This interview was originally broadcast September 15, 2017
Why does the Western mainstream incessantly demonize Putin and Russia? Guy Mettan’s Creating Russophobia offers a detailed and convincing answer. Mettan begins by listing the many incidents and issues that have been wildly misreported (with massive anti-Russia spin at best, outright lies at worst) in the West. Having established the existence of such strong prejudice against Russia, he argues that the roots of this unfortunate attitude go back roughly 1,000 years. Like Islamophobia, Russophobia is an age-old Western prejudice with a religious basis: It goes all the way back to the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Christianity. And like Islamophobia, Russophobia seems to stem from a certain narrow-mindedness, fanaticism, refusal to see the Other’s point of view, and desire for absolute domination that lurks in the dark heart of that imaginary construct we call “the West.”
Today, Mettan argues, the modern histories of French, German, and British Russophobias have converged in, and been subsumed by, an American-dominated Russophobia whose hallmark is a kind of Orwellian “cognitive manipulation” based on linguistic subterfuge. This US-led demonization of Russia via newspeak, Mettan says, uses “readymade language elements” such as those laid out in the notorious “Israel Project 2009. Global Language Dictionary,” a hasbara manual for Zionist propagandists.
Is there any hope for peaceful coexistence with Russia, given the Russophobic forces currently in command? Perhaps…if we make an all-out effort to amplify the voices of sanity. Guy Mattan’s is one of the most important of those voices.
KEVIN BARRETT INTERVIEWS GUY METTAN 9/15/17 (COMPLETE, LIGHTLY EDITED TRANSCRIPT)
Kevin Barrett: Hey, how are you doing?
Guy Mettan: I'm fine, thanks.
Kevin Barrett: All right. Good to have you. Your book Creating Russophobia is really brilliant and extremely timely. It's a little bit mind boggling that somebody who comes out of the center of mainstream Swiss journalism and institutions has managed to tell this much truth about a topic that is so taboo. What got you started on this?
Guy Mettan: I have followed Russian affairs and the gap between Eastern Europe, Russia and the European Union for a long time, about 20 years, as a journalist. And for 25 years I have had special ties with Russia because I received the Russian nationality from President Yeltsin. My wife and I adopted a young girl, our daughter Oksana. Since she became our daughter we could get the Russian passport. And since then I have had a special focus on Russia. I visit the country, I have many friends, and so on. And I am always surprised by the huge gap between the Russian reality, how Russians live, and what is shown by the Western media, the way the Western media speak about Russia. Because it is very negative...When the second revolution took place in Maidan in Kiev in 2014, I thought "these prejudices are so great, so deep, so important, I have to do something." And so I started to write this book.
Kevin Barrett: That's very interesting. I can relate to your situation because I was probably made more sensitive to Islamophobia due to having married my wife, who is Moroccan and Muslim. And so in a sense, I sort of have a dual nationality with the Muslim Ummah. And so since 9/11, with this pervasive Islamophobia, I think I've noticed it more than other people might have, and I can understand how your connection with Russia would also help you see things from this other perspective that's being systematically neglected. So the Western media are obviously not very enthusiastic about publishing information of the kind that you're offering in this book. And I know your book came out in French originally, and it took a while to come out in English. Did you have a hard time finding a publisher?
Guy Mettan: Oh, yes. We tried many times. We took the first edition in France and tried to to get an English publisher or an American publisher as soon as possible. For six months it was quite difficult. But suddenly by chance two publishers (became) interested. We found Clarity Press in Atlanta...
Kevin Barrett: It publishes very high quality stuff.
Guy Mettan: So thanks to Diana Collier, the director of the publishing house Clarity Press, we could publish it in English. And I must say, for me, it was quite an experience. Because the way you write a book is very different in the United States. In America, you are very attached—and I think it's a good thing—to all the details, to check every fact, to check every date and so on. So it was a long, hard job to take everything and to answer all the 300 questions Mrs Collier had before publishing the book. But now I think it is quite good. It improved a lot.
Kevin Barrett: I haven't read it in French, but the English version is terrific. It's very detailed and as far as I can tell, fully accurate and really comprehensive.
