False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:12 pm

This Jeffrey Herf character really is a piece of work. It's spooky. His Twitter account has to be seen to be believed.

https://twitter.com/jeffreyherf?lang=de

Look at the shit Herf links to, approvingly:


Bret Stephens JUNE 9, 2017. NYT Op-Ed

As of Friday, it seemed that Theresa May would cobble together a coalition government — just barely — with a small northern Irish party, which should keep her in office for a while longer. In every other sense she’s a humiliated politician, who squandered a huge lead in a lousy campaign against a vile opponent.

Sound familiar?

The real winner in Britain’s election is Jeremy Corbyn, who led the Labour Party to a 32-seat gain over its disastrous electoral showing in 2015. Corbyn is a man whose only notable concession to conventional politics has been a necktie. He has done as much to shove the Labour Party to the nasty left as Donald Trump has shoved the Republican Party to the ugly right.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/opin ... d=tw-share


These are the good takes by the good thinkers that warmongering pseudleft spook AD wants us to follow and like.

Look at the stuff Herf himself writes (here, in the Times of Israel) and links to on Twitter:

Elements of Conspiracy from Europe to the Trump Campaign

November 2, 2016, 9:11 pm

Jeffrey C. Herf

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/elements ... -campaign/


^^That is one of the stupidest screeds I have ever read, even in the notoriously stupid genre of Spook Articles Condemning "Conspiracy Theories"

Herf also publishes, but of course, in the very spookiest of German journals, Die Zeit and Die Welt.

So where does Herf live and teach?

Jeffrey Herf
@JeffreyHerf

Historian of Modern Europe, especially Germany, at University of Maryland, College Park
Washington, DC metro area


Well, he would, wouldn't he? :lol:
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:28 pm

It's now two weeks since Corbyn made enormous gains for Labour in the UK, especially amongst young voters, despite a massive and vicious corporate-media campaign against him.

It's now one week since the Grenfell Tower Crime discredited Theresa May and the Tories beyond redemption.

It's now increasingly clear that Jeremy Corbyn will be the UK's next Prime Minister, probably before 2017 is out

__________

So why is "American Dream" now going out of his way to post the most abysmally reactionary, far-right, anti-Corbyn, anti-Labour, CIA spook bullshit on the RI Discussion Board (and why, as ever, is he utterly refusing to discuss it)?


Rhetorical question.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:44 pm

09-20-2009 at 1:22 am edited September 2009 in University of Maryland - College Park

CIA a significant employer of grads

I see from various websites that the CIA is a big employer of University of Maryland grads. Besides proximity can anyone tell me why? Thanks.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/uni ... grads.html


Why not ask Professor Jeffrey C. Herf himself, the American Dream's Choice? Judging by his own profoundly spooky output, Herf must be one of the CIA's main recruiters on that campus.
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"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby Sounder » Tue Jun 20, 2017 9:11 pm

AD may or may not be as you say Mac, but does it really matter. There are very many people, similar to AD, driven by their good intentions to fall for a certain kind of warping of reason. Helpfully provided by folk that enjoy weaponizing these sorts of things.

(Providing evidence to the inferior classes that they are inferior)
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 21, 2017 2:40 am

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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby kool maudit » Wed Jun 21, 2017 7:39 am

Sounder » Tue Jun 20, 2017 8:11 pm wrote:AD may or may not be as you say Mac, but does it really matter. There are very many people, similar to AD, driven by their good intentions to fall for a certain kind of warping of reason. Helpfully provided by folk that enjoy weaponizing these sorts of things.

(Providing evidence to the inferior classes that they are inferior)




I wondered that about AD for a long time. In the end, though, I basically decided he was much more of an emotional anti-rightist than any sort of leftist, and also that he just isn't very bright. In past decades he would have been the member of the commune constantly assigned the mimeograph machine, a sort of drone-entity.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Mon Oct 23, 2017 8:03 pm

No tears for tankies

Image


Briefly, a word on the provenance and history of the term “tankie,” for the uninitiated. Amber’s definition — “slang for Soviet apologist, or actual Stalinist” — is serviceable, but rather imprecise. “Tankie” was an epithet coined on the British left several decades ago to denote anyone who still supported the Kremlin line after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Khrushchev had delivered his so-called “secret speech” on Stalin’s cult of personality and its consequences earlier in the year, but the tanks rolling into Budapest signaled a quite obvious return to form.

So to be clear, the term isn’t necessarily anti-Marxist or anti-communist: it’s anti-Stalinist, and anti-Maoist insofar as Mao continued to defend and draw upon Stalin’s legacy. For Marxists like me, or indeed anyone of a more Trotskyist or left communist persuasion, the term is inoffensive. The same goes for nondenominational socialists like Amber, whose membership in the DSA is openly admitted in her article (though Frost’s critics continue to point this out as if it’s some earth-shattering revelation). Personally, I have my issues with the DSA’s mild-mannered Menshevism and tailing of Bernie Sanders. But compared to the old guard Stalinists in the CP-USA, who’ve backed the Democrats in every major national election since the seventies, DSA cadre end up looking like urban guerrillas. Don’t forget that Lenin, too, was for most of his political career a Social Democrat.

Image

I feel it is necessary to point this out, since some self-proclaimed Stalinists have expressed consternation and confusion over the “tankie” label. One young member of the Stalinist Twitter crowd has even gone so far as to suggest that the term “increasingly [just] means ‘principled anti-imperialist’.” Maybe so, if anti-imperialism means mindlessly boosting Putin, Assad, and the late Colonel Gaddafi against local insurrections of various ideological flavors. But I’ve opposed every U.S. military intervention during my lifetime, without at the same time lending support to tin-pot dictators and their henchmen who proclaim themselves “anti-imperialists.” So what would I know about anti-imperialism?


https://thecharnelhouse.org/2015/06/14/ ... r-tankies/
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 02, 2018 9:00 am

Not exactly how I would parse things but interesting and rewarding nonetheless:

Notes on Libya

Max Ajl February 1, 2018

On this question of the agenda of imperialism, contemporary accounts increasingly offer no compelling explanation of its mode of operations. At one pole of what sometimes passes for anti-imperialist theory – realism – capitalism is staked on stability, and level and regulated inter-state competition. The corollary is that imperialism, or as they prefer, the pax Americana, is content with capitalist institutions, period. So, within this framework, hammering Libya is a kind of neo-con induced ideological error, akin to the Zionist-flecked militarism which led to the pummeling of Iraq.33 A similarly naive view of U.S. power insists on the inadvertent disaster the United States birthed in Libya, a kind of bumbling-giant analysis of U.S. foreign policy.34 Meanwhile, for those who insist that all state-capitalisms are identical, and identically degenerate, there is similar analytical debility. For them, Libya under Qadhaffi was without question a capitalist state. Its institutions, then, were merely a means to project power and promote an indigenous African capitalism.35

All three perspectives miss key goals and facets of the foreign policy of U.S. monopoly capitalism. Certainly in the Middle East, the outcome of U.S. policy, remarkably consistent over the last 30 years at least, has been the destabilization and dismantling of the Arab republics and sowing chaos and devastation in any major or minor Arab or Muslim population center outside the U.S. security umbrella. The consistent thread of this policy – from Iraq, to Syria, to Libya, with Iran consistently on the target list, and Palestine and especially the Gaza Strip as a sort of distillate of U.S. goals – has been to dismantle any independent project, or even the state institutions or social forces which could forge or provide the institutional scaffolding for such a project. Independence may be considered with respect to both foreign and domestic policies. In terms of foreign policy, the United States has targeted those forces which have to any extent, continued to support anti-colonial or anti-imperialist militia and resistance forces. On the domestic front, the United States has aimed its fire at countries with states which remain, to some degree, socially embedded, and thus both potentially responsive to demands from below, as well as integral to the lives of those dependent on state services. Indeed, that embedding – put differently, the centrality of the state’s role in social reproduction – is central to what makes a national project national. It is the traces of such a project that the United States and domestic accomplices steering the uprising targeted, and in that they were successful.

The question of stability, chaos, or blowback is not just a distraction, but misreads U.S. policies, which have sought to de-develop the region and splinter into shards any states that have retained the capacity to carry out developmental processes. Too much contemporary analysis rests on a cartoonish portrait of post-colonial states as purely coercive apparatuses. But such states are the crystallizations of the anti-colonial struggles. Their institutions, schools, hospitals, universities, and infrastructure are the fruit of whatever process of development post-colonial governments have been able to set into motion. From the standpoint of utopia, such achievements were woefully insufficient. From the standpoint of victory, one may diagnose weaknesses in terms of popular control of such societies. But from the standpoint of the United States, in this belt of states so central to world power, any order outside of that fully integrated into U.S. foreign policy imperatives and accumulation circuits has been intolerable, if history is any guide.

Immanuel Wallerstein, describing the historical process of incorporation into the world-system, wrote:

Much of the “order” restored by the British after 1750 served as a remedy for an “anarchy” in the very creation of which the Western intrusion had played a significant role in the previous 100 years. The point is that capitalism needs not “order” but rather what might be called “favorable order.” The promotion of ‘anarchy’ often serves to bring down “unfavorable order,” that is, order that is capable of resisting incorporation.36


Much the same applies to governments captured by anti-systemic forces during the 1917–1973 global revolt, which is precisely why Western governments are more than happy to throw them into chaos. It also applies to many states in the region and elsewhere – such as Yemen, where a U.S. assault, subcontracted to Saudi Arabia, has sowed cholera and famine.

Meanwhile, chaos is the state of Libya in the aftermath of the Western blitzkrieg. Campbell counts over 1700 militias roving about “liberated” Libya as the state is no longer able to secure even a modicum of order – never mind law. He thus illustrates perfectly the now-preferred method of Western intervention: one which either inadvertently or likely quite consciously leads to the controlled demolition of the state itself. Looted Libyan weapons have flowed to Egypt, across the Sahara to Mali, leading to the 2013 coup d’etat, and on to a French-led intervention there. Such arms also went on to Syria under U.S. supervision, and many Libyans have been involved in the insurgency against the Syrian government. More recently, open-air slave markets have emerged in Libya.

All of these are the returns of the Libyan war which Campbell so carefully surveys. The book concludes with a call for an anti-systemic program premised on unity and national self-determination – the road not taken. Of course, the road not taken is also the one Western violence destroyed. Here Campbell highlights the assassination of Patrice Lumumba as one of the clearest examples of the West’s assault on Africa’s future. He does not mean to compare him to Qadhaffi. Nor would such a comparison stand. Rather, Lumumba here serves a different purpose: his memory is a specter of what Africa could have been and was prevented from becoming – in substantial part – by Western-sowed disruption and disorder.

Referring to the region, to Africa, is not an accident for Campbell. Taking the widest perspective, he shows that counter-revolution is a global process, proceeding through concrete mechanisms, reversing real social gains. Its mechanisms include not just decapitating anti-systemic movements, removing from them their very best leaders, but also ramping up levels of ambient hostility. The deterioration of Qadhaffi’s government was not the result of that dime-store tautology, “corruption,” but because of inducements offered to those who might sell out the country, as well as, much more crucially, a dimming of the global revolt within which the colonels’ revolution rose. For amidst all its indelible blights, it stood as one of the last remaining pillars of Arab nationalism – an uneven, complex, and enduring legacy, as well as a continuing banner for regional anti-systemic projects.

