Russiagate is mostly about the Democrats' xenophobia

It's weirdly ironic that the people who hate Trump for his racist xenophobia are are the ones most guilty of being racist xenophobes.

The recent McCarthyist witchhunt against Jill Stein has brought the anti-Russian xenophobia into clearer focus.

Now, the Senate Intelligence Committee has demanded that the Green Party fork over any and every document related to contacts with “Russian persons.” The request is the most disturbing reflection yet of the xenophobic politics of Russiagate. Imagine if the US government was investigating a third party politician for their contacts with “the Mexicans,” or “the Indians,” or any other foreign national group with a significant presence inside the US. An outcry would immediately ensue among liberal-minded Americans, protests by immigrant rights groups would likely erupt, and the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards would issue thunderous condemnation of the McCarthyite proceedings.

Oddly, the committee’s demand that Stein identify every Russian she spoke to in 2016 — apparently including Russian-Americans — has been greeted with almost total silence, if not the outright approval, of the national media. And ironically, those who have most heartily supported the investigation into Stein’s dealings with “Russian persons” are the Democrats who have united against Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and slammed his nativist diatribes.

The right-wing still leads the xenophobia race by miles (see immigration and anything muslim), but to see so-called liberals that hate Trump specifically for his racist xenophobia, are using racist xenophobia to attack him with, is just mind-blowing.
Or to put it another way:

Russiagate is helping him—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.

Of course these very same liberals refused to acknowledge the racism built into our GWOT, so maybe it isn't that surprising.

In a letter to the Senate, Stein’s lawyer, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, rebuffed the committee’s request, declaring that her campaign “will not participate in a hunt for the identification of persons based on nationality or descent.” Emphasizing the unconstitutional nature of the demand, Verheyden-Hilliard added that “in the United States there are millions of persons whose ancestry includes Russian heritage, rendering the request impossible to satisfy, aside from its impropriety and the chilling effect it would have on political speech and engagement in political activity.”

Good on Stein. I'm hoping that Democrats challenge her on this, so the xenophobia can be exposed in court for all to see.

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GreatLakeSailor's picture

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Compensated Spokes Model for Big Poor.

Azazello's picture

Depressing.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

The Aspie Corner's picture

The Donkey continues to ride the Elephant through what's left of the American China Shop.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

Bollox Ref's picture

Americans of Russian descent will be directed to various 'camps'.

The whole thing is ridiculous and plain weird.

Is J. A. Reid still 'disbelieving' the things she actually wrote? Good grief. In the word of our August Leader...'Sad!'.

I hope the neighbours don't mind the Imperial Russian Standard being flown again. We flag collectors are a subversive bunch. Once in a while, someone asks, and a history discussion gets going.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

jobu's picture

...about Russia-gate. Side effects include paranoia, loss of critical thinking, diarrhea, vomiting, loss of winnable elections, sudden onset Xenophobia and death.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG-8uZg2uV0]

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kharma's picture

can suck a dirty dick for all I care. Look how concerned she is about the environment. Fuck her.

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There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.. This...is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.--John Adams

Strife Delivery's picture

@kharma um what?

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Azazello's picture

@kharma

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

link

And while jamming communications as a self-defense measure isn't new, lately it's affecting AC-130 gunships operating in the area, according to the head of U.S. Special Operations Command.

"Right now in Syria, we're in the most aggressive [electronic warfare] environment on the planet from our adversaries," Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III said April 25 before an audience at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation's GEOINT 2018 Symposium.

"They're testing us everyday -- knocking our communications down, disabling our AC-130s, et cetera," Thomas said during his speech, using the jamming example to underline the need for more data security as the multi-domain battlespace expands.

drones too

The Russian military has deployed jamming tactics against US drones that have affected the US military's ability to operate in the region, NBC News reports.

US officials told NBC News that the Russian military has been jamming smaller US drones. The jamming is focused on the GPS systems of drones, which can result in things like the operators not knowing where the drone currently is, to more extreme results like crashes.

Department of Defense officials speaking to NBC News did not confirm if they lost any of the drones to crashes as a result of the jamming, but one official did say that the jamming is having an operational impact on military operations in Syria.

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Strife Delivery's picture

This entire episode has truly cemented in my undying hatred of anyone who calls themselves a Democrat.

Seriously.

