Nu
het wel zeker is dat Biden de VS presidentsverkiezingen heeft
gewonnen, zullen de Democraten met geen letter meer reppen dat
Rusland de presidentsverkiezingen heeft gemanipuleerd, zoals de
Democraten en de regulere (massa-) media 4 jaar lang hebben geschreeuwd en dat gesteund door een groot deel van andere westerse politici en de media in die landen…….. Nog maar een paar
maanden geleden liet Kamala Harris, de nieuwe vicepresident van de
VS, op CNN weten dat Russische bemoeienis Biden de verkiezingen zou
kunnen kosten….. Zonder enig bewijs deed Harris haar uitlatingen,
maar zoals Aaron Maté in een Twitterbericht opmerkte: wie
wil de details nog kennen? Nu Biden heeft gewonnen zullen we met geen
letter meer horen over Russische manipulaties, zo vervolgde Maté…… (in
mijn woorden, maar daar komt het wel op neer)
CaitlinJohnstone, de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel, stelt
dat elke Russische agent in de VS, elke trol in Sint Petersburg, elke
Russische hacker die het met z’n allen de klokrond hadden voorzien op
de zogenaamde democratie in de VS, ‘poef’ plotseling niet meer bestaan…… Russiagate werd in de lucht gehouden en dat in weerzin van alle bewijzen dat dit een opgeklopte leugen was…… Een leugen waarmee Hillary Clinton haar misadige handelen wilde verdoezelen >> het op een smerige (beter gezegd: misdadige) manier stelen van de voorverkiezingen in 2016 ten koste van Bernie Sanders…..)
Als
de Russen werkelijk de verkiezingen zouden hebben gemanipuleerd,
zoals het VS volk (en ook ons) 4 jaar lang werd voorgehouden door
politici en media en waar dit in de VS zelfs als een oorlogsdaad werd bestempeld,
vergelijkbaar met 9/11 en Pearl Harbor, zou het niet uit hebben moeten maken wie
de verkiezingen had gewonnen, een dergelijke grote en grove inmenging
in binnenlandse politiek van de VS (en andere landen*) zou een grote zaak blijven, echter nu Biden heeft gewonnen hoor
je zelfs geen piep meer die daarnaar verwijst, zo vervolgt Caitlin
volkomen terecht……
Wel
is Chinagate nu in opkomst en wacht maar, als Trump eindelijk zal
toegeven de verkiezingen te hebben verloren, zal hij China de schuld
geven, zoals een aantal van de Republikeinen nu al doen……
Benieuwd of Ollongren, de AIVD en de MIVD binnenkort ook komen
met China als nieuwe manipulator van de Nederlandse verkiezingen, al maken ze zichzelf dan nogmaals
volkomen belachelijk niet alleen omdat het een leugen is, maar vanwege een al eerder geuite beschuldiging aan het adres van Rusland dat de Nederlandse verkiezingen in maart volgend jaar al zou manipuleren…… ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Hoe gek moet je zijn om met
dergelijke onzin het volk te manipuleren, want dat is het, i.p.v. de
Russen die onze verkiezingen manipuleren, zijn het juist de roepers
van die valse boodschap die met hun leugens plus hun angst- en
haatzaaierij de boel manipuleren, iets waar de reguliere media hier maar al te graag
aan aan meedoen…….. (als Rusland
hier werkelijk de boel manipuleert, zouden het ook de Russen moeten zijn die van
de disfunctionerende VVD leugenaar en premier Rutte een held hebben
gemaakt [althans dat is hij volgens de zogenaamd onafhankelijke
media], ofwel Rutte is een Russische agent!! ha! ha! ha! ha!)
Met
het verlies van Trump wordt er nu gesteld dat de kinderen het Witte
Huis zullen verlaten en volwassenen die plek weer zullen innemen….
Caitlin is het eens met deze uitspraak en stelt (heerlijk
sarcastisch) dat het nu gelukkig volwassenen zullen zijn die oorlogen
beginnen tegen landen waar de VS niets te zoeken heeft….. Vergeet de woorden van Biden niet die Trump zwakte verweet in het
optreden tegen landen als Venezuela en Iran…… Biden heeft dan
ook beloofd dat hij een meer assertieve (lees: agressieve) buitenlandpolitiek zal voeren tegen de twee genoemde landen,
uiteraard weer in totaal andere bewoordingen dan ik hier gebruik…… Waaruit
je kan concluderen dat een nog agressievere aanpak van Iran en Venezuela maar
één ding kan betekenen: weer twee illegale oorlogen van de VS tegen landen waar deze terreurentiteit, ofwel het Vierde Rijk, niets te zoeken heeft……..
Lees
het artikel van Caitlin en zie wie de volgende president van de VS
werkelijk is, een uiterst gevaarlijke man, die af en toe bijna
dementerend bezig is, een man die straks achter de grote knop van een
kernoorlog zit…….
ha! ha! ha! Met die maskers (zonder afstand te houden en zelfs met vastpakken van handen) lijken de twee wel boeven die net succesvol een bank hebben beroofd.
Joe
Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States is
now all
but certain.
In
order to have any chance of successfully advancing his legal
narrative of electoral shenanigans President Trump would have to both
(A) really want to remain president and (B) have the backing of
sufficiently large power structures, neither
of which
appear to be the case. When you’re a Republican president and Murdoch
is actively fighting against you,
it doesn’t matter what the facts are. The narrative war is lost.
Trump is done.
Aaron Maté ✔
@aaronjmate
Two months ago, Kamala told CNN that Russian interference — undefined, of course, because who needs details? — could cost Biden the election. Since Biden won, expect us to now hear zilch about “Russian interference.” It’s outlived its partisan utility.
3,357
[Forrest
Gump voice:] And just like that, the Russians were gone.
Every
Kremlin agent hiding under every bed, every Saint Petersburg troll
lurking around every corner, every Russian hacker we’ve been told was
working around the clock to destroy America’s imaginary
democracy–poof! We’re not hearing a word about them anymore.
If
the Russians had really been trying to influence this election, as
we’ve been told
for years they most definitely would,
and if foreign election interference really is an act of war
comparable to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, as we’ve
been told for years that it is,
then it should be just as big a deal regardless of which candidate
win. Yet we’re not hearing a peep on the subject from the
blue-checkmarked commentariat who’ve been shrieking about the Russian
menace for four years.
I believe I won’t tweet nearly as much as in the past two years starting Jan 20 because I don’t have to reply to Trump and Pompeo’s daily slander on China. I don’t expect Biden and his future Secretary of State (whoever he/she is) to be that type of lowlife.
Liberals
are heaving a sigh of relief around the country, not because their
actual lives have gotten much worse as a result of Trump’s presidency
(they
have not),
but because it means at long last they’ll stop being psychologically
abused by the mass media who’ve been screaming hysterical nonsense in
their faces and making them feel crazy.
Bit
by bit cautious celebrations are beginning to erupt from coast to
coast (okay maybe just the coasts) as Biden’s January inauguration
becomes less of a possibility and more of a certainty. It’s not the
thunderous rejoicing it will be when they make it official, but
little expressions of glee are popping up everywhere. Kids are being
hugged. Parents are being called. Bold
tie choices are being made.
David Corn ✔
@DavidCornDC
When Trump was elected, I decided I’d only wear black ties. It was a personal and private act of mourning. I didn’t say anything about it. And almost no one noticed over these past four years.
“At
long last there will be adults in the White House again!” goes
the common refrain.
And
I couldn’t agree more! I think we’re all breathing a lot easier
knowing that the US government will now be run by grown-ups who
murder people instead of emotionally stunted children who murder
people. We’ll all sleep so much better knowing that there are adults
in the room who murder people, and that the insatiable US murder
monster is under competent management once more.
This
will in fact be the only president in recent memory who actually
campaigned on being more
interventionist and attacking his opponent for not being hawkish enough.
Trump ran
on a platform
of scaling back US interventionism, as did Obama,
as did even
Bush,
but Biden did
the opposite.
He is beginning from a much more hawkish position than he
predecessors right off the bat.
It’s
odd, you know. US political leaders are so revered by the media
and so normalized on our screens that it’s easy to forget how many
children they’ve killed. You see the doddering old man eating ice
cream enough times and it becomes difficult to marry him in your mind
with the butcher who played
a crucial leading role
in advancing the Iraq invasion which killed a million people and
ushered in an unprecedented new age of military expansionism.
But
the important thing is that he won’t be making rude tweets and bungling
coup attempts
in the Global South. He will be a Competent Grown-Up, like the daddy
we always wanted. He will pilot the insatiable death machine with
grace and decency, right into the homes of the world’s most
vulnerable.
_________________________
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* De
Russen zouden immers, om er een paar te noemen, ook de Brexit, het Oekraïne referendum in ons
land en het onafhankelijkheidsreferendum in Catalonië hebben gemanipuleerd….. Als je alles
op een rijtje zet en daarbij voor wat Nederland betreft de woorden
van D66 minister en volksoplichter Ollongren, de AIVD en de MIVD weer leest en
beluistert, moet je oppassen niet in een lachstuip van een uur te
belanden, wat een immense flauwe kul!!
Tijdens
de gehele Democratische Conventie van 17 t/m 20 augustus, viel
letterlijk niet één keer het woord ‘Russiagate’, terwijl de
Democraten het de laatste 4 jaar wel 1.000 keer werd uitgespuugd door
de hypocriete politici van die partij. Logisch dat men er nu maar mee
is gestopt, immers het is bewezen flauwekul en alleen door de partij
in stelling gebracht om Hillary Clinton uit de wind te houden, die op
een smerige manier de voorverkiezingen van de Democraten in 2016
heeft gewonnen, ofwel: zij heeft destijds de voorverkiezingen gestolen ten koste van Bernie Sanders……
Een lid
van Clintons verkiezingsteam, Seth Rich was zo pissig over de
handelswijze van Clinton en de top van dat team, dat hij een enorme
stapel mails van Clinton doorspeelde naar Wikileaks…… Een paar weken later
werd Rich vermoord op straat gevonden, volgens de politie een
roofmoord, hoe vreemd dan dat er werkelijk niets was gestolen van
Rich, terwijl hij ook opzichtig dure sieraden droeg……. (bovendien waarom zou je iemand 2 maal in de rug schieten als je deze wilt ontdoen van diens kostbaarheden en geld??)
Nee,
i.p.v. een Russische agent, bleek Trump de figuur die een enorme
legermacht heeft samengetrokken langs delen van de Russische
westgrens, waarbij hij nu ook nog de beschikking heeft over een
raketschild ‘tegen Iran’ maar waarvan de raketten in een mum van tijd
kunnen worden voorzien van meerdere kernkoppen en dat op raketten die
tot 5.000 kilometer kunnen vliegen, waardoor steden als Moskou en
Sint-Petersburg vanaf de voordeur van Rusland kunnen worden geraakt met kernraketten….
Met dat schild heeft de Trump administratie het INF-verdrag
geschonden, iets waarvan de VS en haar oorlogshond NAVO Rusland volkomen ten onrechte
beschuldigden……. (Rusland zou nieuwe raketten hebben die volgens
de VS onder dat verdrag vallen, echter op meerdere uitnodigingen van
het Kremlin om te komen inspecteren ging de VS niet in, daar de
duivelse Trump administratie dondersgoed wist en weet dat Rusland de waarheid
sprak……)
Lees het
volgende artikel van Caitlin Johnstone die dieper op deze zaak
ingaat en onder andere de stelling van Max Blumenthal steunt dat Russiagate een manier was om Trump zo onder druk te zetten dat hij wapens leverde aan Oekraïne (ben het daar deels mee eens, zeker daar ook wordt gesteld dat Obama Oekraïne niet wilde bewapenen, terwijl zijn minister van BuZa Joe Biden dat land onder druk zette het strafrechtelijk onderzoek tegen zijn corrupte zoon te stoppen, daar men anders een levering van wapens uit de VS kon vergeten):
Dem Convention Made No Mention Of Russiagate Or Impeachment, Because They Were Fake
Caitlin
Johnstone <donotreply@wordpress.com>
The
only interesting thing about either of the conventions held by
America’s two mainstream political parties this month was not
anything that was said by the interminable parade of vapid speakers,
but rather what those speakers did not say.
Despite
their dominating mainstream news cycles for years on end, at no time
during the four-day Democratic National Convention was the word
“impeachment” ever uttered, nor was any mention made of the
Mueller investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump and
the Russian government.
Eight
months after Democrats mounted a historic effort to remove Donald
Trump from office, not a single speaker uttered the word
“impeachment” during their four-day convention.
