American Chauvinism and Hypocrisy Runs Amok:

 “Liberals” Declare Russian Interference in Elections “An Act of War”!

February 24, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On February 16, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian individuals and three organizations for using social media “to interfere with the U.S. political system, including the 2016 presidential election.”

The same night, Jerry Nadler, an influential Democratic congressman, appeared on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes. Nadler declared “This is a very serious attack on the United States by a hostile foreign power. ... We know that the attack is continuing.”

Referring to Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that Russia was responsible for the social media campaign targeted by the indictments, Nadler compared this to the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor—the event that triggered the U.S. entry into World War 2—“Imagine if FDR [President Franklin Roosevelt] had denied that the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor and didn’t react, that’s the equivalent.”

When Chris Hayes pointed out that Nadler was equating a social media campaign with a full-scale military attack, Nadler acknowledged that Russia isn’t accused of killing Americans, but stuck to his comparison, arguing that “This country exists to have a democratic system with a small ‘d’ ... and this is an attempt to destroy that.”

And this was not just Nadler. Former Clinton aide Phillippe Reines made the same point on All In, as did Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post. Pundit David Frum (who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil” for George W. Bush) wrote a piece in The Atlantic titled America Is Under Attack and the President Doesn’t Care, in which he compared this to events leading to the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. Others have compared it to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Chuck Todd of Meet the Press tweeted that if you aren’t focused on the question of “how are we going to punish Russia” you need to “rethink your priorities as a citizen.”

On one level, this is just stunning hypocrisy, a mind-numbing example of the GTF (“The Great Tautological Fallacy”) that Bob Avakian calls out in his talk, “THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America, A Better World IS Possible.” As a leading scholar of U.S. intelligence operations, Loch Johnson said in the New York Times, “We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947. ... We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers ... [and distributed] suitcases of cash" to influence elections.

In fact, the U.S. has done way more, and way worse—helping to organize coups that overthrew elected leaders and installed brutal military or fascist dictatorships in Iran, in Guatemala, in Chile and in Indonesia—and as many as a million people were killed in the wake of these coups. The Times article also cites a study by Carnegie Mellon scholar Dov H. Levin who found that the U.S. engaged in covert interference in other countries’ elections 81 times between 1946 and 2000.

Referring to this whole history, Steven Hall, 30-year C.I.A. veteran and former chief of its Russian operations, told the Times that the U.S. “absolutely” does this “and I hope we keep doing it.” [Emphasis added.]

Yes, it certainly is outrageous that Russia is interfering with elections!

But there is a level of genuine anxiety and indignation involved, because, as Nadler said, this is “an attempt to destroy” U.S. democracy. The concern here is that in the U.S., “free and fair” elections are the alpha and the omega of “democracy.” These elections are the thing that give this system legitimacy. It is what allows the rulers to say—in spite of the mountain of evidence to the contrary—that important decisions reflect “the will of the people,” and not the overwhelming power of the imperialist ruling class, with their control of mass media, the economy, of the educational system, and with their massive government and major political parties representing their interests, each with a huge apparatus of people and organization—all of which has evolved over centuries of practice to package and sell whatever the dominant forces in the ruling class wants to do at any moment as “the will of the people,” which people then dutifully “endorse” in the elections.

Russia reportedly spent 46 thousand dollars on Facebook ads, a drop in the ocean of the 81 million dollars spent by Trump and Clinton. But representatives of this system fear that this “outside interference” has tarnished the aura and sanctity of U.S. elections. It is like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes—once that one little boy pointed out the emperor was naked, everyone could see it, and the rulers fear that the same thing could happen with their myth of electoral democracy, laying bare their actual dictatorship for all to see.

All of this bears out what BA says in BAsics 1:3:

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.

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