AN INCONVENIENT HISTORY
Imagine for a moment that in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had bested Hillary Clinton in the race for the presidency, the Russian magazine, Russia Times, had run a major cover page article picturing Trump and bragging about how Russia had rigged the US presidential election in his favor. The outrage of Americans would have been immediate and vociferous. Calls for outright war against Russia could easily have been imagined.
See the July 15, 1996 cover of the US magazine Time:
A major US publication, Time Magazine, was openly broadcasting to the entire world how American election experts had, with the full knowledge and tacit support of the Bill Clinton administration, successfully engineered the re-election of the highly unpopular Boris Yeltsin to the Russian Presidency. The story goes on to describe how American advisors had lived for months in the Presidential Hotel in Moscow and how they had instituted “reforms” in Russia.
But in reality, Yeltsin was a useful US stooge, and “reforms” is a dubious term to say the least. Quoting Catte Black in the Guardian:
“What Time means by “reform” is the vastly illegal and ethically barbarous looting of the Russian state and its people that was then being systematically perpetrated by the US, its financial institutions and its own gangster capitalists.
A Communist, or even a moderate nationalist, could be a disaster for this lucrative open conduit of virtually free raw materials and knock-down block shares in oil and gas production (and that’s not even getting into the questions of PNAC [Project For The New American Century] and the neocon drive to see Russia perennially divided and weakened, if not actually partitioned).
For all these reasons, broadly encompassed under the weasel word “reform”, the US did not want anyone but Yeltsin in the Kremlin in 1996. So, says Time, the Yanks decided to step in and fix things.”
Boris Yeltsin represented the complete takeover of Russian presidential elections by the United States of America and the Clinton administration for the purpose of looting the people of Russia.
But there is more to the picture. Yeltsin was an international laughingstock who brought great humiliation to Russia. One of his underlings was Vladimir Putin. It is impossible to know what motivates Putin’s current actions, but it is likely he has never forgiven the US for the humiliation of his country or for what happened under the Clintons to literally steal the Russian election. From Putin’s perspective, Russia’s attempts to sway US elections today may well be retribution for the greed and corruption America perpetrated upon Russia 25 years ago.
What occurred in US/Russian relations back in the 90’s is an ongoing tragedy for humanity on several fronts. When the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union broke up under then Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the cold war and the nuclear arms race as the world had known it, came to an end. It was a historic opportunity for the United States and Russia to come together for the ongoing prosperity, health and safety of all. But the American financial industry saw it as way to exploit ever more of the world’s people for their own person gain. The “gangster capitalists” killed a great hope for humanity.
But perhaps the even greater tragedy is what occurred after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. It is likely Russia used social media in an attempt to sway the election, but compared to what the United States had done to them in the 90’s, it was child’s play. We can debate forever the legitimacy of Trump’s victory. But setting aside the obvious hypocrisy of Hillary and others who certainly knew what America had done to Russia when her husband was in office, the actions of the Democratic Party since the election have had devastating, unintended consequences.
Rather than pragmatically assessing Clinton’s flaws as a candidate, the corrupt actions the Democratic National Committee had taken against Bernie Sanders in the primaries, and the history of what America had done in Moscow a few decades past, the Democratic Party’s demand for a scapegoat inadvertently created a spreading hatred of Russia in an attempt to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump. Unwittingly, the Democrats were playing directly into the hands of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Since 1991 this money-making conglomerate had been looking for ways to resurrect the cold war and, most importantly, the fabulously lucrative nuclear arms race. They needed Russia to be an enemy. Intended or not, the Democratic Party opened the door for them and humanity once again faces the very real prospect of total nuclear annihilation.
There are no innocents in this game and if we don’t start taking an honest, in-depth look at history, the greed and power-lust of “leadership” from all sides is going to continue dragging us down this dangerous, counterproductive and completely unnecessary path. For the sake of all, perhaps some truth is in order.