JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE NAVALNY AFFAIR MEETS AMERICA’S CORRUPT AND DISHONEST CORPORATE PRESS – A SUPPOSED NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST WRITES ABOUT TRUMP AND PUTIN AND THEIR THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY – THE AUTHOR’S WORDS ARE A SICKENING REGURGITATION OF COLD WAR RHETORIC – THE NEEDS ACTUALLY SERVED IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND IN THE FBI BY CONTINUING THE UGLY AND PREJUDICED GAME OF RUSSOPHOBIA – AMERICA IS FLIRTING WITH DISASTER WITH ITS B-52s NOW IN UKRAINE IMITATING BOMBING RUNS TOWARDS RUSSIA WHILE ITS PRESS RUNS INFLAMATORY TRASH ABOUT THE COUNTRY – A LUNATIC PLACE WHERE YOU CAN’T REJECT TRUMP’S MUSSOLINI IMITATION WITHOUT BUYING INTO DANGEROUS CLAIMS ABOUT RUSSIA FROM SELF-SERVING BUREAUCRACIES LIKE THE FBI AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

John Chuckman


COMMENT ON AN ARTICLE BY SAMANTHA VINOGRAD IN CNN (CNN DOES NOT ALLOW COMMENT)


“Trump is parroting the Kremlin line on the Navalny poisoning”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/07/opinions/navalny-poison-trump-putin-vinograd/index.html


Just the title of the article makes me want to puke.

The words are from the 1950s and the height of the Cold War with all of its ignorant bellowing. They are the stuff of Senator Joe McCarthy, the closet drunk who terrified many decent people with his obscene efforts to build a career.

They are the kind of crap J Edgar Hoover regularly deposited in television appearances and ghost-written books. Hoover, a man who was a known manipulator and liar – much like Trump, always focused on the continuation of his career – a man who kept many American politicians, Congressmen and Presidents, terrified with his secret-and-confidential files and the occasional suggestion to one of them in private that he was aware of something unpleasant.

That’s some standard for national journalism, but this is America, after all, center of a brutal world empire that it lies about daily, its lies being dutifully reported as facts by the corporate press, so it’s no big deal. The same old, same old.

I don’t like to appear ever to defend Trump, a politician I genuinely loathe, but my regard for decent politics and foreign policy is too high to allow an attack as shabby as that contained in Ms. Vinograd’s words.

She tells us,” The German government said last Wednesday that Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok group -- a Soviet-era chemical weapon. The same agent was used in a March 2018 attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury.”

The German government has yet to produce an ounce of proof for its incendiary accusation, just as Theresa May’s pathetic British government never produced an ounce of proof about Sergei Skripal. Indeed, Skripal and his daughter have disappeared under the loving care of British security services. No one has seen them, and no one can speak to them.

Very high standards indeed of democratic process and transparency of claims.

But when it comes to Russia – and now, Increasingly, to China – any vicious accusation is perfectly acceptable. The effort is on a par with American B-52s now flying in Ukraine and making simulated bombing runs towards Russia. It just does not get more dangerously stupid.

Ms. Vinograd regards this as an accusation: “…in response to a question about the poisoning of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, President Trump said the US had no proof yet about what had happened.” Had it occurred to her that even a habitual liar like Trump occasionally says something true?

There is no proof. Nor do I think there can be any proof because the Navalny Affair has all the hallmarks of a contrived event.

See:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/john-chuckman-comment-more-on-the-navalny-poisoning-in-russia-german-authorities-now-claim-the-poison-used-was-novichok-military-nerve-agent-which-also-played-the-role-o/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2020/08/28/john-chuckman-comment-the-alexei-navalny-affair-none-of-the-facts-that-we-have-so-far-support-assertions-of-poisoning-this-is-beginning-to-resemble-british-prime-minister-theresa/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/john-chuckman-comment-the-navalny-affair-belarus-claims-it-intercepted-a-conversation-between-berlin-and-warsaw-which-shows-the-affair-was-fabricated-transcripts-and-voice-recordi/

Equally important, there was no motive for the Russian government to poison Navalny. And doing so at this time only could work against its own interests. God, we have one of the cleverest, calmest, most pragmatic statesmen of a generation, and people like Ms. Vinograd make accusations which require us to assume he has lost all sense of himself.

Russia had nothing to gain from the death of Navalny while America, indeed, has a good deal to gain from the appearance of an attempt on his life.

Navalny is not an important figure in Russia. He is no threat to Putin who still enjoys wide public support. The Western press much inflates Navalny. Many Russians actually regard him as rather a flake.

And from Putin's point of view, this is a terrible time for something like this to happen.

It could endanger the Nord Stream II project, the second Russian-German natural gas pipeline, which the US long has desperately tried to kill.

America doesn’t want a relationship to build between Russia and Germany, a relationship which has immense potential for both countries, marrying German industry to Russian resources. No, America still wants it still to be the 1950s with the threat of the USSR and the Red Army, both of which haven’t existed for thirty years. Because America simply wants to dominate Europe, a major potential competitor and rival, just as it wants to intimidate Russia and dominate so much of the world.

Chancellor Merkel has refused to kill the pipeline despite furious demands from the United States, including from Donald Trump in his Presidential role as frontman for the American Dark State (the Pentagon and CIA). Germany needs the pipeline for its energy future. Germany also resents American interference in its internal affairs, interference recently backed by threats of “crippling” sanctions.

This Affair puts Ms. Merkel in a very awkward position. Does anyone think Russia would do that? Ms. Merkel and Putin actually get along well. She speaks Russian, and he speaks German. Trump can’t even speak English.

Ms. Vinograd says, offering no examples or proof, “Trump's been doing PR for Putin for a long time, and his actions pose a direct threat to our national security.”

I suggest rather that journalists the calibre of Ms. Vinograd are threats to national security.

She doesn’t know what she is talking about, yet she makes huge and inflammatory claims.

America has become such a lunatic country that you cannot reject Trump’s Mussolini imitation without buying into dangerous claims about Russia from the FBI and the Democratic Party, both organizations with long histories of dishonesty and manipulation.

There can never be enough Russophobia for such organizations. It provides people who have nothing to say with something to talk about. It provides excuses for failure. It provides the impetus of a threat to continue the good work of expanding America’s brutal empire by spending trillions on the military and security services.