The Russians Are Coming!

I am not big on the "Russian interference" story currently wafting about in the mainstream Democratic firmament of this country. Apart from the fact that the whole story smells a bit, its perspective is myopic. Attempts by Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis and others to influence American politics by duplicitous means are neither new nor news. The US has tried to influence elections even in recent years, such as in Israel and Palestine. That Russia made such a move is neither surprising nor cause for outrage, even leaving aside our long history of toppling the democratically elected leadership of other countries.

Russia making corrosive moves to influence American politics is not news, and American outrage over it is a combination of sheer hypocrisy and willful ignorance.

The reason Russia may have been able to interfere and corrode the process so successfully is because the American information system had already been poisoned by people like Murdoch and the Kochs, along with a heaping helping from a Democratic Party with unbridled contempt for its own electorate, and all the other stuff I never tire of rambling about.

The Russians may be shitting in our sewer but they ain’t the ones that stank it up. The way in which this line of thought is being put about now is sometimes outright loony. For example, the assertions that the US has a “puppet government run from Moscow” which I have seen more than once today.

It shouldn’t take a nanosecond's thought to see that, in a country like the US, the idea that “evil foreigners are responsible for my country’s problems” is a recipe for all manner of idiocy and eventual nastiness. I have lived in countries where popular political culture is laden with unreasoned paranoia about “foreign agents.” Now, we are nowhere near there. Yet. But some of this stuff I’m seeing about how “the Russians are behind it” has begun to ring some familiar alarm bells. 

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