If you were an American citizen, cryogenically frozen in the early 60’s, back in the day when Nikita Khrushchev was banging his loafer on the podium and announcing his funeral arrangements for us, you would not believe, waking up in 2021, that a news network would be touting the prowess of the Russian president over the American one. You simply would not believe it. However, that is exactly what has come to pass. Right-wing media, led by Fox News, loves nothing better than to demean the sitting President of the United States and exalt the Russian thug over him. It is stunning. Here’s a sampling.
Wow! How desperate and low the spin of my sister and her Charlie McCarthy sidekick. How do these two “Catholics” attone for such malfeasance?! @IngrahamAngle https://t.co/ivURrjwFL8
— Curtis Ingraham (@CurtisIngraham1) June 17, 2021
What good can possibly come of Fox undermining democracy in this way, and assuring their viewers that the Russian president is really a powerful guy, a “mafia don” ready to overwhelm the American president, I know not.
But it doesn’t stop there by any manner or means. No, the Republican party has adopted Russian taking points as its platform, plain and simple. Putin doesn’t need the bots or the troll farms anymore, he’s got the GOP and Fox News and his side, “without firing a shot” as Khrushchev put it. Charlie Sykes, the Bulwark:
And now it has come full circle, as Russian President Vladimir Putin, feeds back our homegrown disinformation. Dana Milbank notes the symmetry: “For the past few years, Republicans in Congress have echoed Russian propaganda. On Wednesday, in Geneva, Vladimir Putin returned the favor: He echoed Republican propaganda.”
With unconcealed relish, the Russians have adopted the talking points of right-wing media about January 6.
The first sign of trouble came a week ago, when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sounded a bit like a far-right Republican when talking about the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Lavrov told reporters last Monday that the Kremlin is “following with interest” the “persecution” of those “accused of the riots on Jan. 6.”
Putin has amplified the point, insisting that the January 6 insurrectionists are not looters or thieves.” Many of the suspects, Putin said, have been hit with “very harsh charges…. Why is that?”
Yesterday, Putin took the opportunity to emphasize the point. Asked about his repression of political dissent, Putin put on a bravura performance of whataboutism.
“As for who is killing whom or are throwing whom in jail, people came to the U.S. Congress with political demands,” Putin said. “Over 400 people had criminal charges placed on them. They face prison sentences. … They’re being called domestic terrorists.”
Putin specifically cited Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was fatally shot by police while trying to break into an area close to lawmakers.
“One person was simply shot on the spot by the police, although they were not threatening the police with any weapons. In many countries, the same thing happens that happens in our country,” Putin said.
Afterward President Biden called the comparison, “ridiculous,” as indeed it was. But the whole episode showed how our political world has devolved in just a few years.
In 2016 it was considered a bold statement to say that “there are only two parties: Americans and Republicans.” That is exactly what has come to pass. American values are still alive and kicking, but there’s only one political party which is functioning properly, and the other one has become an arm of the Kremlin. It’s incredible to behold, but it’s too obvious to ignore.
Every time I’ve tried to write about a certain theme it’s always turned into one of those long “too much stuff, too long, get to the point, etc.” pieces I have a reputation for writing. People want something that takes five minutes or so unless it’s a really, really highly regarded and widely read writer which I am most certainly not. It takes a lot of history and context to back up my theme – history going back virtually an entire century.
So here’s the cliff-notes version. Russia/the USSR spent well over seven decades (closer to eight) trying to co-opt the American political system via using the American left/liberals – and failed. When you consider the time frame when Putin started pouring major fertilizer on various projects targeted at the American right/conservatives was after Obama took office through Trump’s “winning” Russia managed to achieve via the right/conservatives what it failed to do in the same number of decades with liberals!
And he’s been actively tending his American right-wing garden ever since it bloomed into the Trump Presidency.
As I said I’ve written, or tried to numerous times to provide solid context and documentation for my premise. But it would take longer to read and digest than anyone would like so I’ll leave it at that.
Well, for all the supposed “leftist” policies that Communism supported/abetted, the system itself was remarkably conservative.
Surprisingly, very few “left-wing dictatorships” actually exist or have ever existed. Authoritarianism, by its very nature, requires the kind of top-down control under which true left-wingers cannot function. Once you get a group of “radicals” (a term typically used to describe “left-wing” functionaries) in power, inevitably you find one person in the group who begins to consolidate power, typically at the expense of his associates and that person begins exhibiting an authoritarian streak that turns the “radical” government into one that’s functionally no different from a far-right/reactionary government.
The problem that has ALWAYS existed for Communist countries is that not a single one of them came about in a country that Marx and Engels envisioned. The Marx/Engels view was that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would emerge from an industrial society rather than a largely agricultural society (while “proletariat” largely meant “workers” in general, it was presumed to mean what we would deem “skilled labor” rather than the relatively unskilled labor of farm work*). While a few western countries experienced some local-level Communist governments (following WW1, several German states established themselves as “Soviet/Socialist” Republics but all were toppled by the time the various peace treaties were signed), the majority of countries that were established as Soviet republics by 1950 were largely agrarian at the time the Communists took power (or, in the case of countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, their industrial bases had been so devastated by the war that only the agricultural sector was making much of a contribution to their economies; also their being “liberated” by the USSR allowed the Soviets to “help” the local Communists “rise” to power). The more industrial European countries during Marx and Engels’ time (the UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, the German Rhineland, even Italy’s northern states) all managed to expand their workers’ rights, between changes in social conditions and political power that helped negate any real desire among the potential “proletariat” to rebel (local Communist movements generally were pulled into the local labor movements to varying degrees so that the Communists who didn’t join formed too small a percentage to really make a difference).
True – Putin wouldn’t have protestors shot – he’d arrange for them to be poisoned instead
…or “fall” out of a window several stories up.