Apologies if I've posted the below before, but it seems really apposite at this point in time, as the political incompetents of the US bathe their blind eyes in the ash of the McCarthy era. There's still no evidence - not a jot - that Russia interfered in any way in the US election.
Meanwhile, a much needed observation. Even if you turn around suddenly you can never see your shadow creep up on you and project itself on others. As the audiences shout out joyously in British pantomimes' "it's behind you!"
Quote:US agencies have interfered with 81 elections not including coups
NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov Levin about his historical database that tracks U.S. involvement in meddling with foreign elections over the years.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: This is hardly the first time a country has tried to influence the outcome of another country's election. The U.S. has done it, too, by one expert's count, more than 80 times worldwide between 1946 and 2000. That expert is Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. I asked him to tell me about one election where U.S. intervention likely made a difference in the outcome. DOV LEVIN: One example of that was our intervention in Serbia, Yugoslavia in the 2000 election there. Slobodan Milosevic was running for re-election, and we didn't want him to stay in power there due to his tendency, you know, to disrupts the Balkans and his human rights violations. So we intervened in various ways for the opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. And we gave funding to the opposition, and we gave them training and campaigning aide. And according to my estimate, that assistance was crucial in enabling the opposition to win. SHAPIRO: How often are these interventions public versus covert? LEVIN: Well, it's - basically there's about - one-third of them are public, and two-third of them are covert. In other words, they're not known to the voters in the target before the election. SHAPIRO: Your count does not include coups, attempts at regime change. It sounds like depending on the definitions, the tally could actually be much higher. LEVIN: Well, you're right. I don't count and discount covert coup d'etats like the United States did in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. I only took when the United States is trying directly to influence an election for one of the sides. Other types of interventions - I don't discuss. But if we would include those, then of course the number could be larger, yeah. SHAPIRO: How often do other countries like Russia, for example, try to alter the outcome of elections as compared to the United States? LEVIN: Well, for my dataset, the United States is the most common user of this technique. Russia or the Soviet Union since 1945 has used it half as much. My estimate has been 36 cases between 1946 to 2000. We know also that the Chinese have used this technique and the Venezuelans when the late Hugo Chavez was still in power in Venezuela and other countries. SHAPIRO: The U.S. is arguably more vocal than any other country about trying to promote democracy and democratic values around the world. Does this strike you as conflicting with that message? LEVIN: It depends upon if we are assisting pro-democratic side - could be like in the case of Slobodan Milosevic that I talked about earlier. I believe that that could be helpful for democracy. If it helps less-nicer candidates or parties, then naturally it can be less helpful. SHAPIRO: Obviously your examination of 20th century attempts to influence elections does not involve hacking because computers were not widespread until recently. LEVIN: Yeah. SHAPIRO: In your view, is technology - the way that we saw in the November election - dramatically changing the game? Or is this just the latest evolution of an effort that has always used whatever tools are available? LEVIN: I would say it's more the latter. I mean the Russians or the Soviets before unfrequently did these type of intervention, just, you know, without the cyber-hacking tools - you know, the old style people meeting in the park in secret giving out and getting information and things like that, so to speak. SHAPIRO: Dov Levin is with the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks for joining us. LEVIN: Thank you very much.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
More of the "I know you are but what am I" level of argument. David, who lives in the UK, thinks Americans should be fine with the Mad Boy King because...Deep State! And CIA overthrew other governments, so they're only getting what's coming to them. Or something like that. And the laughable attempt to fluff up the term "McCarthyism!" - the last refuge of countless cornered rats in American politics for the last 50 years (most of them Republicans, oddly enough). And David apparently thinks that the current Russian regime is still a Marxist-Leninist one, and worth defending somehow.
Tracy Riddle Wrote:More of the "I know you are but what am I" level of argument. David, who lives in the UK, thinks Americans should be fine with the Mad Boy King because...Deep State! And CIA overthrew other governments, so they're only getting what's coming to them. Or something like that. And the laughable attempt to fluff up the term "McCarthyism!" - the last refuge of countless cornered rats in American politics for the last 50 years (most of them Republicans, oddly enough). And David apparently thinks that the current Russian regime is still a Marxist-Leninist one, and worth defending somehow.
The "new McCarthyism" critique is a crock and a half.
First of all, Putin and Obama negotiated the mutual reduction of nukes, the removal of chemical weapons from Syria and nuke material from Iran.
This deprived "the Deep State" of it's only rationales for wider war.
That's why Putin and Obama haven't been given anywhere near the amount of credit for these epochal, game-changing negotiations -- the Mighty Wurlitzer carried far more criticism of the Syria/Iran deals than praise.
The Dominionist Proto-Autocracy -- well represented in law enforcement, intelligence and military circles --wants war with Iran but now their hands are tied and Trump obviously doesn't have the make-up of a strong leader. When he refused to shake Angela Merkel's hand he held his little mitts as to defend from getting hit in the nuts again.
The CIA wasn't opposed to Trump until after the election.
What tune was the Mighty Wurlitzer playing over the last 11 days of the 2016 Election? Were the airwaves full of Russian Donnie stories? No, it was all about Hillary and some pervert's e-mail.
They wanted Trump in hopes he could spur permanent war with Islam, but he quickly made it clear he doesn't pack the gear for world leadership.
Robert Parry below on how the lost-in-the-world-of-make-believe Democrats have now traded places with their political counterparts (the Republicans) in their zeal for embracing the new McCarthysim and the new cold war.
The whole soap opera increasingly reminds me of a seaside Punch & Judy show in its exultation of infantile blame-storming. It would be laughable... except for the potential of war that might result.
Quote:Democrats Trade Places on War and McCarthyism
March 23, 2017
Exclusive: The anti-Russia hysteria gripping the Democratic Party marks a "trading places" moment as the Democrats embrace the New Cold War and the New McCarthyism, flipping the script on Republicans, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Caught up in the frenzy to delegitimize Donald Trump by blaming his victory on Russian meddling, national Democrats are finishing the transformation of their party from one that was relatively supportive of peace to one pushing for war, including a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
This "trading places" moment was obvious in watching the belligerent tone of Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Monday as they impugned the patriotism of any Trump adviser who may have communicated with anyone connected to Russia.
Ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, acknowledged that there was no hard evidence of any Trump-Russia cabal, but he pressed ahead with what he called "circumstantial evidence of collusion," a kind of guilt-by-association conspiracy theory that made him look like a mild-mannered version of Joe McCarthy.
Schiff cited by name a number of Trump's aides and associates who as The New York Times reported were "believed to have some kind of contact or communications with Russians." These Americans, whose patriotism was being questioned, included foreign policy adviser Carter Page, Trump's second campaign manager Paul Manafort, political adviser Roger Stone and Trump's first national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
In a 15-minute opening statement, Schiff summed up his circumstantial case by asking: "Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible. But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated."
As an investigative journalist who has covered (and uncovered) national security scandals for several decades, I would never accuse people of something as serious as betraying their country based on nothing more than coincidences that, who knows, might not be coincidental.
