En este blog hemos
posteado varias notas de Diana Johnstone (foto), una progresista sin taras políticamente
correctas ni pelos en la lengua a la hora de señalar las idioteces de la
izquierda. La nota que sigue, publicada en Counterpunch, aborda el tema de las
bandas de llorones y malos perdedores que llenan calles y campuses pidiendo la
cabeza del presidente electo, Donald Trump. (Dicho sea de paso, a esta altura
casi nos cae simpático el Donaldo, mirá lo que te digo). Pasemos a la nota:
Título: Unable to
face reality: Hillary's sore losers
Texto: If the
2016 presidential campaign was a national disgrace, the reaction of the losers
is an even more disgraceful spectacle. It seems that the political machine
backing Hillary Clinton can't stand losing an election.
And why is that?
Because they are
determined to impose "exceptional" America's hegemony on the entire
world, using military-backed regime changes, and Donald Trump seems poised to
spoil their plans. The entire Western establishment, roughly composed of
neoconservative ideologues, liberal interventionists, financial powers, NATO,
mainstream media and politicians in both the United States and Western Europe,
committed to remaking the Middle East to suit Israel and Saudi Arabia and to
shattering impertinent Russia, have been thrown into an hysterical panic at the
prospect of their joint globalization project being sabotaged by in ignorant
intruder.
Donald Trump's
expressed desire to improve relations with Russia throws a monkey wrench into
the plans endorsed by Hillary Clinton to "make Russia pay" for its
bad attitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. If he should do what he has
promised, this could be a serious blow to the aggressive NATO buildup on
Russia's European borders, not to mention serious losses to the U.S. arms
industry planning to sell billions of dollars worth of superfluous weapons to
NATO allies on the pretext of the "Russian threat".
The war party's
fears may be exaggerated, inasmuch as Trump's appointments indicate that the
United States' claim to be the "exceptional", indispensable nation
will probably survive the changes in top personnel. But the emphasis may be
different. And those accustomed to absolute rule cannot tolerate the challenge.
Bad Losers On the
Top
Members of the
U.S. Congress, the mainstream media, the CIA and even President Obama have made
fools of themselves and the nation by claiming that the Clintonite cabal lost
because of Vladimir Putin. Insofar as the rest of the world takes this whining
seriously, it should further increase Putin's already considerable prestige. If
true, the notion that Moscovite hacking could defeat the favorite candidate of
the entire U.S. power establishment can only mean that the United States'
political structure is so fragile that a few disclosed emails can cause its
collapse. A government notorious for snooping into everybody's private
communication, as well as for overthrowing one government after another by less
subtle means, and whose agents boasted of scaring the Russians into re-elected
the abysmally unpopular Boris Yeltsin in 1996, now seems to be crying
pathetically, "Mommy, Vlady is playing with my hacking toys!"
Of course,
Russians would quite naturally prefer a U.S. president who openly shies away
from the possibility of starting a nuclear war with Russia. That doesn't make
Russia "an enemy", it is just a sign of good sense. Nor does it mean
that Putin is so naïve as to imagine that Moscow could throw the election by a
few dirty tricks. The current Russian leaders, unlike their Washington
counterparts, tend to take a longer view, rather than imagining that the course
of history can be changed by a banana peel.
This whole
miserable spectacle is nothing but a continuation of the Russophobia exploited
by Hillary Clinton to distract from her own multiple scandals. As the worst
loser in American electoral history, she must blame Russia, rather than
recognize that there were multiple reasons to vote against her.
The propaganda
machine has found a response to unwelcome news: it must be fake. The Washington
conspiracy theorists are outdoing themselves this time. The Russian geeks
supposedly knew that by revealing a few Democratic National Committee internal
messages, they could ensure the election of Donald Trump. What tremendous
prescience!
Obama promises
retaliation against Russia for treating the United States the way the United
States treats, well, Honduras (and even Russia itself until blocked by Putin).
