As we take a break for the Fourth of July holidays, find below an article by Harrison Berger, one of the producers on our team, about the extreme and telling irony that one of America’s most relentless warmongers, neocon pundit Anne Applebaum, was just awarded a peace prize. We will be back with our regularly-scheduled show on Monday, July 8th.
By Harrison Berger
It is not unusual for a warmonger to be awarded a prestigious peace prize - in fact it’s become something of a tradition. Back in 2009, for instance, Barack Obama collected his Nobel Peace Prize while greenlighting a 30,000 troop surge for the US War in Afghanistan - one of the many wars he escalated despite his 2008 campaign promise that he would not. Henry Kissinger was famously given the same award. Though not as prestigious as that award, the academic and columnist Anne Applebaum received her own peace prize last week.
"At a time when democratic values and achievements are increasingly being caricatured and attacked, her work embodies an eminent and indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy and peace," the award description said of Applebaum.
Anne Applebaum winning awards for peace is like fast food companies winning awards for promoting weight loss. Pick any major US war of the past 20 years and she’s supported it.
Her career trajectory is a gateway to understanding not only the hollowness behind these establishment awards but more importantly how corporate media functions to propel people like Anne Applebaum upward.
Starting at The Economist and later moving upward to the editorial board of The Washington Post, Applebaum currently writes for The Atlantic, a paper owned by Steve Jobs’ widow and managed by Jeffrey Goldberg, famous for his award winning 2003 propaganda, which claimed to have linked Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. Fellow byliners at Applebaum’s magazine include Russia hawk Tom Nichols, Bush speechwriter David Frum, and Bush state department alumni Eliot A. Cohen, producing a neocon editorial line that is indistinguishable from that of The Weekly Standard in its heyday. And the function of both papers - The Atlantic and The Weekly Standard - is the same: to cheerlead and drum up support for America’s foreign conflicts.
Perhaps no magazine has done more than Goldberg’s and Applebaum’s to support America’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, despite the fact that the war is killing a generation of men who are being conscripted against their will, in a country that has suspended elections, banned media, and begun rounding up its own citizens off the streets.
Back in May of 2023, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum were the leading voices along with people like Max Boot and David Petreus at The Washington Post to insist that Ukraine was well prepared for its vaunted counteroffensive and that the United States should dump money into supporting it.
Uniquely, the United States has the power to determine how, and how quickly, the war of attrition turns into something quite different. Over the next few months, as the Ukrainians take their best shot at winning the war, the democratic world will have to decide whether to help them do so. The fate of NATO, of America’s position in Europe, indeed of America’s position in the world are all at stake.”
That counteroffensive was a sluggish battle of attrition which quickly turned into a slaughter. There was no reason to believe that the campaign would be successful - the Russians were completely dug in. And yet from such a far distance from the front lines, Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg definitively pronounced to readers of The Atlantic that the counteroffensive would succeed and that it was worth sending off a generation of young Ukrainian men for.
Looking through her bibliography, it becomes apparent why a paper like Jeffrey Goldberg’s The Atlantic is the perfect home for Anne Applebaum and all the fabulous foreign policy ideas she’s proposed over the years.
In 2002, Israel pummeled Gaza with bombs (a good reminder that the current conflict did not begin on October 7), targeting dense civilian centers. One of the targets of that campaign - much like the targets of Israel’s current campaign - was the press, and in January of 2002, Israel destroyed Gaza’s main radio station, Voice of Palestine. While free press groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the destruction of the radio stations, Anne Applebaum offered her passionate endorsement of the attack in an article for Slate titled “Kill the Messenger: Why Palestine radio and TV studios are fair targets in the Palestine/Israeli war.” This is what she said:
—the official Palestinian media is the right place for Israel to focus its ire. In fact, in the reporting of the Middle East conflict, which almost always focuses on yesterday’s violence and today’s body count, the crucial role of the Voice of Palestine—the official broadcasting arm of the Palestinian Authority—has often been overlooked. Nor is the problem just radio and television. If you want to understand why the Oslo peace process failed, or where suicide martyrs come from, it is worth taking a closer look at all the Palestinian Authority’s official media….
Establishing a credible media will be, for the Palestinians, part of what it takes to establish a credible state. Until then, the Voice of Palestine will remain what it has become: a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war."
Anne Applebaum advised that Israel treat journalists as “combatants” and “legitimate targets,” and ultimately, Israel agreed, and has been routinely targeting the press in all of its wars through its current one, which CPJ notes is the deadliest conflict for journalists on record. But advocating that militaries target the press is just one of Anne Applebaum’s many “indispensable contributions to the preservation of democracy and peace” (to quote her prize description). Another “contribution” can be found 10 months later in October of 2002 when, notably much earlier than most liberals at the time, Applebaum called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Iraq.
