I’m writing this on January 11. In nine days Trump will be be sworn in as President. He will then take over the running of the CIA, NSA, FBI etc., the agencies that have brought charges to discredit the outcome of Trump’s election. The Electoral Collage has rubber stamped his election and now Congress has ratified it. So all of this will soon be moot and forgotten as The Leader takes charge, and cleans house in these agencies. That said, some things should be noted about this brouhaha.
The first thing to say about the charges that Russian President Putin interfered in the recent elections in the U.S. by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, is that they are the height of hypocrisy.
What hubris and gall! Washington, as Master of the Universe, has and still does interfere in the elections in other countries to a far greater extent than Russia or any other country. Moreover, when elections turn out to have elected the “wrong” people, the U.S. has “interfered” much more strongly by using the CIA and other agencies to dispatch the offending government forthwith.
A small sample:
After WWII Korea was divided in two by Stalin and Truman. The U.S. military governed South Korea directly from 1945 to 1948, and organized “elections” in 1948 that installed Syngman Rhee as dictator, a puppet of Washington. Other U.S.-supported dictators followed.
In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown in a CIA-organized coup because he threatened to nationalize the imperialist-owned oil companies in Iran. This ushered in the extremely oppressive U.S. puppet regime under Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose dreaded political police, SAVAK, was organized by the CIA and Israel’s Shin Bet.
In 1954, the CIA organized a coup against democratically elected President Arbenz in Guatemala, for being too leftist, resulting in another military dictatorship.
In 1963, Juan Bosch became the first democratically elected President of the Dominican Republic, after decades of U.S.-imposed dictators. Later that year he was overthrown in a military coup backed by the Catholic Church, landowners, industrialists and the U.S. because he established a constitution that included democratic and workers’ rights. In 1965, when workers, peasants and sections of the military who supported Bosch overthrew the regime, the U.S. armed forces invaded.
In the early 1970s, U.S. government documents released much later demonstrate how Washington tried to keep Salvador Allende from being elected President of Chile because he was a Socialist. Then it worked to destabilize his regime, and finally overthrew Allende and Chile’s democracy in a coup that set up the Pinochet military dictatorship that murdered, imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands.
A similar “dirty war” was established by a U.S.-backed coup of a democratically elected government in Argentina.
A more recent example was Honduras in 2015, when the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton organized, using a U.S. army base in the country, a coup against the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, because he was getting too friendly to Venezuela and Bolivia (which reminds me of the U.S. support to the failed coup against the democratically elected Hugo Chavez in 2002). Clinton then helped the military regime to organize “elections” to legitimize the coup, resulting in Honduras becoming a completely corrupt narco-state known as the “murder capital of the world.”
I’m sure the reader can recall many other examples, from multiple coups in Haiti to the gorillas in Greece.
The second thing to note is that the whole campaign about Russia obscures what the documents, published by Wikileaks, actually revealed. The main question is not who leaked or hacked these documents but what they exposed. Besides some embarrassing details about conflicts in the Clinton campaign, what they showed was an organized effort by the Democratic establishment to discredit the rising challenge by Bernie Sanders. Clinton and the Democrats never challenged the veracity of these documents. So whoever did provide them to Wikileaks is guilty of exposing – the truth. They did a pubic service for the American people.
Possibly this exposure of the truth did sway some voters not to vote for Clinton. Sanders had charged dirty tricks were being played against him, and these documents provided the truth of those claims. It is likely that this caused some Sanders supporters not to vote at all or for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. In any case, the fault lay with Clinton and her supporters, not Russia or whomever did the leaking or hacking.
The third thing to note is that this campaign by the Democrats and some Republicans, that the Russians interfered with the election, actually plays into Trump’s hands. The CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. all say they have absolute proof that Putin himself tried to swing the election to Trump. They just can’t reveal their proof because of “national security.” What all this amounts to is the charge that the election was rigged.
The logic of this charge is that Trump should be disqualified as President. But the accusers all pull back from this conclusion, and say that Trump’s election was fair and square. Trump has said throughout the campaign that all his opponents and detractors are incompetent “losers.” In this example, they are whiners, sore losers, who can’t even do anything about their charges. Weaklings.
Moreover, this toothless attempt to discredit the elections is one more example of the disarray in the establishment parties evident throughout this weird election. One more argument that what is needed is a strongman to cut through the crap and set things right, and guess who is that man.
Barry Sheppard