Democrats arrogantly strut around like they are good people, while they have raped, tortured, and butchered tens upon tens of millions of people.

And right now, if you don't bow before the Democratic party, you are treasonous in their eyes. Yes, treason. Because if you vote third party, you are treasonous. If you voted Green, you are treasonous. Your right to vote for whomever you want does not exist in the eyes of Democrats. For Democrats, it is either vote Democrat or be treasonous.

If you didn't bow before Clinton, you were an agent of Russia. This is utter madness.

The frightening thing is that Democrats actually believe this shit. Tensions are worse than the Cold War and Democrats are ecstatic.

There have only been two organizations in human history who are either calling for the extinction of the human race or silently calling for it:

1) Fossil fuel corporations
2) Democrats

Seriously. The Democratic Party is actively pursuing a nuclear war with Russia. What exactly do fucking Democratic voters think is going to happen. That we just commit a nuclear genocide on Russia and the world is all peachy? No, we all die. We all fucking die.

Right now, besides fossil fuel corporations, the Democratic Party is the greatest threat to the survival of the human race.

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Much of themes and images against the Russians are direct echos of Nazi progaganda against jews and Russians. A German in 1940 would have easily understood and agreed with the genetic references.

The evolution of attacks have evolved into racism. Americans see race throught the lense of skin color and birth and don't see the evolution from xenophobia to racism. Nazi racism did not see the Jews and Russians (Slavs) as being a dispised ethnic group, but a subhuman race in the same way many Americans saw Africans and African-Americans. And the Nazis acted on it by waging a genocidial war against Jews and the Slavic East.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@MrWebster

The surrender of the Nazis was signed on May 8, 1945. Eleven days later, on May 19, "a military transport plane with windows blackened to hide its notorious cargo..." brought in Washington, D.C. the first Nazis, Herbert Wagner, and his two assistants "and then kept [them] hidden from immigration authorities".

The true number of Nazis planted in the US is impossible to know until the CIA opens its files. There were various programs with assorted code-names ("Overcast", "Paperclip", etc) designed to smuggle Nazi scientists (by the thousands) and (inexplicably) Nazi SS regulars (by the tens of thousands). It seems that the US militaries who were recruiting the Nazis after 1945 considered the SS as something similar to the US Marines, so they did their utmost to send them to the US.

Most of the older Nazis (scientists, etc) went straight to the US centers of power. Take the case of General Walter Dornberger. He was one of those responsible for the death of "At least 20,000 prisoners - many of the talented engineers who had been singled out for missile production...- [and who] were killed through starvation, disease, or execution..." Dornberger, after working for the US Air Force, went into the private industry and "eventually rose to be a vice-president in the Bell Aerosystems Division of the Textron Corporation... He died peacefully on June 1980."

The younger SS Nazis, who were brought to the US with their families (!), given free passage, board, emergency funds (with taxpayers money), and assisted to find jobs (at a time when American engineers were laid off), dispersed in the lower levels of the American society.

Did these Nazis, planted in the US society, influence it? The US government's "use of Nazis and collaborators in intelligence programs has left a mark on the life in the United States itself.

::

Noam Chomsky posed the right question: "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent-or denazification."

People do ask that question. It slips out all the time. They see the patterns.

But, what is Nazism? The most accurate answer to that is found in the four Indictment Counts of the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Counts:

1. Conspiracy to commit the crimes enumerated in the other three Counts.

2. Crimes against peace, i.e. the planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression.

3. War crimes, i.e. violations of the laws of war.

4. Crimes against humanity, i.e. exterminations, deportations, and genocide.

Of these counts, number 2 is considered the most important. "By 1939, the peoples of the civilized world had come to believe that the launching of aggressive war was a crime not only morally wrong but one that warranted the most severe punishment. (Bradley F. Smith, "Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg", Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1977, p. 17).

Those were the counts for the Nazis. Now, let us apply them (briefly) to the US:

Count 2: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan Iraq I, Iraq II (not to add Greece with 160,000 killed through a US proxy army in 1947-9).

Count 3: Vietnam "agent orange", Kosovo DU, Iraq I, Fallujah..., torture all over the planet since 1947.

Count 4: Genocides in Indonesia and East Timor.

Count 1: Conspiracy with the UK. to commit the crimes enumerated in the other three Counts.

