Bulletin #720
Subject
:
THE DAY AFTER.
9
November 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
A colleague recently warned me,
citing an old Muslim proverb, “Choose your enemy carefully because you will end
up being much like him!” Last night’s election was a defeat for Hillary
Clinton, but beyond that lies a big question mark !
One constant in the logic of US political
culture is that a President does what a president has to do. A presidential candidate speaks one way in
order to achieve his aim; a President behaves in an altogether different way to
satisfy his obligations which, in the contemporary context of Monopoly
Capitalism, is to serve the interests of US transnational corporations and their
investors.
It is true that war is only one way
for investment capital to achieve large profits; that there also exists
non-military investment opportunities, but the contradictions brought on by
international capitalist expansion have reduced options drastically.
Militarism remains a solution for many investors, like it or not, leaving
massive death and destruction in its wake, as long as it remains a ‘profitable’
investment !
After the political rhetoric of the
campaign trail and the grotesque ideological implications of this rhetoric, the
pragmatics of governing efficiently in the interests of the ruling capitalist
class leave few options. The bottom line, ‘increased private
profits’, will govern the Trump White House as it did the Obama White House and
before him the W. Bush administration. The so-called ‘social movement’ that
brings Trump into the White House is a movement of right-wing populism, which is
artificial and will last as long as it is useful to capitalist class interests.
The laws of capital investment do not permit social justice, human self-fulfillment, or economic equality; such words on the lips of capitalists mean: Shut-up! Listen! and
Obey! Our systemic political economy requires it . .
. .
On this special occasion, the day
after the US presidential election, we offer CEIMSA readers early insights into
what must necessarily follow, given the political-economic forces at play today
at home and abroad .
Please see :
"Michael Moore in TrumpLand":
Filmmaker on Donald Trump, White Men & the Sound of Dying Dinosaurs
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/4/michael_moore_in_trumpland_filmmaker_on
A Wake Up
Call For People in America
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17637
Real News panelists offer their final thoughts
on what will come next after election night
DONALD TRUMP WINS THE PRESIDENCY, DELIVERS GRACIOUS VICTORY SPEECH
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/donald-trump-wins-the-presidency-nbc-projects.html
The Urgency of Now - A
Message from Paul Jay
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17636
Paul Jay concludes our election night coverage
with a promise to our viewers to be a platform for movements trying to organize
The 7 additional items below
offer readers a pre-election background for what is coming toward all of us from
around the proverbial corner . . . .
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
‘We the People’
Against Tyranny: Seven Principles for Free Government
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45804.htm
by John W. Whitehead
“As
I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”—Former
presidential advisor Bertram Gross
===========
b.
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Subject: [MCM] Channeling Joe McCarthy, Hillary's returning to her
roots as a Goldwater Girl
Hillary Clinton’s Exploits in
McCarthyism
The
New Cold Warriors who surround Hillary Clinton have made Russia-bashing and
McCarthyism the go-to tactics
to
silence the few voices warning of the grave and unnecessary risks of a new Cold
War, notes James W Carden.
by
James W Carden
Now
that the 2016 election campaign is at long last over, an examination of the
reckless, fact-free, innuendo-laden McCarthyite
rhetoric which Hillary Clinton’s campaign surrogates deployed over the past
several months is in order.
The
first and most obvious point to be made is that the anti-Russia hysteria that
characterized the election, particularly in its final weeks, did not come out
of nowhere; in fact, it should be seen as part of a natural progression of the
elite media’s Russophobia which took root in and
around the Ukraine crisis of late 2013-early 2014 and led, almost ineffably,
not only to charges of Russian election-rigging in the United States but in the
identification, in the pages of Newsweek and
the Washington Post,
of Russian fifth-columns within the United States.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
How
the Ukraine crisis poisoned America political discourse is by now well known.
As I reported in The Nation almost 18 months ago, the cottage industry of
unscrupulous neo-McCarthyites which has grown up
around Washington, London and Manhattan in recent years has sought to stifle
debate by bandying charges of unpatriotic disloyalty against anyone questioning
the wisdom of U.S. policy toward Russia. (It bears noting that something
similar regarding Syria
policy is happening as I write, driven, for the most part, by
the usual suspects.)
As
one long time political scientist told me at the time, “The atmosphere here in
the U.S. created by the Ukraine crisis is poisonous – and I say this having
been an academic for 37 years.”
The
millennial careerists who help staff the ranks of the New Cold Warriors
instinctually reach for ad hominem attacks over reasoned argument – and in
so doing helped make way for the tactics the Clinton campaign unleashed in
2016.
