Patrice Greanville
Obsessively denouncing Russian phantoms can kill us all.
In embracing with alacrity the campaign of lies about the Trump-Russia connection, or rather, let us be precise, the campaign of lies about the actual national security danger in any past or existing Trump-Russia connection, Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s fervid russophobe, is but the latest liberal hero to show her true colors, yet another example that liberalism is not only dead as a real option for anyone sensible, but positively radioactive, a plague to be avoided.
Maddow’s recent shows (see below) are being hailed by the clueless as a new coming of Zola’s dogged pursuit of liberating truth, but her self-righteous and much applauded theatrics against Trump are but a smokescreen to something much graver going on in America, something that this woman, if she were half the journalist she pretends to be, would be alerting her audience about instead of indulging in cheap rhetorical antics. I say cheap because attacking Trump is like shooting fish in a barrel. The man (and his entourage) is so inept that he almost sets the stage for his attackers. The ammo is handed at the door.
Maddow’s fans, blinded by their longtime admiration, and laser-like hatred for Trump, refuse to see such realities. To most of them Rachel Maddow can do no wrong, she’s their champion, fighting what seems to them like a Quixotic and valiant struggle against a formidable neofascist dragon. Considering that in our age most people can choose their own truth from the well-stocked salad bar of subjective opinion, and to hell with facts, that is indeed their prerogative. However, regardless of whether Trump is such an evil, as he is described by his multitude of opponents, or whether the alternative represented by the CIA-Democrat alliance is much better than his bizarre and erratic rule, I believe the notion that Maddow is such a dragon slayer is itself misguided and wholly undeserved.
For starters, the fascist dragon is no dragon. He never was. The salient feature in Trump’s makeup is incoherence mixed with ample amounts of stubborn ignorance. That he sometimes comes up with good personal instincts that seem to miraculously escape the conformist imperialist bubble in which the entire political class of the United States dwells is not sufficient compensation. Those are his paltry yet notable (in the current clime of almost total political sociopathy) redeeming qualities. That said, the deeply etched ignorance factor, the intellectual laziness, are hard to overcome. This is and always has been the formula for surefire defeat of anyone aspiring to make his mark as a truly autonomous historical agent. Ignorance bordering on cluelessness is a serious impediment to authentic leadership. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that at this point Donald Trump cannot control his political destiny because that requires a clear notion of how and where to sail the ship of state, about which he hasn’t the foggiest. He’s obviously trying to catch up and he may be a quick study, but the process implies a long learning curve and his teachers are not reliable. And his attention span concerning “details”—where the devil resides—is measured in microseconds.
In normal, calmer times this would be a salvageable situation. History offers many examples of powerful men whose policies were effectively crafted outside their own mental perimeters. The story of kings and emperors is instructive in this regard. In general hidden courtiers determine much of a nation’s policies. That is true for monarchs or so-called democracies. France’s Louis XIII rule was essentially the product of Cardinal Richelieu’s statesmanship. Strong, lucid leaders such as a Julius Caesar, Napoleon or an FDR are the exception. Trump’s type of political player however, as we might expect, tends to rely on and be used by submerged parties and sordid actors (who recognize the shape of the vessel and its emptiness). Fact is Trump is an actor, with very narrow gifts, on a stage that at some level, given his pride and fear of failure, must terrify him. The photo-ops— if you look closely—tell the story. Standing with stern mien, jaw jutting out a la Duce, his face supposedly solemn and dignified, while his underlings go through the requisite motions of investiture, etc., shows the strain he absorbs to keep the saucers in the air. He has the look of a man about to be found out as an impostor. Obviously it does not help his psyche that half of the country—for contorted and often dishonest reasons— think exactly that. He’s been out of his depth all along, the fact concealed by the circus surrounding American elections, and the clowns that contested the field with him, a crowd with certifiable idiots like Rick Perry who made even Trump look good.
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut the purpose of this article is not to point out Trump’s inadequacies. Using mostly malice, not just truth, which would suffice nicely, the mainstream media has taken care of that.