…
For
Democrats to completely omit impeachment from their convention was
once unthinkable. Democrats had mounted a case that Trump had abused
his power to blackmail Ukraine into investigating his political
adversaries, including Biden. And they made an existential argument
that without removing him from office, Trump’s behavior would get
worse and democracy itself would be at risk.
…
Special
counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s
ties to Russia — which Democrats once thought could topple Trump
for obstruction of justice — also went unmentioned, even as it was
a defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office.
At
DNC, “the word ‘impeachment’ [was] entirely left out over the
course of the 4-night event. Mueller’s investigation of the Trump
campaign’s ties to Russia… also went unmentioned, even as it was
a defining feature of Trump’s nearly 4 years in office.” https://t.co/Dgt9WQ3LeApic.twitter.com/q8EvEthwZq
“The
fact that Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to even mention
Russiagate or Ukrainegate (the first-ever sequel to a flop?) at their
convention should maybe hasten some reflection for those who made
these issues the ‘defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in
office,'” quipped
incisive Russiagate skeptic Aaron Maté of the omission on Twitter.
“Next
on Unsolved Mysteries: Democrats and media allies accused Donald
Trump of being a Russian agent for four years,” Maté added.
“They chanted ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ and ‘The Walls Are
Closing In.’ But at their political convention, they forgot all about
it. Did Russia give them amnesia?”
“I
personally feel like if the President of the US seeking re-election
is beholden to and controlled by an adversarial foreign power, the
opposition party should find a few seconds to squeeze in a mention of
it if, you know, it wasn’t utter bullshit,” tweetedThe
Intercept‘s
Glenn Greenwald.
And,
of course, it was utter bullshit. And that is indeed why the
Democrats saw no need to mention it at their own four-day convention
despite dominating news cycles with it for years. Russiagate and
Ukrainegate were never the cataclysmic scandals that the Democrats
and their allied media factions portrayed them as. They weren’t even
actually about getting rid of Trump.
In an extremely strange and confounding development, the Democrats *never once* mentioned what this NYT columnist calls “the biggest lie in American politics” at their Convention.
Anyone
with an ear to the ground knew that Russiagate would fizzle, and
anyone capable of counting Senate seats knew impeachment would fail
to remove Trump. The drivers of these attention-monopolizing
narratives knew this also.
If
there’d been any solid evidence to find that the Kremlin was
blackmailing Trump, or that his campaign had conspired with the
Russian government to steal the 2016 election, the US intelligence
community would have found some of it and leaked it to The
Washington Post
long before Trump took office. The Russiagate narrative has been
completely dismantled from the very beginning by journalists like the
late Robert Parry,
and then Maté after Parry’s death. There was never any real
evidence for it, and the people pushing Russiagate from the beginning
knew there was never any real evidence for it.
All
you really need to know about Russiagate was that it was started by
unsubstantiated claims by the US intelligence community, and in the
end it facilitated pre-existing plans by the US intelligence
community. Everything else in between those two points is just empty
narrative fluff.
In
2017 Parry
documented
how the original assessment that Russia meddled in the US election in
the first place was put forward without proof by just a couple dozen
officers from three intelligence agencies hand-picked by the notoriously
Russophobic
then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Maté
has documented
that this allegation remains just as suspicious
and porous
as the day it was first made. Despite having sweeping investigative
powers Mueller indicted not one single American for conspiracy with
the Russian government. The recent evidence-free Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence report did
nothing to change the
flimsy nature of the entire Russiagate narrative.
So
the whole thing has been plainly bogus from the beginning, with the
foundation laid by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies
who have an
extensive history of lying
about exactly this sort of thing. And it just so happens to have
paved the way for operations against a longtime geostrategic foe that
were being unfolded well before Trump’s arrival in
the White House.
This
is an excerpt from an
article
by legendary Australian journalist John Pilger from March 2016:
In
the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces
since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place
along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the
Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat
to Russia.
Ukraine
– once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park.
Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a
regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with
Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the
political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They
openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of
the Russian speaking minority.
This
is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US
military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This
extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with
silence in the West.
This
was all happening during the Obama administration. But he was still
more doveish than the spooks and cold warriors who drive US foreign
policy would prefer, resisting for example loud calls from the
warmongers to arm
Ukraine against
Moscow and forcibly
install a no-fly zone
in Russia’s ally Syria.
We
suddenly found ourselves bombarded with narratives from the US
intelligence community and its mass media stenographers about Russian
election meddling and Trump playing some mysterious role in it. These
narratives were pushed with steadily increasing frequency and
shrillness, with the help of a humiliated Democratic Party that stood
everything to gain by participating, until those of us who expressed
any skepticism of them at all were being accused on a daily basis by
MSM-brainwashed dupes of running psyops for the Russian government.
We
were never at any time presented with any proof of these claims which
rose anywhere near the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world,
but we were hammered with them anyway, day in and day out, year after
year.
This
ended up putting a lot of political pressure on Trump to keep
existing sanctions and military tensions with Russia, and he ended
up adding dozens more new
cold war escalations including further sanctions, shredded nuclear
treaties, NATO expansionism and more. He even armed
Ukraine due
to these pressures, just like the anointed queen was scheduled to do.
The
cold warriors wanted their escalations, and they got them. From
beginning to the end, that’s all this was ever about. They pushed the
narratives, the media joined in because it was great
for ratings,
and the Democrats joined in because it took the focus off their 2016
scandals
and gave them a kayfabe phantom to punch instead of pushing
for actual progressive changes.
And
now the slow
motion third world war
between the US-centralized power alliance and the loose collective of
unabsorbed governments is right on schedule, with Biden all set and
ready to carry the omnicidal torch forward. The 2016 scandals are
well enough forgotten, no progressive changes have been made, and
there is no need to talk about Russiagate or impeachment at the
Democratic National Convention.
Because
everyone already got what they wanted. Everyone except ordinary
people, of course.
____________________
Thanks
for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make
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I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
‘Putin’
zou westerse Corona onderzoeken pikken middels hacken, zo werd afgelopen week gemeld, waarbij men onmiddellijk stelde dat Rusland daarom
zover is gekomen dat men daar een vaccin zou hebben ontwikkeld dat al
wordt getest op mensen…..’Beetje vreemd’ dan dat Rusland gegevens
van een onderzoek heeft gehackt, waarmee nog lang geen testen worden
gedaan op mensen…. Het artikel waarin wordt gesteld dat Rusland
gegevens over COVID-19 rond de wereld verzamelt komt van het National
Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), echter zoals gezegd zonder enig bewijs
daarvoor….
Overigens heeft men in Rusland 26 afzonderlijke onderzoeken lopen naar een vaccin voor COVID-19 en dat zijn bepaald geen onderzoeken die zijn begonnen na het zogenaamd hacken door Russische ‘trollenfabrieken’ (ha! ha! ha!) die geleid zouden worden door Putin zelf…..
Aaron
Maté maakte gehakt van deze beschuldiging in een Twitterbericht, waarin hij zegt dat
het nieuws vergaren een stuk makkelijker is als we ervan uitgaan dat
Rusland alles hackt, zelfs Atari spelcomputers en dat het eigenlijk
alleen nieuws is als anonieme
bronnen van de
Britse en VS geheime diensten melden dat Rusland iets niet hackt….
ha! ha! ha! ha!
Om het
voorgaande nog eens te bevestigen, hoorde ik afgelopen vrijdagmorgen op Radio1 een
plork ‘uitleggen’ dat Rusland continu bezig is het westen te hacken,
o.a. om aan informatie over het Coronavirus te komen, terwijl je hem
daarvoor op de blauwe ogen moet geloven. Al sprak hij nog wel over
ongeveer 10 Russische hackers die e.e.a. zouden doen en niet over een
trollenboerderij of fabriek……
Deze joker stelde dat iedereen hiermee bezig zou zijn, ook deze
figuur kwam niet verder dan te stellen dat men e.e.a. heeft gevonden
door juist de hackers te hacken en uiteraard zijn de bewijzen daarvoor geheim…… Ofwel of we de geheime diensten maar willen
geloven, terwijl die aantoonbaar al zo vaak hebben gelogen……….
Schandalig genoeg wordt Jeremy Corbyn, de voormalige leider van labour door ITV beschuldigt van het gebruiken van door Russen gehackte documenten voor de verkiezingen van 2019, zo zou de Britse regering Johnson hebben bevestigd, en ook hier weer: zonder een flinter aan bewijs….. De leugens dat hij antisemiet zou zijn, leugens van de reguliere Britse media, inclusief de zogenaamd onafhankelijke BBC, hebben Corbyn vorig jaar de verkiezingen gekost….. Zonder meer een zware misdaad, waarvan ook de huidige Britse regering op de hoogte is en dan Corbyn nog een schop na durven geven, schandalig!!!
Volkomen
terecht komt Caitlin Johnstone in het hieronder opgenomen artikel
tot de conclusie dat Rusland zal en moet hangen en dat daarvoor alles
is gelegitimeerd, de grootste leugens en verdraaiingen volgen elkaar
in een redelijk tempo op sinds Rusland zogenaamd de
presidentsverkiezingen van 2016 in de VS zou hebben gemanipuleerd,
nogmaals zonder enig steekhoudend bewijs…… Media en politiek
(zoals hare D66 kwaadaardigheid Ollongren) houden deze leugens erin zodat het makke schapenvolk in een vorm van
hersenspoeling alle leugens en fantasieverhalen gelooft, immers als
je iets maar lang genoeg herhaalt wordt het ‘waarheid’ bij degenen
die deze info ‘verwerken…..’
Vandaar
ook het grote verzet van de westerse politiek tegen de sociale media, omdat daar deze leugens,
halve waarheden en verdraaiingen worden doorgeprikt, niet voor niets
dat naast politici vooral de westerse reguliere media schreeuwen om
actie tegen de sociale media, immers het fake news van die reguliere (massa) media wordt keer op keer ontmaskerd en dat valt ook de gebruikers van die media op en in grote getale zijn afgehaakt……
Hier het
artikel van Johnstone die dieper op deze zaak ingaat, het lezen meer
dan waard (en zo gebeurd):
OMG*
you guys Putin hacked our coronavirus vaccine secrets!
Today
mainstream media is reporting what is arguably the single dumbest
Russiavape story of all time, against some very stiff competition.
“Russian
hackers are targeting health care organizations in the West in an
attempt to steal coronavirus vaccine research, the U.S. and Britain
said,” reportsThe
New York Times.
“Hackers
backed by the Russian state are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and
treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions
around the world, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)
said on Thursday,” Reuters
reports.
“Russian
news agency RIA cited spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the Kremlin
rejected London’s allegations, which he said were not backed by
proper evidence,” adds Reuters.
To make news gathering easier, we should just always assume that Russia has tried to hack everything stored on every computer ever — emails, recipes, Atari consoles — and only report it when anonymous US & UK intel officials determine that Russia has NOT hacked something https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1283756670938742785 …
First
of all, how many more completely unsubstantiated government agency
allegations about Russian nefariousness are we the public going to
accept from the corporate mass media? Since 2016 it’s been
wall-to-wall narrative about evil things Russia is doing to the
empire-like cluster of allies loosely centralized around the United
States, and they all just happen to be things nobody can actually
provide the public with hard verifiable evidence of.
Ever
since the shady
cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike admitted
that it never actually saw hard proof
of Russia hacking the DNC servers, the already
shaky and always unsubstantiated
narrative that Russian hackers interfered in the US presidential
election in 2016 has been on thinner ice than ever. Yet because the
mass media converged on this narrative and repeated
it as fact
over and over again they’ve been able to get the mainstream
headline-skimming public to accept it as an established truth,
priming them for an increasingly idiotic litany of completely
unsubstantiated Russia scandals, culminating most recently in the entirely
debunked claim
that Russia paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in
Afghanistan.
Secondly,
the news story doesn’t even claim that these supposed Russian hackers
even succeeded in doing whatever they were supposed to have been
doing in this supposed cyberattack.
“Officials
have not commented on whether the attacks were successful but also
have not ruled out that this is the case,” Wired
reports.
Thirdly,
this is a “vaccine” which does not even exist at this point
in time, and the research which was supposedly hacked may never lead
to one. Meanwhile, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical
University reports
that it has “successfully completed tests on volunteers of the
world’s first vaccine against coronavirus,” in Russia.
Fourthly,
and perhaps most importantly, how
obnoxious and idiotic is it that coronavirus vaccine “secrets”
are a even a thing??? This
is a global pandemic which is hurting all of us; scientists should be
free to collaborate with other scientists anywhere in the world to
find a solution to this problem. Nobody has any business keeping
“secrets” from the world about this virus or any possible
vaccine or treatment. If they do, anyone in the world is well within
their rights to pry those secrets away from them.
