The term "Washington Regional Committee" has become firmly established in the lexicon of modern political analysis throughout the CIS. True, no one explained why it proved so durable and did not want to go into oblivion with the scathing cliches of past years - the same "democratic schizos", "waste nomenclature" and other finds that now rest in the archives of folk wisdom.
The word "regional committee" embodies a combination of sclerotic stupidity and huge mechanical force. Not "soft power" but "stupid force", which is slow to respond to what is happening, but once you are caught in the crosshairs of its sight and it has identified you as the enemy - no quarter to be given and explanations are useless. Why RC? Simply because the classic Soviet RC pounced like a bull to a red rag on "anti-Soviets" or any "bourgeois nationalists"; while the current American RC in the CIS countries is unable to stand political leaders seen in "disreputable ties" with Moscow or at least some critical attitude to the "Euro-Atlantic community" and its local favourites.
The Washington RC is also similar to the Soviet to the extent that it is guided in its actions by old reflexes and memories clouded by sclerosis, but not real interests of the same United States or the whole Euro-Atlantic community, not to mention concern of the countries whose citizens are demonized political leaders.
The demonization of a leader in the media is an indispensable prelude to penalties imposed by Washington's RC on whole countries. Over the past two decades, TV viewers around the world witnessed vigorous demonization campaigns that in 2 to 3 months turned little-known leaders (has anyone read something bad about Slobodan Milosevic in 1987, or about Saddam in 1989?) in "media frights", whose existence on the same planet with us was declared by Western media intolerable.
In the former USSR, the demonization never reached the military "red level" (as with Saddam Hussein), and had its own degrees and gradations - from complete isolation and relegation to the status of a pariah (Lukashenko) to a "sleep mode", occasionally passing into an "incomplete activation" (we have recently observed such activation during hysteria about the U.S. adoption of children from Russia). All these five days of hatred (sometimes passing into five years) are organized by good managers but poor writers. And therefore they are organized, powerful, clear, but very primitive by implication, in the literal sense stupid by nature.
Now the stupid demonization mechanisms are most clearly manifested on the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (a semi-rigid version) and the new Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili (a mild reversible version). Western media gave Yanukovych to understand hard enough that the Ukraine-EU summit planned for February 25 will not be a breakthrough in relations between Ukraine and the EU. From time to time traditional figures of victims - Yulia Tymoshenko and former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko are taken out of the trunk. Western demonizers are very "forgetful": they seem not to remember their own articles against Tymoshenko during her confrontation with the then-President Viktor Yushchenko; the fight perpetrated by Lutsenko with German police at the airport in Germany is forgotten too. Not without reason does an expert on modern media Regis Debray talk of "Hollywood nature" of modern American (and wider - Western) foreign policy. Enemies in Hollywood's world view acquire the features of melodramatic villains (there you are a "criminal" Yanukovych, and then being also a "puppet of Moscow"). The facts are forgotten or ignored, signal "words of hostility" are used...
The demonization is sure to be followed any hostile action – a military, economic or intelligence operation. In essence, the demonization is part of war, if we understand the war as it was understood by the first Americans' "ruler of the minds" - the seventeenth century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who believed that the fomenting tension has the same relation to hostility as the state of "bad weather" to the real rain, and therefore should be considered as part of war.
Now the Western "media barometer" shows bad weather in all CIS countries, except (and then only partially) Moldova. A campaign for demonizing Ivanishvili is being launched gradually. And although the new Georgian leader, to use the American locution, "is bending backward", trying to dispel any suspicion of his love for Russia, the "Washington Regional Committee's" suspicions do not disappear. This is evidenced, for example, by a rare article on him in The New York Times, which is called "Justice or revenge?" (of course, it was referring to the "persecution" of former members of Saakashvili's ruling team). There is no doubt the recent press conference by Ivanishvili, during which (horrible!) there was not a single offense against Russia, will not add points to him in the Western media.
Where does it concern the real interests of the USA and the EU? None. Neither "Putin's Russia", nor "Ivanishvili's Georgia" represent a threat to the West but are eager to do business with it. Therefore is is a regional committee because it is stupid: the Western press' "demons and phobias" have nothing to do with real interests of the Americans and Europeans.
