[Peace-discuss] FW: The media and the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories

[David Johnson]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/19/pers-f19.html 



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 <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/19/pers-f19.html> The media and
the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories

www.wsws.org

Nothing in the indictment comes close to supporting the wild claims from the
media being used to justify a campaign for war and domestic repression.


 


The media and the Mueller indictment: A conspiracy theory to end all
conspiracy theories


19 February 2018


The announcement Friday by the US Department of Justice that a federal grand
jury has returned criminal indictments against 13 Russian citizens and three
Russian companies, charging illegal activities in the 2016 US presidential
election, has become the occasion for a barrage of war propaganda in the
American corporate media.

Leading the charge is the New York Times, which published a front-page
"news" lead Sunday, authored by Peter Baker. The article was published
online Saturday evening under the headline, "Trump's Conspicuous Silence
Leaves a Struggle Against Russia Without a Leader." In the newspaper's print
edition, the "struggle" was upgraded to a "war . being fought on the
American side without a commander in chief."

The indictments, the Times argues, "underscored the broader conclusion by
the American government that Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the
United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda."
It noted that only a few days ago, the Trump administration "formally blamed
Russia for an expansive cyberattack last year called NotPetya and threatened
unspecified 'international consequences'."

Given that the US government has just issued a series of strategy documents
that, among other conclusions, suggest that a significant cyberattack on the
United States could justify retaliation with nuclear weapons, the
implications of the argument put forward on the front page of the Times are
chilling: What cyberattack could be more significant than an effort to
hijack the US presidential election? By the logic of the leading "newspaper
of record," the US government would be justified in responding militarily to
an alleged Russian election operation.

What is propounded in the media coverage is a conspiracy theory to end all
conspiracy theories. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and much of
the media are espousing paranoid views that were once associated with the
John Birch Society, which notoriously claimed that President Dwight
Eisenhower was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

This supposed conspiracy is described in breathless terms in media accounts:
"sophisticated," "massive," of "breathtaking" scope, one with "tentacles"
that "reached deeply into American political life." Even if one accepts the
facts of the indictment as alleged-and that is hardly a legitimate
assumption, given the capacity of the FBI and other intelligence agencies
for fabrication-nothing in the indictment comes close to supporting what is
being claimed by the Times and other media outlets.

The 37-page document details an alleged operation of individuals in Russia
to establish false identities on social media platforms and use them to
influence political discussion in the US during the election. Conspicuously
absent is any indication of direct Russian government involvement in the
operation, which was funded by a Russian multimillionaire. Nor is there any
claim that the Trump campaign collaborated with the activities of the
Russian operatives, or that these activities had any impact on the course of
the election.

Only two Russians actually traveled to the United States, visiting several
states for what is described in the indictment, with inadvertent humor, as
"intelligence-gathering" on the US political scene. The total resources for
the effort, under $15 million, could not pay for a serious campaign in a
single major US state, let alone influence a presidential election on which
billions of dollars were being expended by the Democrats and Republicans.

The claim that this half-baked operation played any significant role in the
outcome of the election is an absurdity. There were ample reasons for tens
of millions of Americans, particularly working people, to be hostile to the
campaign of Hillary Clinton, the favorite of Wall Street and the Pentagon.
She ran a campaign of complacency and entitlement promising nothing to those
suffering after eight years of supposed "economic recovery" under the Obama
administration. That a section of working people, in desperation, cast their
votes for Trump only testifies to the reactionary blind alley of the
corporate-controlled two-party system.

One fact in the indictment is of genuine significance: the operation began
in April 2014. This was well before Donald Trump was on anyone's campaign
radar screen except perhaps his own, and only a month after the right-wing
US-backed political coup in Ukraine, which mobilized fascist mobs in the
streets of Kyiv to drive an elected pro-Russian president out of office and
replace him with an American stooge.

The Ukraine operation was the culmination of a decades-long effort costing
an estimated $5 billion, according to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria
Nuland. In other words, the supposed Russian operation in the US election
was, if anything, a pinprick response to the devastating US attack on
Russian influence in Ukraine, a country with long historical and ethnic ties
to Russia, and with a large minority of its population speaking Russian at
home.

The primary purpose of the indictment was to provide the media with a flimsy
basis for headlines screaming about a massive operation by Russia to
undermine American democracy.

What is fueling this campaign? First, there is the effort to condition the
population for war with Russia.

The Times and the Democratic Party are acting as the media and political
spokesmen for a section of the US military-intelligence apparatus that
objects to any turning away from the ferociously anti-Russian axis of US
foreign policy established during the second term of the Obama
administration.

The US military-intelligence apparatus is escalating its anti-Russian
military provocations, most recently with an airstrike against Russian
forces in Syria, apparently the most significant loss of life in a US-Russia
conflict in history. The very fact that the Putin regime has downplayed the
incident is an indication of its fears that this could become the spark for
a much wider conflagration.

Second, there is the effort to present all social opposition within the
United States as the product of Russian operations. The ruling class is
terrified of the mounting social tensions within the United States. It is
this fear that is motivating the extremely rapid moves to censor the
Internet and suppress free speech.

The same issue of the Times that claims Russia is at war with the United
States carried an attack on Facebook, headlined, "
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/technology/indictment-russian-tech-faceb
ook.html?rref=collection%2Fissuecollection%2Ftodays-new-york-times> To Stir
Discord in 2016, Russians Turned Most Often to Facebook." According to the
Times, Russia used the most widely used social media platform to foment
political and social discontent in the United States. The implication:
Facebook must implement even more aggressive censorship methods.

It would be fatally wrong to underestimate the right-wing character of the
political conceptions being propounded by the Times and Democrats through
the anti-Russian campaign. In the 20th century, only dictatorial regimes
were able to get away with lying on the scale now being carried out by the
advocates of the anti-Russia narrative. But Hitler's "big lie" and Stalin's
doctoring of history are the political forerunners of the campaign being
waged by the intelligence agents who work in the guise of "editors" and
"journalists" at the Times.

Patrick Martin

 

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