Russia And The Threat To Democracy

I have seen the proofs. Many times, too many times to mention. I literally could not escape them even if I tried. I half-suspect that were I to take up residence in some remote part of Alaska a plane would fly overhead and drop leaflets upon me. And now with social media, others are too willing to share them with me, each a slam-dunk case for the fact that Russia hacked our election or interfered with our election, or sowed discontent after the election. The essential point is still not quite clear. If there is a precise accusation today, it is not the same one it was yesterday, and likely will change tomorrow.

Those smoking guns that I have managed to inspect carefully—and I have reviewed quite a few—have inevitably been filled with blanks. I don’t mean to suggest that some articles were incomplete while others leaned too heavily on the words of anonymous sources within intelligence agencies that have been known to tell a whopper or ten when they’ve felt it was fitting to do so. No, I mean any half-critical read of any one of them revealed serious flaws in the journalism that pointed to something far beyond mere incompetence.

Let me give you an example. An extreme example, certainly, but not too far from the average. Regard this article from The Hill, a publication that is generally thought of as a respected news source. Note the headline, “Trump building in Panama tied to Russian mafia, international crime: report”. Pretty provocative and damning, isn’t it? Smoking gun and all that. Now read the article. What you will notice if you actually read it, is that there is not a single reference to Russia in it. No reference to Vladimir Putin or any Russian business or businessperson. Nothing. An absolute nada burger with a headline that says it ties Trump to the Russian mafia. I’m not making this up, read it. (1)

I say this example is not too far from the norm because with the exception of an added paragraph at the beginning, it is identical to most every other article I’ve read on the subject. Usually an initial paragraph promises to provide some kind of evidence before veering off into a story that actually provides no evidence for the assertion made in the headline. This article is different only in that they apparently forgot to include the initial paragraph.

The most typical story I read—in other words the kind most often sent to me as proof of collusion or whatever it is they are trying to prove on a given day—comes from a (allegedly) respected newspaper. Regardless of the paper, the words “as reported by the Washington Post” soon appear. So I source the original article, which without fail says “according to unnamed sources within intelligence agencies”. It doesn’t take long to spot the pattern.

But that is not journalism, that is dictation, dictation from secretive organizations that lie for a living. These are the same organizations that tried to get Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide, and I haven’t ruled out the possibility that they ultimately did him in. (2) Secret government organizations don’t exist to help the common man. They never have in any country in any time. Go ahead, give me an example of a secretive unaccountable government organization that improved the rights, freedoms and powers of its citizenry. The KGB? The Gestapo? So journalism, at least the “respected”, not “fake” news sources, don’t bother to question the information they get from such agencies, they simply pass it on as “news”. If that is not propaganda, please give me an example of what is.

Why? Why this sudden intense flood of really faulty journalism? Are journalism schools handing out degrees nowadays without asking students to pass any exams? Has it always been this bad and I just haven’t noticed until now? Have I for too long clung to alternative media for my information that I have neglected to realize just how far down mainstream media has fallen? Or is it something more sinister. I cannot help thinking it is something more sinister.

Which is the central reason why, when the Russian Hacking Narrative stories arise, nothing Russia did or did not do is as big a concern to me as the complete falling apart of our sources of information. If Russia actually did something to change our election, there are pretty simple and obvious steps that can be taken to insure the integrity of our elections going forward. But nobody is doing anything about it. Instead the conversation is about how evil Russia and Vladimir Putin are and how we need to punish them, which makes me realize it isn’t the sanctity of our elections that is important but the need to demonize Russia. Which means they’re telling us one thing and doing another. Which means they’re lying. Whatever Russia might be guilty of, the media really doesn’t care about it. The media’s main concern is to direct all of your anger and attention at Russia. Forget about voting machines that could easily be rigged. Forget about purging of the voter rolls.

This is so, as far as I can guess, for one of two reasons. The first is that the powers that be have no desire to fix the real problems that face our society and so deflect your attention with the diversion of Russia the way they distract you with celebrities, sports, and wedge issues. This is bad. The second is that those in control of our highly concentrated media want you to hate Russia as a way to justify aggressive behavior towards them by our government. This is much worse. And it is the much more likely explanation.

I recently witnessed a discussion in congress between Marco Rubio and Daniel Coats, the Director of National Intelligence. You can watch it here. It was quite shocking to me that with Russia currently on their plate, they are already discussing how China is the biggest threat on the horizon. They are discussing how China is looking to overtake the U.S as the primary power on the planet.

The problem with this line of thinking is that we see the successes of any other nation as a threat to our own. Rather than taking the approach of co-existence, we feel the need to do something towards other nations before they become powerful enough to escape being subservient to us. In short, we feel the need to place every other nation at our mercy, need to maintain the position of power over all the planet. This is not who we claim to be, we promote ourselves as a beacon of freedom and democracy. But again, what we are being told does not match our behavior.

This is a very dangerous attitude to have. This is an attitude that inevitably leads to conflict, and the only tool the United States has for dealing with conflict is war. War is an incredibly wasteful, foolish, ultimately counter-productive way of dealing with other nations. It's evil, too. It has cost our nation thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, and that war is not over and does not look to end anytime soon. We may think we have managed the Iraq War, but we still have no idea what the ultimate ramifications of our deeds there are. History stretches beyond news cycles, and nations have long memories and are capable of harboring grievances in perpetuity.

We use aggression against any nation whose interest do not align with ours. And while that is a dangerous approach when dealing with countries such as Iraq and Libya, it is exponentially more so when using such methods when dealing with Russia and China. If for some reason it works against Russia, and I don’t care to contemplate the quite literal fallout should it not, China is next in line. From the video clip I included, it cannot be denied.

The sad thing is, we will never really know what Russia did or did not do. Our sources of information are too unreliable to provide us any certainty. They daily prove their interests are anything but providing us with truth and context. To trust them, to put our safety in their hands or to act on their assertions, is absurd.

We need to find alternate paths to the truth, organizations and individuals that have earned our trust. But the result of the propaganda of the whole Russian narrative is completely the opposite of that. For years the mainstream media has pushed journalists who have proven themselves trustworthy to the margins. Now, lacking anywhere else where they can report their findings, they appear on RT and the mainstream propaganda claims they are Russian puppets. Using the excuse of Russian bots, the internet is slowly being constricted so that our access to alternate media is being strangled. YouTube Channels are being de-monetized, Google searches are showing less, and flat-out banning links to certain sites is now the norm on Facebook.

I am not up on the latest bombshell, so I cannot comment on it. In fact, there are a ton of articles I’ve missed. I simply cannot respond to every assertion that has been made, the propaganda blitz is a tidal wave that overwhelms. But I’ve caught enough of them, read them critically, followed the links and connected the dots, enough to know there is a bigger story going on here than anything Russia is a part of.

Nothing Russia has done or can do, and I am extremely dubious of the official narrative precisely because of the way it has been pushed, can harm our democracy as much as this current wave of propaganda and urge for censorship. We have a system that’s broken and the entire Russian narrative is doing nothing to fix it, it is in fact making it worse. Much worse. And there is no greater threat to democracy than censorship and our sources for information being in the hands of the unaccountable few.

(1) The scary part of this nothing burger is the fact it was shared over 13,000 times, presumably by those using it as evidence of Trump/Russia collusion. Did they not read it? Did they apply no critical thinking skills at all? Are we so flushed with articles about Russian interference in our election that we mistake sheer quantity as proof?

(2) That doesn’t make me a conspiracy theorist. A jury in 1999 found that MLK’s death was the result of a conspiracy. Coretta, Martin Luther’s wife, had this to say “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband.”