Before we published anything on such topics, the news organizations that I worked for required multiple layers of information from a variety of sources including insiders who could describe what had happened and why. Such stories included Nicaraguan Contra cocaine smuggling, Oliver North's secret Contra supply operation, and the Reagan campaign's undermining of President Carter's Iran-hostage negotiations in 1980.
For breaking those stories, we still took enormous heat from Republicans, some Democrats who wanted to show how bipartisan they were, and many establishment-protecting journalists, but the stories contained strong evidence that misconduct occurred and we were highly circumspect in how the allegations were framed.
Going Whole-Hog
By contrast, national Democrats, some super-hawk Republicans and the establishment media are going whole-hog on these vague suspicions of contacts between some Russians and some Americans who have provided some help or advice to Trump.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, at the outset of a bilateral meeting on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo]
Given the paucity of evidence both regarding the claims that Russia hacked Democratic emails and slipped them to WikiLeaks, and the allegations that somehow Trump's advisers colluded in that process it would appear that what is happening is a political maneuver to damage Trump politically and possibly remove him from office.
But those machinations require the Democratic Party's continued demonization of Russia and implicitly put the Democrats on the side of escalating New Cold War tensions, such as military support for the fiercely anti-Russian regime in Ukraine which seized power in a 2014 U.S.-backed putsch overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
One of the attack lines that Democrats have used against Trump is that his people toned down language in the Republican platform about shipping arms to the Ukrainian military, which includes battalions of neo-Nazi fighters and has killed thousands of ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the east in what is officially called an Anti-Terrorism Operation (or ATO).
The Democratic Party leaders have fully bought into the slanted Western narrative justifying the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. They also have ignored the human rights of Ukraine's ethnic Russian minorities, which voted overwhelmingly in Crimea and the Donbass to secede from post-coup Ukraine. The more complex reality is simply summed up as a "Russian invasion."
Key Democrats also have pressed for escalation of the U.S. military attacks inside Syria to force "regime change" on Bashar al-Assad's secular government even if that risks another military confrontation with Russia and a victory by Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists.
In short, the national Democratic Party is turning itself into the more extreme war party. It's not that the Republicans have become all that dovish; it's just that the Democrats have become all that hawkish. The significance of this change can hardly be overstated.
Questioning War
Since late in the Vietnam War, the Democrats have acted as the more restrained of the two major parties on issues of war, with the Republicans associated with tough-guy rhetoric and higher military spending. By contrast, Democrats generally were more hesitant to rush into foreign wars and confrontations (although they were far from pacifists).
Daniel Ellsberg on the cover of Time after leaking the Pentagon Papers
Especially after the revelations of the Pentagon Papers in the 1971 revealing the government deceptions used to pull the American people into the Vietnam War, Democrats questioned shady rationalizations for other wars.
Some Democratic skepticism continued into the 1980s as President Ronald Reagan was modernizing U.S. propaganda techniques to whitewash the gross human rights crimes of right-wing regimes in Central America and to blacken the reputations of Nicaragua's Sandinistas and other leftists.
The Democratic resolve against war propaganda began to crack by the mid-to-late 1980s around Reagan's Grenada invasion and George H.W. Bush's attack on Panama. By then, the Republicans had enjoyed nearly two decades of bashing the Democrats as "weak on defense" from George McGovern to Jimmy Carter to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis.
But the Democratic Party's resistance to dubious war rationalizations collapsed in 1991 over George H.W. Bush's Persian Gulf War, in which the President rebuffed less violent solutions (even ones favored by the U.S. military) to assure a dramatic ground-war victory after which Bush declared, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all."
Fearful of being labeled disloyal to "the troops" and "weak," national Democrats scrambled to show their readiness to kill. In 1992, Gov. Bill Clinton left the campaign trail to return to Arkansas to oversee the execution of the mentally impaired Ricky Ray Rector.
During his presidency, Clinton deployed so-called "smart power" aggressively, including maintaining harsh sanctions on Iraq even as they led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. He also intervened in the Yugoslavian civil war by bombing civilian targets in Belgrade including the lethal destruction of the Serb TV station for the supposed offense of broadcasting "propaganda."
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, many leading congressional Democrats including presidential hopefuls John Kerry, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton voted to authorize President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Though they offered various excuses (especially after the Iraq War went badly), the obvious real reason was their fear of being labeled "soft" in Republican attack ads.
The American public's revulsion over the Iraq War and the resulting casualties contributed to Barack Obama's election. But he, too, moved to protect his political flanks by staffing his young administration with hawks, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. (and later CIA Director) David Petraeus. Despite receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama also became comfortable with continuing Bush's wars and starting some of his own, such as the bombing war against Libya and the violent subversion of Syria.
By nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Democratic Party completed its transformation into the Party of War. Clinton not only ran as an unapologetic hawk in the Democratic primaries against Sen. Bernie Sanders urging, for instance, a direct U.S. military invasion of Syria to create "no fly zones" but positioned herself as a harsh critic of Trump's hopes to reduce hostilities with Russia, deeming the Republican nominee Vladimir Putin's "puppet."
Ironically, Trump's shocking victory served to solidify the Democratic Party's interest in pushing for a military confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. After all, baiting Trump over his alleged "softness" toward Russia has become the centerpiece of Democratic hopes for somehow ousting Trump or at least crippling his presidency. Any efforts by Trump to ease those tensions will be cited as prima facie evidence that he is Putin's "Manchurian candidate."
Being Joe McCarthy
National Democrats and their media supporters don't even seem troubled by the parallels between their smears of Americans for alleged contacts with Russians and Sen. Joe McCarthy's guilt-by-association hearings of the early Cold War. Every link to Russia no matter how tenuous or disconnected from Trump's election is trumpeted by Democrats and across the mainstream news media.
Lawyer Roy Cohn (right) with Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
But it's not even clear that this promotion of the New Cold War and the New McCarthyism will redound to the Democrats' political advantage. Clinton apparently thought that her embrace of a neoconservative foreign policy would bring in many "moderate" Republicans opposed to Trump's criticism of the Bush-Obama wars, but exit polls showed Republicans largely rallying to their party's nominee.
Meanwhile, there were many anti-war Democrats who have become deeply uncomfortable with the party's new hawkish persona. In the 2016 election, some peace Democrats voted for third parties or didn't vote at all for president, although it's difficult to assess how instrumental those defections were in costing Clinton the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
More broadly, the Democratic obsession with Russia and the hopes for somehow exploiting those investigations in order to oust Trump have distracted the party from a necessary autopsy into why the Democrats have lost so much ground over the past decade.
While many Democratic leaders and activists are sliding into full-scale conspiracy-mode over the Russia-Trump story, they are not looking at the party's many mistakes and failings, such as:
Why did party leaders push so hard to run an unpopular establishment candidate in a strongly anti-establishment year? Was it the fact that many are beholden to the Clinton cash machine?
How can Democrats justify the undemocratic use of "super-delegates" to make many rank-and-file voters feel that the process is rigged in favor of the establishment's choice?
