At the latest Republican debate, U.S. presidential candidate Ben Carson started quoting Stalin:
“Joseph Stalin once said: if you want to bring down America, you have to destroy three things: its spirit, its patriotism, and its morality.”
I listened to this and couldn’t believe it: it was word for word the same as the “quote from the Dulles Plan,” also known as the “Roosevelt quote,” the “Brzezinski quote,” or the “Madeleine Albright quote,” endlessly repeated by our United Russia politicians and assorted crooks who insist that outside forces want to destroy Mother Russia.
There are lots of variations, but the principle is always the same: some famous or great foreigner, in an anti-Russian quote, says that Russians cannot be defeated by direct military force—or that it would be extremely difficult—but that if you undermine their spirituality and destroy their faith in mother, father, and homeland, then the Russians can be overcome.
For example, just a month ago the Moscow city government was putting up this fake on the streets as a “quote from Bismarck”:
Needless to say, the quote is fake whether it’s attributed to Dulles or to Stalin, as American journalists wrote immediately after the debate.
It turns out they have their own collection of fake quotes too, used by every politician eager to talk about the importance of “spiritual bonds” (a Russian conservative slogan about traditional values):
It’s remarkable how similar hypocritical moralizers are in their demagogic methods, no matter which side of the ocean they’re on.
It almost makes you want to recall the famous quote by Leonardo da Vinci: when morality and external threats are dragged into politics by the ears, fake Mao Zedong quotes are never far behind.
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