Last week saw the Senate Intelligence Committee going after Russia’s influence in the “free market places of ideas”: Twitter, Facebook, etc. Senators fulminated over Twitter’s failure to appreciate the magnitude of the danger of Russia’s interference in free elections. Cartoonists lampooned Russia with caricatures of the famous Russian military parades showing the Facebook and Twitter logos as displays in the parade along with tanks and missiles.
Suddenly the Senate was all atwitter over, well, Twitter. Who’s feeding this sudden awareness?
The recently created Alliance for Securing Democracy, housed (at least for now) at the German Marshall Fund--USA is one of the core anti-Putin, anti-Russia operations that merits keeping an eye on, especially as it impacts Congressional hearings, resolutions, and media. It’s an alliance of hard core neo-cons who were in the thick of promoting the 2003 Iraq war and the "axis of evil" attacks on Iran-Iraq-North Korea during Bush 43 administration, with the hillary-cons.
They’re determined to turn up the heat against Moscow, not just in the United States, but to spread the Cold War mania to Europe through its GMF network.
For now, the Alliance’s money seems to be limited, but it is a clear move to migrate the "Never Trump" Republicans into alliance with the Democratic Party, even further polluting and destroying that party on the foreign policy front.
With a network of some 2 dozen operatives in the USA and Europe (including former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Obama, Derek Chollet) the Alliance for Securing Democray blog is churning out steady stream of articles about Russian interference in elections (including big focus on the latest German elections) and demanding that Congress take action to further investigate/stop Russian interference in said elections. They claim to be monitoring 600 Russian twitter accounts that they think are threatening democracy.
A significant part of the apparatus comes from the group, Foreign Policy Initiative which went belly up in August, 2017, when it ceased operations. According to The Nation, FPI's demise was largely due to the dropping off of funds in 2017 after the Trump election. The FPI was led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. These "never Trump'ers" were apparently an albatross after the 2016 elections for some Republican and conservative deep pockets who always want to keep a path open to the White House, no matter who they preferred.
Now Kristol has a new home on the Advisory Board of the Alliance for Securing Democracy along with Michael Chertoff, and the anti-Putin ex-Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. Also on the Board is Jake Sullivan, a top Hillary operative at the State Dept. Chertoff recently landed a Wall Street Journal article on September 6th, headlined, Congress Can Help Prevent Election Hacking. I expect there will be a lot of Congressional action on this front if the “Alliance for Securing Democracy” has its way.
Securing democracy? The crowd that brought us Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011?
Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald did an impressive first expose of this outfit in July of this year, identifying the alliance between the war party neo-cons and the Democratic Party, but there’s a lot more to watch in its continuing operations to promote its Cold War agenda, especially in Congress.
Thanks for that, Mariner. A few weeks ago I read a long, detailed article about the role the Filipino Muslims played in US "anti-insurgency" campaigns back then, and was surprised by what it revealed. Unfortunately, few of the details stayed with me. I appreciate the lesson.
Posted by: Pacifica Advocate | 12 October 2017 at 03:09 AM
>>>The Rohingya ARSA insurgency is funded from Saudi....
It is absolutely wrong to call this conflict an "insurgency;" the entire conflict has grown from explicit Buddhist aggression against Rohingya communities. I have been reading about relatively routine attacks on and massacres of Rohingya communities for over 10 years, now. Three or four years ago I got briefly banned by Facebook, in fact, for posting some macabre pictures of dead families taken at one of the crime scenes (my interlocutor at the time refused to believe that S.E. Asian Buddhists were guilty of crimes against humanity, nor that Muslims of any sort could actually be victims of aggression).
If the Saudis have recently become involved in the Rohingya's problems, then it is an instance of the Saudis seizing an unfortunate opportunity created by someone else--and I, for one, am grateful the Rohingya are at last getting some help. Under no circumstances, though, did the US or the Saudis create the conflict, nor are the Rohingya guilty of attempting to either overthrow or challenge the government, nor expropriate other groups' property. This is a simple case of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya by Buddhist groups led by Myan (Mian, in Hanyu Pinyin) nationalists. This conflict started about a decade ago, when the military junta was still in charge, just after a spate of reforms allowed for greater provincial autonomy and civilian representation in the government.
Posted by: Pacifica Advocate | 12 October 2017 at 03:19 AM
O.K. I understand your point.
But as a lit major, I'm still trying to figure out the reference to the Decameron.
