Interesting interview…
Monthly Archives: February 2019
VENEZUELA New Syria? Country & Maduro Calibrations & Predictions! (Excerpt from My New Book, GEOPOLITICAL & GEO-ECONOMIC QUANTUM CALIBRATIONS)
MY NEW EBOOK ON AMAZON
GEOPOLITICAL & GEO-ECONOMIC QUANTUM CALIBRATIONS
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EBOOK & PAPERBACK UPDATE!
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Ebook will also soon be available on other leading platforms, including Barnes&Noble Nook, Apple iBooks and Kobo.
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NEW RELEASE: Geopolitical & Geo-Economic Quantum Calibrations! PAPERBACK NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON!
GREAT NEWS!
Geopolitical & Geo-Economic Quantum Calibrations
PAPERBACK IS NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON!
Click on title or cover above to go to the Paperback buy page! The new paperback Amazon page will eventually link up to the EBook page (give it another couple of days). My bio and other info will also link up to the right page and appear in a few days (Amazon is kinda slow that way, which is understandable considering the volume they have to deal with).
I recommend for now you read book description and flip through pages on the EBook page (the paperback page will need another couple of days to properly update the description and sampling).
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Pence threatens war in Venezuela at Colombia summit: “There is no turning back”
By Eric London
February 26, 2019 “Information Clearing House” -US Vice President Mike Pence delivered a bellicose speech before representatives of 14 Latin American countries at a meeting of the Lima Group in Bogotá, Colombia, yesterday. The remarks were timed to coincide with the US-orchestrated provocations at the Venezuelan border over the weekend, resulting in clashes that left several people dead.
Pence rehashed phrases plagiarized from speeches given by George W. Bush in the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, combining them with denunciations of socialism.
“There is no turning back,” Pence said. “All options are on the table.”
“A new day is coming in Latin America,” he continued. “In Venezuela and across the Western hemisphere, socialism is dying and liberty, prosperity and democracy are being reborn before our eyes.” Pence issued an ultimatum to the Venezuelan military, threatening that if it did not overthrow Maduro, “You will find no safe harbor, no easy exit, no way out. You will lose everything.”
Pence announced that the US would place added sanctions on officials in the Venezuelan government and called on the right-wing governments of Latin America to “transfer ownership of Venezuelan assets in your country” to the government of US puppet Juan Guaidó.
In other words, the US is conducting cross-hemispheric highway robbery.
In his speech, Pence gave several justifications for intensifying US war threats against Venezuela. Venezuela exploits indigenous tribes, damages the environment through oil exploration and impoverishes its population, Pence said.
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These claims would be laughable were it not for the seriousness of the threats. The United States is the world’s worst offender in each of these departments.
Particularly disgusting was Pence’s attack on Venezuela for refusing “shelter for those displaced” immigrants along its border.
The Washington Post wrote that Pence “embraced a sobbing elderly man,” an immigrant waiting to enter Venezuela. The Post reporters, tears welling in their eyes, wrote that Pence “told the man in English, ‘We are with you.’”
The Post report made no mention of the thousands of immigrants currently sleeping on the streets in Mexican cities along the US-Mexico border after the US barred them from entering the country to apply for asylum.
Simultaneous with this weekend’s planned confrontation, the US military escalated its war plans. CNN reported that “the US military has flown an increased number of reconnaissance flights in international airspace off the coast of Venezuela during the last several days to gather classified intelligence” in possible preparation for a military intervention.
On Saturday, Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló reported that the Venezuelan military threatened to “open fire” on an American ship that entered Venezuelan territorial waters without permission. Though the ship was registered in Vanuatu, it was flying under a US flag in violation of international maritime law. US officials claim the ship was carrying 200 tons of “humanitarian aid.”
Venezuelan officials allege that US “humanitarian aid” includes weapons shipments to Colombia. Last Wednesday, Colombian armed forces leader Maj. Gen. Luis Navarro Jiménez traveled to Florida, where he met with leaders of US Southern Command.
