“For
more than a decade, Russia has meddled in elections around the world, supported
brutal dictators and invaded sovereign nations — all to the detriment of United
States interests.”
— The New York Times
— The New York Times
The
Resistance sure got a case of the vapors this week over Mr. Trump’s failure to
throttle America’s arch-enemy, the murderous thug V. Putin of Russia, onstage
in Helsinki, as any genuine Marvel Comix hero is expected to do when facing
consummate evil. Instead, the Golden Golem of Greatness voiced some doubts
about the veracity of our “intelligence community” — as the shape-shifting
Moloch of black ops likes to call itself, as if it were a kindly service
organization in Mr. Rogers neighborhood, collecting dimes for victims of
childhood cancer.
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If I may be frank, the US Intel community looks like a much bigger threat
to American life and values than anything Mr. Putin is doing, for instance his
alleged “meddling” in US elections. This word, meddling,
absolutely pervades the captive Resistance news outlets these days. It has a
thrilling vagueness about it, intimating all kinds of dark deeds without
specifying anything, as consorting with Satan once
did in our history. The reason: the only specific acts associated with this meddling include the disclosure of incriminating
emails among the Democratic National Committee leadership, and a tiny gang of
Facebook trolls making sport of profoundly idiotic and dysfunctional American
electoral politics.
The brief against Russia also contains vague accusations of “aggression.”
It is hard to discern what is meant by that — though it apparently warms the
heart of American war hawks and their paymasters in the warfare industries. They allege that Russia “stole”
Crimea from Ukraine. Consider: Crimea had been a province of Russia since the
1700s. Ukraine itself was a province of the USSR when Nikita Khrushchev put
Crimea under Ukraine’s administrative control in 1956, a relationship which
became obviously problematic after the breakup of the soviet mega-state in 1990
— and became even more of a problem when the US State Department and our CIA
stage-managed a coup against the Russia-leaning Ukrainian president Viktor
Yanukovych in 2014. Crimea is the site of Russia’s only warm
water naval bases. Do you suppose that even an experience American CIA analyst
might understand that Russia would under no circumstances give
up those assets? Please, grow up.
Does
anyone remember the explicit promise that US Government gave the transitional
leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand into the countries of
eastern Europe formerly under soviet control? NATO now includes the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland,
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, Albania,
Croatia, and Montenegro. Is anyone aware that NATO has been staging war games
on Russia’s border the past several years? Do you suppose this might be
disturbing to the Russians, who lost at least 20 million dead when Germany
crossed that border in 1941?
As to the thug-and-murderer
charge against V. Putin, has any news org actually published a list of his
alleged victims? It’s very likely, of course, that Mr. Putin has had some of
his political enemies killed. I wouldn’t take the “con” side of that argument.
But I’d be interested in seeing an authoritative list, if the intel
community has one (and why wouldn’t they?). I imagine it doesn’t exceed two
dozen individuals. How many innocent bystanders did President Obama kill during
the drone attack spree of his second term, when our rockets blew up wedding
parties and sandwich shops in faraway lands. In 2016, The Atlantic published this:
One
campaign, Operation Haymaker, took place in northeastern Afghanistan. Between
January 2012 and February 2013, The Intercept reported,
“U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only
35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation,
according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in
airstrikes were not the intended targets.”
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I
suppose the excuse is that none of this was personal — as V. Putin’s alleged
murders were. No, it wasn’t personal. It was worse than that. It was a bunch of military video-game jocks
sitting around an air-conditioned bunker eating hot pockets and slurping
slurpees while snuffing out lives by remote control twelve-thousand miles away.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were high-fiving each other with every hit,
too.
As for “hacking” of elections, do you
suppose for minute that we do not have hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of
computer techies at our many sprawling NSA facilities around the country
working around the clock to penetrate foreign computer defenses absolutely
everywhere, among friend and foe alike? And that we are not trying to influence
the outcomes of their political struggles in our favor? Go a step further: do
you suppose those US “intel community” hackers are not also collecting
information about American citizens, including yourself?
Reprinted from Kunstler.com.
James
Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic, The
Geography of Nowhere, the World Made By Hand novels, and more than a dozen
other books. He lives in Washington County, New York.
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© 2018 Kunstler.com
