Assange

[Mark Thibodeau]

You know, I also read Counterpunch (and Anti-War, and other outlets of
the Greenwaldian/Assangist Left), and on occasion I have agreed with
them, but recently particularly on Ukraine, in Syria and now with the
Trump/Russia collusion, I have found their analysis to be facile,
jejune, and profoundly lacking... particularly in the journalistic
aggregate.

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 5:49 AM, Thomas Eckhardt
<thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>> I will reply by asking YOU a
>> question: Do you think Trump and Putin are no different from, say,
>> Clinton or Obama?
>
>
> If your measure is, say, the number of people killed around the world for
> oligarchic or MIC interests / geopolitical reasons, Clinton and Obama are
> far worse than Putin. If your measure is the degree of freedom of speech,
> artistic freedom, freedom of the press, gay rights etc. in the countries
> they govern(ed), Putin is worse. Trump may turn out to be worse than all of
> them, on both counts. Right now, however, he stands for cooperation with
> Russia. And this is a good thing.
>
> I might add that Putin didn't vote for the Iraq War, still the greatest
> crime of the 21st century. He didn't destroy Libya and Syria at the side of
> the UK and France. He didn't cackle when Muammar Gaddafi was impaled on a
> bayonet (if you really want to call a politician's behaviour "monstrous",
> this is a prime example). He does not support the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in
> Ukraine or the al-Zenki militia in Syria who beheaded a twelve-year-old boy
> with a small knife on camera but nevertheless remain on the payroll of the
> State Department because, as Mark Toner said, "one incident here and there
> would not necessarily make you a terrorist group"...
>
> I am no fan of Putin, but I prefer to look at the plank in my own eye before
> I look at the speck of sawdust in other people's eyes.
>
> This article might be of interest for you:
>
> "Some of my liberal friends, who have drunk the Kool-Aid of anti-Russia
> hysteria, argue that the US should not even contemplate acting friendly
> towards Russia and its leader President Putin. As one put it, 'We certainly
> at least must be in agreement that Putin’s cruel klepto-capitalist-KGB rule
> has harmed tens of millions of innocents in the former USSR, no?'
>
> Well, actually, no, we are not in agreement. Where do otherwise intelligent
> liberal-minded people get these tales of Putin evil? Nobody’s saying that he
> is a Jeffersonian democrat, but let’s at least get the history right."
>
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/11/democratic-hysteria-on-russia/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l