So then the question arises: How is the mainstream going to deal with this? It's hard to imagine the New York Times Book Review doing justice to your book or even mentioning it. But I'm sure that since you've inhabited the mainstream journalistic world you've seen how people in the mainstream react to the kind of information you're presenting.
Guy Mettan: Yeah. The reaction was very clear. In France, it was silence. In Switzerland I am a very well-known personality. I have been a journalist for a long time. I was the chief editor of one of the biggest newspapers in Switzerland and I am still director of the Swiss Press Club. So it was impossible for my colleagues to ignore the book. But in France nobody from the mainstream papers like Le Monde, Libération or the other big important papers accepted the book to review or critique even very critically; it was impossible to get reviews in mainstream papers. So the book was quite successful, but only due to the buzz. The readers made the buzz in France and in other countries. The reception was much better in the Russian edition, and we can understand easily why. So in Russia, no problem for great reviews in magazines or newspapers; in Serbia, too. But in in European countries like Italy and Sweden, where the book was published, it was quite difficult to get reviewed because mainstream newspapers tried to ignore it.
Kevin Barrett: It reminds me a bit of the situation regarding The New Pearl Harbor, which was the first book on 9/11 by Dr. David Ray Griffin. It was studiously ignored, and Dr. Griffin is still studiously ignored by the mainstream media. Now he has more than a dozen books out. So it was the buzz and the word of mouth that sold well into six figures worth of books. Like your book, his work is very thorough, well documented, and provides a very important perspective on current event that's totally taboo in the mainstream.
So I'm glad to hear that your book has done well. I hope it will do well here in English. And I keep seeing connections between Russophobia and Islamophobia. Both incite the rising militarism driving Western policy today. And a parallel that you brought out in this book that I hadn't really thought about before was that Russophobia, like Islamophobia, seems to go back to more than a thousand years of religious controversy. With Islam, it's obvious that Christianity and Islam have had their disputes throughout the centuries. But with Eastern and Western Christianity, this is not something that is really attended to very much. The mainstream will tell us that with Islam, the religion is the problem. But it doesn't tell us about Orthodox Christianity or Eastern Christianity being the problem. But your book makes a good case that today's prejudices go back to this religious divide.
Guy Mettan: Yeah, that's quite right. And there is a parallel between Islamophobia and Russophobia. I am a good Catholic. I was educated with Catholicism. As a young child, I learned that the Orthodox were—that there is this difference, this gap, between Orthodox and Catholic, (beginning) in the 11th century. So it's very long story. And so I always learned that the Orthodox were the bad guys and the Catholics the good guys.
Kevin Barrett: One side is the heretics or the schematics, and the other side is the good guys. I didn't grow up with that. I grew up in a family of lapsed Unitarians in an increasingly secularized USA. So I missed all of that. And even today, when I see the discourse on Russia, I don't think about this issue. But you've really highlighted it and gone into the history. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the Great Schism.
Guy Mettan: It is a long story to explain the roots. This is maybe not the place to explain it...
Kevin Barrett: The theological issues are bizarre.
Guy Mettan: Yeah, but what was interesting is that it was not only about religious causes. This difference was also for political causes. The West, Western Europe at the time, tried to separate from the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium. And it was a kind of rebellion organized by Western Europe to separate from the legitimate government in Byzantium. And the Western European king became emperor. Charlemagne tried to use the excuse of religion to justify his separation from the legal government represented at the time by the Greek Roman Empire. We can see nowadays that when there is (political) conflict religion is used for political reasons. It was exactly the same 1000 years ago between Western Europe represented by the Catholics and Eastern Europe represented by the Orthodox.
This religious conflict exploded in the 11th century. The theologians of the pope, the Catholic theologians, used all kind of arguments, all kind of propaganda, to justify their behavior and justify their separation from the Orthodox. And they tried to discredit the Orthodox to legitimate their views and to transform them into the bad guys, into the heretics and the schismatics. And all these prejudices developed against the Orthodox. But the Orthodox part of Christendom was transferred to Russia after the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. We can see the same prejudices against the Greek Orthodox being used against the Russian tsars, the Russian Orthodox, and so on. For instance, the Poles, who are Catholics, used the same prejudices as the former Catholic theologians in Rome against the the Russians to launch crusades against Russia already in the 13th century. So it is a very, very long story, but quite interesting.
