I’m cancelling my long-standing subscription to The Nation because it has become a shameless mouthpiece for Putinoid propaganda. Every week the magazine publishes some idiotic piece on Ukraine but this week things have turned even worse. An article by Stephen F. Cohen, an idiot I have already ridiculed on this blog in the past, has decided to excrete some more lunacy and The Nation chose to accommodate him.
Cohen is still sad that the USSR fell apart and is now enthusiastically supporting Putin’s plan to bring it into existence. Of course, he is entitled to his lunacy, just like everybody else is, but I’m shocked that The Nation will publish a piece that makes outlandish claims and doesn’t offer a shred of proof.
In his article, Cohen parrots every one of the favorite propaganda point of his beloved Putinoids. Ukraine is not a real country, the Maidan was an uprising of neo-Nazi street thugs, Putin is a kind, avuncular victim of the West’s tragedy. In short, everything that Putin’s propaganda machine has been hoping the more brain-damaged among the Westerners will swallow. It’s sad that the brain-damaged have taken over what used to be a good magazine.
Clarissa's Blog 
and so it is with boycotts of the mind:
“I never considered a difference of opinion
in politics, in religion, in philosophy,
as cause for withdrawing from a friend”
– Thomas Jefferson
………………………respectfully submitted, Observer Jules…………………
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Cohen is not my friend. I’ve never met him and don’t want to. And as for these “opinions”, I hear them every day on Russian newschannels.
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I understand Clarissa, then for you, it’s better to close that door…for some, darkness is bliss.
love you, I do,
….Observer Jules….
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Thank you! 🙂
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Thanks for sharing this. How sad. We know Putin is an ego trying to remanufacture a past not to be recovered.
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Did you send The Nation this blog post or something like it? Far more people visit a magazine’s website than those who subscribe.to any version of the magazine, and you know they’ll keep begging you to come back.
[And now I’m down a rabbit hole where I’m trying to figure out the difference between news stand and subscription profits. I found this industry article from 2011 claiming that publishers have a higher margin on print copies versus digital copies and I don’t know if that’s still true.]
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Cohen is third generation Lithuanian, if I remember correctly, who became enamored wiht the USSR in the 1950s. He spent most of his career at Princeton, and the Politics Department there has hardly been a bastion of liberal thought. Some of the faculty were reputed to be CIA advisors back in the day. (The old saying was that the best and brightest in social sciences go into economics. There’s a reason for that saying.)
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Good to know. A colleague who knows him in person just told me he always looked normal and she can’t believe he’s been a USSR apologist.
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I notice that comments to his article are closed….. how fitting.
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Cohen is married to Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is the editor, publisher, and part owner of “The Nation,” so obviously his opinions are going to get printed there. But given that “The Nation” has been a consistent apologist for communism and the USSR since the beginning of the Cold War, I’m a bit surprised that you’ve just now noticed.how the magazine leans.
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You do realize that I wasn’t reading it either at the beginning or the end of Cold War, right? 🙂 When I mean I’ve been subscribing for many years, I mean since 2009.
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Since 2009? That was YESTERDAY! 🙂
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You just made me feel very young. Thank you for that! 🙂
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