Russia As Litmus Test
Why Is It Acceptable To Call Americans Putin Stooges? And Why That Should Be Immediately Discrediting!
I know I go on and on about this to the point some will think “Mark is awfully obsessed with this Rus land, almost a myopic focus.” I beg the readers continued indulgence, and the understanding that I have had my integrity publicly called into question by a man I once considered a mentor for so much as casually questioning the bizarre conspiracy theories that have arisen surrounding Russia since 2016 and am resultantly pissed the fuck off and curious as to all hell as to what could cause such a mass hysteria, particularly among people who threw the paranoid conspiracy theorist charge at Americans that feared communist subversion during the 69 years that Russia was the center of a multinational empire dedicated to a worldwide revolution to overthrow republican self-government, free markets, organized religion—in short the American way of life. People who would have been—and were if there were alive at the time—scandalized if the President of these United States accurately referred to Moscow under the rule of the Communist Party as the “locus of evil in the modern world.”
During that 69 years [nice; and good catch Siraj Hashmi, the List comes for all] of Evil Empiring, the Democratic Party in the United States was the chief stan for the Soviet Union. FDR marked the first anniversary of his election to the Presidency by recognizing the USSR and packed his White House and sub cabinet with communist spies and fellow travelers that consistently undermined American interests, painted an unrealistic picture of communist and nationalist movements in eastern Europe and China, and ensured that Stalin would be given even greater control over the Eurasian landmass than his vaunted Red Army had rightfully conquered. Truman took most of the blame while tourniqueting the arteries of American foreign policy, but still foolishly retaining FDR’s civil and foreign service bureaucracies and selling out Chiang Kai-Shek, submitting humanity’s oldest and most populous civilization to the terrors of its most prolific mass murderer, one who went to spread Maoist revolutions to all of China’s borders. The result led General Eisenhower to sweep the 1952 elections on the slogan of Corruption, Communism, Korea. Ike proceeded to purge thousands of suspected communists from the civil service, but tragically a drunken Senator whom he and J. Edgar Hoover had allowed to become the face of the anti-communist movement, apparently during a weeklong bender and no longer being leaked investigative files by Hoover, accused Ike, George Marshall, and a number of other well respected military men of being Russian stooges.
McArthy’s wild charges served to not only discredit his earlier, largely substantiated, allegations against communist subversives within the government, but to permanently forestall any future effort to investigate communist subversion, such efforts to henceforth be denounced as just another ideological “ism” pursuing “witch hunts” and “show trials” as assuredly as the Soviets they condemned. Not all was lost; Tail Gunner Joe’s enduring popularity in opinion polls notwithstanding his Senate censure led his friend and fellow Catholic Senator John F. Kennedy to conclude that out red-baiting the GOP was a winning strategy for the Democrats, to the extent that he made up a non-existent “missile gap” in his debates with VP Nixon, and went on to massively increase defense spending while taking provocative actions against the Soviets.
His was the Democratic Administration exception that proved the rule. By 1968 his surviving brothers were the leading “dove” candidates for the Democratic nomination until one got shot and the other left a woman to slowly asphyxiate in an air bubble in Chappaquidick. All other anti-Soviet Democrats became neocons and fled to Ronald Reagan’s GOP or stroked out on live tv like “Scoop” Jackson—big caveat here, Southern Democrat Congress Critters like Sam Nunn and Charlie Wilson might as well have been Republicans, and many did switch in the 1990’s. Carter tried to out-”detente” Kissinger, who had only been allowed to “detente” in the first place because Nixon was desperately short on cash for an aggressive foreign policy. His VP’s presidential campaign was notable only for flirting with the nuclear freeze movement and two SNL skits, one mocking him for promising to raise taxes, and a Lyndon LaRouche bit where the guy playing LaRouche calls him the most evil man of the 20th Century.
Meanwhile the failed candidacies of Stevenson, McGovern, the aforementioned Mondale, and Dukakis were demonstrably soft on the Soviet Union, but after 1954, to call any of them communists or communist sympathizers or fellow travelers would have been close to touching the 3rd rail in American politics. It was permissible, it would not end a politician’s career like touching Social Security, the actual third rail, but the corporate press and polite society would label the politician a “red-baiter” and destroy his reputation for all time. This even applied to the post-Soviet candidacy of Bill Clinton, the draft dodger who spent his time in the Vietnam Era UK making the acquaintance of some shady foreigners with suspected links to the KGB.
