Gallup headlined on February 16th, “Americans Increasingly See Russia as Threat, Top U.S. Enemy,” and reported that whereas back in 2011 only 3% of Americans answered “Russia” when asked “What country anywhere in the world do you consider to be the United States’ greatest enemy?” 18% cite “Russia” today, which is 3% more than the #2-cited threat, “North Korea,” cited now by 15% (which had been 16% back in 2011, when the top-cited threat of all was then Iran, at 25%, which is now cited by only 9% of Americans, as being America’s “greatest enemy.”

The United States Government has, ever since the end of the Soviet Union and the end of communism there, placed America’s weapons very near the most-highly-industrialized western part of Russia, with 11 NATO members being added since then that had previously been Warsaw Pact members (i.e., that were allies of Russia): Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Albania.

These European countries weren’t motivated to join NATO only by their fear that a now-capitalist Russia might try to re-assemble the empire that the communist dictator Stalin had put together — there was no indication of that even being wanted by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, nor by Yeltsin. These Warsaw-Pact nations were being actively courted by the United States, to join what had previously been a NATO that was anti-communist, but that America’s aristocracy wanted now to become simply an anti-Russian alliance — which is all that it now actually is.

America’s aristocracy succeeded in this effort: NATO is now solidly a military alliance against Russia. Everything else about NATO is just for show.

The Warsaw Pact is dead, and NATO should be too; but, instead, NATO continues on, as now a U.S.-led military alliance against Russia.

Even during the days of the Soviet Union, America’s aristocracy were anti-Russian, not merely anti-communist. In fact, they recruited Hitler’s top scientists and intelligence-operatives to work for the CIA and other U.S. agencies, in order to weaken, first, the U.S.S.R., but then (after the Soviet break-up), Russia itself.

The Soviet leadership, when the brutal dictator Stalin died, tried to avoid a Cold War, or any war, against the U.S. and other major capitalist countries, but the aristocracies in the capitalist countries rejected that peace-effort, and decided to go with nazis instead, who viscerally hated Russians (as did Adolf Hitler himself). America’s aristocrats recruited ‘former’ Nazis, and protected them from prosecution.

According to wikipedia:

“In March 1954, the USSR, fearing ‘the restoration of German Militarism’ in West Germany, requested admission to NATO.[10][11][12] By then, laws had already been passed in West Germany ending denazification [13][14] and the Gehlen Organization [headed by the former head of Nazi Germany’s intelligence, General Reinhard Gehlen], predecessor of the West German Federal Intelligence Service, was fully operative and employing hundreds of ex-Nazis.[15] [Gehlen was chosen for this by America’s Allen Dulles.] “The Soviet request to join NATO arose in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference of January–February 1954. Soviet foreign minister Molotov made different proposals to have Germany reunified[16] and elections for a pan-German government,[17] under conditions of withdrawal of the four powers armies and German neutrality,[18] but all were refused by the other foreign ministers, Dulles (USA), Eden (UK) and Bidault (France).[19] Proposals for the reunification of Germany were nothing new: earlier in 1952, talks about a German reunification ended after the United Kingdom, France, and the United States insisted that a unified Germany should not be neutral and should be free to join the European Defence Community and rearm.”

America’s CIA had coordinated all of this, as a BBC documentary has explained. The CIA had recruited ‘former’ Nazis especially in eastern Europe, such as in Ukraine.

Consequently, the Cold War was on; and, from its very start, it wasn’t just an ideological (capitalist-versus-communist) war; it was also, for the western aristocracies that controlled their nations’ foreign policies, very much an anti-Russia war. That BBC documentary makes this fact very clear: ideological nazis, who had previously worked for or under the guidance of Hitler’s Nazi Party, were now being paid by the CIA and worked for the CIA, not only against communism, but also as nationalists, hating Russia and Russians as ethnicity, quite specifically as nazis who admired Adolf Hitler and who still held the hope for an ultimate victory against Russia, a victory which Hitler himself had failed to achieve.

This tragic background led to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s effort in Cuba during 1962 to place Soviet nuclear missiles into Cuba, right next door to the United States — an outrageous threat to American national security, which President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was willing to go to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union to prevent, and so he prevented it.

Khrushchev had crossed the line, and now he backed down. However, it had actually been been JFK’s predecessor, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who had crossed this line the first: As wikipedia (which is edited by the CIA) has buried in a picture-caption in its article on the Cuban Missile Crisis, “More than 100 US-built missiles having the capability to strike Moscow with nuclear warheads were deployed in Italy and Turkey in 1961.” If one clicks there on the link that’s supplied, one finds that the plan to get U.S. missiles within striking distance of Moscow had originated actually in 1956, and started becoming operational in 1959, which was the same year that Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. In other words: it preceded Castro’s coming-to-power. It was the start of the really dangerous part of the Cold War, and it was an act of sheer aggression by the U.S. against Russia. This was being done by the same President who had made the pro-Nazi Allen Dulles the Director of the CIA, and the pro-Nazi John Foster Dulles the Secretary of State. Under Eisenhower’s leadership, America’s competition against communism became a Cold War against not only communism, but against Russia, and against ethnic Russians — whom Hitler and all of his followers despised.

