Eamonn was saying in an earlier post that he hadn’t seen any left-wing demonstrations outside the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires protesting events in Georgia. It’s a safe bet that there’s the same degree of invisibility in other metropolises.

But reading both Juan Cole and Seumas Milne today, I started to wonder whether these demonstrations might eventually turn up outside Georgian embassies instead. Because, you see, Bush and Cheney are “Putin’s war enablers” (Cole); and this is a tale of “US expansion, not Russian aggression” (Milne).

On Milne, Brett properly says that today’s offering is “so outlandish that one worries it’s too much even for satire… even of the spotty Che-wannabees at Indymedia - but seemingly without fail, Milne and his ilk at CiF are spouting it with a straight face.” Cole, at least, sounds more informed, but his argument is essentially the same.

I’ll confine myself to two points. Firstly, the absence of any serious reference to the Soviet or Russian pasts is just laughable. Milne talks about the Soviet Union as a place where “minorities…were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives.” Yes, the millions who perished during Stalin’s enforced famine in Ukraine felt exactly that way. All those restive minorities who seized their opportunity to secede after the collapse of the socialist motherland were manipulated into doing so by the US. Grozny, the Chechen capital, was no doubt reduced to rubble because of decisions that were made in Washington, not Moscow. Just as 9/11 was the consequence of US policies, so too is the unrest in the Caucasus.

Neither Milne nor Cole mention the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, nor of Czecheslovakia in 1968. Moscow’s historic tendency to intervene in its neighbors affairs is mysteriously wiped from the record.

But the usual targets are there with a vengeance. Cole fulminates about the US undermining democracies; he selects Chavez’s Venezuela and Hamas’s Gaza as examples. The fact that it was the Venezuelan voters who checked Chavez’s most recent attempt to appropriate more power is passed over, and there is, of course, no discussion of the thuggery which distinguishes Hamas rule in Gaza. Moreover, none of this would be complete without a mention of the neocons; according to Milne, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili is among their number.

The sad aspect of all this (and to be scrupulously fair, this is truer of Milne than it is of Cole, who has a less rosy interpretation of Russia’s behavior) is the paucity of the argument. The same cast of global villains - America, Israel, the neocons - is recycled from conflict to conflict. One more depressing example of how the state-focused “anti-imperialism” of the left, and its attendant anti-Zionism, has displaced a more fundamental progressive value: solidarity with those who live under authoritarian regimes.