Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
America’s press cover the Trump campaign with barely concealed hostility toward it, and with an obsessive emphasis upon the candidate’s positions regarding Russia; they’re attacking Trump as being (wittingly or unwittingly) an agent of Russia — and portraying Russia as being America’s enemy.
It’s not only Republican newsmedia that are apparently agreeing with the Republican Mitt Romney’s famous statement made on 26 March 2012, about “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” (Romney, who was the star at the last Republican National Convention, hates Trump so much as to have refused even to attend this Republican National Convention.)
Thus, on Friday, 22 July 2016, right after the Thursday-night end of the Republican National Convention and Donald Trump’s acceptance speech there, the top of the homepage of Huffington Post was this:
Just click onto any of the headlines there, to see the stories they link to. Here is how the homepage-top actually looked (screen-shot, no links):
That “H.W. Speechwriter” is just an incompetent way of referring to a speechwriter for G.H.W. Bush — whose entire family hate Trump — and Huffington Post’s ‘journalist’ there hid that key fact, when reporting on that speechwriter’s comment about the speech: that the comment came from a friend of that inimical family, the Bushes, who hate Trump. In other words: this ‘news’ report, simply and uncritically, stenographically, transmitted that particular Bush-family propaganda, against Trump — and this was supposed to be ‘news’ ‘reporting’: people such as this ‘reporter’ get hired in America to write ‘news’ that gets positioned at the top of one of the nation’s major ‘news’ sites. The second headline-link there was from “Gary Kasparov”, but they also didn’t indicate that this person happened to be a famous Russian opponent of Russia’s current President, Vladimir Putin. The last two of the eight headlines linked-to in that homepage-topper, came from two writers who had been prominent editors at the Democratic Party’s neoconservative magazine, The New Republic, which had been one of the leading PR organs for every American invasion, especially for George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Hillary Clinton also supported.
None of this background-information was supplied to its readers by Huffington Post, whose readership presumably are unaware that they’re reading (especially atop the front page) political propaganda, instead of political news.
The same was true regarding print-media:
Paul Krugman, in The New York Times, at the same time as that HuffPo propaganda, bannered “Donald Trump: The Siberian Candidate”, and he linked there to (as his article’s sources) the rabidly anti-Putin articles that will here be discussed below. All of these articles were written by neoconservatives whose careers have been assisted by some of American’s biggest weapons-makers (the profits of which are now booming with ‘the new cold war’ that those writers had helped to create by their hate-Russia propaganda). Krugman — an economist famous for arguing that producing weapons (and all other industries for war) is just as economically productive as is producing food or art or anything else (or, in other words, that producing bombs is just as good as producing bridges or education) — is now also showing, by this article, that his political views are likewise exclusively neoconservative (i.e., slanted in favor of promoting America’s war-industries). And yet, many readers in America consider Krugman to be ‘liberal’ or even ‘progressive’; he is considered to be the opposite of a fascist, in America.
If America’s readers were well-informed, they’d know that this particular war, the war against Russia, had already become a hot one, to overthrow Russia-friendly leaders in Ukraine and Syria. It started being a hot war, by Obama against Russia, when the Russia-friendly Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was overthrown in 2011 under U.S. leadership, which was supported especially by the neoconservative Hillary Clinton (who famously exulted at Gaddafi’s assassination, “We came, we saw, he died. Ha, ha!!”). Earlier, under neoconservative President George W. Bush, the hot war against Russia had actually begun by invading in 2003 Russia’s then-ally Iraq, after a barrage of neoconservative propaganda in America’s press had been aimed against the ‘threat’ to the U.S. posed (allegedly) by ’Saddam’s WMD’. But, in 2002, Barack Obama condemned that invasion in advance (with a keen eye to his upcoming political career to win the Democratic Presidential nomination), just as, in 2012, Obama condemned his opponent Mitt Romney’s statement about “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe” (when Obama was secretly, like a double-agent — pretending to be friendly toward Russia, while actually planning war against Russia — already preparing for Romney’s ‘number one geopolitical foe’ to be his own second-term’s chief military and diplomatic target and national enemy). Obama was a gifted deceiver, much more gifted than Hillary. However, now that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, the intent to conquer Russia is considerably more overt. (After all, the U.S. government’s prior propaganda-operation has, by now, even bragged to the world its propaganda-success against Russia. And they had good reason to be proud: they had deceived the world, and especially deceived the American public, to fear Putin, when it is actually the U.S. itself that has been the aggressor between the two.)