John F. Kennedy inherited the anti-Russian threat that Dwight Eisenhower had engendered with 100+ nuclear missiles against Moscow. And Kennedy defused it.

As the wikipedia article on the Cuban Missile Crisis notes:

“In response to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey against the USSR with Moscow within range, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to agree to Cuba’s request to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter future harassment of Cuba. An agreement was reached during a secret meeting between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July and construction on a number of missile sites started later that summer.”

So: not only had the United States, under the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, loaded the CIA with ex-Nazis, but “Ike” had secretly placed in Italy and Turkey nuclear missiles aimed against Moscow — an extremely provocative act, which precipitated Khrushchev’s attempt to place Soviet missiles into Cuba.

A secret part of the agreement that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis was that Kennedy accepted Khrushchev’s demand for those 100 missiles to be removed. They were quietly removed.

The Cuban Missile Crisis started in 1956, before communism reigned in Cuba, and it was a result of Eisenhower’s, and the Dulles brothers’, hatred of Russians, and not merely of an opposition to communism. Those people weren’t democrats at all: they were fascists if not racist ones (nazis), and the Soviet leaders were communists, but totalitarians of any stripe are enemies of the public, enemies of the people — and, now, Americans under Obama are coming to fear Russians, for what? It’s sheer suckerdom.

Russians today thus have very sound historical reasons for fearing east-European nazis who are backed by the United States — it’s what they’ve seen since Dwight Eisenhower was America’s President. However, until the time of U.S. President Barack Obama’s second term, this anti-Russian sentiment was not ruling America’s foreign policy; but, now, it tragically is. Barack Obama is the first-ever U.S. President to install a nazi (i.e., racist-fascist) regime anywhere in Europe. In fact, if one doesn’t count Eisenhower’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and replacement of him by a fascist regime as having installed a “nazi” regime there (which one might if one considers the subsequent widespread slaughter there of the native population to have been genocidal or an ethnic cleansing), then Obama is the first-ever outright nazi U.S. President: the first one who has installed a nazi (i.e., racist-fascist) regime anywhere.

When Obama set up a violent coup that in February 2014 overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine and replaced him with a racist-fascist, anti-Russian, regime, and with a follow-on ethnic cleansing program to eliminate the residents in the portion of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the man whom Obama had just overthrown, Russian public opinion turned sharply against the United States. This kind of behavior resonated strongly with Russians’ historical recollection of Adolf Hitler. According to Pew Global, whereas 56% of Russians had had a favorable view of the United States in 2011, that percentage had dropped to only 23% in 2014. Russians now saw the U.S. sponsoring and increasingly arming a regime that was determinedly eliminating ethnic Russians from the Ukrainian population — and especially exterminating the residents in Donbass, the region that had voted 90% for the man Obama overthrew. This did not make the residents of Russia feel very safe against the global superpower. Russians were shocked to find that the nation that Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had led in a war against nazis and other fascists, had now become, under ‘Democratic’ President Barack Obama, a nation that instead sponsored a nazi coup in Ukraine so as to place NATO missiles near Moscow — even worse than President Eisenhower, who at least had an excuse: that he was anti-communist. Obama has none at all; he has only hostility toward Russia and contempt for Russians.

Americans have no reason, other than American media-propaganda and brainwashing, to fear Vladimir Putin, but plenty of reason to fear Barack Obama — he’s goading Putin into another arms-race and weapons-buildup, toward a possible nuclear war.

The Gallup poll merely shows the result of Americans being drenched with propaganda. As for the Pew poll’s showing Russians’ opinions of the United States plunging, anyone in Russia who is at all rational and who has open eyes will feel that way. The drenching in propaganda is the U.S., not Russia — or, at least, not nearly to the same extent.

Americans are drowning in propaganda; that’s what this Gallup poll is showing.

American ‘news’ media are doing their job, for the aristocracy that own them. It’s what they’re paid to do. They’re paid to keep the public in line. What the media are to people’s minds, the police are to people’s bodies. One is mental force: deception. The other is physical force: violence. This combination of deception and violence is the cost-effective way to control the public. It’s efficient.

So: the American public is being prepped to hate Russians and to fear Russia. Americans are starting to get in line, for the Big War. That’s also the reason why the U.S.-initiated ethnic-cleansing program in the Donbass region of the former Ukraine isn’t reported in the western press. All that Americans know is that Russia is bad. And, for most Americans, that’s enough to know. It gives them a fighting spirit. Unfortunately, they’re fighting the wrong enemy. But that’s the purpose, isn’t it?

Even before the coup in Ukraine, a Gallup poll had shown that worldwide the U.S. was considered to be the greatest threat, of all nations, to world peace. But Americans didn’t think so. Now, what would explain that discrepancy? Perhaps the same thing that caused Americans to think that Saddam Hussein’s WMD and support for Al Qaeda necessitated an American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.