What can the Democratic Party do to reengage with many working-class voters, especially downwardly mobile whites, to stop the defection of this former Democratic base to Trump's populism?
Do national Democrats understand how out of touch they are with the future as they insist that the United States must remain the sole military superpower in a uni-polar world when the world is rapidly shifting toward a multi-polar reality?
Yet, rather than come up with new strategies to address the future, Democratic leaders would rather pretend that Putin is at fault for the Trump presidency and hope that the U.S. intelligence community with its fearsome surveillance powers can come up with enough evidence to justify Trump's impeachment.
Then, of course, the Democrats would be stuck with President Mike Pence, a more traditional Religious Right Republican whose first step on foreign policy would be to turn it over to neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, a move that would likely mean a new wave of "regime change" wars.
At such a point, that might put the Democrats and Republicans in sync as two equally warmongering parties, but what good that would do for the American people and the world is hard to fathom.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon" and "Democrats Are Now the Aggressive War Party.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
And Parry manages to misrepresent what Adam Schiff said, as well his key position as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, where he is seeing intelligence reports that he can't discuss in public in detail (yet).
"These Americans, whose patriotism was being questioned, included foreign policy adviser Carter Page, Trump's second campaign manager Paul Manafort, political adviser Roger Stone and Trump's first national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn."
I can only guess that Parry isn't keeping up with the latest developments.
I have no real idea what you're talking about, Tracy.
I can only assume that you continue to assume that somehow I am a closet supporter of Trump because so many of your posts (if not all of your posts) cast me in that unpleasant and unwanted role. Detesting Hilary as I do (and did) and favouring two of Trump's stated policies during the election - friendlier relations with Russia and downgrading NATO - seem to translate in your clouded mind as me having the hots for the crooked orange one.
It's the sort of ludicrous leap made by people who are unable to discriminate one thing from another but join them together in a never ceasing mulch of indignation.
This then leads to my question: what difference does Cohn's relationship to Trump make to the McCarthyism going on in the US today about Russia being the focus of the blame game? These are two entirely different matters. The deep state, the elite faction /neocons of the security and military and industrial complex insist and demand that Trump abandoned his stated desire to thaw relations with Russia. They want the new cold war very badly and engage in McCarthy style activities to ensure this comes about. It looks to me as though they've got their way too, but time will tell on this.
As for Parry being unable to keep up with developments is simply and joyously laughable. You very much remind me of the comment made by Jack Lemmon (playing Jack Martin) talking to then gullible Kevin Costner (playing Jim Garrison)
"You're so naive Mr. Garrison."
As for the 3 titles you linked, well...
I used to write for Business Insider UK and knew the then editor quite well (ex Sun as I recall). Business Insider was founded by Axel Springer and is still owned by Axel Springer CE. Springer was an early neocon in the sense that his publishing empire was founded on five principles, the second of which was to support the vital rights of the state of Israel. The third objective was to support the Transatlantic Alliance (i.e., NATO). The CEO is today Mathias Dopfner, a former executive board member of Deutsche Bank. He studied in Germany and Boston. He once surprised an audience he was speaking to by admitting he was a "non-Jewish Zionist." Mmmm. He was a close friend and travelling companion of George Baron Weidenfeld, an acclaimed lifelong Zionist, a former BBC "monitoring service" alumnus and the Chief of Cabinet to Chaim Weizman, President of the Zionist Organization and first President of Israel. Mmmm.
Another linked newspaper was Politico, founded by Joe Alibritton, a former Chairman of Riggs National Bank. Current ownership resides with his son, Robert, who is affiliated with the Disney owned ABC Network, and who was also a former CEO of Riggs (money launderer of record for Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, as well as Equatorial Guinea's dictator, Teodoro Obiang... and also Saudi Arabia no less). Son Robert is also a trustee of the LBJ Library and Museum. Riggs incidentally had a historical connection to Robert Fleming which I've written about extensively in the past. The Robert Fleming Bank was basically a very spooky outfit, like my old berth in the City. I used to do business with Fleming's too. And with PNC which rescued Riggs from a fate worth than death for bankers --- going out of business.
You also linked to the NYT but we need not to go into any detail given its well known Neocon credentials.
American money launderers, bankers, zionists and Brit spooky bankers; a brief round up of the old Anglo-American-Israel concoction that has brought such misery to the world since WWII
What a lovely choice of company you choose to keep you informed (sic), Tracy.
Lastly, please stipulate exactly your claim about how Parry is "misrepresenting" what Adam Schiff said and I'll look at it critically. Somehow, given Parry's credentials vis-a-vis yours I honestly doubt your allegation and wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to discover this is a misrepresentation on your part --- but we'll see.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
I;m posting the below again here for the record. It is an insightful and timely read. Foreign Affairs the journal of the CFR published this article. I do note however, that the claim that Russia interfered with the US election is stated as bald fact, something that has not yet been established and I doubt ever will ---- it didn't happen.
Robert David English is Associate Professor of International Relations, Slavic Languages & Literature, and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.
In his first press conference as president of the United States, Donald Trump said no fewer than seven times that it would be "positive," "good," even "great" if "we could get along with Russia." In fact, for all the confusion of his policies toward China, Europe, and the Middle East, Trump has enunciated a clear three-part position on Russia, which contrasts strongly with that of most of the U.S. political elite. First, Trump seeks Moscow's cooperation on global issues; second, he believes that Washington shares the blame for soured relations; and third, he acknowledges "the right of all nations to put their own interests first," adding that the United States does "not seek to impose our way of life on anyone."
The last of these is an essentially realist position, and if coherently implemented could prove a tonic. For 25 years, Republicans and Democrats have acted in ways that look much the same to Moscow. Washington has pursued policies that have ignored Russian interests (and sometimes international law as well) in order to encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs conducive to U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder is that the U.S. policy elite doesn't get this, even as foreign-affairs neophyte Trump apparently does.
MEMORY LOSS
Most Americans appreciate the weight of past grievances upon present-day politics, including that of the United States' own interference in Iran in the 1950s, or in Latin America repeatedly from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet there is a blind spot when it comes to U.S. interference in Russian politics in the 1990s. Many Americans remember former President Bill Clinton as a great benefactor to Russia as the country attempted to build a market democracy under then President Boris Yeltsin. But most Russians see the United States as having abetted a decade of degradation under Yeltsin's scandal-ridden bumbling. Washington, they believe, not only took advantage of Moscow's weakness for geopolitical gain but also repeatedly interfered in Russia's domestic politics to back the person-Yeltsin-who best suited U.S. interests. Americans' ignorance of this perception creates a highly distorted picture of Russia's first postcommunist decade.
