Mirror imaging works partly because the U.S. practices the same tactic

Evidence

Vladimir Putin, too, is a master at mirroring, and has been since the early days of his career in politics. Throughout Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, Putin would accuse the Ukrainian government of the precise crimes he was busily committing, or considering committing, himself. When, in October 2022, Russia accused Ukraine of being about to set off a dirty bomb in its own territory and then pin the blame on Russia, Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said it was part of a pattern of “mirror imaging,” adding, “The Russians have accused the Ukrainians, the Russians have accused other countries, of what it itself was planning.” And yet, if Putin was able to sell these upside-down claims to many, it’s partly because the U.S. government consistently does this kind of mirror imaging itself, feigning outrage over Russian interference in U.S. elections with no concern for the irony that its intelligence operatives have meddled in elections and helped overthrow democratically elected governments the world over since the 1950s, from Iran to Chile to Honduras—and let’s not forget the gloves-off U.S. interference in post-Soviet Russia to back Boris Yeltsin, who passed the baton on to none other than Putin. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the mirror mechanism beyond the domestic right to authoritarian geopolitics — important for assessing the breadth of Klein’s device before the Israel/Palestine payoff.
• QUESTION: Does this U.S.-also-does-it framing soften Klein’s treatment of right-wing mirroring? Worth tracking whether the symmetric framing weakens her later indictment.