The Washington Post wrote yesterday that behind the scenes in Bogotá, Guaidó “sought assurances that the United States could use force if necessary.” Venezuelan right-wing opposition leader Julio Borges tweeted Sunday that the opposition “will urge for an escalation of diplomatic pressure and the use of force against the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.”
President Trump has long privately expressed his interest in waging war on Venezuela. In his recently published book, former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe reports that Trump once brought up Venezuela in his presence, saying, “That’s the country we should be going to war with. They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”
The bellicose mood in Washington was exemplified by a reckless Washington Post opinion article published yesterday by Francisco Toro, who leads the think tank “Group of 50,” founded by a former World Bank official with the backing of the imperialist Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Despite the article’s title, “With US military action, Venezuela could become the Libya of the Caribbean,” Toro makes the case for pushing the region to the brink of war. Last weekend’s border confrontation “moved military action to dislodge the Venezuelan regime from fringe speculation to serious policy discussion,” Toro writes.
The Venezuelan military, he continues, is “unlikely to rebel against Maduro unless they calculate US military action is genuinely imminent… The best solution now, then, is a strategy designed to convince Venezuela’s generals that, unless they topple Maduro in short order, they’ll be bombed out of existence—a message that should be delivered by people who understand actually bombing them out of existence would be a disaster. What the United States needs to do, in other words, is bluff, by taking further steps that raise Venezuelan generals’ perception of a threat.”
The article concludes: “God help us all.”
This incendiary strategy has the bipartisan support of the US political establishment. As former Bush administration official José Cárdenas wrote in Foreign Policy :
“US policy toward Venezuela has enjoyed a bipartisan consensus in Congress through successive administrations. Democrats such as Sen. Bob Menendez, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. Eliot Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have been active critics of the breakdown in Venezuelan democracy over the years.”
It is not certain, however, that the US will be able to line up its allies behind its threats of military intervention. The increased threats of war have deepened divisions between Washington and its allies in the region and in Europe.
While the Lima Group declaration called for the immediate resignation of Maduro, it also noted that “the transition to democracy should be conducted by the Venezuelans themselves peacefully… by political and diplomatic means, without the use of force.”
Brazil’s vice president, Hamilton Mourão, said Monday from Bogotá that “a military option was never an option” for Brazil, and that “we advocate for no intervention.” The foreign minister of Spain, Josep Borrell, told the Efe news agency on Sunday, “We have clearly warned that we would not support—and would roundly condemn—any foreign military intervention.”
Despite support from the governments of the region and in Europe for the US regime-change operation, these statements reflect concerns that the US is proceeding with a degree of recklessness that risks throwing the entire hemisphere into an unprecedented level of chaos.
The Trump administration has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, now scheduled for Tuesday. The US will likely use the opportunity to denounce Russia and China, which are likely to exercise their veto power as permanent members to block a pseudo-legal international fig leaf to US imperialism’s machinations in South America.
This article was originally published by “WSWS” –
Copyright © 1998-2019 World Socialist Web Site
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==See Also==
HootHootBerns@HootHootBerns
“We’re in conversation with major American companies now…It would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. It would be good for Venezuela and the people of the United States.” – John “Chickenhawk” Bolton, servant of Swamp King Trump.
874 people are talking about this
The Coup Has Failed & Now the U.S. Is Looking to Wage War: Venezuelan Foreign Minister Speaks Out
US Moving Special Forces and Equipment to the Venezuelan Border
Watch: Guiado Flees to Colombia; Supports Government Coup, Starts Tour of US to Drum Up Support!
Here is the latest Lima Group Statement: The number of countries presented were less that the 13 members of the group.
Madeline Albright: Is The Price Worth It?
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Beware Of Gringos Bearing Gifts
Venezuela: A Collective Victory for a Collective Future
By Chris Gilbert
February 25, 2019 “Information Clearing House” -It was George W. Bush who invented the term: misunderestimating. And it’s what imperialism continually does with Venezuela.
I recall an Aló Presidente program in which Chávez was talking about the 2002 coup attempt. He said that the US thought it could easily replace him. “As simply as this,” he said and demonstrated by moving a glass of water across the table where he was seated.
