{"id":336896,"date":"2017-11-28T01:28:42","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T00:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/misreading-putin-lewrockwell\/"},"modified":"2017-11-28T01:28:42","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T00:28:42","slug":"misreading-putin-lewrockwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/misreading-putin-lewrockwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Misreading Putin &#8211; LewRockwell"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"post-665264\">\n<div class=\"clearfix post-info\">\n<p class=\"authors\"> By <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/author\/paul-gottfried\/?ptype=article\" title=\"Posts by Paul Gottfried\" rel=\"author\">Paul Gottfried<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"attribution\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanthinker.com\">American Thinker<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"date\">November 27, 2017<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"social-sharing\">\n\t\t\t<span class=\"custom-buttons custom-buttons-merged\">&#13;<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"a2a_button_email\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F2017%2F11%2Fpaul-gottfried%2Fmisreading-putin%2F&amp;type=page&amp;linkname=Misreading+Putin&amp;linknote=\" title=\"Email\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\"><!--img src=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/\/wp-content\/themes\/lrc\/images\/icons\/email.png\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Email\"--><\/a>&#13;<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"#\" title=\"Print\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"print-page\"><!--img src=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/\/wp-content\/themes\/lrc\/images\/icons\/print.png\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Print\"--><\/a>&#13;<br \/>\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_16 addtoany_list\" data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2017\/11\/paul-gottfried\/misreading-putin\/\" data-a2a-title=\"Misreading Putin\"><a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F2017%2F11%2Fpaul-gottfried%2Fmisreading-putin%2F&amp;linkname=Misreading%20Putin\" title=\"Facebook\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"\/><a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F2017%2F11%2Fpaul-gottfried%2Fmisreading-putin%2F&amp;linkname=Misreading%20Putin\" title=\"Twitter\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"\/><a class=\"a2a_button_twitter_tweet addtoany_special_service\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2017\/11\/paul-gottfried\/misreading-putin\/\" data-text=\"Misreading Putin\"\/><a class=\"a2a_button_facebook_like addtoany_special_service\" data-href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2017\/11\/paul-gottfried\/misreading-putin\/\"\/><a class=\"a2a_button_google_plusone addtoany_special_service\" data-annotation=\"none\" data-href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2017\/11\/paul-gottfried\/misreading-putin\/\"\/><a class=\"a2a_dd addtoany_share_save\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/share\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.addtoany.com\/buttons\/share_save_120_16.png\" alt=\"Share\"\/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"blog-content clearfix\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t                            \t<!-- S3 Cache --><!-- S3:S3:Non-Original -->\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>Last Saturday, President Trump stated that he thought Russian president Putin \u201cmeant what he said\u201d when he denied interfering in the American presidential election. Whereupon Senator John McCain\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2017\/11\/11\/politics\/john-mccain-donald-trump-russia\/index.html\">shot back<\/a>\u00a0that he was shocked that our chief executive \u201cwould take the word of a KGB official over that of the American intelligence community.\u201d Leaving aside certain obvious questions, such as whether Trump may be justified in suspecting the trustworthiness of some past leaders of the intelligence community and whether Trump was actually agreeing with Putin\u2019s disclaimer, let\u2019s focus on McCain\u2019s designation of Putin as a \u201cKGB official.\u201d This is the same characterization that one hears repeatedly on Fox-news; indeed Fox-news celebrity Charles Krauthammer usually begins his remarks about Putin by referring to him\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/insider.foxnews.com\/2017\/07\/07\/trump-putin-election-meddling-kgb-agent-liar-krauthammer\">as the \u201cKGB agent.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What is being criticized is not the recognition that Putin learned political tricks while working for the KGB earlier in life. It is rather the attempt to view him and his regime as an extension of the Soviet Communist one. This is a glaring misreading of the cultural and political changes in Russia since the 1990s. There isn\u2019t much evidence that Putin was ever anything but a Russian nationalist, who worked for the Soviet rulers of the Russian empire before they fell from power. Identifying Putin as a left-over Soviet Communist is misleading, and perhaps like characterizing Mussolini in 1930 as a Marxist, because he was a socialist before the Great War. This linkage between Putin and Soviet Communism seems especially popular among geriatric Cold&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2017\/11\/paul-gottfried\/misreading-putin\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Paul Gottfried American Thinker November 27, 2017 &#13; &#13; &#13; Last Saturday, President Trump stated that he thought Russian president Putin \u201cmeant what he said\u201d when he denied interfering in the American presidential election. Whereupon Senator John McCain\u00a0shot back\u00a0that he was shocked that our chief executive \u201cwould take the word of a KGB official [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-336896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}