Fast forward 30 years. The USSR is gone, broke up 31 years ago. If you want a speech with a Reaganite tone towards the Soviets and communism from a sitting head of state, your best bet is to find an English translation from one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address’s. In particular, his address to the UN in February 2022 outlining his causus belli for invading Ukraine. That man loves Jesus and hates commies. And yet the Democrats love to accuse the GOP of being Putin stooges. Is it the Jesus thing?
In all seriousness, we know what caused this, but it is still marvelous to reflect upon the phenomenon for the effectiveness of modern propaganda techniques and the all-pervasiveness of the US Corporate Press and Deep State. On a superficial level, Putin has borrowed tropes and talking points from the 1990’s American Christian Right in his own country to try to boost the Orthodox church and traditional conservatism—this is a known and non-controversial fact that has somehow been twisted into claims that Putin’s propaganda is influencing American conservative talking points. But that’s a minor bone of contention. We all know the reason for the “Putin stooge” charge. Aside from the classic and easy technique of claiming your enemies propaganda is foreign and thus discreditable, which was ably practiced by the Soviets themselves, and demonstrated by Orwell in 1984 and Animal Farm, Hillary Clinton adopted a 1987 Lyndon LaRouche conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was a KGB agent who only traveled to Moscow to seek the blessing of his handlers to run for POTUS. (Executive Intelligence Review, “Elephants & Donkeys” Column, September 18, 1987; I’m a connoisseur of conspiracy theories, but if you’re not familiar with this particular brand, the following quote should give you a flavor: “Space Aliens, Nude Conspiracies, Lyndon LaRouche was right.” -Homer Simpson, Treehouse of Horror VII).
Not that this part is particularly critical to the argument, but lest dear reader you think I am exaggerating in my claim that the “Trump is a Russian agent” canard originated with the 1987 Executive Intelligence Review column, aside from the similarities in the stories, particularly with the one Jonathan Chait published in The New Yorker in 2017 claiming Trump’s trip to Moscow in 1987 was part of a successful KGB recruitment effort, we now know that the actual author of the “Steele Dossier,” Steele’s putative “Primary Sub-source,” Igor Danchenko, was in 2016 a drunken, mentally ill Russian employee of the Brookings Institute, where he worked as a research assistant for his former Ph.D advisor, then Brookings Fellow Clifford Gaddy, who founded and led the Stockholm chapter of LaRouche’s European Labor Front from 1974 to 1986. Lest anyone think that Gaddy had shed his LaRouchian conspiracist patina and gone respectable in the intervening 30 years, and we thus have no reason to suspect Danchenko of being aware of his prior works—or even buying BBC journalist Matthew Sweet’s theory in his 2018 book “Operation Chaos” that Gaddy was actually a CIA operative—Danchenko specifically mentioned LaRouche by name in one of the memos that became the “Steele Dossier” as an example of one of the types of “influential Americans” the KGB historically tried to recruit. The fact that Steele or his sources would consider Lyndon LaRouche an “influential American” should have been a giant red flag for the FBI agents reading his memos, even if you can get past someone reporting a conspiracy theory name dropping the most prolific and entertaining conspiracy theorist in the post war English speaking world. The fact that the first memo stating that the Russians had been grooming Trump for several years reads so similarly to the EIR column from 1987 with minor cuts and pastes to change the dates explains the LaRouche name drop in the subsequent memo as a sort of footnote—apparently the lawyer and academic Danchenko was willing to play a key role in the greatest fraud in US history, but plagiarism was a bridge too far.