Replacing Chávez wasn’t easy at all, as everybody knows. Pedro Carmona, the usurper, was quickly forgotten, whereas Chávez lasted another decade, and his movement is still in power today.
Something very similar may have happened on Saturday, as Maduro resisted a concerted international effort to bring him down.
What makes it so hard to replace Chávez and now Maduro? Certainly it’s not merely a question of leadership, since Maduro’s is middling at best. So, it must be something else: some quality or substance that generally goes unperceived on the political radar.
On Saturday, the opposition thought they could incite the Venezuelan army to rebel. They staged “desertions” to encourage the process. (I use the word “staged” advisedly. In the videos of the three National Guardsmen who crossed the bridge in Tachira and “surrendered themselves” to Colombian immigration, you can hear them saying very clearly “Somos nosotros!” ie. “It’s us!”.)
Trump and Marco Rubio view this is an example that should inspire other soldiers to rebel, but Venezuelans see it as something completely different. They view the deserting soldiers as traitors, to say nothing of being simply ridiculous.
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Is that because the majority of Venezuelans are socialists? Unfortunately, there is only a small minority – and almost nobody in the armed forces – that believes in socialism these days.
In fact, the unknown quality that keeps people loyal to the Chavista project is a certain form of patriotism or nationalism. It’s a nationalism closely connected to a comprehension of Venezuela’s historical struggle for emancipation in an unequal global order.
It was the great achievement of the Venezuelan revolutionary movement to have connected with that historical consciousness.
Their historical awareness explains why, when Venezuelans witness soldiers giving themselves over to foreign authorities or they see Guaidó mimic his bosses in the US – “All options are on the table,” he said recently – they are either against it or unmoved.
It was probably fatal for Guaidó to cross the border to Colombia, since Venezuelans don’t believe in exiled governments. They see them as coward governments.
In effect, a form of nationalism linked to a longstanding historical project was the “kryptonite” that defeated the imperialist “superman.” Now the task of revolutionaries in Venezuela is to reconnect that impressively resilient force with a sustainable socialist project.
Trump thinks: everybody has a price. Many leftists, especially economicist ones, think the same way. But that’s not true in every context. Much more than being sold on a better future, it’s those romantic “blasts from the past” that bind people to a project and its values.
One thing that Saturday’s events showed is that most Venezuelans know their history. Because of that, they don’t need to be told: Beware of gringos bearing gifts.
Now let’s see if this same historical sense, combined with the memory of last weekend’s collective victory, can help redirect the Bolivarian Republic to a future conceived along collective and communal lines – the way Chávez himself envisioned it.
Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here
==See Also==
An Ocean of Lies on Venezuela: Abby Martin & UN Rapporteur Expose Coup
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WOW! My New EBook #1 NEW RELEASE in ‘Prophecy’ on Amazon!
Really excellent news Lada! Highly recommend everyone get a copy and understand the state of the world we’re in, also get the latest road map to upcoming future events which will directly impact all of our lives. Be prepared!
Thank you, thank you, thank you LADA!!!! 🙂
Wow! I just announced the book several hours ago and this is the result already!
#1 NEW RELEASE IN PROPHECY:
Amazon screen snapshot, 11 am, 2/25/19, the day of the official release!
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I hope you tell everyone you know about it! You can email, reblog, retweet, facebook, instagram or pinterest this post, as some examples. And/or you can give your friends and family direct link:
MY NEW EBOOK ON AMAZON:
GEOPOLITICAL & GEO-ECONOMIC QUANTUM CALIBRATIONS
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PAPERBACK COMING BETWEEN some time later on MONDAY – WEDNESDAY (it depends on when Amazon releases it!). I’ll announce and post links as soon as this happens!
Know…
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GREAT NEWS! Geopolitical & Geo-Economic Quantum Calibrations Book Now Available on Amazon!
Congrats on your successful book launch, I’ve already notified all my friends! Looking forward to the big reveal of every nation and their respective leaders’ calibrations. Cheers! 🙂
MY NEW EBOOK NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON!