By
the time the nominating conventions rolled around this summer, the Clinton
campaign was engaged in a Twenty-first Century witch hunt against any Trump
adviser who had so much as visited Russia. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page were both
hounded out of the campaign by Clinton-inspired media smears.
Clinton’s
campaign, which was run by Robby Mook, a 36-year-old hot
shot who clearly relished his role as a kind of millennial Roy
Cohn, repeatedly attacked former Ambassador to Germany and arms control
negotiator under Ronald Reagan, Richard Burt.
Burt
was singled out, not only by the Clinton camp, but by Salon and Newsweek,
because he had served as an adviser to Alfa Bank, the Russian bank which played
a starring role in former New Republic editor’s Franklin Foer’s
thoroughly debunked article on the Trump Organization’s (non-existent) “secret”
email server.
Yet
what is most interesting isn’t so much the smears –
phrases like “useful idiot” and “Kremlin stooge” which are mostly warmed-over
fare from the first Cold War – but the mindset of the New Cold Warriors. How is
it that these self-anointed crusaders for “humanitarian intervention” and
“democratization,” these self-appointed enemies of tyranny, end up on the
side of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, Al Qaeda and al-Nusra
affiliate in Syria, all the while stirring up sectarian and nationalist
pathologies across the Middle East and Eastern Europe?
Cold War Nostalgia
The
first thing to recognize is that our New Cold Warriors suffer from la nostalgie de la guerre froide.
The historian John Lukacs has written at length on
this pathology. In his destined to be classic The End of The Twentieth Century, Lukacs
cast a gimlet eye on what he saw as the tendency of academic and media types
during the first Cold War to practice “anti-Communism at a safe distance.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin answering
questions from Russian citizens at his annual Q&A event on April 14, 2016. (Russian government photo)
This
tendency, according to Lukacs, sprang from two
sources: first, from a “sense of self-satisfaction: knowing that one is on the
right side, on the respectable side together with all of those
right-thinking people.”
Lukacs,
himself no apologist for Communism, also observed that this tendency is driven
by “the exaggeration of the diabolical powers and machination of Communism and
the Communists.” Substitute “Communism and the Communists” for “Putin and the
Kremlin” and you have a perfect precis of New Cold
Warrior thinking.
No
better example of this tendency to talk a tough game against post-Communist
Russia by academics and journalists safe in the knowledge that they will never
be called upon to fight, was a conference convened by
Franklin Foer’s New Republic in Kiev in May 2014.
Some
background may be in order: The Ukrainian crisis – involving the violent ouster
of elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22,
2014 – escalated into a full-scale civil war in and around April 6 in the eastern
Ukrainian city of Donetsk. The Western-supported government in Kiev, depicting
the indigenous anti-coup movement for a Russian invasion, sent its military and
privately funded militias to crush the uprising in what was called an
“Anti-Terrorism Operation” or ATO.
To
some, it was a tragedy of the first order that Kiev chose war and missed an
opportunity to earn – via negotiation and compromise – much needed legitimacy
in the east for what was, after all, a junta government.
Yet
others, like Yale University historian Timothy Snyder and the New Republic’s
literary editor Leon Wieseltier, embraced the ouster
of Yanukovych and were positively exultant; so much
so that they wasted little time in making their way to Kiev, “rallying to
democracy’s side.”
The
conference, “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” featured several luminaries of the
liberal-interventionist left including Franklin Foer;
Iraq War apologist Paul Berman; National Endowment for Democracy President Carl
Gershman; a founding father of Poland’s Solidarity
movement, Adam Michnik; a historian of Eastern
Europe, Timothy Garton Ash; and the preening
cheerleader of NATO’s war on Libya, Bernard Henri Levy.
In
a note announcing the
conference, Wieseltier, sounding an awful lot like
Christopher Hitchens in the run-up to the Iraq War,
declared: “We cannot just sit back and watch Putin’s imperialism and
repression. There are times and places where one must stand up and be
counted.”
From
where did this impulse to “stand and up and be counted” arise? Well, Wieseltier’s remarks in Kiev are revealing and are worth
quoting at length. In his rhetoric we can hear a not-so-faint echo of Edward
Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy:
“I
watched the progress of Putin’s imperialism beyond his borders and fascism
within his borders, I ruefully remarked to Frank Foer
that the moment reminded me of what I used to call my Congress for Cultural
Freedom-envy — my somewhat facile but nonetheless sincere regret at having been
born too late to participate in the struggle of Western intellectuals, some of
whom became my teachers and my heroes, against the Stalinist assault on
democracy in Europe. And all of a sudden, pondering the Russian aggression in
Crimea, and the Russian campaign of destabilization in Ukraine, I realized that
I had exaggerated my belatedness. I was not born too late at all.”
That
explains rather a lot. Wieseltier – and in all
likelihood Levy and Foer – were suffering from a bad
case of history-envy and saw in the crisis in Ukraine a chance to assuage their
consciences and prove their worth on the world-historical stage. It is, it must
be admitted, an odd way to go about it, socializing in Kiev with a Facebook billionaire, your friends and neocon fellow travelers from the magazine all the while
homes, schools and hospitals in eastern Ukraine were being shelled to bits by
the very government you traveled so far to “demonstrate
solidarity” with.
Putin Hatred
If
Cold War nostalgia plays a role in shaping the weltanschauung of
the New Cold Warriors, so too does their uncritical embrace of anyone who
opposes Russian President Vladimir Putin. The New Cold Warriors are, in effect,
blinded by pseudo-solidarity for Putin’s “victims” like the crass performance
artists Pussy Riot and the wondrously corrupt former oligarch-turned-sainted
dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Screen
shot of the fatal fire in Odessa, Ukraine, on May 2, 2014, that killed scores
of ethnic Russians while Ukrainian nationalists cheered. (From RT video)
And
then, of course, there is the new Ukraine where the government, so
enthusiastically embraced by Franklin Foer’s New
Republic, has embarked on program of de-Communization which, since Ukraine and
Communism parted ways a quarter of a century ago, means, in practice, a program
of de-Russification, with all that entails,
including, a conscious erasure of the Soviet Union’s role in defeating the
Nazis and a whitewashing of Ukraine’s ugly history of anti-Semitism, including
the role of Stepan Bandera, the wartime leader of the
nationalist OUN which was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands
of Jews and Poles.
As
the magazine The Forward reported:
“The whitewashing, now a disturbingly widespread phenomenon, ramped up in
earnest after Ukraine’s 2013–2014 Maidan uprising and
the ensuing conflict with Russia. On January 1, 2014, 15,000
ultra-nationalists marched through Kiev carrying placards with
[Ukrainian nationalist Stepan] Bandera’s image and
chanting OUN slogans; today, marches honoring Bandera, the OUN and Ukrainian SS
units take place regularly across Ukraine.
“In
the spring of 2015, Ukraine’s parliament passed a highly controversial
law, mandating that Bandera and his groups be regarded as Ukrainian
patriots, and making denial of their heroism a criminal offense.”
In
a way, these developments were probably a long time in coming and have been
facilitated by the effective disenfranchisement of a large share of the
Russo-phone east. Consider the spike in nationalist sentiment in Eastern Europe
in the post-Cold War years.
We
return briefly to the historian Lukacs who observed
in 1993 “a growing nostalgia and appreciation of nationalist Eastern European
governments before and during the Second World War.” He observed that in the
years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, “schools and streets” in Slovakia
and Croatia were being renamed in honor of Nazi collaborators, while in Romania
“the murderous Iron Cross now enjoys a recurrent wave of nostalgic prestige.”
The
American media has willfully turned a blind eye to these similar and ominous
developments in Ukraine (to say nothing of the recent torchlight
parades in NATO-allied Estonia) because what
matters among the New Cold Warriors is to appear to be “taking a stand” against
the Russian bogeyman.
Ignoring Reality
And
then there is the inability or unwillingness of the New Cold Warriors to take realpolitik considerations into account when it comes to
Russia. This is odd, since they are as of one mind when it comes to far more
sinister regimes like Saudi Arabia, where people quite literally have their
heads chopped off in the middle of the street in broad daylight.
But,
they will say, the U.S. needs Saudi Arabia because a) they have oil and b) they
oppose the Iranians. As arch-neoconservative Bret Stephens recently said in an
exchange with Sen. Rand Paul on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” we are “lucky” to have
the Saudis as allies.
Leave
that nonsense aside for the moment: the point is that the facility to think in
terms of geo-strategy abandons the New Cold Warriors when it comes to Russia
and Vladimir Putin. And so, the fact that Russia does not threaten American
interests in our hemisphere; that it did more than most NATO allies to assist
in the fight in Afghanistan (via the Northern Distribution Network); that it
was a crucial player in the Iranian P5+1 negotiations (which the New Cold
Warriors probably hold against the Russians, since they are nearly all opposed
to the deal); and that it brokered the deal to dismantle Bashar
al-Assad’s chemical weapons program in Syria are all studiously ignored in
their analyses.