So in the winter of 2015-2016, Hillary is under investigation for using a personal email server system to conduct government business, including transmission of Top Secret program information, while Secretary of State from 2009-2013, thus avoiding data retention requirements in accordance with Freedom of Information Act. Of particular interest are 30k e-mails that have been subpoenaed by the GOP controlled House Government Oversight Committee, which the Chairman suggests will prove a pay to play scheme involving powerful corporate interests and foreign countries, including Russia with business before the State Department. At the same time, a well-respected investigative journalist has published a book “Clinton Cash,” detailing some of the publicly known contributions to the Clinton Foundation, including tens of millions of dollars from Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs with ties to Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, tech security specialists and retired spies are speculating that Clinton’s server has definitely been hacked, with former NSA Director—and acting CIA Director—Michael Hayden telling Hugh Hewitt’s nationally syndicated radio show that he would lose a lot of respect for a bunch of enemy agencies if they hadn’t hacked the server just a few weeks before Donald Trump famously taunts, “Russia if you’re listening, we’d really like to see those 30k e-mails.” Then of a sudden, a day after Glenn Greenwald promises to publish purloined communications just before the July 25th start of the Democrat National Convention, a new tech security firm, Crowdstrike, which had just gotten its series A funding round from Eric Schmitt, CEO of Alphabet and Chair of the Democrats’ IT Panel, puts out a press release that they have been retained by the DNC’s lawyers to investigate a cyber breach and have concluded that Russian military intelligence has hacked the DNC’s e-mail servers. A day later a blogger calling himself Guccifer 2.0 starts posting these hacked e-mails that for no apparent reason were copied and pasted into the Cyrilic version of Microsoft Word with the username of the founder of the Soviet secret police force before being published by the Guccifer character who made sure to use Russian expressions and emojis in all of his communications.
You now have what appears to be an obviously Russian guy publishing what appears to be stolen e-mails from the DNC. “21st Century Watergate,” “Digital Pearl Harbor,” “Well Trump asked them to do it and they delivered.” But wait a tit, Trump—if you make the absurd assumption he was serious—asked for the 30k subpoenaed emails from Hillary’s home brewed server. None of the published emails were from or to Hillary Clinton. They came from her campaign chairman John Podesta, and DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and didn’t tell us anything that people paying attention to the election—iow likely voters—hadn’t already figured out, that DNC bigwigs were snobs that rigged the primary process in favor of Hillary. And, oh, btw, Podesta admits to having been the victim of a phishing scheme through his gmail account—his password was password, priceless—and DWS in her capacity as leader of the House Democrat Congressional Caucus had hired two Pakistani brothers to manage the House Democrats’ internal IT network and given them by her own admission her username and password for all of her digital devices, not just the ones for the computer systems they had been hired to manage; the DOJ indicted them in 2017 for spying on these systems but inexplicably didn’t ask for remand, allowing them to flee back to Pakistan, where their uncle is a Senator that claims to be a former ISI agent. Plenty of people with the means, motive and opportunity to steal very sensitive data from the Democrats at the height of a Presidential campaign, but the only one who comes forward to publish anything publishes pretty tame stuff compared to what they could have got in theory, none of the actual candidates communications, leaves Russian fingerprints all over their work, and best of all scoops Assange—the supposed Russian intelligence asset—by a month, giving the Clinton campaign weeks, rather than days or hours, to work on damage control before the Democratic National Convention.
This sounds oddly convenient; it’s a good thing the FBI, CIA, and NSA all had their best forensic computer guys go over that DNC server with a fine tooth comb to ensure that Russian intelligence operatives really did it, and have the server locked up in evidence so that any future defendant indicted for the hack can have his own forensic expert examine it on cross examination. What? They didn’t do any of that? They let Crowdstrike exclusively examine the server, then destroy it, and decide what copies of the originally collected evidence to give to the FBI? If Trump did that it would be obstruction of justice.