GEOPOLITICAL & GEO-ECONOMIC
QUANTUM CALIBRATIONS
Ebook is for sale in all international Amazon markets!
READ BOOK DESCRIPTION, TAKE A PEEK INSIDE, FLIP THROUGH PAGES & BUY!
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PAPERBACK WILL BE AVAILABLE FEB 25-27, MONDAY-WEDNESDAY!
It’ll be sold by Amazon in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Japan. Readers who reside in these or neighboring countries can purchase from related markets. For example, the residents of most European countries can purchase this book from the UK, Germany, France, Spain or Italy!
STATS
This book is a labor of love and it contains close to 1000 calibrations…
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Morning Joe Attacks Tulsi For Opposing War #TheJimmyDoreShow
This quite an excellent analysis of the establishment smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard.
War On Venezuela Is Built On A Lie
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51152.htm
By John Pilger
February 22, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – In this analysis, John Pilger looks back over the Chavez years in Venezuela, including his own travels with Hugo Chavez, and the current US and European campaign to overthrow Nicolas Maduro in a ‘coup by media’ and to return Latin America to the 19th and 20th centuries.
Travelling with Hugo Chavez, I soon understood the threat of Venezuela. At a farming co-operative in Lara state, people waited patiently and with good humor in the heat. Jugs of water and melon juice were passed around. A guitar was played; a woman, Katarina, stood and sang with a husky contralto.
“What did her words say?” I asked.
“That we are proud,” was the reply.
The applause for her merged with the arrival of Chavez. Under one arm he carried a satchel bursting with books. He wore his big red shirt and greeted people by name, stopping to listen. What struck me was his capacity to listen.
But now he read. For almost two hours he read into the microphone from the stack of books beside him: Orwell, Dickens, Tolstoy, Zola, Hemingway, Chomsky, Neruda: a page here, a line or two there. People clapped and whistled as he moved from author to author.
Then farmers took the microphone and told him what they knew, and what they needed; one ancient face, carved it seemed from a nearby banyan, made a long, critical speech on the subject of irrigation; Chavez took notes.
Wine is grown here, a dark Syrah type grape. “John, John, come up here,” said El Presidente, having watched me fall asleep in the heat and the depths of Oliver Twist.
“He likes red wine,” Chavez told the cheering, whistling audience, and presented me with a bottle of “vino de la gente”. My few words in bad Spanish brought whistles and laughter.
Watching Chavez with la gente made sense of a man who promised, on coming to power, that his every move would be subject to the will of the people. In eight years, Chavez won eight elections and referendums: a world record. He was electorally the most popular head of state in the Western Hemisphere, probably in the world.
Every major chavista reform was voted on, notably a new constitution of which 71 per cent of the people approved each of the 396 articles that enshrined unheard of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the first time recognised the human rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom Chavez was one.
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One of his tutorials on the road quoted a feminist writer: “Love and solidarity are the same.” His audiences understood this well and expressed themselves with dignity, seldom with deference. Ordinary people regarded Chavez and his government as their first champions: as theirs.
This was especially true of the indigenous, mestizos and Afro-Venezuelans, who had been held in historic contempt by Chavez’s immediate predecessors and by those who today live far from the barrios, in the mansions and penthouses of East Caracas, who commute to Miami where their banks are and who regard themselves as “white”. They are the powerful core of what the media calls “the opposition”.
When I met this class, in suburbs called Country Club, in homes appointed with low chandeliers and bad portraits, I recognised them. They could be white South Africans, the petite bourgeoisie of Constantia and Sandton, pillars of the cruelties of apartheid.
Cartoonists in the Venezuelan press, most of which are owned by an oligarchy and oppose the government, portrayed Chavez as an ape. A radio host referred to “the monkey”. In the private universities, the verbal currency of the children of the well-off is often racist abuse of those whose shacks are just visible through the pollution.
Although identity politics are all the rage in the pages of liberal newspapers in the West, race and class are two words almost never uttered in the mendacious “coverage” of Washington’s latest, most naked attempt to grab the world’s greatest source of oil and reclaim its “backyard”.
For all the chavistas’ faults — such as allowing the Venezuelan economy to become hostage to the fortunes of oil and never seriously challenging big capital and corruption – they brought social justice and pride to millions of people and they did it with unprecedented democracy.
“Of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored,” said former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre is a respected monitor of elections around the world, “I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” By way of contrast, said Carter, the US election system, with its emphasis on campaign money, “is one of the worst”.
In extending the franchise to a parallel people’s state of communal authority, based in the poorest barrios, Chavez described Venezuelan democracy as “our version of Rousseau’s idea of popular sovereignty”.
In Barrio La Linea, seated in her tiny kitchen, Beatrice Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to attend a full day’s school and be given a hot meal and to learn music, art and dance. “I have seen their confidence blossom like flowers,” she said.
In Barrio La Vega, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a black woman of 45 with a wicked laugh, address an urban land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to illegal war. That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a programme aimed at poverty among single mothers. Under the constitution, women have the right to be paid as carers, and can borrow from a special women’s bank. Now the poorest housewives get the equivalent of $200 a month.
In a room lit by a single fluorescent tube, I met Ana Lucia Ferandez, aged 86, and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come with her two children. Once, none of them could read and write; now they were studying mathematics. For the first time in its history, Venezuela has almost 100 per cent literacy.
This is the work of Mision Robinson, which was designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an education because of poverty. Mision Ribas gives everyone the opportunity of a secondary education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson and Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th century).
In her 95 years, Mavis Mendez had seen a parade of governments, mostly vassals of Washington, preside over the theft of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown to Miami. “We didn’t matter in a human sense,” she told me. “We lived and died without real education and running water, and food we couldn’t afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. Now I can read and write my name and so much more; and whatever the rich and the media say, we have planted the seeds of true democracy and I have the joy of seeing it happen.”
In 2002, during a Washington-backed coup, Mavis’s sons and daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchildren joined hundreds of thousands who swept down from the barrios on the hillsides and demanded the army remained loyal to Chavez.
“The people rescued me,” Chavez told me. “They did it with the media against me, preventing even the basic facts of what happened. For popular democracy in heroic action, I suggest you look no further.”
Since Chavez’s death in 2013, his successor Nicolas Maduro has shed his derisory label in the Western press as a “former bus driver” and become Saddam Hussein incarnate. His media abuse is ridiculous. On his watch, the slide in the price of oil has caused hyper inflation and played havoc with prices in a society that imports almost all its food; yet, as the journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is not the catastrophe it has been painted. “There is food everywhere,” he wrote. “I have filmed lots of videos of food in markets [all over Caracas] … it’s Friday night and the restaurants are full.”
In 2018, Maduro was re-elected President. A section of the opposition boycotted the election, a tactic tried against Chavez. The boycott failed: 9,389,056 people voted; sixteen parties participated and six candidates stood for the presidency. Maduro won 6,248,864 votes, or 67.84 per cent.
On election day, I spoke to one of the 150 foreign election observers. “It was entirely fair,” he said. “There was no fraud; none of the lurid media claims stood up. Zero. Amazing really.”
Like a page from Alice’s tea party, the Trump administration has presented Juan Guaido, a pop-up creation of the CIA-front National Endowment for Democracy, as the “legitimate President of Venezuela”. Unheard of by 81 per cent of the Venezuelan people, according to The Nation, Guaido has been elected by no one.
Maduro is “illegitimate”, says Trump (who won the US presidency with three million fewer votes than his opponent), a “dictator”, says demonstrably unhinged vice president Mike Pence and an oil trophy-in-waiting, says “national security” adviser John Bolton (who when I interviewed him in 2003 said, “Hey, are you a communist, maybe even Labour?”).
As his “special envoy to Venezuela” (coup master), Trump has appointed a convicted felon, Elliot Abrams, whose intrigues in the service of Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush helped produce the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and plunge central America into years of blood-soaked misery.
Putting Lewis Carroll aside, these “crazies” belong in newsreels from the 1930s. And yet their lies about Venezuela have been taken up with enthusiasm by those paid to keep the record straight.
On Channel 4 News, Jon Snow bellowed at the Labour MP Chris Williamson, “Look, you and Mr Corbyn are in a very nasty corner [on Venezuela]!” When Williamson tried to explain why threatening a sovereign country was wrong, Snow cut him off. “You’ve had a good go!”
In 2006, Channel 4 News effectively accused Chavez of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran: a fantasy. The then Washington correspondent, Jonathan Rugman, allowed a war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, to liken Chavez to Hitler, unchallenged.
Researchers at the University of the West of England studied the BBC’s reporting of Venezuela over a ten-year period. They looked at 304 reports and found that only three of these referred to any of the positive policies of the government. For the BBC, Venezuela’s democratic record, human rights legislation, food programmes, healthcare initiatives and poverty reduction did not happen. The greatest literacy programme in human history did not happen, just as the millions who march in support of Maduro and in memory of Chavez, do not exist.
When asked why she filmed only an opposition march, the BBC reporter Orla Guerin tweeted that it was “too difficult” to be on two marches in one day.
A war has been declared on Venezuela, of which the truth is “too difficult” to report.
It is too difficult to report the collapse of oil prices since 2014 as largely the result of criminal machinations by Wall Street. It is too difficult to report the blocking of Venezuela’s access to the US-dominated international financial system as sabotage. It is too difficult to report Washington’s “sanctions” against Venezuela, which have caused the loss of at least $6 billion in Venezuela’s revenue since 2017, including $2 billion worth of imported medicines, as illegal, or the Bank of England’s refusal to return Venezuela’s gold reserves as an act of piracy.
The former United Nations Rapporteur, Alfred de Zayas, has likened this to a “medieval siege” designed “to bring countries to their knees”. It is a criminal assault, he says. It is similar to that faced by Salvador Allende in 1970 when President Richard Nixon and his equivalent of John Bolton, Henry Kissinger, set out to “make the economy [of Chile] scream”. The long dark night of Pinochet followed.
The Guardian correspondent, Tom Phillips, has tweeted a picture of himself in a cap on which the words in Spanish mean in local slang: “Make Venezuela fucking cool again.” The reporter as clown may be the final stage of much of mainstream journalism’s degeneration.
Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton.
Under the last Washington-controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no universal education; Mavis Mendez, and millions like her, could not read or write. How cool is that, Tom?
John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist and BAFTA award-winning documentary film maker. He has been mainly based in the United Kingdom since 1962. http://johnpilger.com
Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger
Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here
==See Also==
Everyone has fallen for the lies about Venezuela: Lee Camp
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We ask that you assist us in dissemination of the article published by ICH to your social media accounts and post links to the article from other websites.
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The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
How the Russiagate Investigation Is Sovietizing American Politics
“Collusion,” “contacts,” selective prosecutions, coup plotting, and media taboos recall repressive Soviet practices.
By Stephen F. Cohen
Tales of the New Cold War: 1 of 2: The Sovietization of American Institutions. Stephen F. Cohen
Tales of the New Cold War: 2 of 2: |
February 22, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – Having studied Soviet political history for decades and having lived off and on in that repressive political system before Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms—in Russia under Leonid Brezhnev in the late 1970s and early 1980s—I may be unduly concerned about similar repressive trends I see unfolding in democratic America during three years of mounting Russiagate allegations. Or I may exaggerate them. Even if I am right about Soviet-like practices in the United States, they are as yet only adumbrations, and certainly nothing as repressive as they once were in Russia.