Russia's misery during the 1990s is difficult for outsiders to comprehend. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia's economy entered a sharp slide that would continue for over eight years. Although this decline is rarely is referred to as a depression in Western media, in fact it was much worse than the Great Depression in the United States-between 1929 and 1932, U.S. GDP fell by some 25 percent, whereas Russia's fell by over 40 percent between 1990 and 1998. Compared with the Great Depression, Russia's collapse of the 1990s was nearly twice as sharp, lasted three times as long, and caused far more severe health and mortality crises. The public health disaster reflected Russia's prolonged agony: stress-aggravated pathologies (suicide, disease caused by increased alcohol and tobacco use) and economically induced woes (poor nutrition, violent crime, a crumbling public health system) combined to cause at least three million "excess deaths" in the 1990s.
Faith in free markets, and admiration for the United States, fell sharply in Russia in the 1990s. The failures of "shock therapy," or the rapid transition to a market economy, made such alienation inevitable, as the rush toward privatization and slashing of the state led not to self-regulating growth and broad prosperity but to a pillaging of national wealth by rapacious oligarchs, who flourished under Yeltsin. Worse, American talk of a Marshall Plan for Russia proved empty, and U.S. aid-particularly in the critical first years of transition-was a paltry $ 7 billion. Much of that was in the form of credits that came attached with strings requiring the purchase of U.S. goods or the hiring of U.S. consultants. Also hurting America's image were much-publicized cases of corruption on the part of some Americans, involving insider trading, money laundering, and similar scandals.
In 1993, hyperinflation and poverty led to protests, and the Russian parliament passed legislation attempting to block Yeltsin's reforms. Yeltsin responded by deciding to close the legislature and redesign the political system to concentrate power in his hands. This, however, was blatantly unconstitutional, and many deputies refused to disband. Some turned to violent resistance and were crushed by the army. The Clinton administration regretted the bloodshed but blamed it on the opposition, while ignoring the illegality of Yeltsin's power grab. And the United States supported Yeltsin again two months later, when a referendum on a "super-presidential" constitution passed in a rigged vote.
In 1996, there was more U.S.-assisted mischief on the part of Yeltsin. The worst incident was the "loans for shares" scandal, a crooked privatization scheme in which Yeltsin sold Russia's most valuable natural-resource firms to oligarchs by way of fraudulent auctions-a fraud that was matched by that of the 1996 election, when Yeltsin won his second term. The United States was again tarred by complicity, by winking at such electoral violations as state media working to elect Yeltsin or the gross violations of campaign spending limits, and even by sending U.S. advisers to help Yeltsin's stumbling campaign.
The Clinton administration tolerated Yeltsin's regime in part to gain Russia's compliance on global issues, including NATO expansion. But even this was shortsighted as well as hypocritical. George Kennan, author of the Cold War containment policy, warned that pushing NATO toward Russia's borders was "a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions," which was likely to provoke an anti-Western backlash. Other experts, such as intelligence veteran Fritz Ermarth, issued warnings at the time over the United States' complicity in Russia's domestic corruption. "We have largely lost the admiration and respect of the Russian people," Ermarth wrote. "Think how [U.S. policy] must look to Russians: you support the regime's corruption of our country on the inside so it supports you in your humiliation of our country on the outside. One could not concoct a better propaganda line for Russia's extreme nationalists."
ALTERNATIVE REALITY ABOUT RUSSIA
Few Russians who endured this corruption and humiliation have much sympathy with U.S. anger over Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And with any perspective on the 1990s, it is hard to fault them. Yet such perspective among Americans is rare, in part because the Western media often adopted the Clinton administration's cheery narrative, downplaying negative phenomena as bumps in the road toward a democratic Russia. And despite subsequent revelation of so many scandals from the 1990s, Putin's "autocracy" is still contrasted with Yeltsin's "golden era of democracy," ignoring the fact that it was Yeltsin's team who perfected such tactics as 110 percent turnout in remote precincts, and whose oligarchs used their media empires as lobbying firms while brazenly buying parliamentary votes (to create personal tax loopholes). Many myths about the Yeltsin years persist. A recent National Geographic article by Julia Ioffe, for instance, attributes Russian growth under Putin to "tough economic reforms adopted by Boris Yeltsin" and describes Putin as "coasting on historically high oil prices and economic reforms implemented in the Nineties."
High oil prices, yes. But had Putin merely coasted on the policies of Yeltsin, there would have been little tax collected on the oligarchs' profits to pay for pensions, rebuild infrastructure, and create reserve funds. And there would have been no agricultural revival, because private land tenure would have remained illegal. In his first few years in office, Putin passed tax and banking reform, bankruptcy laws, and other pro-market policies that Yeltsin hadn't managed in a decade. Denying Putin credit in this way is typical. Paul Krugman recently argued in The New York Times, for instance, that growth under Putin "can be explained with just one word: oil." But note that in 2000, when Putin became president, oil stood at $30 per barrel and petroleum accounted for 20 percent of Russia's GDP. But in 2010, after a decade's rise pushed oil over $100 per barrel, petroleum had nevertheless fallen to just 11 percent of GDP, according to the World Bank. Thus as oil boomed, Russian agriculture, manufacturing, and services grew even faster.
Krugman's fellow columnist Thomas Friedman similarly decried Russia's low life expectancy over a period "that coincides almost exactly with Putin's leadership of the country ... the period of 1990-2013," while blaming Putin for "slow gains in the life expectancy of an entire nation." In fact, the first half of this period coincides almost exactly with Yeltsin's leadership, when male life expectancy fell by over six years-unprecedented for a modern country in peacetime. Under Putin, both male and female life expectancy have made rapid gains, and their combined average recently reached 70 years for the first time in Russian history.
VLADIMIR THE TERRIBLE
Distaste for many aspects of Putin's harsh rule is understandable. But demonization that veers into delusion by denying him credit for major progress (and blaming him for all problems) is foolish. Foolish because it widens the gulf between U.S. and Russian perceptions of what is going on in their country, with Russians rating Putin highly because they value the stability and pride he has revived. Foolish because it encourages the illusion that everything bad in Russia flows from Putin, so that if only Putin were removed then Russians would elect another liberal like Yeltsin. And foolish simply because that is how American leaders look when they mock Russia's prospects, as former U.S. President Barack Obama did when he said, "Russia doesn't make anything. Immigrants aren't rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The population is shrinking."
In fact, Russia's population has been growingsince 2010, and the country has one of the higher birth rates in Europe. Russia is the world's third-largest immigrant destination in the world, behind only America and Germany. And Russian products include the rockets that ferry U.S. astronauts into space. Both Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were given to careless quips about Russia. Both mocked Putin, and Clinton compared him to Adolf Hitler-a comparison that would be laughable were they not so offensive to Russians, who lost 26 million countrymen in World War II. It was also reckless, given Putin's broad popularity in Russia. But when confronted with this popularity, Obama replied, "Saddam Hussein had a 90 percent poll rating." He explained, "If you control the media and you've taken away everybody's civil liberties, and you jail dissidents, that's what happens." This view is deeply mistaken.
There is, of course, much to fault in Putin's Russia, and both Obama and Clinton were subject to nastiness from Moscow. But it is undignified and unwise for a U.S. president to disparage not just a foreign leader but his entire country in the way that Obama did. The urge to answer taunts in kind cannot overpower regard for Russian public opinion, and so confirm the Russian media's portrayal of America as ignorant and arrogant. It seemed clever when Hillary Clinton pounced on Trump as "Putin's puppet." But apparently it didn't resonate much with ordinary Americans, who elected Trump, and neither does the pettiness and demonization of Putin resonate with ordinary Russians.
These ordinary Russians are the forgotten people-the hard-working teachers, doctors, and mechanics whose savings, careers, even health were destroyed by the catastrophe of the 1990s. They are the fledgling voters who saw their new democracy bought and sold by Yeltsin and his cronies, and the onetime admirers of the United States who longed for a leader to restore their pride in Russia after a decade of humiliation. Under Clinton, the United States treated Russia like a defeated enemy and capitalized on its weakness to expand NATO. Claims that this was merely a defensive expansion were belied by NATO's bombing of Serbia, a Russian ally, in 1999. Under President George W. Bush, the United States further intimidated Russia by abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, imposing punitive tariffs, launching a reckless invasion of Iraq, continuing to expand NATO, and further encircling Russia by cozying up to Georgia and Ukraine.
It is thus unsurprising that in 2008, Russia hit back, answering a Georgian strike in the disputed region of South Ossetia (which killed some Russian peacekeepers) with a crushing counterblow. For finally pushing back, Putin's approval rating soared to nearly 85 percent-the highest it would reach until Crimea's annexation in 2014.
HOW NOT TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY
This is the Russia that Obama inherited in 2009: prideful, angry, and in no mood for the sanctimony that came with the new administration's stress on democracy promotion. They had seen Bill Clinton ally with a corrupt Yeltsin to make a mockery of their new democracy. They had fumed as Vice President Dick Cheney faulted Russian democracy while praising that of Kazakhstan. And they heard their country criticized for interfering in the affairs of weaker neighbors, even as NATO was expanding right up to Russia's borders, and the United States was launching an invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy promotion that would set the Middle East aflame. Not surprisingly, the Russian media ever more frequently paired the term "double standard" with America.
Thus it may have been unwise for the Obama administration to pursue democracy promotion as brashly as it did, criticizing Russian elections and encouraging Putin's opposition. This carried a whiff not only of hypocrisy but of danger, too, appearing, as it did to many within Russia, as a threat to destabilize Putin's rule. Democracy promoters may draw a distinction between policies aimed at advancing NATO and those aimed at advancing political liberalization in Russia and other former Soviet states-emphasizing that Obama enacted the latter but not the former. But Putin's skepticism was easy to understand given the West's record of undermining Moscow's allies, as in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, and then seeking to anchor their new regimes in the Western political and military blocs. As a senator, too, Obama was an early supporter of Ukraine joining NATO, and preparations for Ukraine's integration with NATO continued throughout his presidency. Hillary Clinton also advocated a NATO "open door" for Ukraine, and then incurred Putin's wrath by pushing humanitarian intervention (which soon turned into regime change) in Libya. So her demand for "a full investigation of all reports of fraud and intimidation" in Russia's 2011 elections was most unwelcome. Michael McFaul, an expert on democracy promotion and longtime critic of Putin, was a particularly provocative choice for new Obama's ambassador to Russia in 2012.
Neither should righteous indignation at Putin's post-election crackdown prevent rethinking of the targets as well as the tools of American public diplomacy. Some fault the focus on Russia's liberal opposition, a small number of Moscow-centered activists who best reflect U.S. values. Many of them are discredited in the eyes of the Russian majority: for their earlier support of Yeltsin's regime, for their disparaging of the widely admired Putin, and for their reflexive backing of U.S. policies-such as NATO expansion-even when they clash with Russian interests. They appear, in a word, unpatriotic. They are earnest, articulate, and highly admirable. But even if they weren't stigmatized by Putin-or tarred by identification with the 1990s-they embody liberal-cosmopolitan values alien to most conservative-national Russians. And while this makes them appealing to the West, it also makes them a poor bet as the focus of democracy-promotion.
Consider the case of Pussy Riot, the feminist-protest rock group, some of whose members were convicted of hooliganism in 2012 for staging a protest in Moscow's Church of Christ the Savior-profanely mocking not only Putin but also the Russian Orthodox Church and its believers. Both activists and state officials in the United States praised Pussy Riot and demanded their release. Yet basic decency-and regard for the values and traditions of others-would suggest that hailing Pussy Riot as champions of free speech was disrespectful of Russia. It was also insensible if the United States is interested in cultivating sympathy among Russians, some 70 percent of whom identify as Orthodox believers. Russia is a conservative society that viewed the years of Yeltsin's rule, and its onslaught of pornography and promiscuity, with horror. In polls, only seven percent of Russians said that political protest was permissible in a church, and only five percent agreed that Pussy Riot should be released without serious punishment. Surely the sensibilities of ordinary Russians deserve as much regard as those of a minority of cosmopolitan liberals. And hectoring by the West will hardly ease traditional Russian homophobia. Indeed, the outcry on behalf of Pussy Riot likely strengthened popular support for the notorious 2013 law against "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations."
Russians see a double standard in U.S. judgments about their country-a prosecutorial stance that criticizes Russia for behaviors that go unnoticed in other countries. For example, The Washington Post has closely covered Russia's anti-LGBT policies but has paid scant attention to the same in countries such as Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine, and when it has it has suggested that Russia is to blame for exporting its anti-gay beliefs. Since 2014, the Western media has similarly reported on Moscow's alleged propaganda onslaught, while largely ignoring the brazen purchase of positive publicity by countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. This is not the usual lobbying or public relations but the funding of ostensibly independent research on a country by that country itself-paying for upbeat election reports and other assessments by such groups as the Parliamentary Association of the Council of Europe.
Americans rarely hear of such activity, even as alarm over Moscow's subversion nears hysteria. A recent U.S. intelligence report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election warned of "a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest." Yet a key culprit is the news channel RT (which has a miniscule share of the U.S. audience), on the grounds that it runs "anti-fracking programming highlighting environmental issues" and "a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement [that] described the current U.S. political system as corrupt." In fact, unlike the 2014 Maidan occupation in Ukraine, which was actively supported by some U.S. and EU officials, Russian diplomats carefully kept their distance from the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests.
DEMOCRACY PROMOTION
Another double standard, ignored by the U.S. media but noted overseas, was Obama's denunciation in 2014 of the Crimea secession referendum that preceded the peninsula's annexation by Russia. Rejecting parallels between Crimea's secession from Ukraine and Kosovo's 2008 secession from Serbia-which the West supported but Russia, along with Serbia, rejected as illegitimate-Obama said that Kosovo only seceded "after a referendum was organized ... in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo's neighbors. None of that even came close to happening in Crimea." In fact, none of that even came close to happening in Kosovo. There was no referendum at all-just a vote by Kosovo's Albanian-majority parliament. As for cooperation with the neighbors, Serbia desperately opposed Kosovo secession; Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, and Slovakia still have not recognized Kosovo; and others, such as Bulgaria, Croatia, and Hungary, only agreed under Western pressure.
Such a factual error-belief in things that never occurred, yet are cited as legal justification to dismember a country-is worrisome regardless. It also highlights an illusion about the free, democratic choice facing countries in central and eastern Europe as they are tugged between Washington and Moscow. In fact, the freedom of their choice belies the powerful political and economic levers employed to pry these countries away from Russia. As noted above in the case of the Kosovo referendum, Kosovo's neighbors were pressured by the United States and NATO to recognize the region's secession from Serbia. In fact, carrots and sticks have been continually applied to the countries of eastern Europe to encourage the policies desired in Brussels, Berlin, and Washington, D.C. When eastern Europeans grew concerned about the higher than expected costs of joining the EU-or about the backlash that NATO expansion was provoking in Russia-accession was sweetened for political and business elites while the masses were sometimes sidestepped with popular referenda replaced by simple parliamentary votes. Occasionally Brussels and Washington pulled in opposite directions, as with the International Criminal Court-backed by the EU but opposed by the Administration of George W. Bush. In this, as in other cases, the countries of central Europe exercised their supposedly free choice under enormous political and economic pressure.
Nobody argues that joining the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union would benefit most countries more than the EU. (NATO is another matter, as the costs of Russian backlash now rival any security benefits from further expansion.) The point is simply to grasp the legitimacy in Moscow's perspective-that expansion of the Western blocs is not an organic, democratic process but, rather, one engineered by the United States and its allies, and motivated as much by power as by principle. The West must also see the costs to the countries involved (and to its own alliances) in a payoff-driven, elite-centered process that shortchanges the concerns of majorities and is in key ways undemocratic. Long before the Syrian refugees crisis soured them even further, support for the EU in central Europe had already fallen because the costs were much higher than expected, whereas the benefits seemed mainly to reward a wealthy business elite.
As an example of this dynamic, consider the case of Moldova, where the EU has supported local pro-European parties to help this desperately poor country toward accession. Few in the West read much about the country until a spate of headlines last November, such as the Telegraph's announcement: "Pro-Russia Candidate Wins Moldova Election." Spinning this result in terms of geopolitics was misleading. The election had turned largely on domestic issues, such as corruption and the economy. Ordinary Moldovans worried that EU accession would mainly benefit elites, and Moldova's pro-EU Liberal Democratic Party was reeling from a scandal in which party leaders funneled $1 billion-half the reserves of the Moldovan National Bank-into private bank accounts. But just as in the cases of similar elections in Bulgaria and Montenegro, U.S. media focused on the struggle for influence with Moscow. Indeed, Montenegro casts all of these issues into sharp relief. This is a country whose secession from Serbia the United States encouraged-for geopolitical goals, to weaken the Serbian leader Milosevic-by backing the epically corrupt boss Milo Djukanovic. Now, a decade later, Djukanovic's Democratic-Socialist party exploits similar geopolitical tensions to engineer Montenegro's accession to NATO-a step of doubtful benefit to either the alliance or Montenegro, provocative to Russia, and one that buttresses a deeply corrupt, patronage-based regime. This focus on geopolitical threats, however, obscures the bigger socioeconomic one: pluralities or even majorities in many eastern European countries now believe that life was better under communism. Such alienation drives anti-EU sentiment in those countries and empowers demagogues like Hungary's President Viktor Orban-not some nefarious influence from Vladimir Putin but deep economic inequality and the manifest failings of European integration.
Western understandings of the conflict in Ukraine show a similar bias. Recall that the crisis erupted in 2013 when President Viktor Yanukovych balked at the EU's harsh accession terms and opted instead to align with Russia. And he was ousted in a revolt that America and the EU openly cheered. No matter how corrupt his rule was, he was elected democratically and had acted constitutionally in making his decision. (In fact, he was elected in 2010 because the previous pro-EU government had proved both corrupt and incompetent.) But in 2014, as the protests in Ukraine grew, the United States decided to abandon a power-transition deal that it had agreed upon with Russia, and instead supported the protests calling for Yanukovych's ouster, which essentially turned into a coup. But this quickly boomeranged, as the Russians concluded that if the West could support an unconstitutional seizure of power in Kiev, then they could hold an unconstitutional referendum in Crimea or support an unconstitutional seizure of power in Donbas. There was a compromise path, but treating Ukraine as something to be yanked from Russia's orbit-which raised the specter of NATO again as well as loss of their centuries-old Crimean naval base-made Putin's choice to hit back an easy one.
Of course this hardly justifies the savagery that Russia has abetted in fighting over the Donbas. But U.S. and EU actions helped spark the conflict by treating Ukraine as a prize to be grabbed, rather than as a linguistically and ethnically divided country in which Russia has legitimate interests. Western policies recklessly ignored these interests and needlessly raised the stakes. As seen, some officials stressed a NATO "open door" for Ukraine while the likelihood of rapid EU accession was exaggerated as well. Before the war, Ukraine had an annual income-per-capita of $4,000, on par with Albania and Kosovo, and in corruption surveys it ranked below Russia and on the same level as Nigeria. Today, after an Association agreement, billions in aid, and three years of EU-mandated reforms, Ukraine is still a corrupt, bankrupt mess-highlighting how unprepared it was for EU accession, how heavily it depended on Russian trade and subsidies that are now lost, and how unwise it was for Western leaders to push an either-or choice on Kiev.
THE ART OF THE DEAL?
In the latest corruption surveys, Ukraine still ranks below Russia. Scandals erupt daily, with an economic drain greater than the conflict in Donbas. Ukraine's pro-EU President Petro Poroshenko has a 17 percent approval rating, lower than the pro-Russian Yanukovych's 28 percent on the eve of his ouster in 2014. Ironically, this means that the pro-Russian Yanukovych was the most popular Ukrainian president of this century. And in the latest poll finding, only 41 percent of Ukrainians still support the EU Association Agreement, the rejection of which sparked the Maidan revolution in the first place. It is trends like these, along with a right-wing turn in Western European states that erodes their patience and generosity with troubled eastern neighbors, that should trouble EU leaders. Instead, across the region, Europeans are on high alert for Russians spreading anti-Western news, supporting anti-Western politicians, and deploying an army of anti-Western internet trolls.
Yet for all the paranoia about Russian subversion, crisis is more likely to come from elsewhere, such as an unraveling of fragile Bosnia leading to a clash between Serbia and NATO. Or it could be Moldova, with the nationalist majority renewing a push to unite with their Romanian kin, thereby reviving conflict with the Russian minority. Hungary could leave the EU, delivering a critical blow to European unity. Or Ukraine could simply collapse of its own corrupt, bankrupt weight.
Yet Ukraine could also be where America and Russia begin repairing ties. The Russian economy is weak-incomes are down a third since 2013-and relief from Western sanctions is sorely needed. Europe, too, cries for the revival of normal trade with Russia. A deal between Russia and the West would build upon the stalled Minsk Accords. Moscow would withdraw from the Donbass and restore Ukraine's eastern border, and Kiev would grant local self-rule to this Russian-speaking region. Russia would, in turn, get a commitment from NATO not to incorporate Ukraine, and Ukraine would get a treaty guaranteeing its territorial integrity as well as military aid. Kiev would also gain major Western investments, while benefitting enormously from restoration of trade with Russia.