I got a list of books that I SHOULD know when I was a high school senior. Boccaccio's Decameron was one of those. A few of the tales still make me blush. I believe some were rehashed in The Canterbury Tales.Please expalain.
And, I might add that I would not want to live in Russia right now, but I can't understand all this hatred for everything Russian.
Posted by: DianaLC | 12 October 2017 at 01:01 PM
Thanks for the question. You go the heart of the matter.
From the introduction:
"... [I]t was come to this, that a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be to-day."
Most editions of Boccaccio's Decameron leave off the Introduction -- the author's picture of the devastation of the Black Plague. It's one of the most chilling in all literature IMO, and a mirror of the indifference and folly of today. There are no exact analogies in history, but "Wars, threats, more wars" -- but in the language of the neo-cons and imperial thinkers. A dead man or dead child is of no more consequence than the death of a goat. Well said, Boccaccio. Most publishers go with the "Disney" version -- tales of lust, irony and escape. Here's an excerpt from the introduction.
"It was the common practice of most of the neighbors, moved no less by fear of contamination by the putrefying bodies than by charity towards the deceased, to drag the corpses out of the houses with their own hands, aided, perhaps, by a porter, if a porter was to be had, and to lay them in front of the doors, where any one who made the round might have seen, especially in the morning, more of them than he could count; afterwards they would have biers brought up or in default, planks, whereon they laid them. Nor was it once twice only that one and the same bier carried two or three corpses at once; but quite a considerable number of such cases occurred, one bier sufficing for husband and wife, two or three brothers, father and son, and so forth. And times without number it happened, that as two priests, bearing the cross, were on their way to perform the last office for some one, three or four biers were brought up by the porters in rear of them, so that, whereas the priests supposed that they had but one corpse to bury, they discovered that there were six or eight, or sometimes more. Nor, for all their number, were their obsequies honored by either tears or lights or crowds of mourners rather, it was come to this, that a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be to-day."
From Boccaccio,
TheDecameron,. M. Rigg, trans. (London: David Campbell, 1921), Vol. 1, pp. 5-11
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/boccacio2.asp
Posted by: Harper | 13 October 2017 at 10:24 AM
'a simple case of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya by Buddhist groups led by Myan (Mian, in Hanyu Pinyin) nationalists. This conflict started about a decade ago'
PA. I'm sticking to my guns on this one. Ethnic cleansing yes, simple case no. Is it ever simple? This conflict started far longer than a decade ago. The ancestors of the people who now call themselves Rohingya have been living in the Arakan border marches for some centuries, moving as the borders moved. Their population increased exponentially when the Brits brought Bengali Muslims across to work in plantations. During WW2 the Brit military referred to them as Chittoganian Muslims and credited their loyalty with having saved India from Japanese invasion. They were also credited with having provided the majority of crews for the Brit Merchant Navy. There are other ethnic Muslim groups in Myanmar, having arrived during the Moghul period and as freed Portuguese slaves.
In the post war period Rohingya did indeed challenge the Govt, and were severely punished for it. Arguably, are still being punished for it.
I continue to suspect economic motive as a causative factor, religion being just a tool used by ambitious economic and political actors to mobilise the masses. Post war Myanmar was governed by dictatorships of the Left, more concerned with fighting both Christian and Buddhist Karen. The Tatmadaw conducted ethnic cleansing of Karen too. That was a period when US and the odd Australia SOF took themselves to the Thai Mynanmar borders to fight alongside Karen.
re Rohingya atrocity photos. Rohingya propaganda has been notoriously bad with many fake photos in circulation since 2012. After the mass exodus of refugees by boat, our PM infamously said 'Nope nope nope' when asked if Australia should take some of them. That undoubtedly encouraged the Tatmadaw to believe no action would be taken if even more severe measures were taken in the future. Turkey and Saudi [where there are some 400,000 Rohingya refugees, since the 1950s] stepped into the vacuum. The US offered to help those who'd reached Indonesia. The Rohingya leadership[s] capitalised on this and meetings were convened in Oslo with past Nobel winners. I thought the academic support that would result from tapping into that network would lead to more believable propaganda, as it has for previous Nobel winners. It didn't, and it harms their cause. There's probably a Nobel waiting for someone who mediates this conflict.
https://www.mmtimes.com/opinion/14925-government-misfires-on-oslo-conference.html
Posted by: mariner | 15 October 2017 at 02:05 AM