Nevertheless, Libya’s refusal to submit to Western diktat marked it out in red as a target for U.S. power, which never forgot the independence of Qadhaffi’s foreign policy, and his moves to set up a polycentric world. It is worth recalling in 1990 that Nelson Mandela stated during a 1990 trip to Libya, “Your readiness to provide us with the facilities of forming an army of liberation indicated your commitment to the fight for peace and human rights in the world.”37 Willful amnesia and the erasure of history are a requirement for U.S. hegemony. And even amidst decay, from the perspective of U.S. power Qadhaffi represented a memory and incarnated a politics whose faint tracings had to be scrubbed cleanly out of Libya. The sudden and significant break with the system which his colonel’s revolt represented, and later, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, his moves towards uniting Africa against external interference, with massive monetary resources to help do so, are an ineluctable part of why Libya had to be destroyed. Campbell anatomizes that destruction to devastating effect, and traces it back to the imperfect colonel’s revolt itself. The point is clear. Against the rainbow of sectarian interpretations, the fact is that responsibility for the country’s fall must be shared. Campbell has provided an important glimpse into the massive segment of that responsibility most relevant to a U.S. readership: its own. Indeed, counter-intuitively, he perhaps underplays that responsibility. For the deterioration of the Qadhaffi government happened not through purely internal decay, but through processes in which Western financial institutions, corporate organs, universities, and the insistent specter and reality of U.S. violence played a major part. And what is inescapable is this: their ability to do so rests on the inability of Western resistance forces to destroy such mechanisms.

So, finally, if there was a failure of international solidarity vis-à-vis Libya, it began long ago. It was one which took place in the three decades before the coup d’état, as the world revolution of 1968 ebbed most quickly and with the most harmful effects in the centers of imperial power, as the counter-revolution smashed the anti-systemic movements in the core: the student movement, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers. It occurred as internationalism became a shadow, a wisp, a deprecated memory, a process that also occurred through the negligence of those whose nominal task was to tend the flame. To stand to the side of that ebb tide and, from Northern capitals, to berate global South governments for their sins, is to miss the fundamental responsibility of Western power in creating the atmosphere for the sin. And it is to forget, too, that solidarity is not a sentiment. Internationalism and interventionism are diametrical opposites. Solidarity starts from reckoning with location. In the words of Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, this is a politics, a “Marxism [which] consists of a more committed internationalism, which insists on the substantive, not cosmetic, dissolution of hierarchies among nations and proletariats in the struggle against capital.”38

Programmatically, this means first and foremost constraining the maneuvers of the governments of the core. The failure to do so is indeed part of the process of global counter-revolution which took place from the mid-1970s onwards. For if it was revolution which painted an indelible target on Qadhaffi’s Libya, it was counter-revolution which weakened it enough to ensure the success of its 2011 targeting, an enterprise of weaponized sectarian militia, the Gulf states, the United States, and finally those too many to list who gave it ideological cover or demobilized opposition to that brutal war. This process, occurring on a stage crafted by imperialist power, is utterly central – indeed, inescapable – to any understanding of the tragedy now cascading daily across what used to be the state of Libya.


More at: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/notes-on-libya/
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 02, 2018 1:29 pm

I like Horace Campbell in many ways but resonate more with this perspective:

Anti-Imperialism – Bankruptcy of the Left? (2016 Version)

Image

Equally mysterious is the support that some are currently giving to Putin, Assad and Iran. Putin in turn is supporting the far Right in Europe; Assad’s torture squads are renowned for their extreme brutality; and Iran has imprisoned, tortured and executed tens of thousands of Communists and other left wingers opposing the Islamist regime.

One possible interpretation of these sympathies is the vulgar theory derived from social democratic theorist Karl Kautsky that capitalism develops towards a kind of super-imperialism. ‘This theory is rolled out regularly by the Left and the far Left of capital, the better to chain the workers to “their” national state, against “worldwide capitalism” and “non-national” bodies like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, multinational corporations, etc.’ (as the International Communist Current put it). This ‘super-imperialism’ is generally identified with the US, which is identified with globalisation, which in turn is often equated with ‘americanisation’.

The resulting anti-Imperialism has a tendency to support or tolerate any movement that is at odds with the perceived enemy. It is thus becoming the rallying cry for any sort of nationalism, and all sorts of fundamentalist movements directly opposed to enlightenment and (bourgeois) democracy, as much as to social liberation and (communist) universal emancipation. The ultra left analysis is correct in pointing out the rivalries between the different factions of the international bourgeoisie, to understand a lot of the drift against the US as an attempt by the European and Arab ruling classes to position themselves to their advantage in the imperialist competition, and to view anti-Imperialism as a mobilizing tool to tie the working classes to the various local elites against a powerful foreign enemy. While certainly being the case in Europe, this is particularly true for Islamic countries, especially the ones with domestic economic and political problems. However, this analysis usually overlooks one important element that glues the different anti-Imperialist camps together: anti-Semitism.


More at: http://datacide-magazine.com/anti-imper ... 6-version/
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 05, 2018 8:51 pm

Fact-checking the latest propaganda rolling off the Assadist assembly-line

Filed under: journalism,Syria — louisproyect @ 9:23 pm

Image

Image
Judith Miller and Christopher Hitchens: forerunners of today’s Assadist propagandists

One of the most off-putting things about Assadist propaganda is that it advertises itself as a corrective to the “mainstream media” even as its purveyors adopt the journalistic norms of Judith Miller. What explains the cavalier attitude toward the truth? To a large extent, it is a function of deep-seated Islamophobia that is rooted in 9/11. Back then, Christopher Hitchens earned the contempt for most of us on the left for his close ties to the Bush administration. Even if it was becoming obvious that the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was based on a mountain of lies, Hitchens gave the Bush administration a free pass because he saw al-Qaeda as the greatest threat to “Western Civilization” since Adolph Hitler.

Today, there is a virtual army of journalists who combine the shoddy journalism of Judith Miller and the virulent Islamophobia of Christopher Hitchens on behalf of a new crusade against the “Salafist menace”. But instead of serving as the lapdog of George W. Bush, they operate as cogs in the propaganda machine for the Kremlin and the Baathist state. Their hatred for “jihadism” runs so deep that they justify the bombing of hospitals in Idlib because Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly al-Nusra) has a foothold there. The ability of many leftists to lament the war crimes in Yemen and now in Afrin while cheering on Russian and Syrian mass murder is a defect in the kind of movement we have become, showing the same kind of cynical “ends justify the means” mindset that destroyed the Stalinized Communist Party.

