Hillary Clinton would have the world believe she is not President of the United States due solely to the efforts of Russian disinformation operatives. The fact that she was an awful candidate has nothing to do with it. There was indeed Russian interference in the United States electoral process, or more accurately an organisation and individuals based in Russia posted messages on Facebook and elsewhere on-line, but can any honest person really believe this is the reason she lost to Donald Trump?
In February last year, the Mueller investigation handed down a 37 page indictment against the Internet Research Agency, an organisation that goes by the unfortunate acronym of IRA. Doubtless any member of the British security forces would rather tackle the Russian IRA than the one that has been murdering people in Northern Ireland and on the Mainland for decades.
Take a gander at this indictment, it does allege real crimes, in particular identity theft which was used to facilitate money laundering, but this sounds a lot more sinister than it is. The money “laundered” through these accounts was not stolen, simply disguised; it was used to purchase advertisements and pay supplementary expenses.
Back in the 1960s during the Cold War, the cinema portrayed Russia spies as sinister and deadly, men and women who travelled on professionally forged documents, carried sophisticated, at times Aramaic weapons, and would kill without conscience. The modern equivalent of the KGB agent sits behind a keyboard and trolls social media. The above cartoon depicts Bernie Sanders; it is said to have been produced by the Internet Research Agency and aimed at potential Sanders voters. Ask yourself, if you were the septuagenarian Bernie Sanders, would you be unhappy with it?
Russian journalist Lyudmila Savchuk claims to have infiltrated (ie worked at) the Internet Research Agency. A presentation given by her at the Atlantic Council was uploaded to YouTube by this august organisation on October 2 last year. Doubtless, she is sincere, but she appears to be a bit of a flake.
Incidentally, the Atlantic Council is a think tank, one of many such organisations that operates worldwide to churn out pro-American propaganda. Its output appears to be a great deal more sophisticated than that of the Internet Research Agency, which can best be described as puerile, somewhat reminiscent of the pathetic fake hate mail produced by the FBI during the COINTELPRO years. The comedian Lee Camp has an alternative explanation for the activities of the Internet Research Agency.
Internet Research Agency aside, some big names in US Intelligence have made grandiose claims about the influence of Russia propaganda on the American election process. These big names include James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan; all are now former big names, and two if not all three of them are currently in serious legal jeopardy for abusing their authority to smear and carry out black operations against the Trump team and later the Trump Administration. But what details specifically do they make in these claims? How did Russian Intelligence, Russian trolls or Russian anything advance the Trump agenda? How did they discredit Hillary Clinton, the woman who told her rich backers to ignore her public pronouncements and that with her in the White House it would be business as usual for banks and corporations? The woman who called half of Trump’s supporters deplorables, ordinary, decent Americans who felt rightly their voices were not being heard as their standard of living stagnated or plummeted?
Less parochially, over half the world’s population uses the Internet, and English is its dominant language. Literally hundreds of millions of people post regularly to social media. These people have countless opinions on all manner of subjects, and not all of them are honest. Is it fair or even intelligent to blame any permutation of Russians for every negative comment made about America or Hillary Clinton, or every positive one made about Donald Trump?
[The above article was first published on Medium, May 4, 2019.]
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