Some of the lies used to stampede a very gullible audience is that Trump represents a new fascist threat, a latter-day Duce. While anything is possible, Trump at this juncture simply lacks the requisite ingredients to pull a stunt of that magnitude. The differences with the real deal are pronounced. Let’s examine: Besides counting with the solid backing of the ruling classes, and well-organized mass militias by the time they came to power, classic Fascist leaders were all people of some intellectual capability. Mussolini, an avid reader and student of history, was a journalist and lesser member of the postwar intelligentsia in Italy; he wrote many of his own tracts. He gave us in fact one of the earliest and most stable definitions of fascism, the marriage of corporate power and the state. Hitler, less accomplished, was somehow able to hammer out the admittedly turgid and highly toxic Mein Kampf, but we can be sure he used no ghost writers. He could not afford them and his vanity prevented such assistance. Again, that’s well beyond the grasp of Trump’s native abilities, but the man has no trouble delegating when such intellectual challenges arise.
As noted elsewhere, after the Flynn debacle and the Sessions tempest in a teapot which Trump did not manage with honorable decisiveness, many astute observers counted him out, his independence eviscerated by the deep state, which bullied and tricked him. All that remains is the usual veneer of being the executive in charge, punctuated by the customary displays of flashy braggadocio. His administration as far as a distinctive Trump stamp is concerned, is finished. It is already sailing along the clearly set margins laid down for him by the PTB. In fact, if we reflect about it, that is the nature of the job: American presidents are mostly figureheads for the unchangeable, permanent power of the moneyed elites. Sometimes they are leaders of such elites, in which case the same results obtain. In either case, without their support they cannot get much accomplished. That’s why we have plutocracy instead of genuine democracy in the United States. And it’s been like that for many generations, probably since the nation was born in the cusp of aristocratic privilege in revolt, more acutely and clearly revealed in the last couple of decades, as the system, in frank senility and decline, has begun to lash out in all directions, showing its true ugly face. Things are not going to get much prettier from here on out.
Maddow emblematic of pervasive mainstream media dishonesty
Since Trump is not really the threat that his enemies painted and paint, unless they are prepared to admit that the whole rotten system—including them—is the real enemy of humankind, why all the frenzy?
It is in this context of false premises—of establishment engineered and disseminated Fake News— that we must weigh Rachel Maddow’s latest performances, an egotist’s dream, wherein the MSNBC host has been setting new lows for her own partisan standards. Maddow’s activities are dangerous and hypocritical because, at bottom, they are far more about drumming up paranoia over a nonexistent Russian threat—which suits the MIC’s plans for the continuation of a bloated, vampirish defense establishment and the deranged confrontational geopolitical aspirations of the Neocons—than about disposing of the pumped-up Trumpian menace.
Such grand impostures fit a pattern for which the American media, as an institution, from owners to top personnel, should not only be ashamed, but regarded as enemies of society, for, after all, what greater enemy of society is there than those who, like Maddow and her ilk, while supposedly going after Trump’s obscene idiosyncrasies (which naturally include no love for the LGBT community’s identity politics so transparently exploited by the Democrats), keep pushing for a nuclear war that will definitely extinguish all life on this already horribly tormented planet? Can anybody name anything more dangerous and heinous than that?
I wish this were hyperbole but it isn’t.
So yes, Maddow and the media machinery she represents are emblematic of a terminally sick society, a nation cynically ruled by deliberate manipulation. Again, this is hardly an original thought. America has been found to be a pretend democracy—a plutocratic machine masquerading as popular will— by even conservative sociologists lodged in impeccably conservative—indeed Ivy League— universities. (1)
New Facts On Russia Influence On GOP Platform | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC
Published on Mar 8, 2017
Rachel Maddow looks at new information on ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and its influence on the Republican Party platform at the national convention, adding credibility to another piece of the unverified Trump dossier.
Donald Trump Weakens State Dept As Vladimir Putin Would Want | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC
Published on Mar 8, 2017
Rachel Maddow shows how the Donald Trump’s State Department under Rex Tillerson is being drastically weakened, a situation that suits Vladimir Putin well in taking U.S. soft power influence out of his way.
The hidden consequences
The complete collapse of the American media as a conduit for anything approaching serviceable information to maintain a workable democracy and the erasure of all vestiges of class struggle represents an extremely dangerous chapter for humanity on many accounts, not the least because normally intelligent people, after decades of conditioning their minds to look at politics exclusively through narrow personal platforms—race, sexuality, gender, etc. something that obviously pleased the ruling class no end—have now totally forgotten what this segmentation has wrought: the self-inflicted inability to look and understand the broader picture. Which for those who claim to be sincere about social struggles is a serious impediment.
The broader picture matters. It always did. Its forced premature retirement, to give way to the supposedly more effective strategies of identity politics, racialism, etc., was as ill-conceived as it was unnecessary, a ruse to substitute a divided left for a unified one, and personal issues for class struggle, a dubious switch that has finally put US society and much of the world on life support.
It is hardly surprising that among the most zealous endorsers of this dubious strategy were members of the affluent liberal class. Media celebs like Maddow, and Hollywood liberals—practically all multimillionaires, some billionaires, and living lives of pampered exclusivity. They were and are the most visible and vocal component of this phenomenon. Never mind that in that sense they cheerfully endorsed a course of action as bogus as the old canard about the end of ideology, that is, the end of class struggle, trumpeted by corporatized academics and their media accomplices barely a generation ago. Perhaps it remains too impolitic to mention, but in this ID politics switcheroo the only people who saw some concrete gains (after hard fought struggles, too) were in the LGBT category, and that’s because, from the ruling class viewpoint, it cost them nothing to concede what these often persecuted people yearned for: equality before the law. Not so with Black America. Giving them some justice would trigger a real redistribution of power in America where it really counts, on the bottom line, not to mention unleash unpredictable ripples through society for which the ruling class is not remotely equipped.
Thus, despite all the brave talk about race, the Democrats never lifted a finger for African Americans, a betrayal all the more despicable given this constituency’s loyalty and the presence for the last decade of a supposedly Black head of state.
These days, in the Trumpian age, with a huge gathering storm on the immediate horizon caused by Washington’s refusal to behave like a normal nation instead of a self righteous bully; with the accelerating breakdown of natural ecosystems; and with the drums of potential nuclear war beating ever louder (by “progressives”, no less), the social costs implicit in the refusal to look at the broader picture are becoming prohibitive.
This rejection further underscores the sheer dishonesty of Maddow’s posturing as a progressive. For the broader picture is the indispensable grid allowing us to organize our priorities in a struggle that packs many seemingly equally urgent fields of combat. Without the broader picture we fight half-blind. With 2-D vision in a 3-D universe. Our priorities get messed up. Our strategies and tactics suffer. Our priority plane is flat. And we end up where we are. With a suicidal choice in 2016 between an utterly corrupt and recklessly warmongering Hillary Clinton and a similarly horrid agent of the plutocracy from the supposedly opposite corral. Confusion wins.
None of this would have happened if the American brainwash had been broken years ago
As just about any thoughtful person realizes today, the state of permanent haze that envelops the American mind is not an accidental occurrence. In the United States, extending fast throughout the world, and already a significant factor in Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc., what Western propagandists have long called “the Free World”, manipulated reality is the norm. What virtually unknown pioneers in the field of political propaganda studies like Alex Carey called “managed democracy”. This pseudo reality, manufactured 24/7 by the most devious and powerful system of mass persuasion ever devised, a natural if dastardly offshoot of capitalism, cancels reality and substitutes pre-digested interpretations. In far too many cases the unwitting victims of such “reality pre-emption” become technically brainwashed; others, more alert, see reality in isolated pieces, devoid of the larger pattern permitting the necessary quantum jump in consciousness. They often begin to doubt their own perceptions. A type of spiteful, belligerent, but essentially uninformed and misguided individualism frequently takes over. In the event, as far as the system is concerned, opposition weakens, unified concerted action becomes more difficult or impossible. Resistance is nipped in the bud for most, and either indifference or fatalism invade those who intuit the disease but lack the basic tools to complete the diagnosis. Further, by being denied access and visibility on the corporate media true dissenters are hard put to estimate their own numbers and the potential of their ideas. The upshot is the squalid stagnation we inhabit in which quiet desperation is almost the rule for many who suffer in silence and frustration. This site is written by and for those who dissent from the official narrative. Those who know that a very different, much better world, is possible.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is why during the eight long years of the Obama regime, an administration that distinguished itself not only for its off-the-charts hypocrisy and abject subservience to the global plutocracy, but for its brutal, underhanded, genocidal wars and turmoil in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and other lands, an aggression that destroyed the lives of millions and flooded Europe with refugees, an administration that, we should add, never shied from recklessly taunting Russia, a major nuclear power, via false flags, coups, provocations on her borders, and the most baseless demonization…throughout this disgusting period neither the media nor the liberals who rise today in self-righteous condemnation of Trump (however merited this indignation may be) ever uttered one word of real criticism—let alone mount an obsessive campaign of nonstop vilification. It is a safe assumption that Barack Obama, one of the slickest demagogs this country has seen since The Great Communicator, well surpasses Ronnie’s high Teflon index. But Obama went one better. Not only did his crimes and betrayals fail to tarnish his image; he also managed to anesthetize all possible opposition to his imperialist agenda. Under Obama, the environmental movement went to sleep, and the antiwar movement—still visible under Bush2, simply ceased to exist.
