Um... could this be "it"?

[Thomas Eckhardt]

For a more nuanced take on the war against dissent, the 
media etc., see this article by Jackson Lears, historian 
and Democrat:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking

Some excerpts:

"A story that had circulated during the campaign without 
much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that 
Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the 
Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing 
emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning 
speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, 
enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington 
establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes 
of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In 
its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other 
formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it 
recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist 
hysteria during the early 1950s."

"The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking 
charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an 
attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to 
interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story 
became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and 
completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as 
apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and 
co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. 
Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large 
part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical 
embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story 
have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It 
is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, 
but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington 
insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual 
conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares 
or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all 
been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments 
when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have 
come to mind."

"It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, 
which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence 
agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources 
of incontrovertible truth."

"Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale 
rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least 
the part of it that supports the notion of Russian 
hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the 
scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment 
that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s 
base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, 
has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted 
John Birch Society."

"Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report 
that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical 
grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. 
Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in 
the French and German elections – they are not retracted 
even after they have been discredited. These stories have 
been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence 
services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, 
confusing debate. The claim that the Russians hacked local 
and state voting systems in the US was refuted by 
California and Wisconsin election officials, but their 
comments generated a mere whisper compared with the uproar 
created by the original story. The rush to publish without 
sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal 
in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside 
the point: the false accusation has done its work."

"We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ 
fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking 
about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, 
they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in 
the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of 
disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking 
about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts 
the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other 
urgently needed social programmes; nor about the 
modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal which Obama 
began and Trump plans to accelerate, and which raises the 
risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war – 
a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by 
America’s combative stance towards Russia."

Highly recommended.


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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l