Summary: As the ongoing controversy about the close relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and the fairly obvious Russian attempts to intervene in Election 2016 begin to gain critical mass, the choice for undecided voters be is no longer an abstract one involving only voter preference.
Instead, the choice has become one involving basic questions of loyalty to the United States. Though Trump supporters and leftists of the Katrina Vanden Heuvel stripe may attempt to put a stop to such discussions by invoking the tired cliché of McCarthyism, the indisputable fact remains that we are indeed being subverted by paid agents of the Russian State, acting on behalf of Donald Trump.
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The defecation has apparently hit the ventilation in Trump world. Aside from his erratic, unhinged, meandering, Fidel Castro-like speech in Pennsylvania in which he required almost an hour and a half to deliver nine scripted sentences, and aside from the bombshell story that hit late yesterday about his $916m claimed loss on his 1995 income tax returns, or his appalling debate performance last Monday evening, or his bizarre, possibly drug fueled, ongoing Twitter attack on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and insisting, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he “won” Monday’s debate, The Donald has clearly had a wonderful week.
In laying aside the irony of trying to spin Donald Trump’s last seven days as anything but a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, we may still wonder how a presidential wannabe can manage to continue to shoot himself in the foot so badly, so often, so theatrically, and still be within a hair’s breadth of being able to win the election.
Because in the last few days the one revelation which has hit about Donald Trump’s campaign from which recovery may not, in the end, be possible, is the revelation inherent in the increasingly detailed information about the manner in which Russian state actors have played an increasingly obvious role in attempting to secure victory for Donald Trump. We know, for example, that Russian state media have made no secret of their desire to see Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States. Moreover, a routine Google search for Putin’s army of Trump trolls brings up 369,000 results in a little bit more than half a second.
While traditional media had largely been reluctant to address the issue of the extent to which Vladimir Vladimirovich was trying to help his good friend Gospodin Donald Trump win the presidency, the issue has hit critical mass in the last few days. When Newsweek, for example, broke Kurt Eichenwald’s story concerning Gospodin Trump’s violation of the federal trade embargo against Cuba, the immediate response to the story took the form of a Russian-linked cyberattack on Newsweek.com, which attack itself became news. The cover story in the current issue of Time magazine is an extensive exposé of the extensive Russian efforts to infiltrate and undermine the integrity of the 2016 elections.
What this critical mass of reporting on Russia’s efforts to mount what is, to all intents and purposes, a hostile takeover bid for the United States government has catalyzed is a discussion of the extent to which our votes in this election have, and must have, a patriotic dimension to them. In short, we have reached the point in this 2016 election cycle where the only patriotic vote possible is unequivocally and absolutely a vote for Hillary Clinton. We had never thought, at least not since the contest between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, that it could, let alone should, be necessary to define a vote for one or another presidential candidate as unpatriotic or treasonable.
Yet, we have reached exactly that point in this 2016 election. Because it simply is not patriotic to support, let alone vote for, a man whose campaign is receiving substantial material assistance from the Kremlin.
Months ago, in writing about the unexpected triumph of Brexit, I suggested that pro-Brexit voices in United Kingdom were actually doing Moscow’s work; I had no hesitation then, and I have no hesitation now, about impugning the basic loyalty to the West of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, or even of David Cameron. I suggested that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin the night the Brexit vote result was announced, largely because the Brexit vote represented a victory in Russia’s long-standing kriegßpiel against the West. I went further in that post from this summer and suggested that Donald Trump’s advocacy of Brexit was of a piece not only with the advocacy of Farage and Johnson for Brexit, but also of a piece with a long-standing Russian policy goals toward the West.
Indeed, I went so far as a suggest that a hundred-division armored thrust at the heart of NATO could not have caused more chaos among the European Union than had Brexit, which Gospodin Trump had advocated for because we now know that Donald Trump is a faithful steward and advocate of Russian policy. We may expect the first foreign decoration to come President Donald Trump’s way will no doubt be the Order of Saint Andrew or some other similar senior Russian bauble.
That is, of course, if Donald Trump is elected president. It is up to us to prevent that from happening by any means necessary.
“By any means necessary” necessarily includes close and searching scrutiny of Trump’s, and Trump’s family’s, business connections with the Kremlin. It should also include an investigation into Donald Trump’s relationships with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Now, one advocating such searching investigations, and possible criminal prosecution against Trump and Assange, can expect to be, and will be, attacked by leftists who have never integrated into their thinking the reality that Russia is no longer a state of the left; what was once the Soviet Union has been replaced by a fascist kleptocracy run by the biggest fascist kleptocrat of all, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Yet the left will still squawk about “redbaiting,” while invoking the tired old trope of McCarthyism. McCarthyism, as a trope, has become an example of what Robert Jay Lifton in his seminal monograph Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which dealt with brainwashing in Mao’s China, has described as a “thought-terminating cliché.” A “thought-terminating cliché” is nothing more than a convenient shorthand by which a rational discussion may be circumvented. Having grown up in the liberal-leftist circles during the late 1970s, and being still myself a man of the liberal left, I can remember the invocation of such thought terminating clichés as “McCarthyism” at first hand.
Among liberal Democrats in the 1970s, for example, invocations of such unfashionable-at-the-time concepts as patriotism were almost routinely met with a facile charge of “McCarthyism.” To rebut a foolish, pro-Soviet notion with a suggestion that such things were harmful to our national interest, or worse, to question the patriotism of the maker or offeror of such a notion, was to call down an immediate invocation of “McCarthyism.” And among the pious, knee-jerk liberals of the time, to invoke the evil memory of Joseph McCarthy was all that was necessary to shut down the discussion. It was a form of intellectual bullying roughly akin to neoconservative invocations of Munich to justify our military misadventure in Vietnam or our similar misadventure in Iraq.
And indeed, we see similar appeals to thought terminating cliches today. It is bad enough when the Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel springs to the defense of Donald Trump and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin by seeking to define any expression of concern about the bromance between the two men as an illegitimate expression of McCarthyism. But what reduces one to sputtering, spluttering, fiery, fulminant, angry, apoplectic rage is to hear Julian Assange try to delegitimize any discussion of his own criminal behavior by invoking a similar fraudulent, thought-terminating cliche.
Because when it comes right down to it, America is in greater danger now from Russian subversion than she was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Iosif Vissarionovich was in command in the Moskovskiy Kremlin. Because for all we knew that Stalin was an authentically bad man, and we remembered how he had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Kulaks, we also knew that Soviet efforts at subversion here in the United States were remarkably unsuccessful. We didn’t have the Soviets attempting to take over one of our major political parties the way that Vladimir Vladimirovich has attempted to co-opt the Republican Party. We could back then name on the fingers of our hands the worst traitors in our midst.
Kim Philby. Guy Burgess. Daniel MacLean. Anthony Blunt. The “fifth man,” whose identity has been much speculated on in Britain but never ascertained. Klaus Fuchs. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Alger Hiss. This was the rogues gallery of traitors upon whom Joseph McCarthy erected an overweening, overreaching edifice of finger-pointing, suspicion, and hysteria. On this edifice rested such enormities as the House Un-American Activities Committee, the California Legislature’s Dies committee, and the purges in many American unions.
Yet, while we knew that there were a great many excessively idealistic Americans who had flirted with Soviet communism because they believed, in truth, that Lincoln Steffens had been right when he had said of Soviet communism “I have seen the future and it works,” we came to realize that their flirtation had been just that, a passing enthusiasm from which many of them came home, for they had never really given up on our American experiment in representative democracy, on our Constitution, and on the fundamental legitimacy of our representative institutions of self-government. What we had thought was a generation of subversives turned out to be a generation of passionate loyalists, passionately loving this country, and passionately convinced that this country had and has a great and exceptional heritage and promise to live up to.
But today, the threat of subversion, the threat of a hostile takeover by the Moskovskiy Kremlin is not just the fever dream of a closeted homosexual Senator from Wisconsin. It’s a reality that could take place as early as January, 2017. For in the 50s, though we were buffaloed into believing wrongly that there was a Red under Every Bed, 60 years later we now see evidence of real fellow travelers everywhere in the Trump campaign, and in the campaigns of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein as well. Why would Donald Trump have a man like Boris Epshteyn in a senior role in his campaign? Epshteyn, an immigrant from post-Soviet Russia, has the kind of resume which strongly suggests that he is in fact an asset of some part of the Russian intelligence apparat; either of FSB, the successor to KGB, or of GRU, Russian military intelligence.
Indeed, there is considerable speculation that Epshteyn is Donald Trump’s Russian control/handler/case officer. If so, it would be in character with the incredibly amateurish nature of the Trump campaign to allow so obvious a Russian intelligence asset to parade himself repeatedly on American television, for all the world to see. I cannot imagine an experienced American case officer, say, Valerie Plame, outing herself in similar fashion. (Indeed, the Bush administration’s deliberate acts to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA case officer resulted in a number of rather high profile criminal prosecutions in this country.) But, apparently, the Trump campaign remains so arrogant and so amateurish that they apparently do not imagine that anyone would have the synaptic capability to connect the dots and conclude that Boris Epshteyn is in fact a Russian intelligence asset.
If, in fact, Boris Epshteyn is a Russian intelligence asset functioning as Donald Trump’s control/case officer/handler, and if, as we know, there are numerous Trump trolls in the pay of the Russian government operating out of venues in Moscow or St. Petersburg, among them a nondescript office block at Ulitsa Savushkina 55 in that city’s Primorskiy district, and another location believed to be on the grounds of the Smolny Institute, a St. Petersburg memorial to the October Revolution owned and maintained by the Russian State, we must nevertheless conclude that Russia’s paid trolls are not exclusively located in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or other cities and towns of the Russian land. We must conclude that there are paid Trump trolls in this country who are either aware that their paychecks come from the Russian State, or who are culpably ignorant of the source of such paychecks.
To the extent that this is the case, we are the target not only of an organized disinformation campaign from without, but also of comprehensive betrayal from within. One can usually tell a Russian Trump troll by their uncertain command of recursion or of the conditional/subjunctive tense and mood in English language. Though English may be linguistically the most promiscuous of tongues, it is also one of the fullest of traps for the unwary. Since Russian handles verb tenses and moves rather differently from English, it’s relatively easy to catch a person for whom Russian is his or her first language. No Russian speaker could have written in English a paragraph as laden with recursions and subjunctive clauses as those which have appeared in this blog.
That is not, of course, to say that every Trump troll is posting from Ul. Savushkina 55 or from Smolny. It is the domestic Trump trolls and the American Trump supporters and surrogates of whom we should be particularly afraid. These are the traitors and nut cases who can be expected to be prominent in any hypothetical Trump administration. These are not people who should be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
And because we cannot allow a nutcase like Trump or nut cases like those who ally themselves to his cause access to the corridors of power, we Hillary Clinton supporters must be willing to frame the next five weeks in the most apocalyptic terms we can. We must be willing to call out the Russian trolls when we encounter them -they will give themselves away by their uncertain command of the English language, or by their repeated cutting and pasting– but even more, we must be prepared to expose the Trump traitors in our midst. Because, this time, a healthy dose of McCarthyism may be all that stands between the United States and a Russian motor-rifle division patrolling Capitol Hill.
Citizens, the Republic is in danger!
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