"the memo"

Some Matt Taibbi. Just for the heck of it 🙂

This is an excerpt from Jonathan Cook’s facebook, and it sums up my own big complaint about ‘russia-gate’. Its not that i think ‘russia’ didnt/hasnt tried to influence amerikan ‘elections’. As Noam matter-of-factly said a long time ago, “I’d be surprised if they didnt.”

To me though, thats the small story. The big story (to me) is how the deep-state/corporate-media/Dem-Party is USING the story to shut down LEFT wing dissent. They are using russia-gate to kill whats left of the left on the Internet.

THAT to me is the story. Not that Putin wanted Trump over Hillary or that Putin interfered in some way with the phony amerikan elections.

Here’s the excerpt. Fwiw.

“This piece by Prof Cas Mudde on the supposed “fake news” problem is the best I have come across in the corporate media. I agree with all the points the author makes. But he neglects to mention two vitally important additional concerns.

1. The moral panic about “fake news” is far more cynical than he suggests (and would be allowed to suggest in a corporate media outlet like the Guardian). It is at worst being engineered, at best being exploited, by the corporate media to maintain their own dominant, fake news narrative – a narrative that keeps voters uninformed and docile in the face of the corporations’ ever-more entrenched hold on power in supposedly democratic western states.

2. The problem of “fake news” in social media (as opposed to the corporate media) is, as the author suggests, predominantly a feature of far-right sites. But the hysteria about “fake news” is being chiefly weaponised to damage leftwing and dissident sites, not far-right ones. That is why western political and media elites are so ready to conflate “fake news” with Kremlin-bots and Russiagate. This is about manufacturing a consensus that the progressive left in the west is a modern incarnation of the “fellow traveller” and the “Red under the bed” – a scare story so that the coming crackdown on “fake news” can be used to silence us.”
—————-

So if you agree that Cook is right on those two points, one question would be, “Ok, how SHOULD the media cover russia-gate so that the facts can be laid-out and light can be shown on the issue?”

My own answer is, it can…not..be…done….unless the issue is put in a broader historical context. IE, How is corporate-news any different than ‘fake news’ and what other forces (beside russia) influence american ‘elections’ and how often and when and where have other nations influenced American elections, and how often and when and where has the US government influenced other elections….etc.

Without that context the issue just becomes propaganda imho. Propaganda to further the notion of american exceptionalism and to shut down leftwing-dissent.

w
v

wv wrote:

So if you agree that Cook is right on those two points, one question would be, “Ok, how SHOULD the media cover russia-gate so that the facts can be laid-out and light can be shown on the issue?”

My own answer is, it can…not..be…done….unless the issue is put in a broader historical context. IE, How is corporate-news any different than ‘fake news’ and what other forces (beside russia) influence american ‘elections’ and how often and when and where have other nations influenced American elections, and how often and when and where has the US government influenced other elections….etc.

Without that context the issue just becomes propaganda imho. Propaganda to further the notion of american exceptionalism and to shut down leftwing-dissent.

w
v

Thing is, “context” stretches in all directions. For example, if we say we have to talk about American imperialism before we talk about Russian interference, then we have to also talk about Russian imperialism, and the roots of that. One of the aspects of “context” that is often overlooked, for example, especially on studies on colonialism is this:

Russia is the biggest colonial power in the world right now, but it doesn’t look like it, because they decided (mostly) to invade, conquer, crush and rule tribal lands close to the “original” central land mass of Russia proper. They did this for centuries, and it was beyond brutal. They had slavery and serfs and ethnic cleansing, and were always trying to expand, especially under the Romanovs, but during the Soviet era too. All told, they did what we did, when we created our empire in North America, but they covered a hell of a lot more land and crushed even more peoples than we did along the way.

So, a real discussion of “context” would have to include American, European, Russian, Middle Eastern and Asian imperialism, its effects, its atrocities, etc. It would be absurd to limit it to America. And, in my view, on balance, it would still come back to this:

We have a duty to prevent Russian interference in our elections, in our social media, etc. We have a duty to prevent its attempts to create strife, regardless of our history of imperialism, wars, coups, etc. etc. They have a duty to stop us from doing the same to them. But we have a duty to our own already weakened democratic system to stop them. That starts with continuous public exposure of what they’re doing to us, and who helped them here.

One mans view (i agree with him, so maybe its two men’s views:) )

nation:https://www.thenation.com/article/what-weve-learned-in-year-one-of-russiagate/

Second big miss by the author:

If Trump and his campaign were innocent, why lie so frequently about contacts with the Russians. Why did they try to hide all of those meetings with the Russians until caught? Why lie on security clearance papers? The latter has Kushner still unable to get clearance. Manafort and Flynn lied and had to go back and change them to reflect their “foreign agent” status, when they were caught.

Trump started out claiming he had zero connections with the Russians. Slowly but surely, that unraveled, with the help of his own sons who bragged about them years before he ever ran. The Trump campaign had to walk back those lies, confirming the reporting on the subject. If those meetings were perfectly innocent, why the widespread attempts to deny them until it was no longer possible?

In addition to the lies, Trump has repeatedly and viciously attacked anyone who even questioned those connections. He’s lashed out like no president this side of Nixon, and went much, much further and got far more personal. He fired Comey because of Russia, ordered the firing of Mueller just a month after he started the probe, has been gunning for the top leadership at the FBI (all Republicans, btw), removing most of them, with Rosenstein the last man standing now. He pressured the director of the CIA, his own pick, to shut down the investigation, as well as Burr in the Senate and Nunes in the House. Nunes has been his lapdog for more than a year, orchestrating witch hunts to divert attention from the Mueller probe.

Do “innocent” people act like that? No way.