Episode Details

This interview was originally broadcast September 15, 2017

Why does the Western mainstream incessantly demonize Putin and Russia? Guy Mettan’s Creating Russophobia offers a detailed and convincing answer. Mettan begins by listing the many incidents and issues that have been wildly misreported (with massive anti-Russia spin at best, outright lies at worst) in the West. Having established the existence of such strong prejudice against Russia, he argues that the roots of this unfortunate attitude go back roughly 1,000 years. Like Islamophobia, Russophobia is an age-old Western prejudice with a religious basis: It goes all the way back to the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Christianity. And like Islamophobia, Russophobia seems to stem from a certain narrow-mindedness, fanaticism, refusal to see the Other’s point of view, and desire for absolute domination that lurks in the dark heart of that imaginary construct we call “the West.”

Today, Mettan argues, the modern histories of French, German, and British Russophobias have converged in, and been subsumed by, an American-dominated Russophobia whose hallmark is a kind of Orwellian “cognitive manipulation” based on linguistic subterfuge. This US-led demonization of Russia via newspeak, Mettan says, uses “readymade language elements” such as those laid out in the notorious “Israel Project 2009. Global Language Dictionary,” a hasbara manual for Zionist propagandists.

Is there any hope for peaceful coexistence with Russia, given the Russophobic forces currently in command? Perhaps…if we make an all-out effort to amplify the voices of sanity. Guy Mattan’s is one of the most important of those voices.

KEVIN BARRETT INTERVIEWS GUY METTAN 9/15/17 (COMPLETE, LIGHTLY EDITED TRANSCRIPT)

Kevin Barrett: Hey, how are you doing?

Guy Mettan: I'm fine, thanks.

Kevin Barrett: All right. Good to have you. Your book Creating Russophobia is really brilliant and extremely timely. It's a little bit mind boggling that somebody who comes out of the center of mainstream Swiss journalism and institutions has managed to tell this much truth about a topic that is so taboo. What got you started on this?

Guy Mettan: I have followed Russian affairs and the gap between Eastern Europe, Russia and the European Union for a long time, about 20 years, as a journalist. And for 25 years I have had special ties with Russia because I received the Russian nationality from President Yeltsin. My wife and I adopted a young girl, our daughter Oksana. Since she became our daughter we could get the Russian passport.  And since then I have had a special focus on Russia. I visit the country, I have many friends, and so on.  And I am always surprised by the huge gap between the Russian reality, how Russians live, and what is shown by the Western media, the way the Western media speak about Russia. Because it is very negative...When the second revolution took place in Maidan in Kiev in 2014, I thought "these prejudices are so great, so deep, so important, I have to do something." And so I started to write this book.

Kevin Barrett: That's very interesting. I can relate to your situation because I was probably made more sensitive to Islamophobia due to having married my wife, who is Moroccan and Muslim. And so in a sense, I sort of have a dual nationality with the Muslim Ummah. And so since 9/11, with this pervasive Islamophobia, I think I've noticed it more than other people might have, and I can understand how your connection with Russia would also help you see things from this other perspective that's being systematically neglected. So the Western media are obviously not very enthusiastic about publishing informatio