Purists will call such a deal a betrayal, as it would be a de facto recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea. But the best is the enemy of the good. Moscow will not allow Crimea to be snatched away again, as it was in 1954, after nearly 200 years as part of Russia. And by democratic rights, it shouldn't-the fact is that a large majority of Crimeans want to remain with Russia. Ukraine, moreover, would benefit from peace and investment, instead of diverting more resources into conflict. Normal political and trade ties with Russia would also benefit Europe as a whole, helping to slow and maybe to reverse the current slide toward dissolution. Continuation of the status quo, by contrast, only exacerbates crisis.
WILL THE REAL VLADIMIR PUTIN PLEASE STAND UP?
A diplomatic breakthrough between Russia and the West on Ukraine-or on Syria, or other major issues-will also require firm agreement on non-interference in each other's domestic affairs. Such diplomacy would test the mettle of the Trump administration's foreign-affairs neophytes, but the greater unknown is Putin. A majority of the U.S. political elite believes that no deals are possible because Putin is irremediably hostile. Whether they attribute that hostility to ideology (an ingrained KGB worldview) or corruption (an illegitimate regime that needs a foreign enemy to distract its people from domestic woes), many American policymakers believe that Putin simply has no interest in peace with the West. In their view, he is bent on expansion and will gladly endure sanctions as the price of fomenting discord in the West.
Another group of policymakers is also skeptical of Putin, but do not blame him alone for the deterioration of relations. Many of these analysts opposed NATO expansion from the outset, for the same reasons that Kennan did-because it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. These experts also criticize the United States' misadventures in Iraq and Libya, failure to respect Russia's red lines on expansion into Georgia and Ukraine, and petty demonization of Putin. Yet they mainly stand with the first group now in believing that containment, not cooperation, is what the West must practice, because Putin's recent actions threaten the postwar liberal order.
A third group of analysts-the realists, who make up a minority of the foreign-policy establishment-reply that Putin does not threaten the entire postwar liberal order but only challenges the post-Cold War U.S.-dominated order that consistently ignores Russia's interests. They wonder how some can admit the folly of NATO's continual expansion and fault the many double standards in U.S. policy but not agree that America must meet Russia halfway. Like realists such as Kennan or Hans Morgenthau, who early warned against the folly of Vietnam, they are sometimes derided as weak (or Putin apologists) for cautioning against inflating foreign threats while ignoring the United States' domestic weaknesses.
These realists argue that the early Putin prioritized market economic reforms and good relations with the West, yet saw his open hand met by the clenched fist of the George W. Bush-era neoconservatives. And Obama, reset or no, continued efforts to expand the Western economic and military blocs that had started under Clinton in the 1990s. In other words, for over two decades, whether motivated by residual Cold War mistrust or post-Cold War liberal hegemonism, America has steadily pushed Western military and political-economic power deeper into Russia's backyard. If history teaches anything it is that any great power will, when facing the continued advance of a rival, eventually push back. And much as Obama-Clinton defenders dislike being reminded of it, any chance of America's post-Cold War power being seen as uniquely benign ended in Serbia, Iraq, and Libya.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Quote:This is why the Deep State is fracturing: its narratives no longer align with the evidence.
As this chart from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased dramatically in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm to the mainstream. I've been writing about the Deep State, and specifically, the fractures in the Deep State, for years.
Amusingly, now that "Progressives" have prostituted themselves to the Security Agencies and the Neocons/Neoliberals, they are busy denying the Deep State exists. For example, There is No Deep State (The New Yorker).
In this risible view, there is no Deep State "conspiracy" (the media's favorite term of dismissal/ridicule), just a bunch of "good German" bureaucrats industriously doing the Empire's essential work of undermining democracies that happen not to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Empire, murdering various civilians via drone strikes, surveilling the U.S. populace, planting bugs in new iPhones, issuing fake news while denouncing anything that questions the dominant narratives as "fake news," arranging sweetheart deals with dictators and corporations, and so on.
The New Yorker is right about one thing--the Deep State is not a "conspiracy:" it is a vast machine of control that is largely impervious to the views or demands of elected representatives or the American people. The key to understanding this social-political-economic control is to grasp that control of the narratives, expertise and authority is control of everything. Allow me to illustrate how this works.
The typical politician has a busy daily schedule of speaking at the National Motherhood and Apple Pie Day celebration, listening to the "concerns" of important corporate constituents, attending a lunch campaign fundraiser, meeting with lobbyists and party committees, being briefed by senior staff, and so on.
Senior administrators share similarly crowded schedules, minus the fundraising but adding budget meetings, reviewing employee complaints and multiple meetings with senior managers and working groups.
Both senior elected officials and senior state administrators must rely on narratives, expertise and authority because they have insufficient time and experience to do original research and assessment.
Narratives create an instant context that "makes sense" of various data points and events. Narratives distill causal factors into an explanatory story with an implicit teleology--because of this and that, the future will be thus and so.
For example: because Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the future promises the terrible likelihood (more than a possibility, given Iraqi deployment of poison gas in the Iraq-Iran War) that America or its allies will be devastated by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This teleology leads to the inescapable need to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction by any means necessary, and remove the political will to use them by removing Iraq's leader from power.
Politicos and senior administrators rely on expertise and authority as the basis of deciding whether something is accurate and actionable. Professional specialists are assumed to have the highest available levels of expertise, and their position in institutions that embody the highest authority give their conclusions the additional weight of being authoritative. The experts' conclusion doesn't just carry the weight of expertise, it has been reviewed by senior officials of the institution, and so it also carries the weight of institutional authority.
So when the C.I.A. briefing by its experts claims Iraq has WMD, and the briefing includes various threads of evidence that the institution declares definitive, who is a non-expert to challenge this conclusion and teleology? On what technical basis does the skeptic reject the expertise and authority of the institution?
We can now define the Deep State with some precision. The Deep State is fundamentally the public-private centralized nodes that collect, archive and curate dominant narratives and their supporting evidence, and disseminate these narratives (and their implicit teleologies) to the public via the media and to the state agencies via formal and informal inter-departmental communication channels.
By gaining control of the narratives, evidence, curation and teleology, each node concentrates power. the power to edit out whatever bits contradict the dominant narrative is the source of power, for once the contradictory evidence is buried or expunged, it ceases to exist.
For example, the contradictory evidence in the Pentagon Papers was buried by being declared Top Secret. The bureaucratic means to bury skeptical (i.e. heretical) views or evidence are many. Sending the authors to figurative Siberia is remarkably effective, as is burying the heretical claims in a veritable mountain of data that few if any will ever survey.
Curation is a critical factor in maintaining control of the narrative and thus of control; the evidence is constantly curated to best support the chosen narrative which in turn supports the desired teleology, which then sets the agenda and the end-game.
