Guy Mettan, Creating Russophobia (2017) — a book review

12 September 2018

A spark of sanity

Author Guy Mettan is a Swiss journalist. Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (Clarity Press, 2017) posits reasons for the anti-Russian hysteria that historically has deluged the West, including Switzerland.

His thesis, sound in my view, traces the origin of hatred of Russia back to the Catholic Church's split into eastern and western components. Although the West dates this schism to 1054 AD, Mettan points out that its origins predate that by centuries.

How the Russophobic process began

German region nobility amplified comparatively trivial disagreements about theology, so as to lend themselves theological credence with Rome's popes. Whom they already were protecting with their armies, in return for papally dispensed secular legitimacy.

The theological narrowing served to distinguish these German nobles from their peers across the east-west Catholic divide. As Mettan suggests, one arguably needs an enemy, so as to lend oneself supposedly higher substance.

In order to sharpen the distinction between us (in the West) and them (in the East), it became fashionable to negatively critique the east's allegedly barbarous and "Byzantine" habits. Russians, especially.

Why create an enemy, if you cannot denigrate him to make yourself more righteous-seeming? (I'm sure that God was pleased.)

Most of the book is taken up by examples of factually unwarranted anti-Russian behavior

This is not a book for readers incapable of tolerating insight into negative aspects of their own cultures.

Mettan has a probing eye for hypocrisy and manufactured delusion. Both of which overwhelmingly characterize the United States and the European Union — in virtually all aspects of their international relations.

Mettan's strength is his willingness to use historical examples illustrate his points.

A caveat — you will need some "big picture" historical knowledge to follow Mettan's argument

A full historical context is naturally missing. The book is only 342 pages long.

Mettan's abbreviated examples do superbly illustrate his theme. But readers will only recognize that those are accurate, if they already have the events' historical context in mind. We cannot readily recognize truth, when we are ignorant as to the circumstances that swirled it up. In this, I agree with Russian Federation foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

Note

Lavrov is not a significant figure in Creating Russophobia. But he illustrates Mettan's theme that the Russians are significantly more "civilized" and much more strategically conservative thinkers than the West gives them credit for.

Regarding the book's American market, Mettan may take readers' presumably sound education too much for granted. Most of us do not accurately know anything historical. Which means that the majority of readers whose objectivity might benefit from reading Creating Russophobia will lack the knowledge foundation necessary to follow the author's reasoning.

Mettan's examples begin with today's and work backward

He even distinguishes strains of French, English, German and American Russophobia.

This separation includes quoting the people, who were (or are) most responsible for creating those nationally distinguishable biases.

A writing excerpt

Regarding Russia's Soichi Winter Olympics (2014):

Russia-bashing mainly took two directions: the European media stressed above all the waste and corruption linked to the vast expenses undertaken, while the American media . . . concentrated their criticisms on the "repression" of Russian homosexuals following the adoption, at the end of 2013 by the Duma, of a law condemning homosexual propaganda involving minors.

Neutral observers promptly pointed out that that measure was similar to a prescription in the French penal code and to a law of the same kind in force in the United States. They further pointed out that several American States, notably Arizona, had just toughened their anti-gay legislation and, by that yardstick, the winter OG [Olympic Games] in Salt Lake City [2002] should have been boycotted, as it is the capital [capitol] of a State, Utah, that represses homosexuality due to the Mormons' preponderant influence.

Consider this incident, too

In discussing Western hypocrisy, he shows that it is not exclusively directed at Russia:

[F]ormer Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd showed how the Chinese conception of the world was influenced over the very long term by the behavior of Europeans toward China.

"By 1916," Rudd writes, "the Triple Entente had convinced the infant Chinese Republic, barely five years after its inception, to enter the war against Germany.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers were thus sent to the European front to dig trenches and die under bombs and epidemics, an episode totally ignored by our historians, who did not mention it at all during the First World War centenary in 2014.

By way of thanks, China, which belonged in the winners' camp, was prevented from participating in the plenary sessions of the Versailles treaty negotiations and, as the epitome of contempt, the former German colonies in China were transferred to Japan!

Doesn't this sad episode shed new light on the history of China, Mao's success, the legitimacy of the communist party still leading China, and the deep suspicion the Chinese have for Westerners and their promises?

The book is full of examples of similar high-horse-deflating examples like that one.

But the Russians are special, in Mettan's view

Creating Russophobia makes the point that the Russians are especially despised because they look like us. Meaning that they are supposedly "white" and — in being white-ish, but daring to be culturally different — they have somehow betrayed the West.

Whether that's a valid insight, I do not know. I admit to being perplexed by the rabidness of factually unwarranted anti-Russian feeling. Mettan, I surmise, may have hit on the psychological point that explains our vicious disregard for objectivity and balance.

He also addresses manipulated "semantics"

For those of you interested in how language can reveal or conceal meaning, Mettan's chapter on language manipulation is valuable.

In that discussion, he begins with the Israel Project 2009 Global Language Dictionary as a sample of how Israel crafts its "newspeak" — so as to make itself look peacefully enlightened and Palestinians look violently bad.

Mettan follows with numerous examples of similar endeavors in the West's similarly duplicitous anti-Russian brain-washing. You will probably smile in recognition of the in-phrases.

These examples are valuable, I think, for those who have been oblivious to how they are being manipulated.

Footnotes are excellent

They are even numbered within the text. How rare is that?

If a self-confessed Swiss "journalist" can incorporate proper footnotes — into what he says he intended to be lay person reading — why can't American authors?

The moral? — Creating Russophobia is outstanding

This is easily one of the most geopolitically worthwhile books I have read in decades.

PeteFree.com

Guy Mettan, Creating Russophobia (2017) — a book review