The Russia and Fake News Hysteria

One would think from recent overwrought headlines, that the American people were clamoring for more confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and just got had in this election!  Hillary’s motto should have been, “Avenge South Ossetia whatever the cost.”  No one believes that of course.

The whole thing is obvious propaganda along with the corrupt media noticing for the first time in 2016 that there’s a lot of crap on the internet, which they have attacked in a coordinated campaign as Fake News.

They and the Democrats are using this and the Russia angle to avoid soul searching on the crimes of the Clintons and the limits of their anti white identity politics. They want to pin their loss on “fake news,” as if so much of the real news had little effect.  I concede that maybe Russia had something to do with Wikileaks. I’ve not seen definitive proof, and some of the stories that come out are either unsourced, contradicted by verifiable facts (no RNC leak), or are otherwise suspicious, conflating the actions of individual Russians with the Russian government.  We do know hackers are often self-motivated vandals by nature, whether it’s the group Anonymous, Brad Manning, or Julian Assange.

But if Russia had an opinion on the election and tried to tip the scales by releasing embarrassing emails of one of the two political parties, so what?  Both parties begged borrowed and stole to get opposition on the other.  Did we forget the legion of women claiming (completely unverifiably) that Trump groped them in the days before the election? No doubt the Russians preferred him to the status quo, including that of Hillary, who was the architect of numerous idiotic foreign policy interventions. In the end, the American people still got a say so, and Trump was the peace candidate.   Further, Wikileaks would not have any bite if there wasn’t so much corruption revealed in the leaked emails, whether it was Clinton getting debate questions, calling favored ethnic groups nasty names, or the DNC screwing over Sanders in the primaries.

Finally, our pearl clutching on this is a little hard to take seriously.  The US was clearly behind the Ukrainian coup, which backfired tremendously. Just as it’s behind a goodly swath of the Syrian Civil War, in which “moderate rebels” cooperated with al Nusra and ISIS in destroying a previously peaceful and orderly country.  That war is now thankfully coming to an end, due mostly to Russia’s intervention.  The US has openly supported and funded candidates in foreign elections.  Hacking emails is quite a bit less intrusive under the circumstances.

But Russia will continue to be treated as a bogeyman for at least three reasons.  First, it’s leadership rejects liberalism, both the good kind and the bad kind, and is traditionalist and authoritarian.  LGBT is now the preferred moniker among Russians for do-gooder western liberals, who are opposed by the revived Orthodox Christianity of the Russian people.  Where Americans see human rights, Russians see imposition of foreign decadence. Putin is a symbol for an effective authoritarian nationalist bringing about a renaissance in a country that was an economic and political basket case during the Yeltsin years.

Second, NATO, and Americans reared on NATO brinksmanship, direct their efforts chiefly at containing Russia.  NATO was unwisely expanded to include former Soviet Republics after the fall of Soviet communism, and this orientation to Russia requires a substantial and continuing U.S. investment in military power. There are many people with a stake in this, including defense contractors, otherwise obsolete “Sovietologists” in the State and Defense departments, and those who generally want a world where the “international community” (i.e., the United States) can call the shots worldwide with impunity, even on such dubious activities as regime change in Libya and Syria, and even where those called shots have no obvious connection to the interests of the American people.

Finally, there is a long-standing emotional animosity to Russia, which is never directed at other equally authoritarian regimes.  We hear endlessly about Russia’s apparent containment of critical journalists, but this is commonplace in Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Iran, and even Mexico.  Their facilities at the Sochi Olympics were mocked, even though China’s and Brazil’s were little better, and the latter was positively dangerous.  And this all goes back to England and the Crimean War, in which classically liberal British absolutely hated Russia and all things Russian, labeling them backwards, authoritarian, and dangerous, long before the appearance of Communism.  Their traditionalism, concept of the state, and prospect of limiting British hegemony all made the press and British leadership of the day lose their way, teaming up with the monstrous Ottomans to wrestle away Crimea from Russia in the 1850s.  The anti-Russian feeling has persisted and extended to the United States, particularly by American Jews for whom a nationalist Russia is equated with anti-Semitism, becoming exaggerated even after the peculiar (and arguably anti-Russian) Soviet episode was undone.

Trump is following a sensible policy regarding Russia, namely, avoiding unnecessary confrontation, even while recognizing it may not be an ally strictly speaking.  In this, he has shown more wisdom than the elites of both parties.  If the Russians recognized this reality and wanted to tip the scales, it should be cause for concern, but more because our legacy policy is so fanatical and bellicose against a country that could do us a lot of harm if we were to get involved in any kind of conflict and, furthermore, could do us a lot of good in the war against radical Islam if we were able to find a way to cooperate more effectively in that regard.  The Fake News talk is an attack on Trump’s legitimacy and a surprisingly non-cosmopolitan line of argument from those who otherwise say we should bow before the “International Community,” by which they mean the suicidal leftist elite of Europe and the anti-western elite of the Third World.

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