“Okay, Mark, we get it; the only Russians in the 2016 US Presidential campaign were employed by the DNC and/or the FBI. Why though, out of all the countries in the world to frame in an elaborate, convoluted hoax/conspiracy theory, did they pick that one?” I think it may actually have something to do with the Christian thing. Clinton and Obama both ran for President in 2008 on a rapprochement with Iran and Russia platform in foreign policy, notably refusing to endorse psychopath McCain’s demand to add Georgia to NATO and go to war on it’s behalf when Russia kicked that little country right in its tiny Caucasus. Clinton as Secretary of State got tens of millions of dollars for her foundation while enriching Russia more than any Democrat since Alger Hiss. But at the time Dmitry Medvedev was Russian President and pitched to the west as a reformer, even though it was obvious he was just swapping jobs with Prime Minister Putin to get around the no more than 2 consecutive terms prohibition. But even Vlad was making nice, even joined the World Economic Forum, and shook hands with Claus Schwab, the current bete noir of anti-globalists—explain that photo op to tankies. But then Putin is President again and kicks George Soros’ Open Society Foundation NGO out of the country and passes an anti-homosexual law, and locks up the Pussy Riot protestors; by 2014 when Netflix is filming the 3rd season of its American reboot of House of Cards and needs a foreign villain as a foil for the President, it chooses a stand in for Russian President Vlad Putin. Then you also have the Maginstsky nonsense, which is convenient for boomercon Cold War nostalgia from elderly GOP Senators who also want an “I told you so” moment against Obama for his “80’s called and want their foreign policy back,” hit on Romney in the 2012 debates.
Bottom line, America’s foreign policy establishment needs an enemy—its the only thing that keeps American taxpayers from noticing they are paying a shit ton of money for a military that mostly defends foreigners rather than themselves. From 1922-1991, Russia was that enemy, because it was legitimately an existential threat to America, and to the world. Communists suck, people—no country under the control of communists can be expected to leave the American people free to live their traditional way of life. In 2012, Russia again became that enemy, because it happened to be the country that pissed off the major interest groups within the foreign policy establishment just at the right moment they happened to be between foreign enemies and were looking for a new one. China is too big to pick a fight with and owns to much of our shit—that would be suicide. We’ve already destroyed every Middle Eastern country except Iran and Pakistan; Pakistan has nukes, and Iran has tens of millions of people and a history of kicking foreign imperial ass going back to Rome. That leaves good old Russia, which just so happens to be under the control of guys trying to use the government to encourage the return of good old traditional values and Christianity. Can you imagine a more fucked up enemy in the mind of globalist trend setters. Plus, they already were the enemy for 69 years (again, nice)—so we don’t need that much programming to get people to hate them; simple nostalgia will get most everyone who was an adult anti-commie before the Berlin Wall fell.
And that is my hypothesis for the bizarre situation we find ourselves in today where people who would have called you beyond the pale for noticing that Russia-Stans were “commie stooges” during the Cold War when Russia was a legitimate threat to our way of life, and perhaps very existence now feel free to call you a Russian or Putin Stooge any time you argue that we should not be expanding NATO, fighting proxy wars within the former USSR, or hell even just not taking steps that could predictably lead to a nuclear exchange. Is it right? No idea. Does it matter? Even less certain. But from the time of the London and Virginia Companies—which got their starts from traders that had profited handsomely from the English Muscovy Company—to Alexis de Toqueville, people have observed the intertwined destinies of Russia and America. If the American Cathedral cannot stop demonizing the Russian, Armageddon may not be far behind.
That should have been Julian Assange, not Glenn Greenwald. And I apologize for the plethora of formatting and punctuation errors and run on sentences in this one. Should I blame the vodka, or should I blame Vlad Putin?
So I have a new like. And not one of my buddies I sent links to when I started blogging on Substack. Who is it? No idea.
“The Shadow Knows!”
Anyway, since I wrote this post I’ve seen that Danchenko was acquitted on all counts—good for him—and that GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy is saying that the GOP Congress come January might not necessarily keep honoring Zelensky’s blank check. Predictably, the blue checks have been claiming this is proof that the Republicans are soliciting Putin’s interference in the midterms. How Putin could achieve such a thing is, as in 2016, 2020, and as always left unexplained, but a very bad thing that we should all be panicked about.
The blue check theory is that the Russians are digging in to wait out November’s election at which point American aid will stop. Aside from the fact that the new Congress won’t be sworn in until January 3, can anyone else spot something wrong with this theory? What else happens on the Eurasian steppe during the fall and winter months? Could it be the Russians are digging in in anticipation of everything freezing?
Truly, we do live in the dumbest timeline!