The main one of Krugman’s sources was the lengthy article on July 21st by Franklin Foer at Slate, who had previously been the editor of The New Republic, that leading Democratic Party neoconservative propaganda-organ. TNR always favored (and hired only ‘journalists’ who favor) invading or overthrowing the leaders of any nation, but especially of nations that are friendly toward Russia. In 2002, it was Iraq; in 2011 it was Libya; in 2010 it was Syria; in 2014 it was Ukraine. None of these invasions and coups was part of any actual U.S. national-security interest, never any campaign against jihadists, anywhere; it was always directed instead solely against Russia (the neocons’ obsession), and against any national leader who was friendly toward Russia. Foer’s article about Trump was aptly titled “Putin’s Puppet”. The central idea in it is that to vote for Trump is to vote for American’s enemy.
Foer now, after TNR, is described in wikipedia as “former editor of The New Republic. Foer was a 2012 Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation.” That Foundation is funded by the Russia-hater George Soros. Bernard L. Schwartz himself had run Loral Corporation, a major arms-maker for the U.S. military. Soros and Schwartz are quite possibly the biggest donors to the Democratic Party — but only to its worst, most deceitful and pro-invasion, politicians (such as Obama and the Clintons). Soros, and his Open Society Institute, along with Bernard L. Schwartz, along with David Bradley the owner of The Atlantic and several other public-policy magazines, and Bradley’s sidekick James Fallows, are among the top donors to, and leaders of, the New America Foundation. This is why it’s now virtually impossible for anyone who isn’t a neoconservative to be able to win the Party’s Presidential nomination. (As for the Republican Party, that Party has long been famous for supporting American invasions, and especially for its hostility against Russia. So, virtually all of America’s aristocracy are united in supporting neoconservatism, so that, though only a small minority of the U.S. public are neoconservatives, that international-affairs ideology encompasses almost the entirety of successful American politicians at the congressional and Presidential — at the national — level.)
Another of Krugman’s sources was the July 21st article by Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, a neoconservative magazine that’s directed both at Republicans and at Democrats, and which pretends to be ideologically ‘nonpartisan’ because it publishes (only) articles ranging between, say, the neoconservative Republican John McCain on the ‘right’, to the neoconservative Democrat Hillary Clinton on the ‘left’. Goldberg’s diatribe against Trump was titled, “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin”. Yet again: the central message was that a vote for Trump is a vote for America’s enemy.
Another of Krugman’s sources was the 4 March 2014 article by the neoconservative Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic, titled “The Increasingly Awkward Conservative Crush on Putin”. (Of course, as a neoconservative himself, Chotiner couldn’t mention that numerous American plain conservatives were rabidly anti-Russian and wanted to see Putin overthrown, just as Chotiner and the many other neoconservatives do. Neoconservatives are just as conservative as are any other nationalists who favor their nation’s conquest and takeover of other nations. It’s just the most extreme end of conservatism — fascism — but it’s a supremely deceitful form, praising instead of condemning its opposite, “democracy.” Neoconservatism favors American dictatorship of the world: ‘spreading American democracy’. It’s what George Orwell called “Newspeak.”)
