Putin: U.S. Routinely Meddles in Russian and Other Nations’ Elections

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In a Showtime interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American film-maker Oliver Stone, which started airing on June 12th, Putin called “lies” many of the allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies, to the effect that he or his government attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He also accused the U.S. government of having actually done not only that (influencing other countries’ democratic process), but far more actual meddling in Russian elections, and in the elections in other former Soviet-and-allied countries, and even done it in recent times, and even done it to countries that had never been friendly toward Russia. The way he asserted this accusation was veiled, however, so that he didn’t identify the specific governments he was referring to, other than to say: “In 2000, and in 2012, this always happened. But especially aggressively in 2012. I will not go into details.” (This article will supply some of those “details,” in what follows.)

Putin described the current accusations against Russia, by the U.S. government, as a deceitful and fictitious tat, which ignores the very real and longstanding American tit, of CIA and other U.S., meddling in the electoral processes of foreign countries.

The neoconservative American Jan Wenner’s Rolling Stone magazine ⁽¹⁾ headlined on June 16th about these Showtime interviews, “10 Most WTF Things We Learned From Oliver Stone's Putin Interviews”, and sub-headlined: “From denying any involvement with U.S. election hacking to Putin's love of Judo and Stalin, our takeaways from these truly baffling conversations”. Wenner’s reporter opened:

What's the Russian equivalent of Kool-Aid? Whatever it is, it's definitely red – and Oliver Stone has eagerly drunk it down. The trailers for The Putin Interviews, Showtime's four-part series documenting a series of conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Stone, would have you believe that you're going to hear some pretty hard-hitting stuff as the autocrat and the filmmaker face off, Frost-Nixon style. What we got instead was a series of softballs lobbed lovingly in the direction of one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world. Except for a few moments, Stone seems serenely unconcerned with anything beyond flattering his subject – and engaging in some supremely one-sided exchanges about history and policy along the way.

SIDEBAR:
Overt Manipulation "Under Freedom"—Rolling Stone implies the Putin Interviews is Fake! Fake! Fake!
By Patrice Greanville
The Rolling Stone screed alluded to above, by one Jenna Scherer, clearly a graduate of the Copacabana School of Hatchet Journalism, is punctuated with obvious "guided interpretation" passages, lest the reader, despite the poisoned review, might actually watch the videos and come to healthy independent conclusions. Observe this passage: "Through it all, the leader is as calm, collected and confident as a dragon seated atop his pile of gold – knowing that he holds all the power in this exchange, and supremely unconcerned. The former KGB agent-turned-head of state comes off as intelligent, rational and well-spoken, which is precisely what makes The Putin Interviews so dangerous. Since Stone more often than not takes him at his word, the politician's proclamations sound like unassailable facts – regardless of whether they actually are." (bold mine).

Not satisfied with the blatant insidiousness in the main text, the piece is accompanied by this video catechism to further immunise our delicate minds against a possible contamination with truth or a more balanced and sane grasp of contemporary reality. —PG

Rolling Stone's poison pill against The Putin Interviews from patrice greanville on Vimeo.

END OF SIDEBAR

TEXT BY ERIC ZUESSE CONTINUES HERE

..
The term “red” in this context refers, of course, to communism, and alleges that Russia is still a communist country. To allow that type of smear to appear in any ‘news’ vehicle, is to expose itself as being actually a propaganda-vehicle, unless the allegation is backed up by solid documentation, which Wenner’s magazine didn’t do — Wenner’s magazine presented no documentation at all, for the inflammatory allegation. (Editor's Note: At TGP "communist" is not seen as a smear but a word of praise for human idealism, certainly a damn sight better than being called a capitalist.) The magazine’s presumption was that their readers will simply believe what Wenner’s operation delivers, to be ipso-facto ‘true’. But any such reader would be welcoming his own deception by Wenner’s propaganda-operation. Evidently, successful magazines can insult their own subscribers’ intelligence, so long as it’s done in ‘the right way’ — the subscribers won’t despise the publisher for trying to deceive them about such important matters as what countries to invade, or whether to invade, or why to invade. The U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC) can attract cannon-fodder for its operations, by means of such ‘news’ media to produce dupes for that MIC.

During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Mr. Wenner’s propaganda-machine had ardently campaigned for the neoconservative Hillary Clinton against the moderately progressive Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Democratic Party primaries; and, then, once she (and her friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz who ran the Democratic National Committee) managed to steal the nomination from her opponent, Wenner’s operation campaigned for Ms. Clinton against her Republican opponent Trump, who claimed (falsely as it turns out, in lies exceeding Clinton’s own) to be opposed to neoconservatives (whom he has actually loaded into his Administration). Trump now relies upon neocons for his support, but perhaps Wenner and Robert Kagan and other neoconservatives won’t be satisfied until the U.S. government takes control over Russia — which cannot happen except upon all of our dead bodies (WW III) — which is precisely what Hillary Clinton was aiming for (and maybe Trump is, too). That’s how insane the U.S. aristocracy (and its PR organs such as Wenner’s) now is — they’re pushing the world toward nuclear armageddon.

So, the American system had offered to its public a choice between two neoconservatives, one of whom hid his neoconservatism and won the election but still isn’t sufficiently neoconservative to suit the neoconservatives (such as Wenner).

What, then, about the substance of Putin’s allegation here, that the U.S. government meddles in other nations’ democratic processes?

Here are some prominent examples of that phenomenon:

From the very moment when Barack Obama became the U.S. President on 20 January 2009, the U.S. government was aiming for a ‘revolution’ to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Then, by no later than 2011, the operation was already under way in the U.S. State Department. Furthermore, also by no later than 2011, a parallel operation was under way to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Whereas in Syria it would be ‘freedom fighters’ who would be paid by the Sauds but armed and trained mainly by the U.S., and mainly organized and led by Al Qaeda; in Ukraine it would be ‘Maidan demonstrators’ who would be paid by the U.S., and mainly led and organized by leaders of Ukraine’s existing two racist-facist, or ideologically nazi, political parties, Right Sektor, and the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine (renamed by the CIA as “Svoboda” or “Freedom” Party).

Furthermore, on 28 June 2009, shortly after Obama became President, a coup by Honduras’s twenty-four richest families overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, who had been trying to institute land reform so that serfdom could become replaced there by a real democracy, but all governments except the U.S. refused to recognize the coup-regime, until first Hillary Clinton and then her boss Barack Obama recognized it and financed it with U.S. taxpayer money so that the international pressure to restore the democratically elected President failed and the junta-regime became stabilized. The U.S. government supported the aristocratic families, and helped them rig an ‘election’ amongst only contenders whom that oligarchy and the U.S. oligarchy supported. Much manipulation of the Honduran ‘news’ media and deceit against the Honduran public were perpetrated by both the U.S. aristocracy and the Honduran aristocracy in order to silence of else kill anyone who would challenge it. Here’s the excellent 3-minute video summary of that; and here’s my article documenting it with 72 links to the sources on that matter.

So: those are three examples of extremely severe “meddling” — Syria, Ukraine, and Honduras — all three of which occurred during Obama’s Presidency (and so we’re not talking here about Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973 or Iraq in 2003 or anything other than the most recent U.S. President). Each and every one of them is vastly more heinous than anything that Putin and Russia did, but Russia isn’t imposing sanctions upon the U.S. Even if all of the U.S. regime’s propaganda against Russia were true, the U.S. regime does vastly more damage to democracy, and to national sovereignty, around the world, than Russia does.

On 14 June 2017, at 2:08 in the afternoon, the U.S. Senate passed, by a vote of 97 to 2 (only Rand Paul and Mike Lee voted against it) an intensification of U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, sanctions that President Obama had first instituted when Russia accepted the petition supported by more than 96% of Crimeans, for Crimea to become again a part of Russia, from which the Soviet dictator Khrushchev had transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 without even consulting the residents there at all. Obama’s brutal coup overthrowing the Ukrainian President for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted is what had sparked Crimeans to seek to become, yet again — as they had been for hundreds of years until 1954 — Russians. For this ‘conquest of land’ as Obama called it, Russia was slapped with sanctions by Obama, and even now increasingly by the U.S. Congress. One of the four co-sponsors of that bill was the ‘progressive’ Democrat, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown. Apparently, corruption (or else one would need to call it simply “evil”) is quite bi-partisan. And, given that the vote to increase sanctions was 97 to 2, that corruption (or evil) is almost universal in the U.S. Senate.

This government of the United States became finally entrenched as a facsist regime on 24 February 1990, when the U.S. President, George Herbert Walker Bush, began telling America’s allies, in secret, that, though the Cold War was now ending on the Soviet side, it would be continuing on the U.S. side, until Russia itself is finally conquered by the U.S. What we’re seeing now is an intensification of that aggression by the U.S. government.

UPDATE:

A reader elsewhere commented calling to my attention the following, which is so relevant that I ought to add his comment here:

andrew1212 • 4PM Eastern on 20 June 2017

CIA was very active in Italy, France and Japan elections after WWII.

The millions were delivered to Italian politicians and the priests of Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican. Suitcases filled with cash changed hands in the four-star Hassler Hotel. "We would have liked to have done this in a more sophisticated manner," [F. Mark] Wyatt said. "Passing black bags to affect a political election is not really a terribly attractive thing." But it worked: Italy's Christian Democrats won by a comfortable margin and formed a government that excluded communists. A long romance between the party and the agency began. The CIA's practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy--and in many other nations--for the next twenty-five years.

— LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (2007), page 31 [in the 2008 printing; page 27 of the first edition, the 2007 printing].

(Also see Pages 133-141 [or 116-121 of 2007 edition] for info on CIA involvement in Japan elections.)

Eric Zuesse, originally [cross]posted at strategic-culture.org

⁽¹⁾ Editor's Note: Jan Wenner, who founded Rolling Stone with loans from family and friends, is a poster boy for Clintonian liberals. Wenner, worth about $700MM, is a very rich mogul indeed and a power in publishing and media circles. Wenner's image has profited from association with rebel youth culture in the 1960s (similar to NBC's SNL and with predictably similar political trajectories) and this has given the man something of a progressive patina, but rooted in heavy hedonism, individualism and self-indulgence, rock & roll itself was never more than a bourgeois countercultural expression, with no serious political agenda or method to secure tangible progressive goals. As a valuable cultural space up for grabs, this was and is an ambit easily populated by the likes of Wenner and Clintonian Democrats (Wenner was a strong and vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton). Progressive posturing is their stock in trade, so no matter what conceit they endorse at the end of the day their political moorings remain firmly conservative and deeply establishmentarian. It's no surprise then that Rolling Stone would attack instead of support Oliver Stone's valuable and brave portrait of Putin at a moment when the nation and the world needs truth and superior journalism. Goes to show you just can't trust liberals.—PG

About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

This government of the United States became finally entrenched as a fascist regime on 24 February 1990, when the U.S. President, George Herbert Walker Bush, began telling America’s allies, in secret, that, though the Cold War was now ending on the Soviet side, it would be continuing on the U.S. side, until Russia itself is finally conquered by the U.S. What we’re seeing now is an intensification of that aggression by the U.S. government.