{"id":313685,"date":"2017-06-20T15:24:34","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T14:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=313685"},"modified":"2017-06-20T19:20:03","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T18:20:03","slug":"putin-u-s-routinely-meddles-russian-nations-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/putin-u-s-routinely-meddles-russian-nations-elections\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin: U.S. Routinely Meddles in Russian and Other Nations’ Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

In a Showtime interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American film-maker Oliver Stone, which started airing on June 12th, Putin called \u201clies\u201d<\/span><\/a> many of the allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies, to the effect that he or his government attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He also accused the U.S. government of having actually done not only that (influencing other countries\u2019 democratic process), but far more actual meddling in Russian elections, and in the elections in other former Soviet-and-allied countries, and even done it in recent times, and even done it to countries that had never been friendly toward Russia. The way he asserted this accusation was veiled, however, so that he didn\u2019t identify the specific governments he was referring to, other than to say: \u201cIn 2000, and in 2012, this always happened. But especially aggressively in 2012. I will not go into details.\u201d<\/span><\/a> (This article will supply some of those \u201cdetails,\u201d in what follows.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Putin described the current accusations against Russia, by the U.S. government, as a deceitful and fictitious tat, which ignores the very real and longstanding American tit, of CIA and other U.S., meddling in the electoral processes of foreign countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

The neoconservative American Jan Wenner\u2019s Rolling Stone<\/i> magazine headlined on June 16th about these Showtime interviews, \u201c10 Most WTF Things We Learned From Oliver Stone’s Putin Interviews\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and sub-headlined: \u201cFrom denying any involvement with U.S. election hacking to Putin’s love of Judo and Stalin, our takeaways from these truly baffling conversations\u201d. Wenner\u2019s reporter opened:<\/span><\/p>\n

What’s the Russian equivalent of Kool-Aid? Whatever it is, it’s definitely red \u2013 and Oliver Stone has eagerly drunk it down. The trailers for The Putin Interviews, Showtime’s four-part series documenting a series of conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Stone, would have you believe that you’re going to hear some pretty hard-hitting stuff as the autocrat and the filmmaker face off, Frost-Nixon style. What we got instead was a series of softballs lobbed lovingly in the direction of one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world. Except for a few moments, Stone seems serenely unconcerned with anything beyond flattering his subject \u2013 and engaging in some supremely one-sided exchanges about history and policy along the way.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The term \u201cred\u201d in this context refers, of course, to communism, and alleges that Russia is still a communist country. To allow that type of smear to appear in any \u2018news\u2019 vehicle, is to expose itself as being actually a propaganda-vehicle, unless the allegation is backed up by solid documentation, which Wenner\u2019s magazine didn\u2019t do \u2014 Wenner\u2019s magazine presented no documentation at all, for the inflammatory allegation. The magazine\u2019s presumption was that their readers will simply believe what Wenner\u2019s operation delivers, to be ipso-facto \u2018true\u2019. But any such reader would be welcoming his own deception by Wenner\u2019s propaganda-operation. Evidently, successful magazines can insult their own subscribers\u2019 intelligence, so long as it\u2019s done in \u2018the right way\u2019 \u2014 the subscribers won\u2019t despise the publisher for trying to deceive them about such important matters as what countries to invade, or whether to invade, or why to invade. The U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) can attract cannon-fodder for its operations, by means of such \u2018news\u2019 media to produce dupes for that MIC.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Mr. Wenner\u2019s propaganda-machine had ardently campaigned for the neoconservative Hillary Clinton against the moderately progressive Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Democratic Party primaries<\/span><\/a>; and, then, once she (and her friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz who ran the Democratic National Committee) managed to steal the nomination from her opponent<\/span><\/a>, Wenner\u2019s operation campaigned for Ms. Clinton against her Republican opponent Trump, who claimed<\/span><\/a> (falsely as it turns out, in lies exceeding Clinton\u2019s own) to be opposed to neoconservatives<\/span><\/a> (whom he has actually loaded<\/span><\/a> into his Administration<\/span><\/a>). Trump now relies upon neocons for his support<\/span><\/a>, but perhaps Wenner and Robert Kagan and other neoconservatives won\u2019t be satisfied until the U.S. government takes control over Russia \u2014 which cannot happen except upon all of our dead bodies (WW III) \u2014 which is precisely what Hillary Clinton was aiming for<\/span><\/a> (and maybe Trump is, too). That\u2019s how insane the U.S. aristocracy (and its PR organs such as Wenner\u2019s) now is \u2014 they\u2019re pushing the world toward nuclear armageddon.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, the American system had offered to its public a choice between two neoconservatives, one of whom hid his neoconservatism and won the election but still isn\u2019t sufficiently neoconservative to suit the neoconservatives (such as Wenner).<\/span><\/p>\n