In this regard I regret to say that Maddow, “the out MSNBC host” as the LGBT publication Advocate chooses to call her in a recent article celebrating her anti-Trump crusade, is apparently contributing to the same disabling effect on liberals as Obama had during his tenure, making them forget the bigger picture.
But Maddow, gay or not gay, is doing something now that goes way beyond attacking Trump for his troglodyte views on sexuality, immigrants or whatever you want to accuse him of. Maddow, whose intelligence cannot be doubted, is consciously part of a cabal seeking to topple Trump on the basis of lies. But not lies about his character and tawdry resume, about which—as has been shown abundantly since the man became a factor in US politics —there is certainly no shortage of material, but about his supposedly criminal and treasonable connections with Russia, a nation with which we are still technically at peace. And this is where it gets dangerous and ugly, fast, and where Maddow deserves condemnation. For this is what these faux progressive people—and their friends in the suddenly popular CIA—are doing: pushing and preparing the American nation to accept a war with Russia, Iran, China and who knows what or who else, all in compliance with the original Neocon script to assure permanent American dominance over the entire world. And by “American dominance” we know what that means, the dominance of America’s overlords, the 0.00001% running this country to the cleaners in pursuit of their relentless drive for power and profits.
Maybe when we look at it that way, from the requisite broader and deeper perspective, what Maddow is doing, along with her numerous cohorts in the sanctimonious liberal media, does not strike us as the work of an enlightened and admirable individual any more. I take no pride of originality in this observation. Helping to sell “wars of choice” is already classified as a capital crime against humanity under Nuremberg international statutes, which US law is judicially bound to respect. We hanged press lords in Nazi Germany for lesser offences. In a recent piece (which was not intended to be read as a defense of Donald Trump), and which surely gained him no converts in the legions of brain-fogged liberals who take their cues from pseudo-progressive icons in the Democratic party and the crowded gallery of liberal mavens, Paul Craig Roberts questioned the basic sanity of those who would criminalize all efforts to defuse the utterly hypocritical and baseless hostility manufactured against Russia—a nation that persists in seeking peace but which remains capable of wiping out the entire United States in a few minutes if pushed beyond endurance—a limit we are clearly approaching. He summed up the situation with customary candor:
Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are despicable, the scum of the earth.
Considering what Maddow and her ilk are doing, was the outspoken Roberts exaggerating? While he wasn’t exactly “politically correct” in the way he said it, his logic cannot be faulted, and many clear-thinking, decent people share his view. I certainly do. Fact is, we find ourselves on the brink of cataclysmic war, with most people throughout the “West” scandalously unaware or indifferent to the risks represented by wanton Russophobic talk. Thus, In the artificial climate of confrontation based on lies manufactured by the Deep State and disseminated by the media and anti-Trump politicians, and triumphantly amplified by the millions of idiots who repeat this dangerous nonsense,
[I]f Trump wants to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions that the reckless Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have resurrected with a powerful thermo-nuclear state that only wants peace with the US, President Trump and any of his appointees who spoke to a Russian are [automatically] unfit for office! This madness is the position of the idiot liberal/progressive/left, the CIA, the Democratic Party, the right-wing morons of the Republican Party such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and the two-bit whores that comprise the Western media. (Paul Craig Roberts, What is to be done)
“Idiot liberal/progressive/left…two-bit whores of the Western media.” The description is harsh but apt. And it suits the Rachel Maddows of this world to a T. Time has come to dust off Joe Welch’s legendary question to Joe McCarthy and apply it to this new type of reckless information poisoner:
Have you no decency, Rachel Maddow?
I guess there is no use waiting for an honest answer to that.
About the author
Patrice Greanville is TGP's editor in chief.
Notes: (1) US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study
I can understand why pro-establishment liberals are defending this man; he stands for everything they stand for. If all you stand for is vapid tribalism and vanity politics and you are willing to sacrifice integrity along with economic and social justice and the lives of other people’s kids in corporatist wars overseas in order to feel like you’re on the right team, Obama is your man. But if you’re an actual, real progressive and not just a latte-sipping NPR listener with a sense of self-righteousness and a pro-choice bumper sticker, you’ve got no business regarding Obama with anything but disgust.
