) was all we got to hear. Not till the Ennis book came out a few years after my time was up did the truth started seeping out to non-witnesses.
One officer, a LTJG, told us he’d been in the area when the Liberty was attacked the year before. He stuck to the official story but he was very tense. Nonetheless he had plenty of praise for the Russian Med fleet, the first ship in the area was Russian, and volunteered help. His understanding was that the captain of the Liberty was under orders not to accept help from any Warsaw Pact navy (logically, being a spy ship). There was still a feeling of oddity about it anyway because other vessels from “friendly” nations were in the area and none did the same. At least that was the officer’s recollection.
Nothing dramatic, but the officer was moved that at least the Russians tried. More than the Liberty’s commander and chief, LBJ, was inclined to do.
And best to you in your last months. I had less than 60 days to go on my hitch and an emergency appendectomy put me in Portsmouth Naval Hospital for most of it. No vacation, that, but a hell of way to leave.
Maybe the young American military personnel are tired of tattoos, nonstop LGBTXYZ propaganda, entitlement-attitude snowflakes, lying politicians and media, and decadent Western culture in general. Maybe their appreciation of clean-cut, disciplined Russian youth is a reaction away from all that. Most people who have had Russian or Ukrainian co-workers or neighbors, as I have, know they are genial, hard-working people who appreciate a decent life and who mind their own business. Russians seem to have something that Americans had at one time, but now, sadly, have now lost forever.
Russia shouldn’t be celebrating that it is considered by some US troops as an American “ally,”
That is a curse.
America, its war criminal military, or their public opinion cannot be trusted for a second.
Never forget: America doesn’t have allies.
America only has (temporary) assets and stooges. See the USA’s backstabbing of the Kurds for the latest example. Or the fact that Saddam Hussein was actually an American ally in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War.
Or that Usama Bin Laden was an American-backed “mujaheddin freedom fighter” in the 1980s against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
In some ways, it is preferable to be America’s enemy, as you know NOT to trust the United Snakes.
If you are an American “ally,” the USA will inevitably try to rape you for its own benefit–all the while running its mouth about your (snicker) “shared democratic values.”
Just look at America’s gangster shakedown of its nominal European allies/vassals like Germany, where the USA is attempting to coerce the Germans to buy more expensive American natural gas over the cheaper Russian natural gas by sabotaging the Nordstream pipeline.
For America, yesterday’s “enemy” will be spindoctored into today’s “ally” and then back again to tomorrow’s “enemy.”
Like Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984, America has always been at war … with Eurasia (Russia) … or East Asia (China).
Bottom line: America is fundamentally motivated by its delusional Manifest Destiny to colonize the world (aka the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine).
Everything else coming out of the Americans’ mouth is just deception to achieve this ambition.