Anti-Russia Hysteria and Democrats’ Sour Grapes

Down With the Sanctions!

Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign had two major themes. The first asserted that voters were well on the road to recovery from the ravages of the 2008 recession, an assertion garnished with a sprig of patriotic parsley encapsulated in the slogan “America is great.” The second theme was to question whether a sexist, racist, egomaniacal admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin should be placed in charge of the nuclear launch button. The rather contradictory implication was that he might casually ignite an atomic Armageddon or fail to do so if the annihilation of Russia (and the rest of humanity) rose to the top of the imperialists’ agenda. In the event, a major chunk of the electorate thought the first theme was hogwash, and many were apparently unmoved by the efforts to revive the battle cries of the Cold War and McCarthy eras. In the final analysis, what won the day in the key swing states was the claim by the reactionary Trump that he, and he alone, could provide the personal elixir required to purge the country of the forces that have eroded the good jobs and prosperity that once were the supposed birthright of every white American male.

Since the election, the Democrats have pulled out all the stops in an effort to persuade the world that “we wuz robbed” by an attack of hackers operating under the command of Putin with the intent of undermining “American democracy” by electing his puppet Trump. Their proof: a gilt-edged report prepared by the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) that purportedly tracks the chain of command to the Kremlin. Widely accused of playing a role in tipping the election to Trump is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as well as FBI director James Comey. It is as yet unclear if the Pope played any role in this cabal.

These complaints of Russian interference in the presidential election are pretty rich coming from the U.S. rulers. Ever since American imperialism emerged onto the world stage during the 1898 Spanish American War, it has intervened around the world through outright invasion or “regime change.” In the early years of the 20th century, the U.S. routinely dispatched troops to countries across Latin America, including Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. After World War II, Washington was behind the coups that ousted Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy funded groups opposed to Putin during Russia’s 2012 elections, which reportedly has the Russian president still fuming.

The bourgeois media that is now howling about Russian hacking has long promoted the CIA as the pinnacle of veracity. Founded in 1947, at the onset of the Cold War, that agency has provided the lies to justify every one of U.S. imperialism’s unending stream of wars from Korea and Vietnam through Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Including 14 years ago when it provided the “proof” that Saddam Hussein had accrued an arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Instead of providing any actual evidence of Putin’s role in hacking the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman (which John McCain labeled “an act of war”), the intelligence chiefs engaged in some classic bait and switch, directing their main attention to RT, a Russian English-language news outlet that few Americans watch. RT’s coverage of Clinton, the report tells us, “was consistently negative and focused on her leaked emails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health and ties to Islamic extremism.” How was that different from Fox News? The report also has the temerity to complain: “RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt.” Americans hardly need RT to tell them about the depredations of the U.S. economic system, Washington and Wall Street.

Barack Obama, who has evidently been “trumped” by Putin in Syria, was quick to endorse the intelligence findings. At the same time, the president made clear that the full version of the exposé will not be available for popular consumption since it would reveal the ever-so-secret methods employed by U.S. operatives. The FBI managed for a while to maintain a skeptical attitude toward the findings of the CIA and NSA. It recently caved in to pressures to join the chorus, perhaps reflecting its director’s desire to maintain his security clearance. Trump voters are hardly alone in remaining decidedly unconvinced by the supposed revelations, in spite of the patriotic hue and cry.

In fact, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. The responsibility for this quite undemocratic result lies entirely with the U.S. Constitution and its Electoral College, an institution created by the “founding fathers” to give disproportionate power to the slaveowning states. To quote the memorable cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” For our part, as Marxists we are equally opposed to any candidates for public office of the bourgeois parties—Democrats, Republicans and Greens—while fighting against all attacks on the right to vote.

It is immaterial whether the alleged hackers were mobilized by Vladimir Putin or the tooth fairy, as in this instance no attack on voting rights occurred. The real undermining of voting rights in the U.S. starts with mass incarceration, especially of black people and Latinos, and the denial of their right to vote. It continues with the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013 and the subsequent barrage of voter ID laws and other anti-voting measures passed by mostly Republican-controlled statehouses.

Hacking foreign governments is the stock in trade of all spy agencies. The espionage operations of the U.S. imperialists are especially devoted to this pursuit, sparing no one, including loyal allies like German chancellor Angela Merkel. Domestically, especially since 9/11, the U.S. government has arrogated to itself the right to monitor everyone’s emails and other personal communications. At the same time, the “right” to proscribe all leaks and exposures has been a special obsession of the Obama presidency.

