Russian Telegram Channel Calls for Moscow to Create Committee to De-Colonize the US

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 21 – Most Russian outlets have either ignored the US Captive Nations Week declaration this week, reacted with anger or treated it with contempt, but the Madam Secretary telegram channel has proposed that the Duma and Foreign Ministry issue a Russian version directed at “the captive nations of the United States.”

            Among the tasks of such a committee, the telegram channel says, would be the preparation of a map of what North America would look like if the United States were broken up along ethnic and racial lines and the active support of such groups by Moscow to achieve that end (t.me/madam_secretar/13045).

            Such mirror-image policies have long been a staple of Moscow’s approach given that the Kremlin knows that given that the Western media’s belief that balanced reporting requires covering both sides of any issue ensures that any such Russian effort will be cited in discussions of what the West is doing and thus the Western media will do the heavy lifting for Russia.

            But Kharun Sidorov, a columnist for the IdelReal portal, says that while the Soviet Union had some advantages in promoting the de-colonization of others because of its nominally ethno-federal system, the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin has thrown them all away and so any such effort is doomed to inglorious failure (idelreal.org/a/31953842.html).

            The Kremlin’s current campaign against federalism and against non-Russian minorities means that “only those representatives of the peoples of the US who simply do not know what is happening in Russia could possibly be attracted by a Russian call for “the de-colonization” of the United States,” he says.

            And if Washington wanted to counter this, it would have a simple means to do so: organizing a trip by the leaders of independent-minded ethnic and religious communities from Russia throughout the US and give them the chance to tell these potentially “de-colonized” peoples exactly what they would get from the Russian model.

            Were that to happen, Sidorov says, “such Kremlin-backed projects for the de-colonization of the United States would “end before they could even begin.”