This
intensely stupid story comes out at the same time British media are blaring
stories about Russian interference
in the 2019 election, which if you actually listen carefully to the
claims being advanced amounts to literally nothing more than the
assertion that Russians talked about already leaked documents
pertaining to the UK’s healthcare system on the internet.
“Russian
actors ‘sought to interfere’ in last winter’s general election by
amplifying an illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by
Labour during the campaign, the foreign secretary has said,” reports The
Guardian.
“Amplifying”.
That’s literally all there is to this story. As we learned with the ridiculous
US Russiagate narrative,
Russia “amplifying” something in such allegations can mean
anything from RT reporting on a major news story to a Twitter account
from St Petersburg sharing an article from The
Washington Post. Even
the foreign
secretary’s claim itself explicitly admits
that “there is no evidence of a broad spectrum Russian campaign
against the General Election”.
“The
statement is so foggy and contradictory that it is almost impossible
to understand it,” responded
Russia’s foreign ministry to the allegations. “If it’s
inappropriate to say something then don’t say it. If you say it,
produce the facts.”
Documents
in 2019 Election”. The completely
bogus allegation
that the NHS documents came to Jeremy Corbyn by way of Russian
hackers is not made anywhere in the article itself, but for the
headline-skimming majority this makes no difference. And headline
skimmers get as many votes as people who read and think critically.
All
this new cold war Russia hysteria is turning people’s brains into
guacamole. We’ve got to find a way to snap out of the propaganda
trance so we can start creating a world that is based on truth and a
desire for peace.
Zelfs voor CNN is de nieuwe lastercampagne die deze zendgemachtigde tegen Assange voert van een niveau dat al in jaren niet meer werd gezien, behalve dan bij de desinformatie vorig jaar over het ‘Assange-Manafort rapport’ in The Guardian. De haatzaaicampagne van CNN berust niet op documenten zoals men beweert, er is voor geen van de beschuldigingen ook maar een schijntje van bewijs……..
Zo stelt men dat Assange de Ecuadoraanse ambassade in een commandopost had omgetoverd om de verkiezingen in de VS te manipuleren….. Verder meldt CNN dat Assange kamers van de ambassade onder de poep zou hebben gesmeerd, weer geen greintje van bewijs, terwijl de ambassade maar wat blij zou zijn geweest, ware het echt gebeurd, immers men zat al sinds het aantreden van de nieuwe (fascistische Ecuadoraanse president) met Assange in de maag en had hem dus makkelijk kunnen laten verwijderen als inderdaad zou blijken dat hij een gevaar voor anderen en zichzelf zou zijn (dan zou hij zijn opgenomen in een psychiatrische kliniek….) Nee, ook dit door CNN gebrachte ‘feit’, wordt niet onderschreven door de Ecuadoraanse ambassade, noch de regering van dat land…….
Messcherp legt de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel de vinger op de etterende wond, waar ze bijvoorbeeld stelt dat door het gebruik van het woord ‘potentially’ (mogelijk) de kijkers en luisteraars op het verkeerde been worden gezet, immers men koppelt er zogenaamde ‘feiten’ aan vast in de vorm van ‘documenten’ (die men niet heeft bij CNN, immers ze bestaan niet..)……
Mensen lees het artikel van Johnstone, een gedegen stuk tekst en zegt het voort, daar we ook hier op dergelijke manieren worden besodemieterd, zo hoorde ik gistermorgen de bijna slechtste presentator van Radio1 (die bovendien volkomen ten onrechte denkt leuk te zijn), Jurgen van den Berg zeggen dat de vraag over de eigenaar van het goud uit een museum op De Krim, diezelfde dag in een rechtszaak in Nederland zou dienen (in hoger beroep, wat van den Berg er niet bij vertelde), een zaak aangespannen door de directie van het museum op de Krim en autoriteiten van de regio daar.* Volgens van den Berg is dit goud tijdens de inname door Rusland van De Krim naar Nederland gegaan voor een tentoonstelling……
Dit zijn 2 dikke leugens, ten eerste hadden de autoriteiten na het referendum waar meer dan 80% van de bevolking stemde vóór aansluiting bij Rusland, nooit toestemming gegeven het goud te verzenden. Het goud was ten tijde van het referendum al een paar maanden in Nederland… De autoriteiten en de museumleiding hadden echt wel geanticipeerd op een eventuele (schandelijke) inbeslagname ware men van plan geweest die collectie af te sturen naar Nederland, juist daar er in Oekraïne een neonazi-junta zat o.l.v. de zwaar corrupte misdadiger en neonazi Porosjenko, een junta door de VS geparachuteerd, deze junta werd ook onvoorwaardelijk door de Nederlandse flutregering Rutte 2 gesteund…….
Ten tweede: iedereen kan weten dat De Krim niet is ingenomen door Rusland, maar dat de bevolking zich in een door internationale waarnemers als goed en eerlijk beoordeeld referendum, massaal (meer dan 80%) uitsprak vóór aansluiting bij Rusland (en dat vóór aansluiting stemmen werd met eenzelfde percentage gedaan door de oorspronkelijke bewoners van De Krim….)
New CNN Assange Smear Piece Is Amazingly Dishonest, Even For CNN
CNN has published an unbelievably brazen and dishonest smear piece on Julian Assange, easily the most egregious article of its kind since the notoriously bogus Assange-Manafort report by The Guardian last year. It contains none of the “exclusive” documents which it claims substantiate its smears, relying solely on vague unsubstantiated assertions and easily debunked lies to paint the WikiLeaks founder in a negative light.
And
let’s be clear right off the bat, it is most certainly a smear
piece. The
article,
titled “Exclusive: Security reports reveal how Assange turned an
embassy into a command post for election meddling”, admits that it
exists for the sole purpose of tarnishing Assange’s reputation
when it
reports,
with no evidence whatsoever, that while at the Ecuadorian embassy
Assange once “smeared feces on the walls out of anger.” Not
“reportedly”. Not “the Ecuadorian government claims.” CNN
reported it as a fact, as an event that is known to have happened.
This is journalistic malpractice, and it isn’t an accident.
Whenever
you you see any “news” report citing this claim, you are
witnessing a standard
smear tactic of
the plutocratic media. Whenever you see them citing this claim as a
concrete, verified fact, you are witnessing an especially aggressive
and deliberate psyop.
The
Ecuadorian embassy was easily the most-surveilled
building in the world during
Assange’s stay there, and the Ecuadorian government has
leaked photos of Assange’s living quarters to
the media in an attempt to paint him as a messy houseguest in need of
eviction, so if the “feces on the walls” event had ever
transpired you would have seen photos of it, whether you wanted to or
not. It never happened.
Exclusive: Security reports reveal how Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election…
New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series…
cnn.com
“New
documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked
materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of
suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” the
article begins.
In
its very first sentence the article invalidates all the claims which
follow it, because its use of the word “potentially” means that
none of the documents CNN purports to have contain any actual
evidence. It’s worth noting at this time that there is to this day
not one shred of publicly available evidence that any of the
Democratic Party emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016 were in fact
“hacked” at all, and could very well have been the result of a
leak as
asserted by former British ambassador Craig Murray,
who claims to have inside knowledge on the matter.
The
glaring plot holes in the Mueller report’s assertions about Russia
being the source of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops have already been ripped
wide open by journalist Aaron Maté’s meticulous analysis of
the report’s timeline in an article accurately titled
“CrowdStrikeOut:
Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims“.
The CNN smear piece, which claims
to “add
a new dimension to the Mueller report”, is entirely relying on this
porous timeline for its reporting. Plot holes include the fact that
Mueller claims (and CNN repeats) that the Russians transferred the
emails to WikiLeaks on or around July 14, which Maté notes is “a
full month after Assange publicly announced that he had them.”
CNN
kicks off its smear piece with the inflammatory
claim that
“Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical
moments”, mentioning both “Russians” and “hackers” in the
same breath in an attempt to give the impression that the two are
related. It’s not until paragraph 43 and 46,
long after most people have stopped reading, that the articles
authors bother to inform their readers that the “hackers” in
question are German and have no
established connection to
the Russian government whatsoever. The “Russians” counted among
Assange’s scores of visitors consist of RT staff, who have always
consistently reported on WikiLeaks, and a “Russian national”
about whom almost
nothing is known.
The
article falsely
labels Assange a “hacker”,
a defamatory
claim the
mass media circulates whenever it wants to tarnish Assange’s
reputation. Assange, of course, is a publisher. WikiLeaks publishes
materials which are given to it, it doesn’t “hack” them.
.@CNN puts out the claim that @RT published articles about Podesta e-mails before @wikileaks even released them. A serious claim for which CNN scrupulously fails to provide evidence.
That is a LIE that’s been debunked over and over. We published ONE article about the emails that were RELEASED already, just not TWEETED about yet, because WikiLeaks had been releasing them like clockwork and we paid attention. It’s called journalism, they should try it sometime.
CNN
also repeats the long-debunked
lie that
RT “published articles detailing the new batches of emails before
WikiLeaks officially released them” during the 2016 election,
citing no evidence because this never happened. RT reported
on a WikiLeaks release in
October 2016 after it had been published by WikiLeaks but before the
WikiLeaks Twitter account had tweeted about it, and western
propagandists willfully conflated WikiLeaks publications with tweets
from the WikiLeaks Twitter account in order to make it look like RT
had insider knowledge about the publications.
In
reality, RT was simply watching the WikiLeaks site closely for new
releases in order to get an early scoop before other outlets, because
Podesta email leaks had been dropping regularly.
“That
is a LIE that’s been debunked over and over,” tweeted RT
America editor Nebojša Malić in response to the smear. “We
published ONE article about the emails that were RELEASED already,
just not TWEETED about yet, because WikiLeaks had been releasing them
like clockwork and we paid attention. It’s called journalism, they
should try it sometime.”
“Yes
that is fake news,” tweeted RT’s
Ivor Crotty. “I was the editor on the team that monitored wikileaks
and by Podesta 6 we knew they tweeted at 9am EST each day (1pm
Dublin) – so we checked the database by reverse searching and
discovered a new dump, tweeted about it, and the conspiracy theorists
jumped.”
“RT
already addressed this in 2016, convincingly if you read the sequence
of events they lay out: the Podesta emails appeared on the WikiLeaks
website before WikiLeaks sent a tweet about it,” Maté tweeted
at CNN’s Marshall Cohen.
“Ignoring that allows for the conspiracy theory you propose. It’s
ridiculous to suggest that RT-Wikileaks ‘were coordinating behind
the scenes’ based on the fact that RT tweeted about the Podesta
emails AFTER they appeared on WL’s site, but BEFORE WL tweeted
about them. You’re implicating RT in a conspiracy… for doing
journalism.”
It’s
not possible to research the “RT had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks
drops” conspiracy theory without running across articles which
debunked it at the time, so the article’s authors were likely
either knowingly lying or taking dictation from someone who was.
“Spanish
newspaper El Pais on July 9: ‘Spanish
security company spied on Julian Assange’s meetings with lawyers‘.
Add little security state propaganda and 6 days later you get from
CNN: ‘How Julian Assange turned an embassy into command post for
election meddling’,” notedShadowproofmanaging
editor Kevin Gosztola in response to the CNN smear, a reminder of how
a little narrative tweaking can turn a story on its head in support
of the powerful.
This
would be the same CNN who told its viewers that it’s against the
law to read WikiLeaks, with Democratic Party prince Chris
Cuomo lying “Remember,
it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents; it’s different
for the media, so everything you learn about this you’re learning
from us.” The same CNN which falsely reported that Assange is a
pedophile not once,
but twice.
The same CNN which has been
caught blatantly lying in
its Russiagate coverage, which has had
to fire journalists for
misreporting Russiagate in a media environment where that almost
never happens with Russia stories, which has deleted
evidence of its journalistic malpractice regarding
Russiagate from the internet without retraction or apology.
So
this latest attempt to tarnish Julian Assange’s reputation from CNN
is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that the article contains
exactly zero of the “exclusive documents” which it says validate
its claims and insinuations. Nor is it surprising that CNN is using
invisible evidence which almost
certainly came
into its hands through a government agency to give weight to its
smear. But the sheer volume of disinformation and deceit they were
able to pack into one single article this time around was just
jaw-dropping. Even for CNN.
_____________________
The
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* Er is nog geen uitspraak in deze zaak, maar reken maar dat de rechter beslist dat de kunstschatten volkomen ten onrechte naar Kiev en niet naar De Krim gaan…..
Je zou
wellicht denken dat onze reguliere media bij tijd en wijle knettergek
zijn met het herhalen van bijvoorbeeld aantoonbare VS leugens, maar zelfs dat kan men bij de makers van die leugens, dus de VS, altijd nog veel beter.