::

The account above stopped counting in 2007. Since then, the evil acts of the US and its allies have touched the souls of every American. Without another Numenberg, US histories will be void of all knowledge of this. But somehow, the people will know because it is a part of them. If it stopped today, it would still take another century to wash society clean of it.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

@Pluto's Republic Amazing and disgusting story. It took roughly 5-6 years before the Unites States dealt with WWII refugees. The delay was because the republicans were worried that there would be too many Jews among the refugees. Finally in 1950 Republican Congress passed the DP Act, which Truman signed with a scathing rebuttal to gop anti-semistism that fanagled immigration rules to prevent Jews from coming into the country. I believe there was later a revised bill that allowed Jewish refugees to come into the country.

And the US treated these Nazis better than the refugees...

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snoopydawg's picture

‘Russians go after people with shady morals’, or how to capitalize on Russiagate

Democrat @SenWhitehouse declares in neoconspiracist Russiagate documentary: “Russians have a particular type of mark who they go after."
Imagine if he had said the same about any other national or ethnic group

“Russians have a particular type of mark who they go after,” Whitehouse said, explaining that Russians (just, in general?) like to target people with “shady morals” who are “amenable to bribery” and possess political connections. “I’ve just described Donald Trump,” Whitehouse says. “He was the perfect mark for the Russians.”

It wouldn’t be the first time a high profile US government figure made reference to the “Russians” and their shady ways. Last year, former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd that Russians were almost “genetically driven” to be untrustworthy. Fortunately for Clapper, no-one in the media called him out on the xenophobic comment – so it’s unlikely Whitehouse will face any backlash either.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg day, where ever you did it, that we need to put the red pill in the water supply and quick, yeah. Wish there truly was a way.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

@snoopydawg From what I have read about the "documentary", it is the movie version of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". I think someone noted that something like 30 people were interviewed and not one of them Russian I think two of the worst American spies for the Russians approached the Russians.

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snoopydawg's picture

@MrWebster

Active Measures review – middling doc on Russian election meddling
While there’s an impressive roster of talking heads, including Hillary Clinton, this exhaustive documentary struggles to move past outrage

Which is all a rather ambivalent way of saying that Bryan is extremely thorough in his research and collation of facts. He begins at the beginning of the beginning, with the turbulent circumstances of Vladimir Putin’s conception and birth into a Russia fraught with hardship. A portrait of Putin as a ruthless crime boss in the guise of an elected official promptly takes shape – Tony Soprano, but without the psychological conflict to earn him the empathy. He’s then posed as the architect of what the film touts as “the single largest intelligence operation in history”, a multi-decade scheme to get Donald Trump under the Kremlin’s thumb as a conduit for money and influence at the highest level of American authority.

Two years’ worth of newspaper headlines have told this story piecemeal, but seeing it all arranged just so communicates the enormity of the purported con. Bryan methodically charts the increasing Russian presence in Trump’s business and social lives, from the allegations of his allowing gangsters to use Trump Tower as their personal money laundromat up to the DNC email hack and even the Cambridge Analytica data-mining mischief. Trump is all fraying threads; yank on any one and it leads back to some para-governmental ghoul with a body count and a corruption charge or two. Bryan’s done his homework, mapping out an elaborate network of past wrongdoings with news clippings and TV footage. If the just deserts that this film demands ever come to pass, it will almost certainly be the most copiously photographed treason in a long and illustrious American tradition.

The Review

Though by the film’s conclusion, that outrage is the only thing he’s got. For all the mountains and mountains of evidence that Bryan has organized, it’s strictly circumstantial. As thorough as his reportage may be, this documentary was never going to be the thing to discover the smoking gun definitively proving Trump’s guilt. Without being able to break that news, the film can’t help but end on a note of inconsequentiality. More troubling still, Bryan compensates for the ebbing drama by ratcheting up the attack ad aesthetics (spooky inverse coloration, overtaxed musical cues, flurries of associative cross-cuts) to extremes approaching fear-mongering and paranoia-stoking.

Yeah, yawn.

@lizzyh7

Yeah, we need to give this some thought of how to get people to take the Red Pill.

IMG_2060.PNG

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

in that Real News video don't realize how much they look and act like your most rabid Tea Bagger. "Read the news." Sheesh. Scary.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur