WHO READS YESTERDAY'S PAPERS?

Georges Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I hope that my readers find my posts useful, or at least entertaining.  But I’ve always assumed they had a limited shelf life – not ephemeral, exactly, but definitely focused on the events of the day. 

That’s why I was more than a little surprised last week, when a post I wrote back on August 6, 2018, suddenly drew comments from two people I’d never heard of.  They appear to be Trump fans, and they took issue with my criticism of the Dear Leader. 

Reader, I am condemned to repeat it.  And to elaborate on it.

I wrote that at the height of the post-war Red Scare, Americans were encouraged to believe that communist spies were everywhere.  Why, any of your co-workers, any of your neighbors, maybe even a member of your own family, might be on the Kremlin’s payroll.  If mommy is a commie, then you gotta turn her in.

I went on to argue that, in retrospect, the Soviet Union’s Boris-and-Natasha style agitprop was never likely to seduce American public opinion to any significant degree.  Sure, the Soviets were powerful.   But few Americans wanted to be like them.  Let the commissars boast about the record-breaking beet harvests and doubling their tractor production quotas.  America had TV and Elvis Presley.  We were cool.  They were ... the opposite of cool.

I also wrote that “When the Soviet Union broke up, and Russia no longer felt obligated to promote its ideology, they began to think more clearly about how to sabotage their chief geopolitical rival. Sabotage was much easier than conversion, and as the events of 2016 proved, it wasn’t difficult to introduce confusion and discord into the American political system.”

And, I might have added, into the UK, and elsewhere in Europe.  The so-called “American Century” is over, both literally and figuratively.  To be honest, maybe it’s for the best.  We meant well, at least most of the time.  But we got cocky.  We thought we could get away with interfering in the affairs of other countries.  And since it took a while – years in some cases, decades in others – for events to unfold, we could tell ourselves that everything would turn out OK. 

And yet somehow, things haven’t turned out OK.  In Asia, in Latin America, and in the Middle East, we’ve thrown our weight around since the end of World War II, with little to show for it except ill-will on all sides.  They resent us for casually interfering with their lives, and we resent them for resenting us.  And Vladimir Putin chuckles.  

I’m grateful to my two Deplorable critics for drawing my attention to that old post, because it foreshadowed a more recent observation by science fiction writer David Brin (link below) that I’ve intended to call to your attention.  Brin connected a couple of dots that I overlooked.  He wrote:

“After 70 years spent futilely trying to suborn the U.S. left, which generally saw through all the faux-egalitarian Leninist crap, Putin and his fellow commissars and KGB agents just dropped all the hammer-sickle stuff and re-branded themselves as billionaire-Christian mafia-oligarchs. And that was all it took, in order to hypnotize the entire U.S. right.”

After all, if you can’t trust billionaire-Christian mafia-oligarchs, who can you trust? 

I think it’s a little more complicated than that.  Putin understood the importance of creating dissension on the Left.  His 2016 fake news operation cost Hillary Clinton some progressive votes, and – with the American Right now subjugated – the Left will be the primary focus of Russia’s disinformation campaign this year.  I’ll write more about that soon.  In the meantime, you can read Brin’s full post here.   

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2020/01/at-heart-of-matter-ukraine-rapture-and.html