And yet, ominous trends are not to be discounted and still less ignored. I have commented on them previously, on the official use of “informants” to infiltrate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, and such practices have now multiplied. Consider the following:
Soviet authorities, through the KGB, regularly charged and punished dissidents and other unacceptably independent citizens with linguistic versions of “collusion” and “contacts” with foreigners, particularly Americans. (Having inadvertently been the American in several cases, I can testify that the “contacts” were entirely casual, professional, or otherwise innocent.) Is something similar under way here? As the former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out, to make allegations of Trump associates’ “collusion” is to question “everyone who had interacted with Russia in the last quarter-century.” In my case and those of not a few scholarly colleagues, it would mean in the last half-century, or nearly. Nor is this practice merely hypothetical or abstract. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently sent a letter to an American professor and public intellectual demanding that this person turn over “all communications [since January 2015] with Russian media organizations, their employees, representatives, or associates,” with “Russian persons or business interests,” “with or about US political campaigns or entities relating to Russia,” and “related to travel to Russia, and/or meetings, or discussions, or interactions that occurred during such travel.” We do not know how many such letters the Committee has sent, but this is not the only one. If this is not an un-American political inquisition, it is hard to say what would be. (It was also a common Soviet practice, though such “documents” were usually obtained by sudden police raids, of which there have recently been at least two in our own country, both related to Russiagate.)
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In this connection, Soviet authorities also regularly practiced selective prosecution, which is persecution intended to send a chilling signal to other would-be offenders. For example, in 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested for publishing their literary writings abroad under pseudonyms, an emerging practice the Kremlin wanted to stop. And in 1972, an important dissident figure, Pytor Yakir, was held in solitary confinement until he “broke” and signed a “confession,” even naming some of his associates, which greatly demoralized the dissident movement. Paul Manafort is no American dissident, literary or otherwise, and he well may be guilty of the financial misdeeds and tax evasion as charged. But he is facing, at nearly age 70, in effect a life sentence in prison and, through fines imposed, the bankruptcy of his family. We may reasonably ask: Is this selective prosecution/persecution? How many other hired US political operatives in foreign countries in recent years have been so audited and onerously prosecuted? Or has Manafort been singled out because he was once Trump’s campaign manager? We may also ask why a young Russian woman living in Washington, Maria Butina, was arrested and kept in solitary confinement until she confessed—that is, pleaded guilty. (She is still in prison.) Her offense? Publicly extolling the virtues of her native Russian government and advocating détente-like relations between Washington and Moscow without having registered as a foreign agent. Americans living in Russia frequently do the same on behalf of their country. Certainly, I have often done so. Are patriotism and promoting détente as an alternative to the new and more dangerous Cold War now a crime in the United States, or is the selective prosecution of Butina a response to Trump’s call for “cooperation with Russia”?
Now we have an even more alarming Soviet-like practice. Former acting head of the FBI Andrew McCabe tells us that in 2017, he and other high officials discussed a way to remove President Trump from office. As Alan Dershowitz, a professor of constitutional law, remarked, they had in mind an “attempted coup d’état.” Which may remind students of Soviet history that two of its leaders were targets of a bureaucratic or administrative “coup”—Nikita Khrushchev twice, in 1957 and 1964, the latter being successful; and Gorbachev in August 1991, though perhaps several other plots against him may still be unknown. Khrushchev and Gorbachev were disruptors of the bureaucratic status quo and its entrenched interests—very much unlike President Trump, but disruptors nonetheless.
Finally, at least for now, there is the role media censorship played in Soviet repression. To a knowing reader who could read “between the lines,” the Soviet press actually provided a lot of usable information. Equally important, though, was what it excluded as taboo—particularly news and other information that undermined the official narrative of current and historical events. (All this ended with Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost in the late 1980s.) In the era of Russiagate, American mainstream media are practicing at least partial censorship by systematically excluding voices and other sources that directly challenge their orthodox narrative. There are many such malpractices in leading newspapers and on influential television programs, but they are the subject of another commentary.
These examples remind us that we are also living in an age of blame—particularly blaming Russia for mishaps of our own making, for electoral outcomes and other unwelcome developments elsewhere in the world. Drawing attention to Soviet precedents is not to blame that long-gone nation state. Instead, we again need Walt Kelly’s cartoon philosopher Pogo, who told us decades ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
This commentary is based on the most recent weekly discussion between Cohen and the host of The John Batchelor Show. (The podcast is here. Now in their fifth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.)
This article was originally published by “The Nation” –
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