FuzzyLumpkins
10-22-2016, 08:30 PM
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/22/trump-wont-inherit-the-land-so-hes-sowing-it-with-salt-vladimir-putin-playbook/
To me, all of this was just one more step in the long, absurdist slog of the Russianization of this campaign. I’m not talking about Paul Manafort, or Trump’s real estate investors, or even his open invitation to the Russian intelligence services to hack U.S. computers in search of Clinton’s deleted emails. Even the Wikileaks-Trump-Putin triad feels natural at this point.
When Trump and his acolytes accuse protestors of being well-organized, paid saboteurs, I hear echoes of Kremlin television accusing people who came out in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square to protest for democracy in 2011 of working for the U.S. State Department. When Trump lies and injects conspirological plots into the mainstream, when I hear his supporters echo them back to me as gospel because “it’s on the Internet,” I feel like I’m back in Russia, listening to people tell me about George Soros and his nefarious plots. And then I hear about George Soros from Trump supporters who tell me that he has both created the Black Lives Matter movement and hacked American voting machines.
When I lived in Russia, every opposition group was afraid to take money from any organization even remotely connected to Soros, a name that is still code for shadowy, Semitic control over the duped masses, their money, and their screens. When Trump accuses others of what he’s doing himself — or what the Russians are doing on his behalf — I hear Vladimir Putin’s voice. When Trump talks about regulating the “dishonest” press or about jailing Clinton, these echoes become deafening.
But when Trump questions the peaceful transfer of power, when he, essentially, says that he will only accept the election results if he wins, when his supporters talk of assassinating Clinton if she becomes president, and of blood flowing in the streets if Trump doesn’t, the moment I’m transported to is not a Russian one, but an American one.
One of the first events I covered on returning to Washington from Moscow was Barack Obama’s 2012 inauguration. Amid the hundreds of thousands on the Mall on that frigid January morning, I watched Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander say, through gritted teeth, that the thing that makes America great is the peaceful transfer of power.
Some saw it as rude — what a grudging, petulant thing to say at an inauguration — but I stood there weeping at the beautiful simplicity of it. I had just watched pro-democracy protests in Moscow descend into Kremlin-provoked violence as Putin muscled his way into a third presidential term, one of questionable legality and through a series of elections that were actually rigged. Friends in Moscow were having their apartments searched; one was facing two years in prison and the loss of custody of her seven-year-old son for yelling during a protest. The parliament was swiftly passing laws cracking down on freedom of assembly and what was left of free speech.
And here I stood, watching a powerful man who hated the re-elected president, who had wished to see him lose, and would continue doing everything in his power to keep him from accomplishing anything in office. But Alexander was still conceding that this is how the voters had voted, and that this — not America’s vast nuclear arsenal or wealth — was what had made the country great. It was the thing that made, and still makes, our democracy different from others: that the peaceful, if grudging, transfer of power allowed us to channel our energies not into post-election violence that we see in, say, Bangladesh or Kenya, but into other, bigger things, like prosperity, security, or even a fight over rights and equality — because the basics were taken care of and were agreed upon.
That is the unnerving reality of 2016: it is the year of relitigating the basics, not just in the United States, but in the West in general. It is the year Britons decided to test whether Europe should really be free, whole, and at peace, essentially writing off the centuries of war that the European Union was designed to end. In the United States, thanks to Trump’s petulant poking of the Jenga-tower system of international relations, we’re debating things that have never previously been on the table, like a nuclear-armed Japan, coming to the aid of NATO allies, or a religious test for people entering the United States. There is now an open discussion of whether democracy is a stable form of government, or even all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not so much a reinvention of the wheel as it is a questioning of why it’s round, what those spoke things are, and does it really need a hub?
To me, all of this was just one more step in the long, absurdist slog of the Russianization of this campaign. I’m not talking about Paul Manafort, or Trump’s real estate investors, or even his open invitation to the Russian intelligence services to hack U.S. computers in search of Clinton’s deleted emails. Even the Wikileaks-Trump-Putin triad feels natural at this point.
When Trump and his acolytes accuse protestors of being well-organized, paid saboteurs, I hear echoes of Kremlin television accusing people who came out in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square to protest for democracy in 2011 of working for the U.S. State Department. When Trump lies and injects conspirological plots into the mainstream, when I hear his supporters echo them back to me as gospel because “it’s on the Internet,” I feel like I’m back in Russia, listening to people tell me about George Soros and his nefarious plots. And then I hear about George Soros from Trump supporters who tell me that he has both created the Black Lives Matter movement and hacked American voting machines.
When I lived in Russia, every opposition group was afraid to take money from any organization even remotely connected to Soros, a name that is still code for shadowy, Semitic control over the duped masses, their money, and their screens. When Trump accuses others of what he’s doing himself — or what the Russians are doing on his behalf — I hear Vladimir Putin’s voice. When Trump talks about regulating the “dishonest” press or about jailing Clinton, these echoes become deafening.
But when Trump questions the peaceful transfer of power, when he, essentially, says that he will only accept the election results if he wins, when his supporters talk of assassinating Clinton if she becomes president, and of blood flowing in the streets if Trump doesn’t, the moment I’m transported to is not a Russian one, but an American one.
One of the first events I covered on returning to Washington from Moscow was Barack Obama’s 2012 inauguration. Amid the hundreds of thousands on the Mall on that frigid January morning, I watched Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander say, through gritted teeth, that the thing that makes America great is the peaceful transfer of power.
Some saw it as rude — what a grudging, petulant thing to say at an inauguration — but I stood there weeping at the beautiful simplicity of it. I had just watched pro-democracy protests in Moscow descend into Kremlin-provoked violence as Putin muscled his way into a third presidential term, one of questionable legality and through a series of elections that were actually rigged. Friends in Moscow were having their apartments searched; one was facing two years in prison and the loss of custody of her seven-year-old son for yelling during a protest. The parliament was swiftly passing laws cracking down on freedom of assembly and what was left of free speech.
And here I stood, watching a powerful man who hated the re-elected president, who had wished to see him lose, and would continue doing everything in his power to keep him from accomplishing anything in office. But Alexander was still conceding that this is how the voters had voted, and that this — not America’s vast nuclear arsenal or wealth — was what had made the country great. It was the thing that made, and still makes, our democracy different from others: that the peaceful, if grudging, transfer of power allowed us to channel our energies not into post-election violence that we see in, say, Bangladesh or Kenya, but into other, bigger things, like prosperity, security, or even a fight over rights and equality — because the basics were taken care of and were agreed upon.
That is the unnerving reality of 2016: it is the year of relitigating the basics, not just in the United States, but in the West in general. It is the year Britons decided to test whether Europe should really be free, whole, and at peace, essentially writing off the centuries of war that the European Union was designed to end. In the United States, thanks to Trump’s petulant poking of the Jenga-tower system of international relations, we’re debating things that have never previously been on the table, like a nuclear-armed Japan, coming to the aid of NATO allies, or a religious test for people entering the United States. There is now an open discussion of whether democracy is a stable form of government, or even all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not so much a reinvention of the wheel as it is a questioning of why it’s round, what those spoke things are, and does it really need a hub?