Two recent examples illustrate how low the Assadist left has sunk. The first is an article in Viewpoint by Patrick Higgins titled “The Enemy at Home: U.S. Imperialism in Syria” that invokes Karl Liebknecht’s call for opposition to WWI. Hasn’t Higgins any idea that opposition to WWI in the USA back then would land you in prison as Eugene V. Debs discovered? Today, opposition to a Bush-style American intervention in Syria is universal, spanning from Higgins on the left to Henry Kissinger and David Duke on the right.

As is customarily the case, as long as Higgins writes about American foreign policy exclusive of Syria, there is not much to quibble with. Most of it is what you’d read in Noam Chomsky or Alexander Cockburn. Or, for that matter, what I wrote about Vietnam, Nicaragua, Palestine or Iraq over the years.

It is only when he gets to Syria that the propaganda kicks in.

Higgins argues that the war in Syria is the culmination of a policy that began during Eisenhower’s administration to contain Arab radicalism, particularly of the type Nasser represented. Making the case that the Baathist state is inimical to American interests in the region would by necessity omit any reference to Hafez al-Assad becoming part of the coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. The Baathist dictator’s support for American imperialism paid dividends as the Chicago Tribune reported:

A year ago Syria, which always has aspired to a leadership role in Arab affairs, was isolated and resented by most of its neighbors. Now it has forged an alliance with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and has joined with Egypt in providing the bulk of the troops for a new Arab peacekeeping force in the Persian Gulf region.

It has received about $2.5 billion in assistance from the Gulf States and Japan, and its role in the peacekeeping force promises another sizable windfall.


So, imagine that. Assad the father cuts deals with Mubarak and the Saudis in cahoots with the USA and this is what “Arab radicalism” amounts to? Oh, did I mention that Kuwait is not mentioned once in Higgins’s article?

Like many others who profess support for the Palestinian cause, Higgins credits the Syrian dictatorship for backing Hezbollah’s resistance to Israel in 2006 even if it is impossible for him to sweep under the rug how it allied with Israel against the PLO in Lebanon.

Once again, this is a highly selective version of Syrian-Palestinian relations. Search for a reference to Gaza or Hamas in his article and you will come up empty just as was the case with Kuwait. He cannot admit that Hamas has condemned Russian and Syrian war crimes in East Aleppo. When Russian and Syrian jets were bombing hospitals, Hamas issued a statement that said: “We are following with great pain what is happening in Aleppo and the horrific massacres, murders and genocide its people are going through, and condemn it entirely.” Unlike Higgins, Hamas was not persuaded by the need to bomb hospitals because they were treating 4-year olds with broken bones who might grow up one day to become “terrorists”. When Syria dropped leaflets in East Aleppo to demand that the citizenry repudiate terrorism in the way that IDF did in Gaza City, Hamas could not help identifying with the victims of the “war on terror”.

In a journalistic maneuver that would have been too crass for Judith Miller to employ, Higgins claims that weaponry supplied to rebels in Syria were “diverted” to al-Nusra. As is often the case when I click the link to an article such as this, it is not what it was supposed to be saying. Maybe Higgins did not read past the Reuters article headline: U.S.-trained Syrian rebels gave equipment to Nusra: U.S. military. However, when you continue reading the article, you will learn that the weapons were surrendered in order to gain safe passage. This is like saying shopkeepers used to “give” protection money to the Mafia as if the consequences for refusing such payments would have been nothing but a slap on the wrist rather than a bullet in the head.

To make the case that the rebels were “Salafists” from the beginning, Higgins cites a Pentagon report that appears on the rightwing Judicial Watch website and that has been cited by a thousand other Assadist propagandists. However, in 2012 the dominant force in Syria was the FSA that would soon begin to clash with ISIS as it had with al-Nusra on occasion. To really make sense of the relationship of forces in Syria, you’d have to do more than write a brief report that was never official policy and that was also heavily redacted.

In May of 2013, the Center for American Progress issued a report estimating that the FSA had 50,000 fighters as opposed to al-Nusra’s 6,000. Another report from Charles Lister around this time estimates ISIS and al-Nusra’s combined forces to be 12,000 (I would have put ISIS into a separate category altogether since it had little interest in the goals of the Arab Spring, even less so than al-Nusra), while all other rebel groups amounted to 88,000. Perhaps Higgins has his own estimates but I doubt that someone who relies on the specious Judicial Watch report has any interest in that.

Higgins has the audacity to compare US bombing in Syria to that which occurred during the Vietnam war. This is truly astonishing. The USA dropped more than 3 times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than it dropped during all of WWII. And what was an example of US bombing in Syria? The only examples that Higgins could dredge up was a mortar attack on a trade fair in Damascus last August that killed 6 people and a suicide bombing there 3 months earlier that killed 31. This is on one side of the ledger and on the other you have artillery, missiles, barrel bombing and Sarin gas attacks that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. Talk about putting your fingers on the scales of justice.

As it happens, Higgins wrote essentially the same article for Jacobin in 2015 before it switched gears editorially to oppose Assad. To a large extent, Max Ajl was responsible for Assadist propaganda when he was a member of the editorial board. That kind of garbage disappeared after he got the boot. Now that he is on Viewpoint’s editorial board, we can expect the same kind of Islamophobic junk to appear. We might even assume that he will recruit the same scoundrels he used to line up for Jacobin.

On December 2, 2017, I wrote about Ajl’s conversation with fellow Assadist Justin Podhur about his departure from Jacobin. The oddest thing about their wound-licking session is their outlandish exaggeration of the power that is wielded by people like me, Gilbert Achcar, the ISO, New Politics and the new Jacobin over the Syria debate. Podhur put it this way:

And I think that feeling is something that I have personally been feeling for a really long time – guilty, muted, fumbling, silenced – about opposing imperialism, especially in Syria, and it’s been really confusing for me. And so for you to write that…I felt a lot of relief reading that somebody else felt that way.

This is truly astonishing. You have Alternet, Truthdig, CommonDreams, The Nation, the Boston Globe (via Stephen Kinzer), the LRB, the NYRB, 90 percent of the articles on CounterPunch, and countless other bloggers and websites making the same arguments as Ajl and Higgins and they feel “silenced”? Maybe what is irking them is that there are still a few lonely voices that don’t buy their crap. It wasn’t enough that Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton were bribed into write Assadist propaganda. Speaking for myself, I’d rather be water-boarded than justify bombing hospitals.