Het
volgende uiterst humoristische en sarcastische artikel, geschreven
door Caitlin Johnstone en afgelopen donderdag gepubliceerd, moet je lezen, maar
let op: het gevaar bestaat dat je in een lachstuip blijft!
Whales,
Crickets, And Other Fearsome Russian Doomsday Weapons
Caitlin
Johnstone
Headlines
were blaring the word “Russian” again the other day because
the mass media narrative managers found yet another reason for
westerners to feel terrified of the icy potato patch that we’d barely
ever thought about prior to 2016. I’d like to talk about the
Kremlin’s latest horrifying horrific addition to its fearsome
doomsday artillery, and recap a few of the other incredibly
frightening and terrifying tactics that those strange
Cyrillic-scribbling demons of the East are employing to undermine
truth, justice, and the American way. Just to make sure we’re
all good and scared like we’re supposed to be.
Gather
the kids, clutch your pearls and sign off on hundreds of billions of
dollars of extra military spending, my patriotic brethren! Here are
five super scary ways the Red Menace is trying to destroy you and
everything you hold dear:
Headlines
and TV news segments from virtually all mainstream outlets were
falling all over themselves the other day to report the fact that
some Norwegians found a tame beluga whale with a harness on it, and
“experts” attest that the animal may have been part of a
covert espionage program for the Russian navy.
While
there is no indication that this spying cetacean has been trained in
the arts of sonar election meddling or shooting novichok from its
blowhole, the Guardian helpfully
informs us that
the harness was labeled “Equipment of St. Petersburg”, and
was equipped to hold “a camera or weapon”.
“Marine
experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white
whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to
use underwater mammals as a special ops force,”
the Guardian reports.
The
Norwegian tabloid Verdens
Gang,
which picked up on the discovery well before the breathless English
headlines began gracing us with their presence, is a teensy bit less
Ian Flemingesque in its reporting on the matter: the harness is
equipped for a GoPro camera.
The words “Equipment of St. Petersburg” are
written in English.
Why
is the Russian military writing “Equipment of St. Petersburg”
in English on the garments of its aquatic special ops forces, you may
ask? If there were indeed a secret beluga espionage squad assembled
by Russian intelligence services, would they not perhaps avoid
writing the home address of the whales on their harnesses altogether,
and maybe, you know, not let
them run free in the wild?
And
to that I would say, stop asking so many questions. That’s just what
Putin wants.
NBC and MSNBC Blamed Russia for Using “Sophisticated Microwaves” to Cause “Brain Injuries” in U.S….
We now have what might be the most vivid, reckless and dangerous illustration yet of how NBC functions.
theintercept.com
A report seeded
throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials
last September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had
suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in
homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being “sophisticated
microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon” from Russia.
A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by
scientists and turned
out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket.
Neurologists and other brain specialists have
challenged the claim that
any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any
kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were
misinterpreted.
The
actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that
some government workers once heard some horny crickets in Cuba.
Ye
gads, is is nothing sacred? Is there any weapon these monsters won’t
use to transform the west into a giant, globe-spanning Mordor?
That’s
right, in 2017 puppies became one of the many, many things we’ve been
instructed to fear in the hands of our vodka-swilling enemy to the
east, with mass media outlets reporting that a Facebook group for
animal lovers was one of the sinister, diabolical tactics employed by
St. Petersburg’s notorious Internet Research Agency. As the Moon
of Alabama blog has
explained,
the only evidence we’ve seen so far actually indicates that the
Internet Research Agency’s operations in America served no purpose
other than to attract eyeballs for money. As journalist
Aaron Maté wrote of
the highly publicized Russian Facebook meddling, “Far from being
a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and
mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.”
The
late, great Robert Parry, one of the earliest and most outspoken
critics of the Russiagate narrative, covered this one for Consortium
Newsin
an article he
authored a few months before his untimely passing:
“As
Mike Isaac and Scott Shane of The New York Times reported in
Tuesday’s editions, “The Russians who posed as Americans on
Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. … There
was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable
puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”
Now,
there are a lot of controversial issues in America, but I don’t
think any of us would put puppies near the top of the list. Isaac and
Shane reported that there were also supposedly Russia-linked groups
advocating gay rights, gun rights and black civil rights, although
precisely how these divergent groups were “linked” to Russia or
the Kremlin was never fully explained. (Facebook declined to offer
details.)
At
this point, a professional journalist might begin to pose some very
hard questions to the sources, who presumably include many partisan
Democrats and their political allies hyping the evil-Russia
narrative. It would be time for some lectures to the sources about
the consequences for taking reporters on a wild ride in conspiracy
land.
Yet,
instead of starting to question the overall premise of this
“scandal,” journalists at The New York Times, The Washington
Post, CNN, etc. keep making excuses for the nuttiness. The
explanation for the puppy ads was that the nefarious Russians might
be probing to discover Americans who might later be susceptible to
propaganda.
“The
goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure,” Isaac and Shane
acknowledged. “But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to
build a large following before gradually introducing political
content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by
Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried
such tactics.”
This
Russia hysteria has been a long, wild ride, and sometimes it’s
honestly felt like they’re just experimenting on us. Like they’ve
been testing the limits of how ridiculous they can make this thing
and still get mainstream Americans to swallow it. Like the
establishment propagandists are all sitting around in a room smoking
blunts and making bets with each other all,
“I’m
telling you, we can sell a Pokémon Go Kremlin conspiracy.”
“Do
it!”
“No
way. There’s no way they’ll go for it.”
“Yeah
well you said that about the puppy dogs!”
And
then they release their latest experiment in social manipulation and
place bets on how many disgruntled Hillary voters they can get
retweeting it saying “God dammit, I knew that
jigglypuff looked suspicious!”
The
October 2017 CNN
report which
sparked off a full day of shrieking “OMG THEY’RE EVEN USING
PIKACHU TO ATTACK OUR DEMOCRACY” headlines was titled
“Exclusive: Even Pokémon Go used by extensive Russian-linked
meddling effort”, and it reported that Russia had extended its
“tentacles” into the popular video game for the
purpose of election meddling. Apparently the Internet Research Agency
attempted to hold a contest using the game to highlight police
brutality against unarmed Black men, which of course is something
that only an evil autocracy would ever do.
Not
until the
fifteenth paragraph of
the article did we see the information which undercut all the frantic
arm flailing about Russians destroying democracy and warping our
children’s fragile little minds:
“CNN
has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to
enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were
promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who
designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.”
Russia’s government wants people to have a laugh – as long as it’s at its opponents’ expense, and not Mr Putin’s.
bbc.co.uk
Late
last year the BBC published
an article titled
“How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about yet
another addition to the Kremlin’s horrifying deadly hybrid
warfare arsenal: comedy. The article’s author,
ironically titled “Senior
Journalist (Disinformation)” by the BBC, argues that Russia has
suddenly discovered laughter as a way to “deliberately lower
the level of discussion”.
“Russia’s
move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively
recent phenomenon,” the article explained, without speculating as
to why Russians might have suddenly begun laughing at their western
accusers.
Is
it perhaps possible that Russian media have begun mocking the west a
lot more because westerners have made themselves much easier to make
fun of? Could it perhaps be the fact that western mass media have
been doing absolutely insane things like constantly selling us the
idea that the Kremlin could be lurking behind anything in our world,
even really innocuous-looking things like puppy dogs, Pokémon
and whales? Could we perhaps be finding ourselves at the butt end of
jokes now because in 2016 our society went bat shit, pants-on-head,
screaming-at-passing-motor-vehicles insane?
Nahhh.
Couldn’t be. It’s the Russians who’ve gone mad.
Everyone
has my unconditional
permission to
republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve
written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely
reader-supported,
so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around,
liking me onFacebook,
following my antics onTwitter, throwing
some money into my hat on Patreon orPaypal, purchasing
some of my sweet
merchandise, buying
my new book Rogue
Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone,
or my previous book Woke:
A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see
the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for
my website,
which will get you an email notification for everything I publish.
For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do
with this platform, click
here.
Nancy
Pelosi, de ‘Speaker of the House’ (nee, bepaald geen B&O speaker) heeft
laten weten dat ze geen behoefte heeft aan een impeachment (afzetten) van Trump
over Russiagate…… ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Na 2
jaar lang schreeuwen over Russiagate, zonder ook maar een flinter aan
bewijs, waar het woord ‘impeachment’ niet van de lucht was, durft
Democraat Pelosi te zeggen dat ze geen reden ziet om Trump af te
zetten…….
Russiagate
was niets anders dan een doofpot voor het misdadig optreden van
Clinton en haar campagneteam, ofwel: Russiagate truc geslaagd: Trump
ten onrechte beschuldigd van samenspannen met Rusland*, (nogmaals) terwijl de
misdaden van Clinton en haar campagne team onder het tapijt zijn
geveegd!! Het gaat hier om de enorme misdaad van de kandidaatstelling diefstal, door Clinton en haar team, de kandidaatstelling voor het presidentschap van de VS van haar partijgenoot Bernie Sanders…..
Sanders was veel te ‘links’ voor de apparatsjiks van de Democraten, dus voor figuren als Clinton en Obama, vandaar dat de boel zo werd gemanipuleerd dat Sanders deze voorverkiezingen verloor…… De aanduiding ‘Clintongate’ zou dan ook moeten worden gebruikt, i.p.v. Russiagate……….
Vergeet niet dat de hele Russiagate hysterie heeft gezorgd voor censuur op het internet**, iets waarvoor westerse politici en de reguliere westerse media, regimes als dat in China aan de paal nagelen…… Niet alleen dat, er worden kapitalen uitgegeven ‘om te voorkomen’ dat Russiagate zich kan herhalen…..
In Nederland heeft hare D66 akeligheid Ollongren het gore lef te stellen dat Rusland hier ook de boel manipuleert en reken maar dat ook aan de bestrijding van die fantasie enorme kapitalen aan belastinggeld worden verspild…….. Waar de schrijvers op sites die vertellen wat er echt gebeurd in de wereld, werden en worden afgeschilderd als Russische trollen……. Denk daaraan als je volgende week en in mei in het stemhok staat, niet alleen D66 is volkomen fout op dit gebied, maar ook partijen als de VVD, CDA, PvdA, CU, SGP en GroenLinks……
Lees het
volgende sarcastische en toch ook humoristische artikel (je gelooft je ogen af en toe niet) van Caitlin Johnstone,
eerder geplaatst op haar website en overgenomen van Anti-Media:
Nancy
Pelosi Tacitly Admits That Russiagate Is Bullshit
(CJ Opinion) — In
an interview
with the Washington
Post yesterday,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she opposed the impeachment
of President Trump. This comes shortly before Mueller’s
investigation into Trump-Russia collusion is expected
to wrap up.
“I’m
not for impeachment,” Pelosi told the Post. “This is news. I’m
going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this
to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been
thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that
unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and
bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it
divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”
The
response to Pelosi’s remarks has been swift and strong.
“Wrong!” exclaimed MSNBC’s
Russiagate con
man Malcolm
Nance via Twitter. “What the hell is wrong with the @SpeakerPelosi
Congress that they absolve themselves of their duty! Nothing is
criminal anymore?! Trump can do and say like a dictator as he
pleases? All of his crimes are OK even if you see them? This requires
a public outcry. #Disgraceful”
“I
like Speaker Pelosi but this is NOT the right
approach,” tweeted Michael
Avenatti of Stormy Daniels fame. “If Trump has committed
impeachable offenses, he must be charged and he must face a trial in
the Senate. Would the Repubs take this approach? Hell no! And this is
why we get outplayed.”
“Sorry,
Madam Speaker,” tweetedEsquire’s
Charles P Pierce. “If you really believe the president* is an
unprecedented threat to the Constitution, your oath demands that you
begin the process to remove him. It’s your job.”
Wrong! What the hell is wrong with the @SpeakerPelosi Congress that they absolve themselves of their duty! Nothing is criminal anymore?! Trump can do and say like a dictator as he pleases? All of his crimes are OK even if you see them? This requires a public outcry. #Disgraceful.
The
House’s most virulent Russiagater, however, sang a different tune.
“If
the evidence isn’t sufficient to win bipartisan support for this,
putting the country through a failed impeachment isn’t a good
idea,” said Congressman Adam Schiff told
CNN yesterday.
As
you might expect, those voices in alternative media who’ve been
voicing skepticism of the Russiagate narrative since the beginning
have been having a ball with this one.
“BREAKING:
The Democrats’ Congressional leadership is realizing that their
two-year Russia conspiracy theory is not going to pan
out,” tweeted journalist
Aaron Maté, who has been in my opinion the single most lucid
Russiagate critic for a long time now.
“If
Trump is literally controlled by Putin to the point where Trump is
forced to act in the best interests of Russia *at the expense of the
US* — which has been the prevailing claim not of Dem fringes
but its mainstream — how can it be morally justified not to
impeach him???” tweeted journalist
Glenn Greenwald in response to Pelosi’s comments.
How
indeed? Pelosi’s comments go completely against the narrative that
mainstream Democrats have been selling America for over two years
now, and this close to the Mueller report amount to a rejection of
that narrative. Her statement is a tacit admission that she knows
Russiagate is bullshit, has always been bullshit, and will continue
to be bullshit.
Anyone who actually believed Putin controls Trump, Trump subordinates US interests to Russia, and that Trump conspired with a foreign adversary to win an election – as Schiff has spent 2 years screaming he’s seen *conclusive* evidence for – would have a duty to try to impeach:
“Is
it possible that Putin has something on Pelosi?” Greenwald joked.
“Or perhaps Democratic politicians and their media allies have been
knowingly feeding the party base and cable viewers unadulterated,
deranged, unhinged bullshit that they now can’t carry through on
with the power in their hands because it was all self-serving,
manipulative dreck? Anyone who has ever believed Trump is controlled
and blackmailed by Putin to the point that Putin makes Trump
treasonously sacrifice America’s interests for Russia’s — and
there are a lot of you — should be marching in fury in the
streets over Pelosi’s refusal to impeach Trump.”
But,
of course, they will not. There will be no protest against Pelosi’s
opposition to impeachment because those who would lead it know there
will never be any evidence that could possibly lead to a bipartisan
willingness in the Senate to remove him from office.
Anyone
who’s paid close and intellectually honest attention to the
Russiagate circus has known since the beginning that Trump was never
going to be impeached for a treasonous conspiracy with the Russian
government, despite the endless fantasies inflicted upon the
blinkered Maddow muppets day after day after day for over two years
now. Back in 2017 I
said that
“Mueller will continue finding evidence of corruption throughout
his investigation, since corruption is to DC insiders as water is to
fish, but he will not find evidence of collusion to win the 2016
election that will lead to Trump’s impeachment,” because it was
obvious to anyone who knew anything. And that has proven to be the
case with uninterrupted consistency.
If
those who have been driving the Russiagate conspiracy theory really
believed what they’ve
been pushing,
they would be up in arms at Pelosi’s remarks. Instead, we see
responses like Russiagate grifter Bill
Palmer publishing a
hilarious article titled
“Nancy Pelosi is playing rope-a-dope with Donald Trump on
impeachment”, explaining that her remarks were actually a brilliant
57-D chess maneuver designed to “play this Trump fool like fiddle.”
“Instead,
by answering the question in this manner, Pelosi accomplishes two
things,” says the Palmer
Report,
where sitting
US senators and top
Harvard law professors go
for the important updates they need to continue fueling Russia
hysteria in America. “First, she manages to put off the question
until she and her allies have managed to carve Donald Trump up.
Second, she’s messing with him. She just insulted him
by saying he’s not worth the trouble of impeachment. Pelosi is
looking to bait Trump into publicly feuding with her over the
question of impeachment. That way it’ll be Trump introducing the
concept, not her. And that’ll serve to help put the impeachment
process on the right track. Just don’t call it ‘impeachment’
quite yet.”
So
that tells you a bit about where the Russiagaters are at today.
This
all comes out, by the way, at the same time as a
new Wall
Street Journalreport that
Trump once attempted to personally cajole German Chancellor Angela
Merkel into ceasing to buy gas from Russia out of fear that “it
will make Europe’s largest economy excessively reliant on Russian
energy.” Hardly the behavior you’d expect from a Putin puppet,
but then neither are the rest of the many,
many other actions that
this administration has taken against the interests of Moscow.
As Democratic elites back off impeachment & collusion after pushing it for 2 years, perhaps voters will conclude they’ve been misled. And perhaps a backlash will benefit the wing of the party those same elites have used the Trump-Russia hype to ward off: the actual progressives.
It
is right and appropriate that those few voices on the left who’ve
been sharply critical of Russiagate from the beginning are now taking
some time to gloat at and mock its peddlers with increasing scorn.
The centrists who chose to spend more than two years forcing
everyone’s energy into this blatant psyop which escalated
a cold war against
a nuclear superpower were wrong, and the leftists who objected to it
were right. Trump’s term is more than halfway over, and
Russiagaters chose to suck all the oxygen out of the room for this
brainless, fruitless, worthless endeavor instead of allowing space
for progressive reform and for criticism of Trump’s actual
pernicious policies from the left. And they did it on purpose.
Mock
the Russiagaters. Mock them ruthlessly, and never, ever let them
forget the horrible thing that they did. Never stop making fun of
them and reminding them how stupid and crazy they acted during this
humiliating period of American history. And never stop using it as a
weapon against them. They were wrong, so they should not be leading
the way on what passes for America’s political left today.
Skepticism was the only appropriate response to Russiagate in a
post-Iraq invasion world, and those on the left who made that
appropriate response should be treated with infinitely more respect
and deference than those who did not.
They
were wrong, we were right, and now even Nancy Pelosi is all but
admitting it. Never let them forget it.
* Door alle tamtam van Pelosi en andere Democratische Partijbonzen zullen velen in de VS blijven geloven dat Trump wel degelijk samenspande met Rusland…… Immers een belachelijk cliché werkt voor velen nog steeds: ‘waar rook is is vuur……’ Begrijp me goed, Trump is een smerige psychopaat, die inderdaad afgezet zou moeten worden, maar juist door het gebruik van valse beschuldigingen komt Trump steeds ‘vaster’ in het zadel te zitten…..
** Hier een ‘paar’ voorbeelden van wat het Russiagate sprookje teweeg heeft gebracht:
Gisteren
publiceerde Caitlin Johnstone een artikel met een kop waarin ze stelt
dat de hysterische massamedia eindelijk openlijk erkennen dat propaganda werkt.
Ze legt dit verder uit met te zeggen dat de reguliere (massa-)
media hebben ontdekt dat propaganda werkt, dit door het dag in dag uit op de oorlogstrommel slaan met de leugen
dat Rusland de verkiezingen in de VS heeft gestolen van Hillary
Clinton…….
Ben
het in deze niet eens met Johnstone, daar die reguliere media al ver
voor de presidentsverkiezingen van 2016 volop propaganda maakten,
neem alleen al de leugens van die media over Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië, leugens die mede aan de wieg stonden van grootschalige VS terreur tegen die landen, dit in
de vorm van illegale oorlogen……
Ondanks dat voor een ieder en zeker voor journalisten van de massamedia, duidelijk zou moeten zijn dat men het publiek heeft voorgelogen (over de landen waartegen de VS illegale oorlogen begon), immers daar zijn stapels bewijzen voor, blijven die media (alsook het grootste deel van de westerse politici) dezelfde leugens herhalen……….
Syrië?
Vraag je je misschien af. Ja, in feite geldt dit ook voor Syrië,
immers de VS was al vanaf 2006, onder opperschoft G.W. Bush, bezig
met het opzetten van een opstand in Syrië, die tot de afzetting van
Assad had moeten leiden….. Met grote graagte herhaalden de massamedia de leugens van o.a. de CIA over Syrië en dat al ver voor ‘de opstand…..’
Eén en ander zegt jammer genoeg niets over het in puin bombarderen van Syrië, waarvoor de VS als hoofdverantwoordelijke kan worden aangewezen….. ‘Opstand’ (middels buitenlandse
agitatoren en de CIA) geslaagd, coup mislukt, hetzelfde recept werkte overigens
wel in Oekraïne en als gevolg van die geslaagde staatsgreep tegen de
democratisch gekozen regering Janoekovytsj, voert de door de VS
geparachuteerde neonazi-junta Porosjenko oorlog tegen burgers, die het
terecht niet pikten dat de door hen gekozen regering werd
afgezet….. Ofwel de VS is ook verantwoordelijk voor de oorlog die de Porosjenko junta voert tegen de burgerbevolking van Oost-Oekraïne….
De
media hebben met hun propaganda het grootste deel van de westerse
bevolkingen overtuigd van de Russische bemoeienis met de
presidentsverkiezingen, het Brexit referendum en het Catalaanse
onafhankelijkheidsreferendum. Waar de media in de EU lidstaten de
Russen beschuldigden van zo ongeveer alles wat fout ging op
politiek-maatschappelijk gebied…..
Uiteraard
beseft men bij die media dat men openlijk meewerkt aan anti-Russische
propaganda, immers waar zou men als eerste door moeten hebben dat
claims van Russische manipulaties je reinste kul zijn? Juist, bij die
reguliere media! Media die met een claim op nationale veiligheid
al lang zijn gestopt met het zetten van vraagtekens bij
beschuldigingen waarvoor zelfs na 2 jaar niet één steekhoudend
bewijs werd geleverd……..
Ondanks
mijn bedenkingen geeft het artikel van Johnstone een duidelijk
(sarcastisch en bij tijd en wijle humoristisch) beeld van waar het om
gaat als je spreekt over Russiagate en de verdere anti-Russische propaganda
in de reguliere media. Nogmaals wijst Johnstone (volkomen terecht) op de minimale bedragen waarmee Rusland zogenaamd de VS presidentsverkiezingen zou hebben beïnvloed, terwijl de bedragen waarmee deze verkiezingen wel worden beïnvloed, de ‘Russische bedragen voor eenzelfde invloed’ volkomen in de schaduw stellen…..
Om nog maar te zwijgen (niet dus) over het optreden van de Israëlische Palestijnenslachter en premier Netanyahu in de VS senaat, maanden voor de presidentsverkiezingen, waar deze massamoordenaar de democraten afmaakte en de republikeinen (onder Trump) voor Israël als enig aanvaardbare toekomstige regering afschilderde…… Geen hond in de reguliere (massa-) media die hier grote ophef over maakte, terwijl dit toch echt veel verder ging dan de leugens over het kwaadaardige sprookje dat men ‘Russiagate’ noemt…….
Mass
Media’s Russia Hysteria Is Openly Acknowledging the Power of
Propaganda
(CJ Opinion) — “So
now the question becomes: how did Russia know to target African
American voters, and especially in certain key states,” asked popular
#Resistance pundit Amy Siskind in response to a New
York Times article claiming
Russian social media trolls targeted Sanders supporters and Black
voters during the 2016 election.
“I
think we’ll get our answers in the coming months from the Mueller
probe,” Siskind speculated.
Well
that’s a mighty good question there, Amy, and I think the answer is
pretty obvious. Clearly Russia knew to target African American voters
because Donald Trump called his boss Vladimir Putin and told him
about America’s secret racial issues, which nobody in any foreign
country could ever know about on their own. Then it was a simple
matter of sending the trolls of St Petersburg’s Internet Research
Agency to trick black people into thinking that the American
political system hasn’t been working for them, thereby ensuring the
defeat of the rightful heir to the presidential throne, Hillary
Rodham Clinton. It’s not disenfranchised voters’ fault that
Hillary’s coronation failed to take place, it’s the fault of
Russian memes on social media which confused their silly heads about
who they wanted to vote for!
Or,
alternate theory: everything about that question is immensely stupid.
Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media
Two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee take a deeper look at the fake social media accounts used by Russia in the American election.
nytimes.com
This
whole story is unbelievably idiotic. Not just because it’s based on
a report by a private cybersecurity company that was founded
by an NSA veteran,
a company which would have every incentive to bend its findings in
the most sensational way possible to attract clients with a viral new
“bombshell” story about Russian election meddling. Not just
because it infantilizes voters by implying that a smattering of
cutesy memes deprived them of independent agency and caused the
failure of Hillary Clinton’s historically awful presidential
campaign. Not just because of the sleazy gaslighting element inherent
in a narrative which insinuates that a populace meant to elect a
different candidate but got confused. By far the dumbest thing about
this story is the implicit suggestion that only Russian propaganda
was at play during the 2016 election, and no other propaganda.
It’s
often claimed that the dastardly Russians had a $1.2 million monthly
budget for US social media influence in the lead-up to the 2016
election, but that’s false. As Aaron Maté noted
back in February,
this figure actually covers the Russian troll farm’s total
operating budget, which was for “domestic audiences within the
Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in various
countries, including the United States.” So the actual monthly
budget was some thousands of dollars, and most of the troll farm’s
posts weren’t
even about the election.
Contrast that with Hillary Clinton’s $1.2
billion campaign budget and
the untold billions of dollars worth of free mass media coverage she
received, and even if everything we’re being told about Russia’s
“influence campaign” is completely true, that’s a microscopic
drop in the bucket.
