by
Barry Grey
The
report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, exonerating Trump of
collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice, is a political
debacle for the Democratic Party and the corporate media. Day after
day, the bulk of the establishment press, led by the New York
Times, pumped out unsubstantiated claims and outright lies
accusing Russia of subverting the 2016 election and branding Trump as
an agent of Putin.
Mueller's
report, after a sprawling investigation lasting nearly two years, has
exposed the entire anti-Russia narrative as a hoax, perpetrated on
the American people in pursuit of reactionary political ends.
Journalist Matt Taibbi published an article on Saturday headlined
“It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD,” in
which he wrote: “The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation
of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it… As a purely
journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to
Russiagate.”
Those
responsible—from the editorial offices of the major media outlets
to the decision-makers in the Democratic Party—knowingly lied,
while serving as conduits for factions of the CIA, the NSA and the
FBI, whose opposition to the fascistic Trump was of a thoroughly
right-wing character. They opposed Trump and sought either to remove
him or politically cripple him on the grounds that he was
insufficiently belligerent toward Russia and too reluctant to
escalate military action in Syria and elsewhere.
The
anti-Russia campaign revived the witch-hunting methods of the
McCarthyite red scare. Its aim was threefold: first, to create an
atmosphere of hysteria to justify preparations for war against
nuclear-armed Russia; second, to channel the mass popular opposition
to Trump in a right-wing, pro-war direction; and, third, to create a
pretext for internet censorship and other attacks on democratic
rights.
It
was part of a broader, international anti-Russia witch hunt,
including the fabricated allegation that Putin was behind the
poisoning of Russian expatriate Sergei Skripal and his daughter in
England.
The cast
of characters instrumental in perpetrating this fraud includes Adam
Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee; his
counterpart in the Senate, the billionaire tech mogul Mark Warner;
the "liberal" MSNBC pundit Rachael Maddow; late-night TV
hosts such as Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers; and James Bennet,
editorial page editor of the Times, whose father, Douglas
Bennet, ran the CIA-backed US Agency for International Development
under President Carter.
The
director of national intelligence under Obama, James Clapper, who
lied to Congress about NSA domestic spying, and Obama's CIA director,
John Brennan, who defended CIA torture programs and lied to Congress
about CIA hacking of Senate Intelligence Committee computers, have
been omnipresent on the airwaves denouncing Trump as a Russian
stooge.
These
people were engaged in a massive political conspiracy. The
Democrats made a decision from the outset—beginning with the
election campaign of the favored candidate of Wall Street and the
CIA, Hillary Clinton—that they would not oppose Trump on his
anti-working-class social policy or his authoritarian hostility to
democratic rights and promotion of anti-immigrant racism, but on
issues of imperialist foreign policy.
An
indication of the priorities of the establishment media is given in a
survey by the Tyndall Report on stories covered by the broadcast
network evening news programs in 2018. Between ABC, CBS and NBC,
the “Russian election meddling probe” was reported nearly twice
as many times as Trump’s detention (and abuse) of migrant children,
and nearly three times as often as fatal police shootings in the US.
Taken
together, Russiagate at number two and the top reported story, the
#MeToo Justice Kavanaugh confirmation battle, were reported four
times more frequently than the Gestapo-like treatment of immigrant
children.
The
mechanism by which the mainstream media promoted Russiagate was to
publish “news” articles composed of assertions by national
security officials and experts, unusually anonymous, without any
factual substantiation of their claims. The same intelligence
agencies that dragged the American people into the illegal invasion
of Iraq, which cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and
thousands of American ones, on the basis of the Big Lie of Iraqi
“weapons of mass destruction,” were presented as unassailable
sources of truth.
The
Democratic Party based its opposition to Trump on this right-wing
campaign, while at the same time collaborating with the White House
in passing near-record military budgets and opposing any popular
mobilization against tax cuts for the rich or the persecution and
mass imprisonment of immigrants. It combined anti-Russia hysteria
with the #MeToo witch hunt, aimed at promoting racial and gender
politics to divide the working class, undermine core democratic
principles such as the presumption of innocence and due process, and
consolidate support for imperialist war within privileged layers of
the upper-middle class.
The
Mueller report has left the Democratic Party in shambles. Its effort
to either remove Trump or force him to adopt a more belligerent
policy toward Russia have resulted only in strengthening the Trump
administration and the Republicans. The Democrats’ response,
signaled by an editorial in Monday's New York Times that
recycles all the lies about Russian “meddling” and “sowing
discord,” will be to double down on its anti-Russia campaign and
lurch even further to the right.
The
World Socialist Web Site has from the outset opposed and
exposed the Russiagate fraud. It has explained repeatedly the
necessity for the working class to reject both big business parties
and their politics of "palace coup" and conduct a struggle
against Trump on the basis of an independent revolutionary
mobilization against capitalism.
In
the name of fighting Russian-inspired “fake news” and upholding
“authoritative media” against those that oppose the policies of
the government, the American state has enlisted the internet and tech
giants to marginalize and censor left-wing publications, first and
foremost the WSWS. This has gone hand in hand with the ongoing
persecution of Julian Assange and, just this month, the
re-imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, the spearhead of a frontal attack
on free speech.
The
outcome of the Democrats’ debacle, however, has demonstrated that
it was precisely the “authoritative” media that has been lying
through its teeth, while the WSWS’s exposure of the reactionary
character of every faction of the ruling class has been confirmed.
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment