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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 12/6/18

Russiagate McCarthyism Led to Internet Censorship of the Anti-War and Social Justice Movement

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Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity

The anti-Trump movement is not simply a progressive movement against a rightwing president. It also carries within it a rightwing current.

Progressive minded people fight against Trump's racist actions against Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, his crude sexism, his pro-corporate policies, his rejection of action on global warming, his massive tax cut to the 1%, his war threats against Syria, Korea, Iran, and Venezuela.

But the rightwing element of the anti-Trump movement, embodied in the "liberal" corporate media, the Democratic Party establishment, many Republican leaders, and the national security state, focuses on his character, on his alleged friendliness to Russia's Putin, and alleged collusion with Putin to steal the 2016 election. They campaign to indict Trump for collusion, even for treason, or to remove him for mental unfitness.

These rightwing national security state representatives aim to break or at least tame Trump. They cannot tolerate presidential questioning of imperial war-mongering - Trump's talk of taking the US military out of Syria, his friendly meetings with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, with Russia's Putin, his wish to downgrade NATO, take US troops out of South Korea, calling much of the corporate media propaganda fake news, his attacks on the FBI, CIA and NSA. These actions have infuriated the corporate-military national security establishment running Washington.

They are the ones who lie to us, and lied to us into the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. They are the ones behind the police state agencies, the CIA, NSA, FBI, and DIA.

This rightwing anti-Trump movement at present dominates the "Resistance," and has little problem with Trump's racist, pro-corporate, warmongering, anti-environment (actually anti-Planet Earth) policies. To the extent they do, much of it is a question of his crude style.

Two major "liberal" newspapers, pushing Trump-Putin Russiagate "collusion" are the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times' long article on September 20 The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far claimed "What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention." Yet, like most such Russiagate tales, deep inside it says "no public evidence has emerged showing that [Trump's] campaign conspired with Russia." That is, the Russia US election interference story has as much validity as the Obama has no US birth certificate story.

Glenn Greenwald , Steve Cohen, The Real News Network, Consortium News, World Socialist Web Site, 21st Century Wire, have repeatedly shown that this whole Russia investigation is based on nothing of substance. So has Fox News' Tucker Carlson, the Ron Paul Institute, Jack F. Matlock Jr. , ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, and Craig Murray, a former British ambassador. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in their study called allegations of Russian election interference "evidence-free."

Actual interference in the 2016 election was two-fold: 1) the corporate buying of the candidates, and 2) Clinton and DNC manipulating the primaries so that she won delegates, not Bernie Sanders. Israel and Saudi Arabia are two countries that have a vastly more extensive influence operations on US politicians than does Russia.


Russiagate is a new McCarthyism

Today's repackaged anti-Russia campaign took off after Putin helped block the US- NATO seizure of the entire Ukraine, which would have placed their troops on Russia's borders. Putin then thwarted the US strategic plan to impose a neo-colonial regime on Syria, crush Hezbollah and Iran, and advance US control over the Middle East. Putin's successes enraged the US rulers.

The Russian news services, RT and Sputnik, have repeatedly exposed the fake news propagated by Western corporate media and politicians: alleged Russian shootdown of MH17, alleged chemical weapons attacks by Syria's Assad, and similar stories concocted to create the conditions for "humanitarian intervention." RT became a news source about Wikileaks' release of documents the US rulers wanted kept secret from us. As a result, the Western fake news propagators sought to suppress Russian news reporting that was reaching an increasing audience of US people, growing ever more skeptical of what the US government and corporate media fed them.

We are now even called traitors if we don't subscribe to Russiaphobia stories the 'intelligence" secret police (NSA, FBI, CIA, etc.) tell us: the ones who swore the NSA doesn't spy on every one of us, who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, who gave visas to two of the 9-11 attackers six months after they were killed in the attack, who killed or framed the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, organized the contra war against Nicaragua, brought crack cocaine in the US, created torture black sites around the world, and so on.

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anti-war and solidarity activist, of Chicago ALBA Solidarity. See ChicagoALBASolidarity.wordpress.com

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