Kevin Barrett: The Crusaders, as they were heading off to fight the Muslims in Jerusalem, attacked various Western communities on the way, (including) Jewish communities, of course. But many people don't realize that it was actually the Crusaders that destroyed Byzantium. Their destruction of Byzantium was what enabled the Muslim conquest of Byzantium two centuries later. So these religious conflicts and their history clearly leave a mark on the entire culture. And there's a negative sense about Islam, and about Orthodox Christianity, in Western culture. And we have Samuel Huntington with his clash of civilizations, which was, of course, borrowed from Bernard Lewis, the Zionist MI6 adviser. These guys said that Eastern Christianity is a separate civilization that's going to clash with the West in the same way that the West is going to clash with Islam and the Chinese. What are your thoughts about the thesis that these civilizational conflicts are inevitable?
Guy Mettan: Western countries, Western Europe and now the United States, are always trying to to justify their imperialism through religion. And they have a spirit of conquest. The Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries were the first examples of this kind of (religious) justification of imperialism used by Western countries. First it was against Islam, because in the 13th century in the Middle Ages, the Crusades were against Islam. And to justify that, we had to explain to the people, explain to the kings and popes and bishops, why we had to go. The people (were told) the Muslims were bad guys, backward, and so on, which was not the case. The same kind of bias used against Islam is used against Russia now.
Kevin Barrett: The discourse has really changed since the Cold War. I grew up during the Cold War, and I remember that our enemy was the godless communists. So basically we were fighting people because they weren't religious enough. They were anti-religious and we were the religious ones. But today we in the West are the non-religious ones who are fighting the people who are too religious. The Muslims are the most obvious example of the people who are supposedly too religious. But it seems that there's a sort of subtle message in the mainstream media that the problem with Russia now isn't that they're communist and godless and anti-religious. Now the problem is maybe they are too religious, and they don't like having pussy rioters tearing up their cathedrals. So like the Muslims they're too religious. And it's very strange how this has changed over my lifetime.
Guy Mettan: You know, what is interesting is the use of propaganda developed by the Europeans into the modern means of propaganda that appeared in France in the late 18th century and thereafter in Great Britain, Germany, and now the United States. It is based on geopolitical grounds. Western Europe was always trying to conquer the rest of the world, the Islamic world at first, then Africa, Asia, Latin America. Beginning in the 18th century and into modern times, religion was not so important. And especially during the communist era. There was the secularization of society. But what's interesting is that anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War against Russia used exactly the same terms as the pope and then the kings used against Russia in the Middle Ages, and again in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There are two main prejudices. First, "Russia is an authoritarian, despotic state." So the 18th century used despotism. During the communist era it was totalitarianism. And now against Putin, it's authoritarianism; he's not democratic. So that's the first prejudice.
Secondly: "Russia is intrinsically, is essentially, in its spirit, in its soul, an imperialist country. Russia tries throughout the centuries to invade and conquer poor Western Europe." Which is quite false, quite incorrect. Because historically it was always the Europeans who tried to invade Russia. It was the Poles, for instance, in the beginning of the 17th century, who conquered Moscow. After that it was Napoleon, the French emperor, who invaded and burned Moscow in 1812 and 1813. Then after that it was Germany's Hitler who invaded Russia with partial success. So if we look at history, the Western powers have always used the same arguments blaming Russian authoritarian, despotism, totalitarianism and imperialism. But they are not true.
Kevin Barrett: Zbigniew Brzezinski is notorious, or was notorious, for his anti-Russian bias. He comes from a Polish background, Polish minor nobility. And so he apparently seemed to think that Russia was imperialistic. As a patriotic Pole from that background, he had a problem with Russia. And he saw the same sort of thing with regard to Russian border conflicts in other places as well. But isn't it true, though, that Russia is centered around a kind of a culture, a kind of a linguistic and cultural and religious center, but it includes a pretty vast area that is not all made up of Russian speaking Slavic Orthodox Christians? And this has been true for quite some time. So isn't it true that there is a kind of an imperial aspect to Russia?