What, then, about the substance of Putin\u2019s allegation here, that the U.S. government meddles in other nations\u2019 democratic processes?<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some prominent examples of that phenomenon:<\/span><\/p>\n

From the very moment when Barack Obama became the U.S. President on 20 January 2009, the U.S. government was aiming for a \u2018revolution\u2019 to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad<\/span><\/a>. Then, by no later than 2011, the operation was already under way in the U.S. State Department. Furthermore, also by no later than 2011, a parallel operation was under way to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Whereas in Syria it would be \u2018freedom fighters\u2019 who would be paid by the Sauds but armed and trained mainly by the U.S., and mainly organized and led by Al Qaeda; in Ukraine it would be \u2018Maidan demonstrators\u2019 who would be paid by the U.S., and mainly led and organized by leaders of Ukraine\u2019s existing two racist-facist, or ideologically nazi, political parties, Right Sektor, and the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine<\/span><\/a> (renamed by the CIA as \u201cSvoboda\u201d<\/span><\/a> or \u201cFreedom\u201d Party). <\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, on 28 June 2009, shortly after Obama became President, a coup by Honduras\u2019s twenty-four richest families overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, who had been trying to institute land reform so that serfdom could become replaced there by a real democracy, but all governments except the U.S. refused to recognize the coup-regime, until first Hillary Clinton and then her boss Barack Obama recognized it and financed it with U.S. taxpayer money so that the international pressure to restore the democratically elected President failed and the junta-regime became stabilized. The U.S. government supported the aristocratic families, and helped them rig an \u2018election\u2019 amongst only contenders whom that oligarchy and the U.S. oligarchy supported. Much manipulation of the Honduran \u2018news\u2019 media and deceit against the Honduran public were perpetrated by both the U.S. aristocracy and the Honduran aristocracy in order to silence of else kill anyone who would challenge it. Here\u2019s<\/span><\/a> the excellent 3-minute video summary of that; and here\u2019s<\/span><\/a> my article documenting it with 72 links to the sources on that matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

So: those are three examples of extremely severe \u201cmeddling\u201d \u2014 Syria, Ukraine, and Honduras \u2014 all three of which occurred during Obama\u2019s Presidency (and so we\u2019re not talking here about Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973 or Iraq in 2003 or anything other than the most recent U.S. President).\u00a0 <\/span>Each and every one of them is vastly more heinous than anything that Putin and Russia did, but Russia isn\u2019t imposing sanctions upon the U.S. Even if all of the U.S. regime\u2019s propaganda against Russia were true, the U.S. regime does vastly more damage to democracy, and to national sovereignty, around the world, than Russia does.<\/span><\/p>\n

On 14 June 2017, at 2:08 in the afternoon, the U.S. Senate passed, by a vote of 97 to 2 (only Rand Paul and Mike Lee voted against it)<\/span><\/a> an intensification of U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, sanctions that President Obama had first instituted when Russia accepted the petition supported by more than 96% of Crimeans, for Crimea to become again a part of Russia, from which the Soviet dictator Khrushchev had transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 without even consulting the residents there at all. Obama\u2019s brutal coup<\/span><\/a> overthrowing the Ukrainian President for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted is what had sparked Crimeans to seek to become, yet again \u2014 as they had been for hundreds of years until 1954 \u2014 Russians. For this \u2018conquest of land\u2019 as Obama called it, Russia was slapped with sanctions by Obama, and even now increasingly by the U.S. Congress. One of the four co-sponsors of that bill was the \u2018progressive\u2019 Democrat, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown<\/span><\/a>. Apparently, corruption (or else one would need to call it simply \u201cevil\u201d) is quite bi-partisan. And, given that the vote to increase sanctions was 97 to 2, that corruption (or evil) is almost universal in the U.S. Senate.<\/span><\/p>\n

This government of the United States became finally entrenched as a facsist regime on 24 February 1990, when the U.S. President, George Herbert Walker Bush, began telling America\u2019s allies, in secret, that, though the Cold War was now ending on the Soviet side, it would be continuing on the U.S. side, until Russia itself is finally conquered by the U.S.<\/span><\/a> What we\u2019re seeing now is an intensification of that aggression by the U.S. government.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org In a Showtime interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American film-maker Oliver Stone, which started airing on June 12th, Putin called \u201clies\u201d many of the allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies, to the effect that he or his government attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":313686,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[549,541,839,522,526,543,524,754,6257,523],"class_list":{"0":"post-313685","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"tag-honduras","9":"tag-media","10":"tag-news-media","11":"tag-obama","12":"tag-propaganda","13":"tag-putin","14":"tag-russia","15":"tag-syria","16":"tag-trump","17":"tag-ukraine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}