Unlike Higgins, who was an obscure graduate student with little to show either as a journalist or activist, Daniel Lazare has written some important stuff, including two books on the American constitution. But like all these good people from Seymour Hersh to Patrick Cockburn, he turned into Mr. Hyde after 2011.

In a Truthdig article titled “Jacobin Is Fueling the Lies About Syria”, Lazare hyper-ventilates on the post-Ajl Jacobin:

Syria has generated more lies than any United States action since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That’s why Jacobin Magazine, the self-proclaimed “leading voice of the American left,” is so important. Readers need it to help cut through the dense fog of mendacity billowing forth out of Washington.

Correction: That’s why Jacobin should be important. In fact, the magazine/website has echoed U.S. propaganda on Syria and in some cases even exceeded it.


Like Higgins, Lazare makes claims that are not backed up by the articles he links to in support of those claims. For example, he writes that “Jacobin has attacked the Assad regime for dwelling excessively on rebel atrocities against Christians, Shiites and other minorities” but when you go to the article in question, which is an interview with Yasser Munif, you can find nothing remotely connected to this. Just go to the article and look for anything about the Assad regime being attacked in such a manner. If you can find it, I will donate $1,000 to the Moon of Alabama’s next fund-drive.


Continues at: https://louisproyect.org/2018/02/05/fac ... mbly-line/
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 07, 2018 4:54 pm

https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/02/07/russi ... -realists/

FEBRUARY 7, 2018 | RUSS BAKER

A RUSSIAN SIGHTSEEING TOUR FOR REALISTS

Image
Popular Russian landmark, St. Basil’s Cathedral, pictured in the winter.


The other day I received an invitation from The Nation magazine to “Visit Russia.”

Dear Friend of The Nation,

Join us in Russia April 19–30, 2018!

At this pivotal moment in US-Russia relations, The Nation continues to believe in the power of direct people-to-people interaction as an essential way to foster more productive dialogue and to support peaceful relations between nations. Please join us on our next trip to Russia for firsthand insight into Russia’s rich culture, complex history and politics, and welcoming people.


The tour, I was informed, would include a stay at a five-star hotel in St. Petersburg, a high-speed train ride to Moscow, a trip to the Gulag Museum, and a private “escorted” tour of the Kremlin, as well as meetings with “distinguished historians, cultural leaders, professors, and curators.” We would be accompanied on the trip by other journalists, The Nation’s editor in chief, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, vanden Heuvel’s husband, and an emeritus professor of Russian studies, history, and politics from New York University and Princeton.

All of this was presented in a casual, entirely non-critical tone as though this were an offer for a Club Med vacation in the Caribbean. Not a word mentions Russia’s current role in the world and in US affairs or the many abuses of human and international rights under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin.

There is also no reference to Russia’s role in the election of President Donald Trump, and calling whatever is going on between him and Putin a “pivotal moment in US-Russia relations” seems like a naive description.

As a one-time editorial contributor to The Nation, I am not surprised that the magazine prefers engagement over confrontation. It’s hard to disagree with that. I was also glad to see mention of past problems in Russia, such as the gulag, and encouraged by the notion that there should be independent journalists along.

By the same token, it is difficult to see this as anything but willfully blind.

How can you celebrate Russia and simply ignore the political realities of that country today?

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Pussy Riot at Lobnoye Mesto on Red Square in Moscow.

When I read that invitation to visit “delightful Russia,” I thought what an alternative tour might look like:

Visit sites where journalists and opponents of the regime were shot, beaten to death, or tossed from windows.

Hear an informative lecture from scientists who develop ways to poison enemies of the regime with polonium and other exotic substances.

View a fascinating display of items used to stealthily deliver the poisons, such as the umbrella that shot a tiny, ricin-containing pellet into the leg of a victim who hardly felt a thing.

Visit horrific prisons where members of the band Pussy Riot and others who spoke their minds were held.

Learn how to loot a nation and transfer assets to shell entities on sunny islands.

Meet the oligarchs and see their fabulous mansions — plus, as a bonus, learn how to launder money through real estate acquisitions.

Speak to an opposition politician who was barred from running in this year’s election.

Spend a few hours with young hackers who will show you how easy it is to assume the identity of an indignant American to sow discord online.

Join mathematicians exploring potential vulnerabilities in online American voter registration systems.

Join a homophobic hate march.

Visit the Olympic doping center.

Enjoy a day tour to the recently occupied Crimea.


That would be the WhoWhatWhy Russia Tour. Who wants to join me?

(Of course, in the spirit of fairness, it is worth remarking just how many aspects of present-day Russia have their counterparts in the United States. An insiders’ tour of such locales, from Wall Street boardrooms to Guantanamo to the White House Situation Room, might be illuminating for Russians and Americans alike.)
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby dada » Wed Feb 07, 2018 6:52 pm

"By the same token, it is difficult to see this as anything but willfully blind."

I agree with the argument that attacking American imperialism doesn't mean we have to defend Russia. Of course. But, that doesn't mean we should paint everything in Russia besides Pussy Riot and Alexei Navalny with a broad brush of suspicion and guilt.

I'll give an example: Russ feels the need to put sarcasm quotes around the word escorted, in 'a private “escorted” tour of the Kremlin.' I took it to mean a tour accompanied by a guide that knows all about the architecture, art, can tell stories and anecdotes.

Likewise, I think we need to be careful about romanticizing and idolizing the opposition. Putting revolutionaries on pedestals goes against everything they represent. We're fighting the culture industry, we don't want to do their work for them.

(I'm glad Russ added the comment in the spirit of fairness at the bottom. You could do just about everything on that list, with slight variations, right here at home. And for the things on that list we can't do here, we could add our own uniquely American sights. Including that comment in the article adds to its integrity.)

Curiosity about foreign places is a sentiment I'd encourage, not try to suppress. The world is a complex place. Where is there not beauty and corruption?
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:07 pm

Yeah, to me the juiciest part of the piece is this:

Visit sites where journalists and opponents of the regime were shot, beaten to death, or tossed from windows.