Guy Mettan: You mean if Russians are imperial? Yes, they are. They are like all the Western countries—like Germany, like France, like Britain, and so on. In the history of all these countries imperialists have tried to justify the conquest of the world. And the Russians also have had an imperial spirit. For instance, they were quite successful to get Siberia and to get to the Pacific and into Alaska. But the Russian conquests didn't use the same weapons as the West, because the Russians developed slowly, demographically, allowing the slow integration of the people. For instance, the Russians did not massacre all the indigenous people they met during their progress to the Pacific Ocean, which was not the case, for instance, in the United States, where the conquest of the West was very bloody and a kind of ethnocide.
Kevin Barrett: Yes, it was an ethnic cleansing.
Guy Mettan: There is also an imperial spirit in Russia, but not by aggressive wars like Napoleon's in the beginning of the 19th century. (Russian progress to the Pacific) was not an invasion. It was a slow progression of the Russian people.
And we can say that in the First World War and in the Second World War the attacks came from the West, not from Russia. It was Hitler who attacked Stalin, not the opposite. It was Napoleon. It was also the Kaiser, the gentleman who attacked the tsar in 1914. So if you look at the history, the aggression came mainly from the West and not from Russia.
Kevin Barrett: Well, I would certainly agree that as empires go, Russia is not the most blatantly, obviously aggressive one. Let's go back to the 19th century Great Game, because some people would say that this Great Game pitting the Anglo Empire—the British in the 19th century and the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries (against Russia)—hasn't ever really ended. That is, the Russian Empire has been expanding in the Eurasian heartland, and the Anglo Empire has been ruling the Atlantic-based rimland, and the two have been at loggerheads for a couple of centuries. How has the Great Game changed since the 19th century?
Guy Mettan: It hasn't really changed. The Great Game started in the 19th century after the Napoleonic Wars. During Napoleonic times, the tsar of Russia and the king of England were close allies. And for centuries the British and the Russians had good collaboration in matters of trade and economic exchange.
But what happened during Napoleon times? The main goal of the British was to struggle and fight and beat Napoleon. And Napoleon was allied at first with the Tsar, but there was tension between them. And so the Tsar became an enemy of Napoleon, and made a very good alliance with Great Britain. Together, they were quite successful at beating Napoleon. It was first the Russian Army and secondly the British fleet with Nelson who beat Napoleon and overthrew him.
But in the years following the successes against Napoleon—the Battle of Waterloo and the conquest of Vienna—the British, while trying to make peace with France and the other countries of Europe, reversed their policy and started to consider Russia an enemy. Why? Because after Napoleon and France fell the only two superpowers of the times were Russia on the continent and Great Britain on the sea. For the British it was not bearable, not acceptable, to have a competitor. And that is the reason why, just after 1815, Great Britain changed its mind and changed its ideas vis a vis Russia, and Russia went from a former good ally against Napoleon to an enemy of Great Britain.
And that was the beginning of the Great Game. From this period onward you can see in newspapers like The Times of London and other newspapers, some of them still existing today, how the journalists, the British propagandists, turned their vision of Russia into a very negative one, using the same old argument: "Ah, but Russia is dangerous. It's an autocracy. The Tsar is an autocrat, he is not democratic, he is a very bad guy. And he maintained the people in serfdom."
Kevin Barrett: Sounds just like what they're saying about Putin today.
Guy Mettan: Yeah, exactly. If you look at the Times of London newspaper in 1851-1852, the cartoonists are describing the Tsar of the time, Nicholas, like a vampire with big teeth, trying to suck the blood of the poor British people.
Kevin Barrett: Exactly like Putin! You explain in your book that this is where Dracula comes from—that Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was inspired by this.
