The Atlantic Flips Over ‘Pro-Fascist’ Realists Who Justify Russia’s Special Military Operation

Sept. 30, 2022 (EIRNS)—The Atlantic monthly, mouthpiece of the globalist warmongers who seek Russia’s total destruction, opened its pages to one James Kirchick, whose Sept. 29 article “How the Anti-War Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt” is an unhinged attack on what he describes as an unholy alliance between right-wing “realists”—naming John Mearsheimer and Chas Freeman as examples—and the anti-imperialist left, which justifies Russia’s special military operation against Ukraine. Today, he asserts, the anti-war caucus which urges the West to cut off supplies of defensive weapons to “peaceful, democratic” Ukraine, and find a solution that will satisfy Russia’s “legitimate security interests,” is “objectively pro-fascist.” He agrees that Zelenskyy should be

Oct. considered a modern-day Winston Churchill, for his “charismatic resistance” to foreign invaders.

So, who is Kirchick? Back in 2007, then a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, he authored two nasty articles published in Commentary magazine, founded by neocon and LaRouche-hater John Podhoretz. One of Kirchick’s articles, dated Oct. 30, 2007 “The Closest of Strangers,” and one dated Nov. 3, 2007 “The Friends of Lyndon LaRouche,” were both ostensibly dedicated to exposing Bob Dreyfuss, then a writer for the American Spectator, for his past association with Lyndon LaRouche. Aside from trying to get Dreyfuss fired, the articles retailed the slanders of LaRouche as a fascist anti-Semite, “demagogue cult leader,” sourced from Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Recall, too, that Podhoretz’s Commentary published a review of paid Anti-Defamation League information Dennis King’s slanderous Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.

In the current Atlantic article, Kirchick takes umbrage at anyone, left or right, who suggests that the U.S. is at fault in the Ukraine conflict, or who questions the assertion that Russia is guilty of hideous war crimes. He is apoplectic at those who use the phrase “we will fight to the last Ukrainian” to refer to Anglo-American/NATO policy. Ron Paul, Noam Chomsky, Freeman, Mearsheimer, The Grayzone, the CATO Institute’s Doug Bandow, and a new online magazine Compact, whose columnists include Marxists and Catholics, all come under attack.

The attacks on Chas Freeman and John Mearsheimer are notable. He excoriates Freeman for saying that Russia’s special military operation is an understandable reaction to the years of NATO expansion, and is incensed over Freeman’s statements to the leftist, anti-imperialist Grayzone, in which “no anti-Western tyrant is too brutal for fawning adulation.”

Kirchick also howls that Mearsheimer, described as the “dean of realist international-relations theorists,” appears joined at the hip with the anti-imperialist left, both arguing that the U.S. is using Ukraine as a proxy war against Moscow. Even in the face of evidence of horrific Russian crimes against Ukrainian civilians, Kirchick complains, Mearsheimer still won’t change his position that NATO’s enlargement is to blame for the war.

Kirchick concludes by asserting that the war in Ukraine has exposed “the incompetence of the Russian military and the hubris of President Putin,” while revealing the “bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people.” And here in the U.S. “the war has also exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of an ideologically diverse set of foreign policy commentators: the ‘anti-imperialists’ who routinely justify blatant acts of imperial conquest, and the ‘realists’ who make arguments unmoored from reality.”