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Election
Meddling: Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About
if Done by USA
By Adam
Johnson
August 17,
2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- The Washington Post
(8/10/16) published what has to be one of the
most naked examples of projection ever displayed by
a major American paper. The Post’s editorial
board, in
another
effort to
bash
Russia, lumped its President Vladimir Putin and
Turkey’s increasingly autocratic ruler President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a generic “strongman”
category, and warned of their paranoia:
The piece
began by mocking foreign leaders who blame outside
influences (the United States, for example) for
interfering in their domestic affairs:
One of
the enduring rules of autocracy is that a
strongman must not admit something is amiss
inside the kingdom. Instead, troubles come from
enemies outside. This is often used to distract
people from genuine woes at home, and while
hardly new, it has been embraced with fresh
enthusiasm by the latest generation of political
strongmen. It betrays a paranoia and insecurity
among those who boast of power and control.
The glaring
irony of this criticism is that the Washington
Post has been spent the past several weeks
blaming Russia for interfering in the US elections:
-
Trump Proves He’s a Putin Lapdog (7/21/16)
-
Russia May or May Not Want
President Trump, but Putin Has Made His Feelings
About Clinton Very Clear
(7/25/16)
-
Putin’s Suspected Meddling in a
US Election Would Be a Disturbing First
(7/25/16)
-
The Complete Guide to Vladimir
Putin, Donald Trump’s Favorite Autocrat
(7/25/16)
-
Democrats Have Found a Brand New Running Mate
for Donald Trump: Vladimir Putin (7/27/16)
-
Republicans Have a Problem:
Trump-Putin (7/27/16)
-
Here’s What We Know About Donald
Trump and His Ties to Russia
(7/29/16)
-
In Endorsing Clinton, Ex-CIA
Chief Says Putin Made Trump His ‘Unwitting
Agent’ (8/5/16)
-
Will Trump’s BFF Putin Stage
Another Attack? (8/11/16)
-
Alleged Russian Involvement in
DNC Hack Gives US a Taste of Kremlin Meddling
(8/13/16)
When US
media—to say nothing of
the leading contender to be the next president
of the US—allege that foreign elements are steering
our politics, that’s rational, serious discourse.
When others do it, it’s laughable, unhinged
blabbering.
In its
August 10 editorial, the Post scoffs at the
idea that then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
was involved in anti-Putin protests in 2011 and
2012:
Mr.
Putin still holds to the fallacy that Hillary
Clinton, while secretary of State,
sparked the mass street protests against him
in 2011 and 2012, conveniently overlooking the
fraudulent attempt to steal that election by his
party.
The State
Department-funded NED
openly gives millions of dollars to dozens
of Russian political organizations.
While
there’s no evidence Secretary Clinton “sparked” the
2011 protests, the US certainly influenced them.
It’s
not a secret the US State Department, USAID and
other US-linked organizations supported many
dissident groups; it’s openly discussed on the
website of the State Department–funded National
Endowment for Democracy. (Here’s an
archived page describing more than 50 groups the
NED boasted of supporting in 2011.)
The US
government and allied NGOs routinely meddle in the
affairs of other countries; that’s the entire
purpose of their “pro-democracy” efforts. That’s
what “soft power” means. As Reuters (12/13/11)
reported at the time:
The
amount of money USAID allocated to programs in
Russia was nearly $55 million, according to a
document on the organization’s website,
including around $3 million allocated to
“political competition and consensus-building.”
If the
Washington Post had to argue that US meddling
was the good kind of meddling, because it’s a
necessary balance to Putin’s autocratic rule, this
nuance would get in the way of the Post’s
simplistic “paranoid strongman vs. good, clean US
democracy” dichotomy, so the reader is left with the
ahistoric and childish impression that the US
doesn’t interfere in the domestic affairs of other
countries.
In fact,
the US has a long history of intervening in the
affairs of countries around the world—not just
Russia. In the interest of brevity, let’s skip over
the long decades of
gunboat diplomacy and
Cold War interventionism, and focus instead on
Clinton’s four-year tenure at the State Department,
during which time the US:
During this
time, USAID (which operates under the guidance of
the State Department) was also involved in two
elaborate plots to undermine the Cuban government,
one involving the
secret creation of a fake Twitter-like
social media platform, and the other the
infiltration of Cuba’s hip hop scene—both for
the purposes of “stirring unrest” on the socialist
island.
The US
government doesn’t occasionally meddle in the
domestic affairs of other countries or try to
overthrow their governments—it does so as a matter
of course. It’s in its DNA, its animating ethos.
To omit the
endless string of examples of US interfering in
other countries in an editorial about fears of US
interfering in other countries is at best negligent
and at worst deliberately obtuse. It’s hard to
describe foreign leaders as being paranoid about US
meddling and coups if you acknowledge that the US
has been involved in meddling and coups for more
than a century.
Adam
Johnson is a contributing analyst for
FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter
at @AdamJohnsonNYC. |