Hear an informative lecture from scientists who develop ways to poison enemies of the regime with polonium and other exotic substances.

View a fascinating display of items used to stealthily deliver the poisons, such as the umbrella that shot a tiny, ricin-containing pellet into the leg of a victim who hardly felt a thing.

Visit horrific prisons where members of the band Pussy Riot and others who spoke their minds were held.

Learn how to loot a nation and transfer assets to shell entities on sunny islands.

Meet the oligarchs and see their fabulous mansions — plus, as a bonus, learn how to launder money through real estate acquisitions.

Speak to an opposition politician who was barred from running in this year’s election.

Spend a few hours with young hackers who will show you how easy it is to assume the identity of an indignant American to sow discord online.

Join mathematicians exploring potential vulnerabilities in online American voter registration systems.

Join a homophobic hate march.

Visit the Olympic doping center.

Enjoy a day tour to the recently occupied Crimea.


The reason why I feel such criticisms are important is that they form a counterpoint to prevailing assmptions of conspiracy culture. If I were posting in a heavily russophobic pro-DNC/liberal milieu, I would want to post a very different take on things, as that might be most needed there.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 16, 2018 5:26 pm

Syria seen from the Viewpoint of imperial purity: the crushing narcissism of empire

Posted on February 12, 2018by nothingiseverlost

Image
When your politics are based solely around a sense of national guilt, you can end up in some strange places.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” – Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man



most leftist[s] know almost nothing about Syria, and the little they know is either deeply flawed or absolutely false… their anti imperialism discourse moved from the field of analysis and politics to the realm of identity: concepts were transformed to symbols, a specific linguistic expressions that tell who you are, not what you are doing and how to offer a better understanding of the world. So when you talk about struggle against imperialism, this in no way means that you are really doing anything that will annoy imperialism.” – Yassin al-Haj Saleh




Viewpoint Magazine is a publication with a very curious editorial policy. At times, it’s put out some really useful, insightful analysis, particularly where it comes to the intersection of class and what is sometimes described as identity politics, and engaging with some of the best thinkers to emerge from the broad Marxist tradition, from Pannekoek to Federici; and at other times, it’s published some barely readable crap, especially distinguished by a strange reverence for the “New Communist Movement” sects that emerged out of the defeat and fragmentation of the student and anti-war movements of the 1960s.

Among the really good things that Viewpoint’s published is a piece by Asad Haider from about a year ago, with the deliberately provocative title “White Purity”, looking at how forms of liberal white anti-racist politics that focus on white privilege and white guilt can have the counter-productive effect of making everything all about white people. One of the things that’s interesting about White Purity is that it provides some conceptual tools that can help articulate precisely why some of the more recent stuff that Viewpoint’s published is so awful.

I haven’t had time to read much of their new collection on imperialism, because it’s really long and none of us have as much free time as we’d like, but from what I have had the chance to read so far, it contains at least one really glaringly bad article, dealing with the subject of Syria. The author, Patrick Higgins, is guided by an ideology that would usually be described as “anti-imperialism” or simply “anti-Americanism”, but which, following Haider, we can refer to as “imperial purity” or “American purity”. What does imperial purity involve?

Here are some quotations from Haider’s piece which, with some minor editing, can provide a good sketch of imperial/American purity:

“Among other things, [empire] is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, [Americans] consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity…

These debates, flaring up constantly since [at least WWI], provide [Americans] with a perfect opportunity to make the world revolve around them…

And so it turns back around, back to [Americans] and their fantasies. We have tried, for some time, to ignore this and continue to discuss the substantive issues. But [Americans] make our lives even more difficult when they claim to speak in our name. I can only conclude that the strange phenomenon called [empire] produces a very deep and tenacious psychopathology, and that it is time for us to attack it openly…

Indeed, to the consternation of good [Americans], not every [person from a colonized country] is on board with [imperial] purity. Many are, to be sure, because the secret reality which [imperial] purity hopes to obscure is that [people from colonized countries] are just as capable of a diversity of opinions and perspectives as [Americans] are. For [imperial] purity to succeed, [people from colonized countries] have to be romanticized as noble victims. When they fail to fit into this category, [imperial] purity seems to lack a proper foundation…

The Weather Underground used the language of “privilege” to reject the white working class as a force for revolutionary change, instead associating political struggle with vanguard groups like themselves, who attacked their own privilege by adopting a revolutionary lifestyle. What this amounted to was the self-flagellation (with explosives) of white radicals, who substituted themselves for the masses and narcissistically centered attention on themselves instead of the black and Third World movements they claimed to be supporting – reducing those movements to a romantic fantasy of violent insurrection…

White liberals are suggesting that a new wave of “pro-white” socialists have arisen to defend the “white working class.” This is nonsense. [International] revolutionaries throughout [global] history have argued that the project of emancipation requires overcoming the divisive logic of [nationalism].”


Now, to examine Higgins’ article for examples of what this imperial purity looks like in practice:

Early on, Higgins includes Syria as part of a list of “targets of U.S. imperialism” and “sites of large-scale U.S. military violence”, consisting of Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. This feels a bit like comparing apples, oranges and watermelons: Iraq, certainly, is a place where the US started a war by invading, and it’s unarguable that, if the US hadn’t invaded in 2003, Iraq would not have been at war then. Libya and Syria, where the US intervened in existing internal conflicts that had already escalated into civil wars, are less clear-cut cases, and in Yemen, the main outside intervention has come from the Saudi military, with the US playing much more of a supporting role. This is an early sign of the kind of disappearing trick that imperial purity specialises in: to conflate the case of Iraq, where the US really did start a war, with the much more complex multipolar conflicts in Libya, Syria and Yemen, only works if we deliberately ignore a great number of other players, or insist on treating them as being solely proxies for US interests.

Higgins mentions that there are around 4000 US troops inside Syria, but avoids comparing this to the number of forces deployed by other actors in the region, or asking too much about what they’re doing. The entire thrust of his article is based around depicting the situation in Syria as being solely about a US war against Assad’s government, so it’s unfortunate for his argument that those troops have been engaged far more in attacking ISIS – one of Assad’s enemies – than in attacking the Syrian state.*

And those 4,000 US troops seem a less impressive number if we bear in mind that one report estimated that there are also 20,000 Iraqi militiamen, around 15,000-20,000 members of Iranian-backed Afghan militias, 7,000-10,000 from Hezbollah, and 5,000-7,000 from various other international Iranian-supported militias, on top of a direct Iranian military presence of 8,000-10,000 IRGC forces and 5,000-6,000 from the Iranian army. And that’s before we even begin to take other interested players like Russia and Turkey into account. Even if we assume that all these numbers are gross overestimates, it’s clear that the 4000 US soldiers are a tiny, tiny minority of the foreign forces fighting in Syria, so to brand the country as just being a “site of direct U.S. military occupation” is an impressive display of the “peculiar kind of solipsism” that characterises imperial purity. It’s like talking about New Zealand’s war on Vietnam, Poland’s invasion of Iraq or Morocco’s war in Yemen – technically accurate in a narrow sense, but showing a somewhat skewed sense of perspective.


Continues at: https://nothingiseverlost.wordpress.com ... of-empire/
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 20, 2018 8:26 am

Russiagate or Deep State? What Some Progressives Get Wrong on Russia

The bizarre denialism of some on the left and right about Russiagate doesn't bode well for the future of American politics


by John Feffer February 19, 2018

ImageWhen it comes to the Russiagate scandal, progressives usually take one of two positions.

They either dismiss the scandal as a lot of hooey, a “nothingburger,” just a way for warmongers and the “Deep State” to revive a cold war between Washington and Moscow. Or they treat the scandal as just a means to an end, a way to cast doubt on the 2016 presidential election, implicate the administration in a variety of crimes, and ultimately impeach the president.

Both of these positions are wrong.

I last wrote about the perplexing positions of some progressives on Russia back in March 2015, long before the Russiagate scandal and the 2016 elections. At the time, I was trying to understand why some progressives were bending over backwards to excuse the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, both domestically (his authoritarianism) and externally (his meddling along the periphery of Russia and further afield in Syria).

Putin, I argued, was an autocrat, an anti-progressive nationalist, and an imperialist wannabe. By all means, the United States should negotiate treaties with Russia and avoid a resurgent cold war, I maintained, but progressives should have no illusions about the nature of the current wielder of power in the Kremlin.

What had once been a strange sideshow of geopolitics has now, with the election of Donald Trump, become the main act. And the bizarre overlap in positions between some elements of the left and the right about Russiagate does not bode well for the future of American politics.

The stakes, in other words, are far greater than the fate of the current president of the United States. Why focus on Russiagate when we face possible nuclear war in Korea, a slow-motion apocalypse through climate change, and growing economic inequality worldwide? Because Russiagate points to a new kind of politics, in the United States and elsewhere, that makes resolution of these crises increasingly difficult.

Yes, the U.S. status quo before Russiagate was grossly unfair. The future status quo, a world of continuous Russiagates, will be grossly unfair and authoritarian as well.

Addressing the Skeptics

The Russia scandal has scrambled the political spectrum. Consider the case of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist based in Brazil who writes for The Intercept.

Greenwald has emerged as one of the prominent skeptics of the investigation into collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Once a fixture in the progressive media for his dissection of the national security state, he is now more frequently cited by the far right in its efforts to discredit the investigation run by Robert Mueller. The journalist used to chat regularly with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, but now he’s more likely to appear with Tucker Carlson on Fox News.

“I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” Greenwald told New York magazine. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.”

Wow, that’s harsh.

Greenwald is not alone. You can find skeptical articles about Russiagate at The Nation, Counterpunch, Consortium News, and many other progressive outlets. And these articles can be equally scathing about the journalists, mainstream or otherwise, that take the investigation seriously.

Over at The Nation, Russia specialist Stephen Cohen regularly challenges the emerging narrative, most recently suggesting that the intelligence community essentially fabricated Russiagate, which has generated in turn a different scandal — he calls it “Intelgate” — even larger than Watergate.

I cut my Sovietology teeth on Stephen Cohen and have always had tremendous respect for him. I certainly understand his desire to counter the demonization of all things Russian and his skepticism of the organs of U.S. national security. But he seems to have lost sight of the fact that the two principal groups of actors in this saga — the Trump team and the Putin people — are ruthless operators who have imported their mafia style into democratic politics.

Remember: The enemy of my enemy, even if that enemy is the U.S. national security state, is not necessarily my friend!

Consortium News, meanwhile, likes to give voice to former intelligence operatives. For example, former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi accepts the charges in the recent Nunes memo at face value and asserts that Israel, not Russia, played a much more prominent role in determining the 2016 election. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, also at Consortium News, believes that he can prove that the FBI, on behalf of the “Deep State,” is out to get the Trump administration.

But really it’s the same old material that Fox News has been trumpeting. I suppose it takes one to know one, but I suspect these former operatives have other axes to grind in this fight. Hell hath no fury like an intelligence operative scorned.

At Counterpunch, meanwhile, political economist Rob Urie argues that Russian involvement in the 2016 election is a “red herring” because, essentially, it has not been proven that any voter changed his or her mind as a result of Russian influence. Oh, and there isn’t any proof anyway of Russian meddling — or, if there is “proof,” it comes from unreliable sources. And if Russia engaged in such meddling, it had good reason to do so, given U.S. foreign policy maneuvers in Ukraine and elsewhere.

There’s a lot here to parse (which I will do below). But let’s return to Greenwald, because his perch at The Intercept is so influential.

Most of the time, Greenwald has delighted in revealing what the mainstream media has gotten wrong on the Russia story. In September, he ridiculed reports of Russian hacking of 21 state election systems, which turned out to be, in some cases, misreported. But some overly hasty conclusions don’t entirely discredit the entire story. The Department of Homeland Security first mentioned the attempted hacks in June 2017 but noted that it did not affect any votes. Again, this month, the head of cybersecurity for DHS, Jeanette Manfra, repeated the same claim.