Although I dislike the modern tendency to compare every mad dictator to Hitler, in this narrow sense, the comparison to Saddam might be apt. Are you sure Saddam would not risk the destruction of his country, if he thought, for some reason, that he or his regime was in danger? Do you want to wait and find out?...We really don’t know whether deterrence will work in the case of Iraq. Megalomaniacal tyrants do not always behave in the way rational people do, and to assume otherwise is folly.
If I have any real qualms about the potential war in Iraq, they are not so much about the central issue—should we fight or should we not (I think, with caveats, that we should be prepared to do so)—but about the peculiar way in which the administration has until now gone about making its case for the war."
To reiterate, Anne Applebaum had no opposition to the question of “should we fight or not,” but rather, “about the way in which the administration” had presented the case for war. Presumably, if she were Bush, she simply would have made a better power point presentation to argue for that war which, let’s remember, killed over a million people, spilled over into neighboring countries, and spawned ISIS.
In 2016, the by that point established peace activist Anne Applebaum took to The Washington Post to mourn what she called “The disastrous nonintervention in Syria.”
Maybe a U.S.-British-French intervention would have ended in disaster. If so, we would today be mourning the consequences. But sometimes it’s important to mourn the consequences of nonintervention too. Three years on, we do know, after all, exactly what nonintervention has produced:
Estimates of war casualties range from about 155,000 to 400,000, depending on who is counted…According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were 4.8 million registered Syrian refugees as of Aug. 16…the country has been destroyed. Schools and hospitals have been leveled."
Notably, the casualty range she provides for the Syrian conflict is roughly half of the total of those killed in the Iraq War, which as we just saw, she proudly stood with hardline neocons like Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney to support. But more importantly, the account of events that Applebaum provides here, is pure fiction. When she uses the conditional tense to say things like “intervention would have ended,” like x, or uses phrases such as “our disastrous nonintervention,” I honestly do not know what she is talking about. Her article takes place in a universe so far from our own that I’m convinced this may be Applebaum’s attempt at science fiction.
Despite her misleading headline, the US government did intervene in Syria - that has been thoroughly documented by every mainstream outlet. The New York Times for instance, reported 7 months before Applebaum’s column in an article titled “U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels” that “Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria’s embattled rebels in 2013,” and that
Mr. Obama gave his approval for the C.I.A. to begin directly arming and training the rebels from a base in Jordan, amending the Timber Sycamore program to allow lethal assistance. Under the new arrangement, the C.I.A. took the lead in training, while Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, provided money and weapons, including TOW anti-tank missiles.”
That Anne Applebaum wields Syrian conflict casualty statistics as an argument for more war, while deliberately concealing the US role in producing those statistics, shows just how desperate Applebaum is to send other people’s children to fight in foreign conflicts.
Really, the thing that stood out most when reading through the backlog of Applebaum’s articles is the bizarre blindspot she has for much of recent history. At first glance her approach appeared to be deliberately cherry picking events in order to downplay the role of the US in shaping much of the suffering in the world. But reading even more of Applebaum , it becomes clear that what she writes is a reflection of a much more serious mental pathology - one shared by many elites. It has become a common tactic of establishment elites to project the blame of domestic failures on foreign governments. That was the whole point of Russiagate conspiracy theories in 2016, of which Applebaum was a fanatical supporter. This elite pathology is maybe best represented in one of Applebaum’s latest articles for The Atlantic where she explains her theory for who is to blame for a decline in America's global standing and popularity, (Spoiler alert: it’s Russia and China!)
…the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language."
Anne Applebaum’s writing should not be studied by political scientists, it should be studied by psychiatrists; the level of delusion on display here is remarkable. This is a royal member of the US foreign policy elite, whose signature policy has been intervention around the world and support for despised and outcast governments like Israel. I just showed you all the wars she’s advocated for in just a 20 year period. And when confronted with bubbling anger and bitterness toward her country from the rest of the world, Anne Appplebaum is incapable of making a cause and effect connection between that resentment and the US foreign policy she has successfully cheerled. Rather, Applebaum insists that the “Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans” are the victims of “Russian propaganda campaigns,” and “China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence” them. In other words, implies Applebaum, Africans, Latin Americans, Asians, and some Westerners don’t really harbor any resentment for American foreign policy at all, they only feel that way because of a Russian and Chinese propaganda campaign which, apparently, they are too stupid to notice, unlike the wise and educated Anne Applebaum, who sees the propaganda campaign with clear eyes and benevolently offers to unshackle the minds of people in the third world.
That such a deranged and delusional person has advocated so many terrible and destructive policies only to move upward in corporate media is not surprising (advocating destructive policies and success are directly correlated in Washington). That she wins awards for peace should make you disregard these sorts of establishment awards completely.
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