All of those articles were based on bogus allegations, especially about Ukraine — that’s the country whose government the neoconservative friend of Hillary Clinton and of Dick Cheney (Victoria Nuland) had organized to overthrow in a coup culminating in February 2014, but which coup she had started (by no later than 1 March 2013) to set up even before she had been officially sworn in (on 18 September 2013) to her new post in Obama’s second Administration. None of the articles that Krugman linked-to made any mention of Obama’s/Nuland’s coup in Ukraine, installing in that nation bordering on Russia, a rabidly anti-Russian regime, and thereby endangering Russia’s national security. Obama cites Putin’s response to that ‘Ukrainian revolution’ as constituting Obama’s excuse for, first, economic sanctions against Russia, and, then, NATO’s pouring troops and weapons onto and near Russia’s borders. Trump is being criticized in Democratic Party ‘news’ media because Trump hints that he rejects both the Democratic Party’s and the Republican Party’s neoconservatism. This anti-neoconservatism is the major reason why Trump receives very little support from other members of America’s aristocracy (i.e., from other billionaires and centi-millionaires).
The buildup toward war against Russia is remarkably similar to how the U.S. ‘news’ media stenographically ‘reported’ U.S. government lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’ and deceived the American public to invade Iraq in 2003. But the war against Russia can end only in America’s defeat, or else in a globe-destroying nuclear war, because Russia, like the U.S., is nuclear-armed to the teeth. So: if there is any insanity here, it’s from Hillary Clinton, not from Donald Trump — though the nation’s ‘news’ media portray Trump as being (by far) the more dangerous of the two (because he hasn’t, at least not yet, sold out to the rest of America’s aristocracy).
An actual invasion of Russia would be enormously worse than was America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. This reality — and American ‘news’media’s participation in causing it — is the reality that’s unpublishable in the United States. (One can’t even report, in the West, that America is building toward an invasion of Russia.) But it helps explain those ‘news’media’s ‘news’-reporting about Trump’s proposed foreign policies, and also the American press’s coverup of the reality: Hillary Clinton is determined to push Russia to the nuclear brink if not beyond, whereas Donald Trump opposes doing that. That basic difference between the two nominees cannot be honestly reported in the U.S.
That’s the central issue in America’s 2016 Presidential campaign. And the way it’s being dealt with by the press is the way one would expect it to be dealt with, in a dictatorship.
NOTE ABOUT NEOCONSERVATISM: The origin of neoconservatism was as a reaction by conservative Marxist Jewish intellectuals in the 1950s who were terrified by the fascist demagogue Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunts and so they switched from favoring leftist dictatorship to favoring instead rightist dictatorship: they switched to fascism. The American aristocracy then promoted them to ideological leadership, because, in the wake of World War II, the American public couldn’t even imagine that a Jew could be a fascist. These Jewish intellectuals, in other words, could effectively spread fascism yet never be thought of as being fascists. Consequently, by sponsoring fascist Jewish intellectuals in America, fascism could now be successfully promoted in America, under the “neoconservatism” brand. This was particularly helpful to the U.S. aristocracy for yet another reason: those Jewish intellectuals were now rationalizing their formerly having been communists, not by means of their having been influenced by Jews or Judaism, but by their having been influenced by Lenin and other Russians, as having reflected a ‘defect’ in Russian culture, not in Jewish culture; so, as the self-obsessed individuals that they were, they focused their hatred against Russia, which just happens to be also the country that America’s aristocracy have most been wanting to conquer. In fact, amongst America’s aristocracy, the Cold War never was about ideology, at all; it was (and still is) about their conquest of the entire world. In the post-communist era, their fascism has thus become laid bare.
But the “neoconservatives” are mere tools of the aristocracy; they are tools, not the users of tools. The users, the aristocrats, exploit those duped-and-dangerous intellectuals. It’s like taking advantage of a fool’s foolishness, or of a pit-bull’s obsession to kill. Taking advantage of an intellectual’s prejudices is as easy as taking advantage of anyone else’s prejudices: all it requires is hiring the ‘right’ ones, and not hiring the ‘wrong’ ones. The ultimate decisions are made by the people with the money, not by their mere agents — the hirees. The “neoconservatives” are hirees.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.