Putin retorted that so far as he knew, the United States was not a banana
republic, but a great power able to protect its elections. Washington is loudly
denying that. The same mainstream media who brought you Saddam's "weapons
of mass destruction" are now bringing you this preposterous conspiracy
theory with straight faces.
When intelligence
agencies become aware of the activities of rival intelligence agencies, they
usually keep the knowledge to themselves, as part of the mutual spook game. Going
public with this wild tale shows that the whole point is to persuade the
American public that Trump's election is illegitimate, in the hope of defeating
him in the electoral college or, if that fails, of crippling his presidency by
labeling him a "Putin stooge".
Bad Losers On the
Bottom
At least the bad
losers on the top know what they are doing and have a purpose. The bad losers
on the bottom are expressing emotions without clear objectives. It is false
self-dramatization to call for "Resistance" as if the country had
been invaded by extraterrestrials. The U.S. electoral system is outmoded and
bizarre, but Trump played the game by the rules. He campaigned to win swing
States, not a popular majority, and that's what he got.
The problem isn't
Trump but a political system which reduces the people's choice to two hated
candidates, backed by big bucks.
Whatever they
think or feel, the largely youthful anti-Trump protesters in the streets create
an image of hedonistic consumer society's spoiled brats who throw tantrums when
they don't get what they want. Of course, some are genuinely concerned about
friends who are illegal immigrants and fear deportation. It is quite possible
to organize in their defense. The protesters may be mostly disappointed Bernie
Sanders supporters, but whether they like it or not, their protests amount to a
continuation of the dominant themes in Hillary Clinton's negative campaign. She
ran on fear. In the absence of any economic program to respond to the needs of
millions of voters who showed their preference for Sanders, and of those who
turned to Trump simply because of his vague promise to create jobs, her
campaign exaggerated the portent of Trump's most politically incorrect
statements, creating the illusion that Trump was a violent racist whose only
program was to arouse hatred. Still worse, Hillary stigmatized millions of
voters as "a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic,
xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it." These remarks were made to an
LGBT rally, as part of her identity politics campaign to win over a clientele
of minorities by stigmatizing the dwindling white majority. The identity
politics premise is that ethnic and sexual minorities are oppressed and thus
morally superior to the white majority, which is the implied oppressor. It is
this tendency to sort people into morally distinct categories that divides
Americans against each other, every bit as much - or more - than Trump's
hyperbole about Mexican or Islamic immigrants. It has served to convince many
devotees of political correctness to regard white working class Americans in
the "fly-over" regions as enemy invaders who threaten to send them
all to concentration camps.
Terrified of what
Trump may do, his opponents tend to ignore what the lame ducks are actually
doing. The last gasp Clintonite campaign to blame Hillary's defeat on
"fake news", supposedly inspired by The Enemy, Russia, is a facet of
the growing drive to censor the Internet - previously for child pornography, or
for anti-Semitism, and next on the pretext of combating "fake news",
meaning whatever goes contrary to the official line. This threat to freedom of
expression is more sinister than eleven-year-old locker-room macho boasts by
Trump.
There will and
should be strong political opposition to whatever reactionary domestic policies
are adopted by the Trump administration. But such opposition should define the
issues and work for specific goals, instead of expressing a global rejection
that is non-functional.
The hysterical
anti-Trump reaction is unable to grasp the implications of the campaign to
blame Hillary's defeat on Putin. Do the kids in the street really want war with
Russia? I doubt it. But they do not perceive that for all its glaring faults,
the Trump presidency provides an opportunity to avoid war with Russia. This is
a window of opportunity than will be slammed shut if the Clintonite
establishment and the War Party get their way. Whether they realize it or not,
the street protesters are helping that establishment delegitimatize Trump and
sabotage the one positive element in his program: peace with Russia.
Adjustments in
the Enemy List
By its fatally
flawed choices in the Middle East and in Ukraine, the United States foreign
policy establishment has driven itself into a collision course with Russia.