In
other words, panic and handwringing over the alleged “cyber war” aside, Putin’s
Russia does not threaten U.S. interests, properly defined. Indeed, Russia has,
whether we find its domestic politics and widespread government corruption
distasteful or not (and I do), proved to be an important partner when its core
interests coincide with ours – which is more often than not.
Interests
should drive policy not ephemeral, so-called “shared values” to which the New
Cold Warriors themselves only fitfully adhere.
Twenty-five
years ago, one U.S. president sketched out an alternative path to the one that
the U.S. has been pursuing since Bill Clinton took office. In a speech much
derided by those who practiced “anti-Communism at a safe distance,” President
George H.W. Bush traveled to Kiev on Aug. 1, 1991, to warn against succumbing
to the siren song of ethno-nationalism.
“Freedom,
democracy, and economic liberty,” said Bush, “No
terms have been abused more regularly, nor more
cynically than these. Throughout this century despots have masqueraded as
democrats, jailers have posed as liberators.” He continued in a vein almost
unthinkable by an American president today: “Americans will not support those
who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local
despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based
upon ethnic hatred.”
Bush
was prescient: the steady diet of Russophobia and
anti-Putin hysteria now underway (and de rigueur among the New Cold Warriors)
is fanning the flames of ethno-nationalist hatred within Europe. Does this
development enhance or detract from pan-European stability and U.S. national
security?
The
answer is clear. And yet the new crusaders persist, and worryingly, as of
Tuesday, may have a commander-in-chief who completely shares their views
waiting in the wings.
___________________
James
W Carden is a contributing writer for The Nation and
editor of The American Committee for East-West Accord’s eastwestaccord.com. He
previously served as an advisor on Russia to the Special Representative for
Global Inter-governmental Affairs at the US State Department.
===========
c.
From: Mark Crispin
Miller
Subject: Ask Ed Snowden.
How easily might someone hack an e-voting machine? How hard is
it to know it's even happened? Ask Ed Snowden....
===========
d.
From: Mark Crispin
Miller
Subject: "If it's a close
election, the cheaters are going to win" (MCM interviewed by MintPress News)
Could US Elections Be Stolen? Election Integrity Activists
Say Yes !
http://www.mintpressnews.com/us-elections-stolen-election-integrity-activists-say-yes/222112/
by Kit O'Connell
‘If
it’s a close election, the cheaters are going to win,’ says Mark Crispin
Miller, a professor of media studies who’s spent years
combing
through U.S. election results for evidence
of electronic voting machine fraud.
AUSTIN,
Texas — Election fraud is a dangerously real possibility in the United States,
but Donald Trump is wrong about how elections could be rigged under the current
system.
The
Republican nominee has warned his supporters that the election could be rigged
against him, and there have already been reports of Trump supporters with guns
at polling places intimidating voters.
However,
Mark Crispin Miller, a self-described “election integrity activist,” dismissed
Trump’s claims.
“It’s
basically impossible to vote ten times or fifteen times,” said the professor of
media studies at New York University who has spent more than a decade studying
election results.
“Under
current electronic voting systems, it’s no longer really possible … to get a
bunch of immigrants out there to stuff the ballot box. With a computerized
system, it’s extremely difficult for many people to vote even one time, much
less ten or fifteen.”
===========
e.
Another U.S. Massacre in Afghanistan
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45805.htm
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In
a war that has now gone on for 16 years, U.S. forces just killed at least 32
more civilians, many of whom were children. Another 25 people were wounded. Of
course, this is on top of all the wedding parties, hospitals, and other victims
of U.S. bombing attacks that have brought the death toll from U.S.
interventionism in Afghanistan to more than 200,000, not to mention the
wounded, maimed, homeless, and refugees. In the last seven days alone, 95
civilians have been killed in Afghanistan and 111 injured.
===========
f.
Trump and the Social Basis of Fascism
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17329
The
threat of fascism is real, but it shouldn't push the left to vote for Clinton
in states where she will clearly win, says historian Gerald Horne.
===========
g.
RAI With Former Weatherman Bill Ayers (1/3)
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17632
On
Reality Asserts Itself Bill Ayers joins Paul Jay to discuss his journey from an
apolitical life to the militant group the Weatherman to social activism and
organizing.
In
Part 2, Ayers tells Jay that the Weathermen were delusional about armed
struggle because they mistakenly thought the American people were in a
revolutionary crisis during the Vietnam War.