Today’s Independent has former Labour Minister of State for Europe, Chris Bryant, telling Parliament that:
There is now clear evidence of Russian direct, corrupt involvement in elections in France, in Germany, in the United States of America and, I would argue also, in this country.
Clear evidence, huh? Must be right if honest Chris – pro Iraq invasion, twice mortgage flipper, £92k in ‘expenses’ – says so. It would be churlish to ask why he and a swarm of likeminded politicariat on both sides of the Atlantic offer not one shredlet of the stuff.
I mean, who needs evidence, with a country so deviously aggressive as to deliberately surround itself with NATO countries bristling with nukes? The way some folk keep demanding substantive proof, and forever harping on about hundreds of billions in arms sector profits, you’d think Joe McCarthy back in town.
Post truth politics and fake news from Parliament. Who would have thought it eh?
Is that sort of evidence free approach, courtesy of Karl Rove, still covered under Parliamentary Privilege or is lying through your teeth to the citizenry no longer considered out of bounds in in what passes for a Parliament these days?
The reality based community seems to be getting smaller by the day. It surely cannot be too long before we find ourselves living under the tutelage of the equivilant of the Wise Men of Gotham.
We live in an age where claims, constantly asserted, acquire by mere repetition the status of facts. We saw it big time in Syria, we’ve long seen it in respect of Putin, and the depressing thing is, it works.
Also depressing, but predictable, is Trump’s seeming inability to stand by his declared intent to work with Putin in the face of an American ruling class bent on stepping up its supremacism regardless of the cost. See Eric Zeuss today in OffGuardian
Character assassination,demonising of the of the potential target as prelude to war, are stock-in-trade of war-mongers as we witnessed in the case of Iraq,Libya,Syria and increasingly in a formative stage, in the case of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.
The sad fact is there is invariably a grain of truth in the basic war-mongering narrative, as in the case of use of nerve gas by Saddam on the hapless Kurdish minorities in that country.
Yes to all this Satch. As you say, there’s invariably a grain of truth in the war mongering narrative: that’s how propaganda works; it rarely invents things completely – though I think it came close with Bashir al-Assad, for instance on chemical weapons charges which have ‘stuck’ long after the UN’s chemical weapons team concluded it wasn’t Damascus. More usually it’s as you say: take a grain of truth, amplify and distort, disregard all positive aspects of the demonised leaders/nations. This was done to Saddam and Gaddafi, ignoring not only the fact the west used and armed these men for years, but also that for all their authoritarianism, these leaders fed their people and delivered high levels of welfare and literacy. Funny, innit, how those things don’t seem to be deemed human rights?
Back to Putin, Lavrov et al. I don’t know the real degree to which these men are corrupt and tyrannical. I suspect not much if at all but that’s beside the point and has nothing to do with NATO’s constant provocations and encirclement. But we get distracted by irrelevance, rarely think things through. In forming opinions on whether, say, Putin threatens Western Europe, we semi consciously factor this extraneous stuff about Putin ‘rigging elections’ .. ‘having his hands in the Russian cookie jar’ .. ‘murdering Litvinenko and Politkovskaya’ – stuff which, even if true, should form no part of calculations on whether a nation is a threat. By such means do “our” leaders keep us on a war footing.