FiveThirtyEight
editor-in-chief Nate Silver, a fairly reliable establishment
loyalist, tweeted
today about
the new Russia report saying “If you wrote out a list of the most
important factors in the 2016 election, I’m not sure that Russian
social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite
small and there’s not much evidence that they were effective.”
“For
instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian
social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on… 5,000
tweets? That’s **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like
500,000,000 tweets posted each day,” Silver continued.
What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I’m not sure what the answer is, but suspect it’s low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.
For
all the fearmongering we see in the mass media about “Russian
propaganda”, propaganda from Russia actually constitutes an almost
nonexistent percentage of the media westerners consume which is
designed to influence the way they think, act and vote. You can go
your whole life without ever encountering any propaganda that was
cooked up by the Kremlin, yet every day you are surrounded
by screens,
billboards and literature aimed at manipulating you into supporting
the corporatist oligarchy that rules the nation you live in. The only
reason anyone thinks Russian psyops have any kind of meaningful
influence on people’s minds is because the mass media have been
shrieking about it day in and day out for two years without ever
contrasting it with the rest of the propaganda they consume.
But
within all the hysterical hand-wringing about Russian propaganda
there is an important admission: these mass media talking heads are
all openly acknowledging that there exists a science for manipulating
the minds of the public, and that it is very effective. Now if they
could only admit that they are the world’s greatest practitioners
of this science, they’d be telling the full story.
Of
course, that’s the part of the story they’ll never tell you. They
tell you their concern is that Russians are trying to manipulate your
mind with propaganda, but really their concern is that they want to
be the only ones manipulating your mind with propaganda. They tell
you Russian propaganda is so dangerous that it’s necessary to
censor the internet and hide all narratives which aren’t in line
with the ruling establishment in order to protect democracy, but
really all they want is to have full control of the narratives you
consume. This is evidenced in the
article by the Washington
Post which
kicked off this latest round of Russia panic, which reports the
following:
The
report expressed concern about the overall threat social media poses
to political discourse within nations and among them, warning that
companies once viewed as tools for liberation in the Arab world and
elsewhere are now threats to democracy.
“Social
media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing
collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a
computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political
consultants and available to politicians in democracies and
dictatorships alike,” the report said.
Of all the absolute mountains of propaganda produced every election cycle, we’re supposed to believe the minuscule fraction of Russian stuff (probably .000001% of total propaganda produced) was somehow decisive. No one has *ever* explained how that even remotely makes sense.
There
does indeed exist a science for manipulating the minds of the people.
It is indeed very effective, and it has been developed, refined and
perfected for
over a century.
Propaganda works, and even establishment mouthpieces like the New
York Times and
the Washington
Post admit
it.
Think
powerful people in your own country aren’t using it on you? Think
again.
‘Campagne Clinton, smeriger dan gedacht…………‘ (met daarin daarin opgenomen de volgende twee artikelen: ‘Donna Brazile Bombshell: ‘Proof’ Hillary ‘Rigged’ Primary Against Bernie‘ en ‘Democrats in Denial After Donna Brazile Says Primary Was Rigged for Hillary‘)
Alle
verhalen over Russische manipulatie van verkiezingen zijn leugens, zo
is intussen meer dan duidelijk geworden, echter de westerse (massa-)
media en het grootste deel van de westerse politiek blijven deze leugen
volhouden, immers als je een leugen dag in dag uit bij het publiek
door de strot duwt, blijft deze bij een groot deel hangen als was het
een waarheid als een koe…..
Professor Russische studies en politiek aan de Princeton
University en de New York University (NYU), Stephen Cohen ziet het anders, volgens hem is er een
kentering opgetreden en hij stelt daarbij dat juist door het hameren op die
leugens, het publiek het vertrouwen en geloof in integere politiek
verliest…. Ofwel de democratie zelf wordt aangetast met deze leugens en zoals in de
kop gesteld het ondermijnt de democratie…….
Cohen
bedoelt niet dat het (grootste deel van het) publiek doorheeft dat er
wordt gelogen, echter de verhalen over de Russische bemoeienis richt
bij dat publiek grote schade aan in het vertrouwen in de politiek….
Dit daar men zal denken dat zelfs al ‘één door de Russen gemanipuleerde of gestoken verkiezing’ zal leiden tot meer, ofwel ‘men heeft het manipuleren van de presidentsverkiezingen in 2016 niet
kunnen voorkomen’, waarom dan nu wel??
Het is al zo zot in de VS dat men het ontbreken van bewijzen voor Russische bemoeienis, wordt gezien als een bewijs voor de manipulatie die Trump in 2016 het presidentschap in de schoot heeft geworpen….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Jammer
dat Cohen niets zegt over de politiek en het gehalte aan democratie
in de VS*, immers als je niet van het christelijk
geloof bent, of je hebt niet de grote bedrijven met kapitalen achter
je staan, kan je het als kandidaat in deze immer weer gekochte
verkiezingen wel vergeten, om over alle leugens waarmee men elkaar
bestookt voorafgaand aan de verkiezingen nog maar te zwijgen, waar
men ook mensen inzet om het publiek via de sociale media (en
uiteraard via de reguliere media) te bestoken met leugens en
achterklap……… (en dan nog durven lullen over Russische inmenging……)
Ik
moet zeggen dat ik het niet met Cohen eens ben, waar hij een intellectueel uit Moskou citeert dat Russisch autoritarisme** niet door
de politiek wordt bepaald, maar door de genen (van het Russische volk)…. Je reinste kul,
hetzelfde soort gelul als het verhaal dat alle Nederlanders op klompen
lopen….. Democratie moet groeien, niet alleen in de politiek, maar
ook in het individu en gezien er van democratie nog maar kort sprake is in
Rusland (en deze als de democratie in de VS bepaald niet volmaakt is), kan je niet
stellen dat mensen niet open zouden staan voor democratie.
Het
lullige is wel dat de Russen een hoop rottigheid zien in westerse
‘democratische landen’, dit doet de lust voor democratie op z’n zachtst gezegd
geen goed…… (zie bijvoorbeeld hoe men in EU landen als
Nederland met referenda is omgesprongen…..) Waar de macht van bedrijven, geheime diensten en terreurorganisaties als de NAVO over de westerse ‘democratieën’ niet vergeten moet worden…..
Het volgende artikel van Cohen komt van The Nation (je kan daar ook 2 video’s bekijken, die ik niet kan overnemen):
Who’s
Really ‘Undermining’ American Democracy?
Allegations
that Russia is still “attacking” US elections, now again in
November, could delegitimize our democratic institutions.
Stephen
F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU
and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly
discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments,
now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)
Summarizing
one of the themes in his new
book, War
with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate,
Cohen argues that Russiagate allegations of Kremlin attempts to
“undermine American democracy” may themselves erode confidence in
those institutions.
Ever
since Russiagate allegations began to appear more than two years ago,
their core narrative has revolved around purported Kremlin attempts
to “interfere” in the 2016 US presidential election on behalf of
then-candidate Donald Trump. In recent months, a number of leading
American media outlets have taken that argument even further,
suggesting that Putin’s Kremlin actually put Trump in the White
House and now is similarly trying to affect the November 6 midterm
elections, particularly House contests, on behalf of Trump and the
Republican Party. According to a page-one New
York Times “report,” for
example, Putin’s agents “are engaging in an elaborate campaign of
‘information warfare’ to interfere with the American midterm
elections.”
Despite
well-documented articles by Gareth
Porter and Aaron
Maté effectively
dismantling these allegations about 2016 and 2018, the mainstream
media continue to promote them. The occasionally acknowledged lack of
“public evidence” is sometimes cited as itself evidence of a deep
Russian conspiracy, of the Kremlin’s “arsenal of disruption
capabilities…to sow havoc on election day.” (See the
examples cited
by Alan MacLeod at
FAIR.org.)
Lost
in these reckless allegations is the long-term damage they may
themselves do to American democracy. Consider the following
possibilities.
Even
though still unproven, charges that the Kremlin put Trump in the
White House have cast a large shadow of illegitimacy over his
presidency and thus over the institution of the presidency itself.
This is unlikely to end entirely with Trump. If the Kremlin had the
power to affect the outcome of one presidential election, why not
another one, whether won by a Republican or a Democrat? The 2016
presidential election was the first time such an allegation became
widespread in American political history, but it may not be the last.
Now
the same shadow looms over the November 6 elections and thus over the
next Congress. If so, in barely two years, the legitimacy of two
fundamental institutions of American representative democracy will
have been challenged, also for the first time in history.
And
if US elections are really so vulnerable to Russian “meddling,”
what does this say about faith in American elections more generally?
How many losing candidates on November 6 will resist blaming the
Kremlin? Two years after the last presidential election, Hillary
Clinton and her adamant supporters still have not been able to do so.
We
know from critical reporting and from recent opinion surveys that the
origins and continuing fixation on the Russiagate scandal since 2016
have been primarily a product of US political-intelligence-media
elites. It did not spring from the American people—from voters
themselves. Thus a Gallup poll recently showed that 57 percent of
those surveyed wanted improved relations with Russia. And other
surveys have shown that Russiagate is scarcely an issue at all for
likely voters on November 6. Nonetheless, it remains a front-page
issue for US elites.
Indeed,
Russiagate has revealed the
low esteem that many US political-media elites have for American
voters—for
their ability to make discerning, rational electoral decisions, which
is the bedrock assumption of representative democracy. It is worth
noting that this disdain for rank-and-file citizens echoes a
longstanding attitude of the Russian political intelligentsia, as
recently expressed in the argument by a prominent Moscow policy
intellectual that Russian authoritarianism springs not from the
nation’s elites but from the “genetic
code” of its people.
US
elites seem to have a similar skepticism about—or contempt
for—American voters’ capacity to make discerning electoral
choices. Presumably this is a factor behind the current proliferation
of programs—official, corporate, and private—to introduce
elements of censorship in the nation’s “media space” in order
to filter out “Kremlin propaganda.” Here, it also seems, elites
will decide what constitutes such “propaganda.”
===========================
* Althans Cohen gaat er in dit artikel niet op in, al heeft hij het boek ‘War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate’, over dit onderwerp geschreven, wellicht dat hij daarin wel ingaat op die kant van het verhaal.
** Autoritarisme is een politiek systeem dat gekenmerkt wordt door de volgende elementen: Er is geen machtsdeling: de leider of de leidende groep verenigt alle machten in één hand. Er is geen scheiding van de wetgevende, uitvoerende en rechterlijke machten, overeenkomstig het beginsel van de “Trias politica” (Wikipedia). Alsof je het over de VS hebt…..
‘Campagne Clinton, smeriger dan gedacht…………‘ (met daarin daarin opgenomen de volgende artikelen: ‘Donna Brazile Bombshell: ‘Proof’ Hillary ‘Rigged’ Primary Against Bernie‘ en ‘Democrats in Denial After Donna Brazile Says Primary Was Rigged for Hillary‘)
Professor
Stephen Cohen prikt in een interview dat Aaron Mate afnam, fijntjes door de
Putin – Trump hysterie heen, de hysterie die in de VS ontstond na het gesprek dat
Putin en Trump voerden in de Finse hoofdstad Helsinki. Men raakt er
in de VS weer niet over uitgesproken, al heeft dat alles met de reguliere, over het algemeen rechtse neoliberale pers in de VS te maken,
uiteraard aangevuld met de democratische en republikeinse politici
die openlijk lobbyen voor het militair-industrieel complex……….
Vanaf
het eind van de Sovjet-Unie tot de ontmoeting van Trump en Putin, zet
Cohen duidelijk uiteen hoe we zijn voorgelogen, bijvoorbeeld over ‘de
oorlog van Rusland tegen Georgië’, via Oekraïne, De Krim tot
Syrië…..
Voorts
moet ik Cohen gelijk geven als hij stelt dat we nu blij mogen zijn met
Trump als president, daar hij niet meegaat in de oorlogshitserij die
zoveel VS politici in hun greep houdt. Zoals op deze plek al eerder gesteld,
wat is erop tegen dat men met elkaar spreekt en probeert oorlog te
voorkomen??? Oké Trump is een beest, maar liever een beest dat niet aanvalt dan bijvoorbeeld Obama die 2 volledige termijnen in illegale oorlogsvoering was verwikkeld, zelfs 2 illegale oorlogen extra begon en veel meer bommen liet afwerpen dan Bush in 2 termijnen…….
Cohen stelt voorts terecht dat het onder eerdere
presidenten de normaalste zaak van de wereld was om te spreken met
de Russische collega’s, terwijl dat nu als verraad wordt
neergezet, alleen om Trump af te kunnen zetten en ongebreideld oorlog te kunnen voeren, zoals de VS gewend is te doen…….