The senior apparatchiks of the old Soviet Union were masters of curation; when a Soviet leader fell from favor, he was literally excised from the picture--his image was erased from photos.
This is how narratives are adjusted to better fit the evidence. Thus the accusation that "the Russians hacked our election" has been tabled because it simply doesn't align with any plausible evidence. That narrative has been replaced with variants, such as "the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee." Now that this claim has also been shown to be false, new variants are popping up weekly, with equally poor alignment with evidence.
The primary claim of each Deep State node is that its expertise and authority cannot be questioned. In other words, while the dominant narrative can be questioned (but only cursorily, of course), the expertise and authority of the institutional node cannot be questioned.
This is why the Deep State is fracturing: the expertise and authority of its nodes are delaminating because its narratives no longer align with the evidence. If various Security Agencies sign off on the narrative that "Russia hacked our election" (a nonsense claim from the start, given the absurd imprecision of the "hacking"--hacking into what? Voting machines? Electoral tallies?), and that narrative is evidence-free and fact-free, i.e. false, then the expertise and authority of those agencies comes into legitimate question.
Once the legitimacy of the expertise and authority is questioned, control of the narrative is imperiled. The control of the narrative is control of the teleology, the agenda and the end-game--in other words, everything. If the institution loses control of the dominant narrative, it loses its hold on power.
This is why the Deep State is in turmoil--its narratives no longer make sense, or are in direct conflict with other nodes' narratives or have been delegitimized by widening gaps between "definitive" claims and actual evidence.
There is indeed a Deep State, but its control of dominant narratives, and thus its source of control and power, is crumbling. The gap between the narratives and the evidence that supports them has widened to the point of collapse.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines.
I've been writing about the divided Deep State for a number of years, most recently in The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare. The topic appears to be one of widespread interest, as this essay drew over 300,000 views.
It's impossible to understand the divided Deep State unless we situate it in the larger context of profound political disunity, a concept I learned from historian Michael Grant, whose slim but insightful volume The Fall of the Roman Empire I have been recommending since 2009.
As I noted in my 2009 book Survival+, this was a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse. The shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained.
A funny thing happens when a nation allows itself to be ruled by Imperial kleptocrats: such rule is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together. The public sees the value system at the top is maximize my personal profit by whatever means are available, i.e. complicity, corruption, monopoly and rentier rackets, and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.
But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top .1% and their army of technocrats and enablers, so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic.
Meanwhile, diverting the national income into a few power centers is also destabilizing, as Central Planning and Market Manipulation (a.k.a. the Federal Reserve) are intrinsically unstable as price can no longer be discovered by unfettered markets. As a result, imbalances grow until some seemingly tiny incident or disruption triggers a cascading collapse, a.k.a. a phase shift or system re-set.
As the Power Elites squabble over the dwindling crumbs left by the various rentier rackets, there's no one left to fight for the national interest because the entire Status Quo of self-interested fiefdoms and cartels has been co-opted and is now wedded to the Imperial Oligarchy as their guarantor of financial security.
The divided Deep State is a symptom of this larger systemic political disunity. I have characterized the divide as between the Wall Street-Neocon-Globalist Neoliberal camp--currently the dominant public face of the Deep State, the one desperately attempting to exploit the "Russia hacked our elections and is trying to destroy us" narrative--and a much less public, less organized "rogue Progressive" camp, largely based in the military services and fringes of the Deep State, that sees the dangers of a runaway expansionist Empire and the resulting decay of the nation's moral/political center.
What few observers seem to understand is that concentrating power in centralized nodes is intrinsically unstable. Contrast a system in which power, control and wealth is extremely concentrated in a few nodes (the current U.S. Imperial Project) and a decentralized network of numerous dynamic nodes.
The disruption of any of the few centralized nodes quickly destabilizes the entire system because each centralized node is highly dependent on the others. This is in effect what happened in the 2008-09 Financial Meltdown: the Wall Street node failed and that quickly imperiled the entire economy and thus the entire political order, up to and including the Global Imperial Project.
Historian Peter Turchin has proposed that the dynamics of profound political disunity (i.e. social, financial and political disintegration) can be quantified in a Political Stress Index, a concept he describes in his new book Ages of Discord.
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If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines. There is no other possible output of a system of highly concentrated nodes of power, wealth and control and the competing rentier rackets of these dependent, increasingly fragile centralized nodes.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
In this fascinating Part 1 episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt Interviews Deep Politics author, Former Canadian Diplomat and UC Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott. Professor Scott has been writing on the covert political system for 50 years, including his seminal and controversial works Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, The Road to 9/11, and American War Machine. His most recent groundbreaking book, The American Deep State, exposes the truth about covert forces that constitute an unelected, unaccountable, shadow system of political power.
Covert Political System
The "Deep State," is a concept that Professor Scott created over decades of research that posits that a covert political system operates alongside the public state and utilizes intelligence contractors, the NSA, CIA assets, Media Companies, Wall Street and Corporate Big Oil funding to manipulate the public with what he refers to as "Deep Events," such as 9/11 and the JFK Assassination and their subsequent coverups, for profit and control.
New McCarthyism of the Media
This shadow system has gone into overdrive since the election of President Trump and has attempted to manage the public narrative with controlled CIA leaks aimed at destabilizing the Trump administration. At the same time the Corporate Media has gone on the assault against the rising popularity of Alternative Media and is attempting to subvert the competition by applying the Orwellian term Fake News' to dispose of their media enemies.
This recent, almost hysterical reaction to their loss of influence, evident in the election of 2016, finds them even going so far as to accuse popular political websites of being connected with the Kremlin in some way and by creating discredited lists of alt journalists with supposed Russian Connections.' Their objectives in trying to reinvent a New McCarthyism seems to be aimed at achieving a new Cold War II with Russia to satisfy the financiers of the Military Industrial Complex and to further inflate the already bloated Defense Budget.
CIA Drug Running
Professor Scott takes a wide angle lens and pulls no punches in his research on the involvement of the intelligence agencies in the flow of profits from the drug trade and their extra constitutional efforts to destabilize other countries when they don't fall in line with the objectives of a hijacked American Foreign policy. He reveals the influence of Wall Street on public policy, Big Oil Companies skirting the laws with congressional help and Military Contractors fueling a worldwide arms trade to make huge profits while peddling illegal political influence.
Media Says The Deep State Doesn't Exist
Professor Scott observes that the Mainstream Media in their battle with President Trump, has become concerned that this theme of the Deep State, which is widely circulated in the Alternative Media, may become well understood by the general public. To stop this momentum they are waging a counter attack by using headlines in the Washington Post and New York Times to try and debunk that the Deep State even exists! This relentless campaign of disinformation is a joint effort by the CIA and the media to thwart the rise of awareness due to the internet and other factors that see their control slipping away. Professor Scott also discusses his concerns that these forces may resort to a False Flag Deep Event to regain control that they have temporarily lost at the ballot box.
Shocking, eye-opening, informative and unnerving, you don't want to miss this crucial Dark Journalist episode
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