Unable to admit that the United States backed the wrong horse in Syria, the War
Party sees no choice but to demonize and "punish" Russia, with the
risk of dipping into the Pentagon's vast arsenal of argument-winning nuclear
weapons. Anti-Russian propaganda has reached extremes exceeding those of the
Cold War. What can put an end to this madness? What can serve to create normal
attitudes and relations concerning that proud nation which aspires primarily
simply to be respected and to promote old-fashioned international law based on
national sovereignty? How can the United States make peace with Russia?
It is clear that
in capitalist, chauvinist America there is no prospect of shifting to a peace
policy by putting David Swanson in charge of U.S. foreign relations, however
desirable that might be.
Realistically,
the only way that capitalist America can make peace with Russia is through
capitalist business. And that is what Trump proposes to do.
A bit of realism
helps when dealing with reality. The choice of Exxon CEO Rex W. Tillerson as
Secretary of State is the best step toward ending the current race toward war
with Russia. "Make money not war" is the pragmatic American slogan
for peace at this stage.
But the
"resistance" to Trump is not likely to show support for this
pragmatic peace policy. It is already encountering opposition in the war-loving
Congress. Instead, by shouting "Trump is not my President!" the
disoriented leftists are inadvertently strengthening that opposition, which is
worse than Trump.
Avoiding war with
Russia will not transform Washington into a haven of sweetness and light. Trump
is an aggressive personality, and the opportunistic aggressive personalities of
the establishment, notably his pro-Israel friends, will help him turn U.S.
aggression in other directions. Trump's attachment to Israel is nothing new,
but appears to be particularly uncompromising. In that context, Trump's
extremely harsh words for Iran are ominous, and one must hope that his stated
rejection of "regime change" war applies in that case as well as
others. Trump's anti-China rhetoric also sounds bad, but in the long run there
is little he or the United States can do to prevent China from becoming once
again the "indispensable nation" it used to be during most of its
long history. Tougher trade deals will not lead to the Apocalypse.
The Failure of
the Intellectual Establishment
The sad image
today of Americans as bad losers, unable to face reality, must be attributed in
part to the ethical failure of the so-called 1968 generation of intellectuals.
In a democratic society, the first duty of men and women with the time,
inclination and capacity to study reality seriously is to share their knowledge
and understanding with people who lack those privileges. The generation of
academics whose political consciousness was temporarily raised by the tragedy
of the Vietnam war should have realized that their duty was to use their
position to educate the American people, notably about the world that
Washington proposed to redesign and its history. However, the new phase of
hedonistic capitalism offered the greatest opportunities for intellectuals in
manipulating the masses rather than educating them. The consumer society
marketing even invented a new phase of identity politics, with the youth
market, the gay market, and so on. In the universities, a critical mass of
"progressive" academics retreated into the abstract world of
post-modernism, and have ended up focusing the attention of youth on how to
react to other people's sex lives or "gender identification". Such
esoteric stuff feeds the publish or perish syndrome and prevents academics in
the humanities from having to teach anything that might be deemed critical of
U.S. military spending or its failing efforts to assert its eternal domination
of the globalized world. The worst controversy coming out of academia concerns
who should use which toilet.
If the
intellectual snobs on the coasts can sneer with such self-satisfaction at the
poor "deplorables" in flyover land, it is because they themselves
have ignored their primary social duty of seeking truth and sharing it.
Scolding people for their "wrong" attitudes while setting the social
example of unrestrained personal promotion can only produce the anti-elite
reaction called "populism". Trump is the revenge of people who feel
manipulated, forgotten and despised. However flawed, he is the only choice they
had to express their revolt in a rotten election. The United States is deeply
divided ideologically, as well as economically. The United States is
threatened, not by Russia, but by its own internal divisions and the inability
of Americans not only to understand the world, but even to understand each
other.