In the eyes of liberal pundits who portray skepticism of the recent intelligence report as apostasy, the real “crime against democracy” is that the information gathered by hacking was released to the public. No doubts have been raised about its accuracy or authenticity. The leaks merely revealed a portion of the wheelings, dealings and hypocrisy of Clinton and her campaign staff. As Julian Assange noted during a January 9 press conference: “If WikiLeaks had an effect it’s because people read the words of Hillary Clinton and her team and didn’t like what they saw.” Bourgeois democracy evidently demands that its subjects be kept ignorant of the machinations of their leaders.

Indeed, control of information by the capitalist class—through its control of the education system, the press and mass media—is vital to the normal workings of bourgeois democracy, a fig leaf for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Elections under bourgeois democracy allow the oppressed masses to “choose” who will subjugate them during the next few years. Ultimately, domination by the capitalist rulers is ensured through the armed might of the military, the police and the prisons, which together constitute the core of the capitalist state.

The hysteria the Democrats desire to provoke against the fictional war on democracy is simply to cover with jingoist bluster their failure to retain control of the White House, regain control of the Senate or end the ongoing losses of state legislative seats. This has had some impact on the gullible as many Democratic supporters were reportedly willing to believe that the ballot boxes had been hacked.

The diplomatic sanctions against Russia recently put in place by Obama are the cosmetic and fairly routine measures employed by states to signal their displeasure with each other. Not so those put in place almost three years ago to punish Putin for the actions he took in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Those sanctions have exacerbated Russian economic difficulties that were set off by the decline of world oil prices. All these sanctions are an expression of U.S. imperialism’s diktats and must be opposed.

The confrontation with Putin over Ukraine was touched off by the February 2014 fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev that was engineered by Washington with the assistance of the European Union. With the overwhelming support of the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea, historically part of Russia, Putin moved to reclaim the peninsula the following month, an action we supported. In the ethnically mixed but predominantly Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, militants fighting government and fascist attacks held a referendum that resulted in an overwhelming vote in favor of “self-rule.” We defended the right of the population of those areas to conduct the poll and act on the result of the vote. That position is an expression of our support for the democratic right of national self-determination, i.e., the right of peoples to amalgamate or to separate. At the same time, we give no political support to the Great Russian chauvinist rebel leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk, nor to Putin’s repressive capitalist regime.

The imperialist NATO alliance has expanded into East Europe, right up to Russia’s doorstep. U.S. imperialism has also sponsored color “revolutions” to install pro-Washington regimes in several former republics of the USSR. The largest contingent of U.S. tanks since the fall of the Soviet Union is just arriving in northern Germany, to be stationed in the Baltics and East Europe, backed up by troops from Britain, France and Germany. In the 2016 budget, Obama laid the groundwork for spending a trillion dollars to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a stance echoed by Trump.

The belligerence of the U.S. rulers toward Putin’s Russia is rooted in their determination to keep Russia out of the club of imperialist powers. Arising out of capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, post-Soviet Russia inherited a large nuclear arsenal in a country with enormous natural resources. Yet it remains essentially a regional capitalist power. Where imperialist countries are characterized by the export of capital, Russia mainly exports oil and other natural resources as well as armaments. The imperialists intervene militarily throughout the world in their drive to control markets, raw materials and cheap labor. Moscow’s main military campaigns, with the exception of Syria, have been within the borders of the former Soviet Union: above all, two brutal wars in Chechnya to prevent the oppressed Chechens from asserting their right to secede, a right that we support.

Trump is no less committed than the Cold Warriors and neocons—from Hillary Clinton to John McCain—to expanding, prosecuting and enforcing the dominance of U.S. imperialism. That is the real content of Trump’s promise to make America great again. Trump’s obsession is to conduct the orchestra; he cares little about the program as long as it promises to further American might. While his opponents fret about whether “fake news” stories influenced the electorate, Trump wants to throw flag burners in prison, the First Amendment be damned. Meanwhile, he appears intent on acquiring many more megatons of nuclear explosive capacity as he charges off to duel with those he perceives as America’s enemies.

The recent U.S. elections revealed the widespread contempt the citizenry has for the governmental administrators of the capitalist system. However, this is not a threat to that system absent a proletarian-centered social upheaval led by a revolutionary working-class party. The model for such a revolutionary transformation is the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. It is necessary to abandon all illusions in lesser-evil nostrums and commit to the building of a workers party that embraces the traditions and intent of the Bolsheviks to overthrow the imperialist order through international socialist revolution.