Guy Mettan: It's quite funny because now the cartoonists use the bear, the bad, bad Russian bear trying to attack the poor European. But in the 19th century it was the vampire. So it's quite funny. But it's the same argument. And the British tried to stop the Russians in Asia. It's funny because in the late 18th and 19th century Great Britain made a bigger empire, with Egypt, India, all the way to Hong Kong—the British were successful creating an empire too. It was 20 times bigger than Great Britain. That was not the case with Russia. Russia has also grown but not so much, maybe 25 percent, but not 20 times bigger! And at the time, during the 18th and 19th centuries, the British used the argument "the Russians are the imperialists."
And the Great Game was very strong in Central Asia and Afghanistan because there were two wars conducted by the British in Afghanistan in the 19th century to try to push Russia north and to stop the progression toward the opening of Asia and the sea. The goal of the British was always containment. Like during communist times.
Kevin Barrett: And even today.
Guy Mettan: Yeah. And even today, exactly. And so the Great Game is is a two century long story.
Kevin Barrett: That's right. “Plus ça change…” The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Guy Mettan: Exactly.
Kevin Barrett: And yet the propaganda today doesn't seem to me to be working quite as well as the Cold War propaganda did. For instance, we had the election of Trump who was pilloried by Hillary for being friendly to Putin and Russia. And Trump wasn't a very attractive candidate in many ways, but he managed to win, and his relatively positive view of Russia and Putin—I don't think that hurt him at all. If anything, it probably helped him. Does that mean that the Russophobic propaganda isn't working?
Guy Mettan: It's hard to say. Maybe you are in a better situation than me to judge. I think in Washington, the Hillary camp and the neocons supported the Democrats. And the neocons used Russia as the bad guy. They need to have Russia as an enemy, to present Putin as a horrible guy, like the communist with the knife between the teeth, because they were supported by lobbies like the military and oil lobbies. And so they were very opposed to Russia.
Trump was much more clever. He has no prejudices against Russia. As a businessman he used to work with Russia, like he used to work with other countries. But hatred of Russia was used during the United States' recent elections, and all the Democrats and the Republican neocons tried to use it against Trump. This struggle is going on now with all the attacks against Trump. So I think the anti-Russian propaganda is still very strong now in the United States. And Russia's effort to struggle against this propaganda is not so successful because the mainstream media never mention Russia in a positive way. It's always negative. It's impossible for Russia to counter this anti-Russian and Russophobic propaganda in the United States media. So this is the kind of info war in my view, which will keep developing and will not stop tomorrow.
Kevin Barrett: The anti-Russian element in the mainstream is very much aware of this. And their accusations against Trump include things like “he was supported or got favorable coverage by Russia Today” and things like that. But but I think they're having a hard time demonizing Putin. It wasn't that hard to demonize someone like Saddam Hussein, who in certain respects was a somewhat unpleasant character. Gadhafi, I don't know. I liked Gadhafi, but he was a little goofy in certain respects as well. Assad is maybe a little harder to demonize, but they've got all that humanitarian stuff, those accusations against him. With Putin, the impression Putin makes is one of understated competence and generally being reasonable and charting a course that's actually positive and constructive for his own country. I don't really see the peg that they're able to hang any kind of real caricature of Putin on. Maybe I spend too much time in the alternative media world, but I haven't really sensed that people here in the United States have imbibed any real hatred of Putin.
Guy Mettan: Yes, Putin is a different personality. So for me, since I do not live in the United States, it's hard to feel how Americans feel. Putin is different. He is not exactly a dictator like Kim Jong Un, Saddam Hussein and so on, because he's a clever guy, he is not extremist, he is very rational. And that's also, for me, the reason why Trump has found that he is not really a bad guy. We can speak with him. And I think that's true for people who have met President Putin, even Barack Obama. If he's fair and not biased, he must recognize that Putin is a normal guy. It is difficult for the anti-Russian propagandists to depict him as a bad guy. But (still) they have been quite successful doing it, using all the same arguments about being autocratic and so on, or depicting him a Nazi, an authoritarian Führer of Russia, depicting him as a Stalin. You know, "Putin is Hitler" or "Putin is Stalin."
