The election of Putin to another term as President has become a lightning rod for inane proclamations. A Facebook Friend from High School posted an article from the Washington Post headlined: Trump’s national security advisers warned him not to congratulate Putin. He did it anyway. Above the link to the article, he wrote,

“How’s your Russian? It may be time to study up.”

alleging that Trump’s “collusion” with Moscow meant Russia was on the verge of not only successfully invading, but subjugating on the order of suppressing the national language. These sentiments seem to be quite widespread. Someone else posted as a comment, “Dah” along with a picture of Trump as a hand puppet of President Putin:
I would say that kind of xenophobia and prejudice is out of bounds. And then there’s this:

If you’ve listened to President Putin’s most recent State of the Nation speech, then you know why he was so overwhelmingly and resoundingly re-elected. Widely acknowledged outside NATO and the U.S., Putin is an impressive Statesman. One would think that whose who had access to Youtube and could read and listen to multiple sources to confirm what the rest of the world knows, would stand up and protest. But, if you live in the U.S., you probably don’t do this. You rely instead on extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds, and I imagine you do so because you were programmed to in middle school and onward. An entire nation of Manchurian Candidates.

As a child In my American middle school, Mr. Meisenheimer, our social studies teacher, wiled away an hour of our afternoons with the curtains drawn and a series of filmstrips entitled, “Two Worlds”. As he intoned the text that went along with the images, we learned that we were free, and they were not; we learned the difference between Americanism — which was good, and Communism — which was bad.

Being a child back then, I didn’t give it much thought. I don’t recall believing any of it, but it looks as though my classmates did. It would be years before I met my first bona fide Russian, the poet Yevtushenko, who impressed me with his erudition. This was in the early eighties, when most Americans knew who Solzhenitsyn was. In the years since, the Russians I’ve met have inspired in me respect and admiration. It seemed like a great waste that the American and Russian cultures had been estranged from each other for so long.

McCarthyism, I was taught, wasn’t so much about hating Russians or Communism as it was about anti-intellectualism, a strain that runs straight through the American character. We can see this pernicious anti-intellectual mindset pilloried in the pages of Sinclair Lewis novels, or, we can look out the window and see the current Russophobia/ Russiagate shitstorm. It’s pernicious and threatens to justify contesting Syria’s air space, or to justify escalating NATO hostilities in the former Soviet Satellite States (where the quality of life has been steadily decreasing since the arrival of neoliberal economics). This anti-intellectualism is being harnessed to make our adversary on the Syrian or European battlefield into an enemy so detestable that we would feel comfortable murdering. There’s been deep-seated hostility toward Russia programmed into us. Hostility which perhaps can only be countered by getting to know Russian people; and coming to understand, probably through study, Russian culture and history. For those who are resolutely anti-intellectual, this may never happen. Wallowing in their ignorance, they will become more and more rabid in their derision.