You’ve Been Lied To About Russia

In the last two years, the mass hysteria surrounding Russia has shown the full power of the establishment’s propaganda machine. By making every news station tell people the same idea, and by attaching the idea to partisan emotions, the American deep state has convinced millions of people to believe a wildly distorted picture of Russia’s relationship with the U.S.

Evidence of a lie

The new Red Scare, as Andrew Cockburn of Harper's magazine diagnosed it in 2016, started with the West’s misleading portrayal of the events in Ukraine. I admit that Russia’s 2014 Crimea annexation violated Ukraine’s laws, and was a colonialist injustice against the region’s native Tatar people. But its having been in response to the Ukrainian people’s overwhelming support for Russia to take power makes the situation more nuanced; the argument that Putin will undemocratically try to annex additional countries if the West doesn’t intervene is unsubstantiated. And as I’ll show, the Western imperialists have had good reason to propagate such false fears.

This was followed by lies that powerfully appeal to American patriotism: that Russia stole the 2016 election, and that it’s therefore destroying our democracy. Aside from how this narrative is a visible attempt to make us ignore the clear absence of a functioning American democracy, the arguments for Russia’s impact on the election have all been thoroughly debunked.

Amid abundant evidence that Russia was not behind the 2016 DNC leak, Veteran Intelligence Professionals  for Sanity has found that a hack may not even have taken place, as evidenced by their digital tests showing that the DNC’s servers at the time quite possibly couldn’t have accomodated a remote hacking operation. The charges that Russia hacked into state election systems fell apart last September when officials from the states clarified that no infiltration had happened. The Facebook ads that Russia supposedly bought were only found to have been bought by unknown people in Russia, making the involvement of the Russian government unproven. As far as the evidence can tell us, the thirteen Russians Mueller indicted in February were not working to swing the election or “sow discord,” nor were they actually working for the Russian government. And on the list goes of Russiagate stories that have been either dubious or disproven.

Evidence of an effort to promote the lie

There are too many falsehoods about Russia for me to address them all here individually. It’s this endless piling up of Russia “bombshells,” in fact, that’s made the lies believable in so many people’s minds. Instead I’ll detail the extremely suspicious events that have been going on within the government and media centers which promote the demonization of Russia. These events give us very good reason to think that these centers are engaging in a deliberate and politically motivated campaign to distort public perceptions about Russia.

Since the Cold War, the U.S. has done all it can to keep Russia submissive, because for Russia to gain similar world status would be a threat to American hegemony. Throughout the last twenty-five years, the U.S. and its allies have broken NATO’s past promises by expanding NATO, while the U.S. has repeatedly interfered in Russia’s elections. Russia didn’t try to reassert its strength until Putin expressed this goal in a 2007 speech, which he followed up with a strong stand from Russia in 2013 to not tolerate America’s attempt to overthrow Assad’s government. After this, everything changed about U.S.-Russia relations.

A 2017 U.S. army document titled Cultural Perspectives, Geopolitics & Energy Security of Eurasia has confirmed that in recent years, America has been in what the document’s text describes as an “information, economic and diplomatic” campaign to “dethrone Putin.” This is the most direct evidence we’ve seen so far of a conspiracy within America’s deep state to manufacture anti-Russia propaganda for the purposes of restarting McCarthyism and creating a new Cold War. And it’s been accompanied by a lot of similar revelations about what’s been going on behind closed doors within media, intelligence agencies, and political campaigns.

Among these revelations is the fact that, as Obama’s ex-intelligence chief John Brennan admitted last year, the officials who authored the January 2017 “assessment” of so-called Russian interference were “hand-picked” by the Obama administration. Further hints of a politically motivated conspiracy within U.S. intelligence agencies have since come out, and not just with the fact that the intelligence agencies appear to have fabricated the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. The publication of February’s Republican House Committee memo revealed that before the 2016 election, John Brennan thought of the idea to paint Trump as “Putin’s puppet,” as an apparent ploy to ensure his continued position under a Clinton presidency.

As the still unsubstantiated “Russiagate” scandal has developed, evidence has come out that Clinton’s team has used it to their advantage by inflating its coverage in the media, and by creating news stories to try to vindicate it. In Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” it was revealed that John Podesta thought of the idea to blame Russia for Clinton’s loss just 24 hours after the results came in. Podesta and his associates quickly worked to feed this excuse to mainstream media outlets, which put out an overwhelming amount of material about “election hacking” in the following weeks and months.

Team Clinton has since strategically added fuel to the fire they helped start, with Hillary Clinton and the DNC having paid for the research behind the Steele dossier. The salacious allegations behind the dossier, predictably, are still not verified. This isn’t the only bizarre claim that Russiagate’s central propagators have included in their arguments; for instance, their statement that “seventeen intelligence agencies” agreed with the Russian hacking charge doesn’t even make sense, since those agencies include the Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Administration. In reality, four agencies have agreed with the claim, and their statements have of course been well debunked.

Then there are the signs that the Mueller probe, despite its prosecutions of corruption within Trump’s circle, has been conducted with bias towards protecting the deep state’s Russia narrative. Mueller has never tried to get information from Julian Assange, a major witness to the events surrounding the Russiagate case. And Mueller’s decision to indict Russian nationals without any apparent evidence of illegal activities was also very strange.

Could Mueller, who facilitated torture during the Bush era and has been described by many as a “dirty cop,” be conducting a biased investigation to benefit the agenda of the intelligence community? We’ve seen the deep state carry out more far-fetched schemes, like the Iraq WMD hoax, the Gulf War “incubators” testimony, and the previous McCarthyite campaigns of the 1950’s.

The view that there are powerful people who aim to use Russiagate to advance imperialist agendas isn’t even a theory, because powerful people have explicitly spoken to this effect. In January 2017, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said on air that she planned to intensely attack Trump on Russiagate in order to pressure Trump into not pulling NATO troops away from Russia’s borders. And in March last year, Democratic senator Eric Swalwell said in a Tucker Carlson interview that he hoped to impose economic sanctions on Russia so that Putin’s popularity would be undermined. Western-led regime change in Russia has also been promoted by The Guardian and other establishment voices.

What should Americans do?

They say the way to find out if a conspiracy theory is true is to see whether details confirming the theory leak out over time, since human nature makes it impossible for a large group of people to all keep a secret forever hidden. The details I just mentioned definitely support the idea that a deep state agenda to restart the cold war is afoot, and that anyone who threatens this agenda-or the agenda of corporate capitalism and imperialism in general-will be punished with McCarthyite attacks from the political establishment.

As evidence of this Russia deception continues to leak out, we need to make sure the American public hears about it. The establishment propaganda machine is in a vulnerable state right now. And if the American people find out they’ve been lied to on this scale, the machine’s power could break irreparably.