Cohen gaat ook in op de beschuldiging dat Putin journalisten laat vermoorden, terwijl daar geen bewijs voor wordt geleverd, sterker nog: Cohen stelt dat deze moorden alles te maken hebben met de georganiseerde misdaad in Rusland……
Lezen mensen en geeft het door, de hoogste tijd dat we met z’n allen weer ons gezonde verstand gebruiken en ons niet langer laten voorliegen en gek laten maken door de reguliere media en het grootste deel van de politici in ons land!
Video:
Debunking the Putin Panic With Professor Stephen Cohen
(RN) — President
Trump’s warm words for Vladimir Putin and his failure to endorse
U.S. intelligence community claims about alleged Russian meddling
have been called “treasonous” and the cause of a “national
security crisis.” There
is a crisis, says Prof. Stephen F. Cohen, but one of our own making…
Part
1:
AARON
MATE: It’s
The Real News. I’m Aaron Mate.
The
White House is walking back another statement from President Trump
about Russia and U.S. intelligence. It began in Helsinki on Monday,
when at his press conference with Vladimir Putin, Trump did not
endorse the claim that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. After an
outcry that played out mostly on cable news, Trump appeared to
retract that view one day later. But then on Wednesday, Trump was
asked if he believes Russia is now targeting the U.S. ahead of the
midterms.
DONALD
TRUMP: [Thank]
you all very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.
REPORTER: Is
Russia still targeting the U.S. [inaudible]. No, you don’t believe
that to be the case?
DONALD
TRUMP: Thank
you very much, everyone. We’re doing very well. We are doing very
well, and we’re doing very well, probably as well as anybody has
ever done with Russia. And there’s been no president ever as tough
as I have been on Russia. All you have to do is look at the numbers,
look at what we’ve done, look at sanctions, look at ambassadors.
Not there. Look, unfortunately, at what happened in Syria recently. I
think President Putin knows that better than anybody. Certainly a lot
better than the media.
AARON
MATE: The
White House later claimed that when Trump said ‘no,’ he meant no
to answering questions. But Trump’s contradiction of U.S.
intelligence claims has brought the Russiagate story, one that has
engulfed his presidency, to a fever pitch. Prominent U.S. figures
have called Trump’s comments in Helsinki treasonous, and compared
alleged Russian e-mail hacking and social media activity to 9/11 and
Pearl Harbor. Those who also question intelligence claims or
warmongering with Russia have been dubbed traitors, or Kremlin
agents.
Speaking
to MSNBC, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul
declared that with Trump’s comments, the U.S. is in the midst of a
national security crisis.
MICHAEL
MCFAUL: Republicans
need to step up. They need to speak out, not just the familiar
voices, because this is a national security crisis, and the president
of the United States flew all the way to Finland, met with Vladimir
Putin, and basically capitulated. It felt like appeasement.
AARON
MATE: Well,
joining me to address this so-called national security crisis is
Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus at New York University and
Princeton University. His books include “Failed Crusade: America
and the Tragedy of Post-Soviet Russia,” and “Soviet Fates and
Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.” Professor
Cohen, welcome. I imagine that you might agree with the view that we
are in the midst of a national security crisis when it comes to
Russia, but for far different reasons than those expounded on by
Ambassador McFaul.
STEPHEN
COHEN: There is a national security crisis, and there is a
Russian threat. And we, we ourselves here in the United States, have
created both of them. This has been true for years, and now it’s
reached crisis proportion. Notice what’s going on. A mainstream TV
reporter shouts to President Trump, “Are the Russians still
targeting our elections?” This is in the category “Are you still
beating your wife?” There is no proof that the Russians have
targeted or attacked our elections. But it’s become axiomatic. What
kind of media is that, are the Russians still, still attacking our
elections.
And
what Michael McFaul, whom I’ve known for years, formerly Ambassador
McFaul, purportedly a scholar and sometimes a scholar said, it is
simply the kind of thing, to be as kind as I can, that I heard from
the John Birch Society about President Eisenhower when he went to
meet Khrushchev when I was a kid growing up in Kentucky. This is
fringe discourse that never came anywhere near the mainstream before,
at least after Joseph McCarthy, that the president went, committed
treason, and betrayed the country. Trump
may have not done the right thing at the summit, because agreements
were reached. Nobody discusses the agreements. But to stage a
kangaroo trial of the president of the United States in the
mainstream media, and have plenty of once-dignified people come on
and deliver the indictment, is without precedent in this country.
And it has created a national crisis in our relations with Russia. So
yes, there’s a national crisis.
AARON
MATE: Let
me play for you a clip from Trump’s news conference with Putin that
also drew outrage back in the U.S. When he was asked about the state
of U.S.-Russia relations, he said both sides had responsibility.
DONALD
TRUMP: Yes,
I do. I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United
States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should
have had this dialogue a long time ago. A long time, frankly, before
I got to office. And I think we’re all to blame. I think that the
United States now has stepped forward, along with Russia, and we’re
getting together, and we have a chance to do some great things.
Whether it’s nuclear proliferation, in terms of stopping, because
we have to do it. Ultimately that’s probably the most important
thing that we can be working on.
AARON
MATE: That’s
President Trump in Helsinki. Professor Cohen, I imagine that this
comment probably was part of the reason why there was so much
outrage, not Just of what Trump said about the claims of Russian
meddling in the election. Can you talk about the significance of what
he said here, and how it contradicts the, the entire consensus of the
bipartisan foreign policy establishment?
STEPHEN
COHEN: I
did not vote for President Trump. But for that I salute him, what he
just said. So far as I can remember, no wiser words or more important
words have been spoken by the American president about Russia and the
Soviet Union since Ronald Reagan did his great detente with Mikhail
Gorbachev in the late 1980s. What
Trump just did, and I don’t- we never know, Aaron, how aware he is
of the ramifications of what he says. But in this case, whether he
fully understood it or not, he just broke with, and the first time
any major political figure in the United States has broken with the
orthodoxy, ever since at least 2000. And
even going back to the ’90s. That all the conflicts we’ve had
with post-Soviet Russia, after communism went away in Russia, all
those conflicts, which I call a new and more dangerous Cold War, are
solely, completely, the fault of Putin or Putin’s Russia.That
nothing in American policy since Bill Clinton in the 1990s did
anything to contribute seriously to the very dangerous conflict,
confrontation we have with Russia today. It was all Russia’s fault.
What
that has meant, and you know this, Aaron, because you live in this
world as well,it
has meant no media or public dialogue about the merits of American
policy toward post-Soviet Russia from Clinton, certainly through
Obama. It
may be changing now under President Trump. Not sure. It means if we
don’t have a debate, we’re not permitted to ask, did we do
something wrong, or so unwise that it led to this even more dangerous
Cold War? And
if the debate leads to a conclusion that we did do something unwise,
and that we’re still doing it, then arises the pressure and the
imperative for any new policy toward Russia. None of that has been
permitted, because the orthodoxy, the dogma, the axiom, is Putin
alone has solely been responsible.
So
you know, you know as well as I do what is excluded. It doesn’t
matter that we moved NATO to Russia’s borders, that’s not
significant. Or that we bombed Serbia, Russia’s traditional ally.
Or that George Bush left the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which was
the bedrock of Russian nuclear security and, I would argue, our own.
Or that we did regime change by military might in Iraq and Libya, and
many other things. Or that we provoked the Ukrainian crisis in 2004,
and supported the coup that overthrew a legitimate, elected,
constitutional president there. None of that matters. Oh, it was kind
of footnotes to the real narrative. And the narrative is, is that a
Russian leader Vladimir Putin in power was a horrible aggressor.
Killed everybody, somehow, with secret poisons or thieves in the
night who opposed him. And began this new cold or even worse war with
the United States.
No
historian of any merit will ever write the story that way. It’s
factually, analytically, simply untrue. Now Trump has said something
radically different. We got here in these dire circumstances because
both sides acted unwisely, and we should have had this discussion a
long time ago.
So for that, two cheers for President Trump. But whether he can
inspire the discussion that he may wish to, considering the fact that
he’s now being indicted as a criminal for having met Putin, is a
big question.
AARON
MATE: So
a few questions. You mentioned that some agreements were made, but
details on that have been vague. So do you have any sense of what
concretely came out of this summit? There was talk about cooperation
on nuclear weapons, possibly renewing the New START Treaty. We know
that Putin offered that to Trump when he first came into office, but
Trump rejected it. There was talk about cooperating in Syria. And,
well, yeah, if I can put that question to you first, and then I have
a follow-up about what might be motivating Trump here. But first,
what do you think concretely came out of this?
STEPHEN
COHEN: Well,
look, I know a lot, both as a historian, and I’ve actually
participated in some about the history of American-Russian,
previously Soviet, summits. Which, by the way, this is the 75th
anniversary of the very first one, when Franklin Roosevelt traveled
to Tehran to meet Stalin. And
every president, and this is important to emphasize, every president
since
Roosevelt
has met with the Kremlin leader. Some many times, or several times.
So there’s a long tradition. And therefore there are customs. And
one custom, this goes to your question, is that never, except maybe
very rarely, but almost never do we learn the full extent and nature
of what agreements were made. That
usually comes in a week or two or three later, because there’s
still the teams of both are hammering out the details.
So
that’s exactly what happened at this summit. There was no
conspiracy. No, you know, appeasement behind closed doors. The two
leaders announced in general terms what they agreed upon. Now,
the most important, and this is traditional, too, by meeting they
intended to revive the diplomatic process between the United States
and Russia which has been badly tattered by events including the
exclusion of diplomats, and sanctions, and the rest. So to get
active, vigorous diplomacy about many issues going. They
may not achieve that goal, because the American media and the
political mainstream is trying to stop that. Remember that anything
approaching diplomatic negotiations with Russia still less detente,
is now being criminalized in the United States. Criminalized. What
was once an honorable tradition, the pursuit of detente, is now a
capital crime, if we believe these charges against Trump.
So
they tried to revive that process, and we’ll see if it’s going to
be possible. I think at least behind the scenes it will be. Obviously
what you mentioned, both sides now have new, more elusive, more
lethal, faster, more precise nuclear weapons. We’ve been developing
them for a long time in conjunction with missile defense. We’ve
essentially been saying to Russia, you may have equality in nuclear
weapons with us, but we have missile defense. Therefore, we could use
missile defense to take out your retaliatory capacity. That is, we
could stage the first strike on you and you would not be able to
retaliate.
Now,
everybody who’s lived through the nuclear era knows that’s an
invitation to disaster. Because like it or not, we’ve lived with a
doctrine called MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, that one side dare
not attack the other with a nuclear weapon because it would be
destroyed as well. We were saying we now have this primacy. Putin,
then, on March 1 of this year, announced that they have developed
weapons that can elude missile defense. And it seems to be true. In
the air and at sea, their dodgy, darty, quick thing- but they could
avoid our missile defense. So where we are at now is on the cusp of a
new nuclear arms race involving more dangerous nuclear weapons. And
the current START, New START Treaty will expire, I think, in three or
four years. But its expiration date is less important that the
process of talking and negotiating and worrying officially about
these new weapons had ended.
So
essentially what Trump and Putin agreed is that process of concern
about new and more dangerous nuclear weapons must now resume
immediately. And if there’s anybody living in the United States who
think that that is a bad idea they need to reconsider their life,
because they may be looking into the darkness of death. So
that was excellent. Briefly.
What
I hope they did- they didn’t announce it, but I’m pretty sure
they did- that there had been very close calls between American and
Russian combat forces and their proxies in Syria. We’re doing a
proxy war, but there are plenty of native Russians and Americans in
Syria in a relatively small combat cell. And there have been
casualties. The Russians have said at the highest level the next time
a Russian is killed in Syria by an American-based weapon, we will
strike the American launcher. If Russia strikes our launching pads or
areas, whether on land or sea, which means Americans will be there
and are killed, call it war. Call it war.
So
we need to agree in Syria to do more than, what do they call it,
deconfliction, where we have all these warnings. It’s
still too much space for mishap. And what I hope it think Trump and
Putin did was to try to get a grip on this.
AARON
MATE: Stephen
F. Cohen, professor emeritus at at Princeton University and New York
University, thank you. And stay tuned for part two. I’m Aaron Mate
for The Real News.
*
* *
There
is much to criticize the Russian president for, says Professor
Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and NYU, but
many US political and media claims about Putin are false – and
reckless…
Part
2:
AARON
MATE: It’s
The Real News. I’m Aaron Mate. This is part two with Stephen Cohen,
professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and
Princeton. In part one we talked about the uproar over the
Trump-Putin summit, and Trump’s comments about the U.S.
intelligence community and about cooperation with Russia. Now
in part two we’re going to get to some of the main talking points
that have been pervasive throughout corporate media, talking about
the stated reasons for why pundits and politicians say they are
opposed to Trump sitting down with Putin.