But he is a really rational guy. He has explained what he is trying to do for ten years now. In 2007 in Munich, Putin explained very clearly the limits to all the NATO countries. You know, there is a limit. Russia has interests. Russia has the right to defend itself against enemies. So you cannot come with your weaponry, with your missiles in Poland, just under our nose, without reaction from Russia. As you know, when the Soviets tried to put missiles in Cuba in 1962 the reaction of US President Kennedy was very strong and we just missed a nuclear war. So if the Russians are putting missiles in Mexico or in Cuba or in Canada, it would be a very big problem for America. But what about putting missiles just on the frontier of Russia in Ukraine now or in Poland a few years ago? Or in Germany and Romania, and so on? And then telling the Russians: "Oh, but we are very peaceful with you. We like you. But we put our missiles and our nuclear warheads there because we think it's better for us and because we do not like the Iranians."
Kevin Barrett: (Sarcastically) Yeah, right. "It's all about Iran."
Guy Mettan: Yeah, "it's all about Iran. But our missiles...You have your border there...that's not our fault."
Kevin Barrett: This is where the media have really fallen down. Here in the West, I think the media have not even come close to reporting accurately about this aspect of what's going on, who's really the aggressor. Didn't the U.S. promise not to advance one inch into the formerly Iron Curtain countries at the end of the Cold War?
Guy Mettan: Even President Bush, when Presidents Bush and Gorbachev agreed to to to to pull down the Iron Curtain in 1991, President Bush decided not to include Poland and Eastern European countries in NATO. But just a few years later it was done. Clinton was president at the time. They just forgot, or tried to forget, the agreement made by President Bush a few years earlier. So the Russians didn't forget this promise, this agreement. And when they try to mention it, the West, says "we forget" or "it was not so clear" or "we did not sign a clear agreement, it was just words."
Kevin Barrett: It's pretty disgusting, really. I'm ashamed to be part of the West and the U.S. with regard to that kind of mendacity. We only have a few minutes left, so I want to jump to my controversial questions that you'll only get on shows like this. First: Why won't RT push back harder against this propaganda by giving us a little more focus on the truth about 9/11, which profoundly brainwashed the West in general and the US in particular? It's such an obvious inside job. Building Seven alone: You can look at it for 30 seconds, and you can see that this is a demolition. Therefore, the whole official story falls apart. RT used to occasionally cover this, but it doesn't anymore. Why not?
Guy Mettan: To be frank, I cannot answer the question because I don't know. I really don't know, because there is some evidence that, yes, that is fact, but it is not really clear. And I think that for me, as you are accused of conspiracy every time you try to bring an alternative view, another vision of the world, a non-mainstream vision, I think it is a question of credibility. They do not wish to enter this ground because otherwise it will probably give (their enemies) arguments to accuse them of conspiracy theory and so on and of not being serious journalists, because this evidence is not so easy to present and explain. And probably there is no certain or very good evidence or very clear evidence. That is my interpretation of this point.
Kevin Barrett: If I were on RT's policy board, I would argue about that. But how about last controversial question: the Saker wrote a great review of your book, and he discussed how you ably analyze the English, French, German and American flavors of Russophobia, but you never mentioned what he calls Jewish Russophobia. Or maybe we could call today's version Zionist Russophobia. He thought that was something that should have been covered in your book. What do you think?
Guy Mettan: Yes, there were some remarks about this. But for me, I tried to concentrate on the main countries in history, on the planet, who are France, Great Britain, Germany, and now the United States. I think Jewish Russophobia is also not very clear because while there are some or many Jewish people who were Russophobic, there are also many who are not Russophobic. And in history, for instance, a lot of Jews were living in Russia in pretty good conditions. Where their condition was not so good, it was not on Russian territory, but in Ukraine or in countries like Lithuania, western Poland, or Romania...
Kevin Barrett: I'm sorry. Unfortunately we're going to have to cut you off there, because that was a very interesting and good answer. There could be a whole lot more to say, but we won't say it tonight because the show is over. I appreciate the fantastic work you did with the book Creating Russophobia.
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