Perhaps DHS is continuing to engage in disinformation. But Greenwald didn’t bother to write anything about Illinois, the one specific and rather well-documented case of Russian hacking that did manage to penetrate a state system (again without having any impact on the election results).

Also escaping his scrutiny have been the reports I mentioned in last week’s column: Dutch surveillance of Cozy Bear in Moscow as the operation hacked into the Democratic National Committee and the trial in Russia of a hacker who described receiving orders from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) “to attack the DNC’s servers for the purpose of manipulating the U.S. electoral process.”

Okay, so the U.S. media has made mistakes in its coverage of Russiagate. It’s not exactly a transparent story. And it’s very useful for journalists to keep other journalists honest (not to mention government officials).

But Greenwald is after something different. He is out to discredit all claims of Russia’s malign conduct. In a recent article, he made a list of all the “false” claims involving Russia — interference in the Brexit vote, responsibility for the #releasethememo Twitter campaign, intervention in the recent German and French elections — alongside the “corrections.”

These dismissals are too casual. The jury is still out on how much Russian social media presence influenced the Brexit vote. Greenwald cites a Senate report on Russian bots using Twitter and Facebook in large numbers then “refutes” the report with an article on YouTube’s denial of Russian interference. Well, those are very different platforms. Greenwald is skeptical that the #releasethememo Twitter campaign was, in part, Russian-influenced, but cites as proof an article with a single anonymous source. On Russian involvement in the German election, he identifies a New York Times article with the headline: “German Election Mystery: Why No Russian Meddling?” But he neglects to investigate the deeper Russian involvement — in cultivating the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland, supporting its messages on social media, and unleashing a botnet onslaught in the final hours of the campaign (a story that broke after The New York Times article but well before Greenwald’s putative takedown).

Finally, Greenwald points to an AP article refuting Russian involvement in a celebrated hacking of Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign. Perhaps Fancy Bear was not involving in phishing schemes, as investigators allege. But, as with Germany, Russia was involved in other ways, primarily through support for the National Front and Marine Le Pen.

In other words, the exposure of one poorly reported story on Russia — or even a dozen such embarrassments — does not mean that Russiagate or reports of Russian interference in European elections are “fake news.” Greenwald should know better, as a lawyer and a journalist. He’s pissed at the Democratic Party for running a lousy presidential campaign. He’s pissed at the Obama administration for its drone and surveillance policies. Fair enough. But please, do us a favor and look at all the evidence instead of playing the blinkered prosecutor.

Now let’s take a look at some of the other efforts to debunk this supposed myth.

Countering the Counter-Narrative

One of the major arguments of the skeptics is that Russian interference, even if there was some, didn’t influence the election because it was only a trivial amount of Twittering, Facebook ads, and trolling. Okay, perhaps that’s true. But Russian hacking was not just bots and trolls. The release of the results of the DNC hacking turned out to be quite damaging for the Clinton campaign.

But frankly, this isn’t the most important question. The election is over, and the Democratic Party should own up to its failures rather than blame it on some other party, be it Bernie Sanders, the Green Party, the Russians, or the deplorables.

Instead, the investigation should focus on only two things — the Trump campaign’s complicity and safeguarding future elections. Any interference in U.S. elections — whether from a foreign power or domestic actors trying to suppress voter turnout — should be taken very seriously.

A corollary to the “Russia didn’t really do anything” argument is that other countries had greater impact on the elections. The two countries usually cited are Israel and Mexico.

Certainly Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown a fondness for Donald Trump, and hardline pro-Israel donors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson poured millions into the Trump campaign. But there were also plenty of friends of Israel pushing in the opposite direction because of an authentic fondness for Hillary Clinton, or because of authentic fears of the anti-Semitic forces supporting Trump. As for Mexico’s meddling, this is largely a right-wing rant about how immigrants are subverting America, not about Mexico trying to sway any particular election.

Then there’s the argument that Russia wasn’t doing anything that the United States hadn’t done over the years. It’s certainly true that the United States has engaged in such conduct. So? It has also been involved in the assassination of foreign figures. Would that justify another country taking out the U.S. president? Do U.S. regime-change efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq justify another power taking over Washington DC and setting up a puppet government?

It’s always useful to point out U.S. hypocrisy. But this should be done in order to reform U.S. policy — not to excuse other countries for acting in similarly reprehensible ways.

Finally, let’s talk about the so-called Deep State.

I have to be honest. I’m not really sure what the “Deep State” is. Given that the pushback against Trump has been widespread, does the “Deep State” include all the judges who have blocked the administration’s immigration plans? Does it encompass all the career bureaucrats who refuse to go along with the anti-regulatory fervor at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, and elsewhere in the federal system?

Should we include whistleblowers who are aghast at the abuses of power? What about the “Washington playbook” that pushed for military solutions during the Obama era but has also resisted Trump’s more radical proposals?

Obviously such an amorphous entity lacks any meaningful coherence. So, let’s assume that it’s just the intelligence community and elements of the Justice Department and the FBI that are “out to get” Trump because he’s a rogue president.

Stephen Cohen argues that the intelligence community targeted Trump during the Obama administration and continues to push its agenda. But this is more usually an argument from the right wing. As Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs put it, “It may be time to declare war outright against the deep state and clear out the rot in the upper levels of the FBI and the Justice Department.”

I’m quite sure that there are a lot of folks at the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence agencies who are freaked out about Trump. The president shows little interest in intelligence briefings, has casually given away sensitive information and shown no regard for security protocols, has sought to politicize intelligence, has given highest-level security access to people like his son-in-law without proper vetting, supports all manner of lawbreakers (Joe Arpaio, neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, sexual harassers left and right), has defied the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and so on.

Is it remotely possible that intelligence agencies are genuinely worried about Russian interference? At the latest congressional hearing on Russia’s gearing up for the U.S. midterm elections, even Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA chief Mike Pompeo expressed their very clear concerns about Russian interference, directly contradicting their commander in chief.


More at: http://newpol.org/content/russiagate-or ... ong-russia
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