Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 21 – The Khodorkovsky-supported
Dossier Center is reporting and the American television network NBC is
rebroadcasting a report that Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as Putin’s “chef” and who
has been involved in subversive activities in Africa has come up with a plan to
stoke racial hostilities in the US and ultimately threaten that country’s
territorial integrity.
The essence of the plan, if such it
is, calls for Prigozhin’s team to recruit Black Americans, train them in Africa
for combat and sabotage, and then return them to the US to foment violence (dossier.center/e-prigozhin/article/prigozhinskij-otvet-doktrine-gerasimova/
and nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-documents-reveal-desire-sow-racial-discord-violence-u-s-n1008051).
What is especially disturbing about
all this is that those presented with such documents, which certainly reflect a
mindset of the Putin regime which supports using all means legal and illegal
against its opponents, have been put in an impossible position exactly as the Kremlin
intends.
If they dismiss such plans as the
kind of fantasies they almost certainly are, the kind of thing some Russian
officials can be counted on to think would be wonderful if they were carried
out, those who are presented with such documents risk missing a real story, one
that shows Moscow is intervening in American life far beyond the elections.
But if they report them and focus only
on the likelihood of such plans being carried out, they may be missing the
point because in broadcasting the report, they are likely doing exactly what
the Kremlin and its “cook” want: spreading a story, which even if it isn’t
true, will likely exacerbate suspicions among Americans and further undermine
racial comity.
In many ways, the supposed Prigozhin
plan is yet another revival of Soviet-era programs to reach out in support of
Black Americans in the 1920s and later. Those plans did little to help Negroes,
but they did provide a trope for segregationists and their supporters who argued
that the drive for racial justice was a communist plot.
Unfortunately, there will be some in
the US now who will be ready to draw similar conclusions and vote
accordingly. That is what the Kremlin
wanted in Soviet times; it is what it wants now. And those who comfort themselves with the notion
that Russia is not the USSR should recognize that in this case as in many
others they are only deceiving themselves.
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