So
let me start with Jon Meacham. He is a historian. And speaking to
CNN, he worried that Trump, with his comments about NATO calling on
the alliance to pay more, and calling into question, he worried about
the possibility that Trump won’t come to the aid of Baltic states
in the event that Russia invades.
JON
MEACHAM: And
what worries me most is the known unknown, as Donald Rumsfeld might
put it, of what happens next. Let’s say Putin- just look at this
whole week of the last five, six days in total. What happens if Putin
launches military action against, say, the Baltics? What, what is it
that President Trump, what about his comments that NATO suggest thar
he would follow an invocation of Article 5 and actually project
American force in defense of the values that not only do we have an
intellectual and moral assent to, but a contractual one, a treaty
one. I think that’s the great question going forward.
AARON
MATE: OK.
So that’s Jon Meacham speaking to CNN. So, Professor Cohen, putting
aside what he said there about our intellectual values and strong
tradition, just on the issue of Trump, of Putin posing a potential
threat and possibly invading the Baltics, is that a realistic
possibility?
STEPHEN
COHEN: So,
I’m not sure what you’re asking me about. The folly of NATO
expansion? The fact that every president in my memory has asked the
Europeans to pay more? But can we be real? Can we be real? The only
country that’s attacked that region of Europe militarily since the
end of the Soviet Union was the United States of America. As I
recall, we bombed Serbia, a, I say this so people understand, a
traditional Christian country, under Bill Clinton, bombed Serbia for
about 80 days. There is no evidence that Russia has ever bombed a
European country.
You
tell me, Aaron. You must be a smart guy, because you got your own
television show. Why
would Putin want to launch a military attack and occupy the Baltics?
So he has to pay the pensions there? Which he’s having a hard time
already paying in Russia, and therefore has had to raise the pension
age, and thereby lost 10 percentage points of popularity in two
weeks? Why
in the world can we, can we simply become rational people. Why in the
world would Russia want to attack and occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and
Estonia? The only reason I can think of is that many, many of my
friends love to take their summer vacations there. And maybe some
crazy person thinks that if we occupy it, vacations will be cheaper.
It’s crazy. It’s beyond crazy. It’s a kind-.
AARON
MATE: Professor
Cohen, if you were on CNN right now I imagine that the anchor would
say to you, well, okay, but one could say the same thing about
Georgia in 2008. Why did Russia attack Georgia then?
STEPHEN
COHEN: I’m not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The
European Commission, if you’re talking about the 2008 war, the
European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia,
which was backed by the United States, fighting with an
American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly
unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that
he began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin,
which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and
Obama’s best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry
Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country
would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border
through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what
essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.
So
that- Russia didn’t begin that war. And
it didn’t begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by
[continents], the overthrow of the Ukrainian president in [20]14
after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to
happen. And I think it happened within 36 hours. The
Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and
betrayed. They use this word, predatl’stvo, betrayal, about
American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when
it wasn’t just President George Bush, all the documents have been
published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the
leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union that
under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be
NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two inches to
the east.
Now
NATO is sitting on Russia’s borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So
Russians aren’t fools, and they’re good-hearted, but they become
resentful. They’re worried about being attacked by the United
States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily, we are
under attack by the United States. And
this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being
put out that Russia somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been
sleeping. I didn’t see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is
reckless, dangerous, warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has
a better case for saying they’ve been attacked by us since 1991. We
put our military alliance on the front door. Maybe it’s not an
attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.
AARON
MATE: OK.
And in a moment I want to speak to you more about Ukraine, because
we’ve heard Crimea invoked a lot in the criticism of Putin of late.
But first I want to actually to ask you about a domestic issue. This
one is it’s widely held that Putin is responsible for the killing
of journalists and opposition activists who oppose him. And on this
front I want to play for you a clip of Joe Cirincione. He is the head
of the Ploughshares Fund. And this is what he said this week in an
appearance on Democracy Now!.
JOE
CIRINCIONE: Both
of these men are dangerous. Both of these men oppress basic human
rights, basic freedoms. Both of them think the press are the enemy of
the people. Putin goes further. He kills journalists. He has them
assassinated on the streets of Moscow.
Donald
Trump does not go that far yet. But I think what Putin is doing is
using the president of the United States to project his rule, to
increase his power, to carry out his agenda in Syria, with Europe, et
cetera, and that Trump is acquiescing to that for reasons that are
not yet clear.
AARON
MATE: That’s
Joe Cirincione.
STEPHEN
COHEN: I
know him well. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that.
AARON
MATE: Well
Yes. There’s two issues here, Professor Cohen. One is the state of
the crackdown on press freedoms in Russia, which I’m sure you would
say is very much alive, and is a strong part of the Russian system.
But let’s first address this widely-held view that Putin is
responsible for killing journalists who are critical of him.
STEPHEN
COHEN: I
know I’m supposed to follow your lead, but I think you’re
skipping over a major point. How
is it that Joe, who was once one of our most eminent and influential,
eloquent opponents of nuclear arms race, who was prepared to have the
president of the United States negotiate with every Soviet communist
leader, including those who had a lot of blood on their hands, now
decide that Putin kills everybody and he’s not a worthy partner?
What happened to Joe?
I’ll
tell you what happened to him. Trump. Trump has driven once-sensible
people completely crazy. Moreover, Joe knows absolutely nothing about
internal Russian politics, and
he ought to follow my rule. When I don’t know something about
something, I say I don’t know. But what he just said is ludicrous.
And the sad part is-.
AARON
MATE: But
it’s widely held. If it’s ludicrous-. But widely held, yeah.
STEPHEN
COHEN: Well,
the point is that once
distinguished and important spokespeople for rightful causes, like
ending a nuclear arms race, have been degraded, or degraded
themselves by saying things like he said to the point that they’re
of utility today only to the proponents of a new nuclear arms race.
And he’s not alone. Somebody called it Trump derangement
syndrome. I’m
not a psychiatrist, but it’s a widespread mania across our land.
And when good people succumb to it, we are all endangered.
AARON
MATE: But
many people would be surprised to hear that, because again, the
stories that we get, and there are human rights reports, and it’s
just sort of taken as a given fact that Putin is responsible for
killing journalists. So if that’s ludicrous, if you can explain why
you think that is.
STEPHEN
COHEN: Well, I
got this big problem which seems to afflict very few people in public
life anymore. I live by facts. I’m
like my doctor, who told me not long ago I had to have minor surgery
for a problem I didn’t even know I had. And I said, I’m not going
to do it. Show me the facts. And he did. I had the minor
surgery. Journalists
no longer seem to care about facts. They repeat tabloid rumors. Putin
kills everybody.
All
I can tell you is this. I
have never seen any evidence whatsoever, and I’ve been- I knew some
of the people who were killed. Anna
Politkovskaya, the famous journalist for Novaya Gazeta was the first,
I think, who was- Putin was accused of killing. I knew her well. She
was right here, in this apartment. Look behind me, right here. She
was here with my wife, Katrina vanden Huevel. I wouldn’t say we
were close friends, but we were associates in Moscow, and we were
social friends. And
I mourn her assassination today. But I will tell you this, that
neither her editors at that newspaper, nor her family, her surviving
sons, think Putin had anything to do with the killing. No
evidence has ever been presented. Only media kangaroo courts that
Putin was involved in these high-profile assassinations, two of the
most famous being this guy Litvinenko by polonium in London, about
the time Anna was killed, and more recently Boris Netsov, whom, it’s
always said, was walking within view of the Kremlin when he was shot.
Well, you could see the Kremlin from miles away. I don’t know what
within the view- unless they think Putin was, you know, watching it
through binoculars. There is no evidence that Putin ever ordered the
killing of anybody outside his capacity as commander in chief. No
evidence.
Now,
did he? But we live, Aaron, and I hope the folks who watch us
remember this. Every professional person, every decent person lives
or malpractices based on verified facts. You go down the wrong way on
a one-way street, you might get killed. You take some medication
that’s not prescribed for you, you might die. You pursue foreign
policies based on fiction, you’re likely to get in war. And
all these journalists, from the New York Times to the Washington
Post, from MSNBC to CNN who churn out daily these allegations that
Putin kills people are disgracing themselves. I
will give you one fact. Wait. One fact, and you could look it up, as
Casey Stengel used to say. He was a baseball manager, in case you
don’t know.
There’s
an organization called the Committee to Protect American Journalists.
It’s kind of iconic. It does good things, it says unwise things. Go
on its website and look at the number of Russian journalists killed
since 1991, since the end of the Soviet Union, under two leaders.
Boris Yeltsin, whom we dearly loved and still mourn, and Putin, whom
we hate.Last
time I looked, the numbers may have changed, more were killed under
Yeltsin than under Putin. Did Putin kill those in the 1990s?
So
you should ask me, why did they die, then? And
I can tell you the main reason. Corrupt business. Mafia-like business
in Russia. Just like happened in the United States during our
primitive accumulation days. Profit
seekers killed rivals. Killed them dead in the streets. Killed them
as demonstrations, as demonstrative acts. The only thing you could
say about Putin is that he might have created an atmosphere that
abets that sort of thing. To which I would say, maybe, but originally
it was created with the oligarchical class under Boris Yeltsin, who
remains for us the most beloved Russian leader in history. So that’s
the long and the short of it. Go look at the listing on the Committee
to Protect Journalists.
AARON
MATE: OK.
So, following up on that, to what extent- and this gets a bit into
history, which you’ve covered extensively in your writings. To what
extent are we here in the West responsible for the creation of that
Russian oligarchal class that you mentioned? But also, what is
Putin’s relationship to it now, today? Does he abet it? Is he
entrenched in it? We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the
richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement with the
very corruption of Russia you’re speaking about. So both our role
in creating that problem in Russia, but then also Putin’s role now
in terms of his relationship to it.
STEPHEN
COHEN: I’m
going to give you a quick, truncated, scholarly, historical
perspective on this. But this is what people should begin with when
they think about Vladimir Putin and his 18 years in power. Putin came
to power almost accidentally in 2000. He inherited a country whose
state had collapsed twice in the 20th century. You’ve got to think
about that. How
many states have collapsed that you know of once? But the Russian
state, Russian statehood, had collapsed once in 1917 during the
revolution, and again in 1991 when the Soviet Union ended. The
country was in ruination; 75 percent of the people were in poverty.
Putin
said- and this obsesses him. If you want to know what obsesses Putin,
it’s the word ‘sovereignty.’ Russia lost its sovereignty-
political, foreign policy, security, financial- in the 1990s. Putin
saw his mission, as I read him, and I try to read him as a
biographer. He says a lot, to regain Russia’s sovereignty, which
meant to make the country whole again at home, to rescue its people,
and to protect its defenses. That’s been his mission. Has it been
more than that? Maybe. But everything he’s done, as I see it, has
followed that concept of his role in history. And he’s done pretty
well.
Now,
I can give you all Putin’s minuses very easily. I would not care
for him to be my president. But let me tell you one other thing
that’s important. You evaluate nations within their own history,
not within ours. If
you asked me if Putin is a democrat, and I will answer you two ways.
He thinks he has. And compared to what? Compared to the leader of
Egypt? Yeah, he is a democrat. Compared to the rulers of our pals in
the Gulf states, he is a democrat. Compared to Bill Clinton? No, he’s
not a Democrat. I mean, Russia-. Countries are on their own
historical clock. And you have to judge Putin in terms of his
predecessors. So people think Putin is a horrible leader. Did you
prefer Brezhnev? Did you prefer Stalin? Did you prefer Andropov?
Compared to what? Please tell me, compared to what.
And
by the way, that’s how that’s how Russians-. You want to know why
he’s so popular in Russia? Because Russians judge him in the
context of their own what they call zhivaya istoriya, living history;
what we call autobiography. In
terms of their own lives, he looks pretty darn good. They complain
out him. We sit in the kitchen and they bitch about Putin all the
time. But they don’t want him to go away.
AARON
MATE: All
right. Well, on that front, we’re going to wrap this up there.
Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York
University and Princeton. His books include “Failed Crusade:
America and the Tragedy of Post-Soviet Russia,” and “Soviet Fates
and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.”
Professor Cohen, thank you.
STEPHEN
COHEN: You
forgot one book.
AARON
MATE: I
did not say I was reading your, your complete bibliography.
STEPHEN
COHEN: It’s
called-. It’s called “Confessions of a Holy Fool.”
AARON
MATE: Is
that true? Or are you making a joke.
STEPHEN
COHEN: Somewhere
in between. [Thank you, Aaron.]
AARON
MATE: Professor
Cohen, thank you. And thank you for joining us on The Real News.
