On The Real News Network interview Where's the 'Collusion'? (Dec 27th 2017)
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A truly fascinating interview which reveals the alternate universe where the people are – as I like to say – infected with The Western Psychosis. Aaron Maté is an excellent journalist working with The Real News and writing at The Nation, an important commentator amid all the countless retweets out there of what I'd argue are self-serving frauds due to their inconsistencies, namely Max Blumenthal and Jeremy Scahill. Watch and listen as the Russiagate narrative falls apart piece by piece because Luke Harding works from a position of bias and Western liberal prejudice that relies on broad generalisations which eschew any rational analysis of facts. Listen carefully to a give away: just how many times does Harding use the extremely frustrating British idiosyncrasy of saying 'kind of' and 'sort of'? OMG! He even describes himself as a 'storyteller' which really says it all. Never mind that the investigation's conflicts of interest and malfeasance are off the charts, that isn't an issue.
How do you write books on this stuff and live in Moscow for years believing all sorts of unsubstantiated nonsense? You do it by being the bureau chief for The Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that deals with a topic like Syria by launching an abusive smear campaign against the people who traveled to Syria to interview people on the ground released from Western-sponsored terrorist captivity, that's how! You do it by living in a hermetically sealed chamber which keeps out opposing views. You attack Russian intelligence because you wholly accept without question what is told by NATO, British Military Intelligence, GCHQ, CIA, the Pentagon, the Guardian, the BBC etc.
The message we get from Russiagaters is that they have an overweening need to denigrate Russia and emerging multipolarity; to bolster the failing Western liberal order while overlooking the mindblowing levels of corruption and military expansionist criminal terrorism and censorship/surveillance overseen by it. Of course, Russia is not perfect, what country is? But last week, Aleppo was celebrating the first anniversary of liberation, citizens were holding portraits of Russian soldiers who died fighting for Syria, they had fought because the West launched unimaginable terror upon that country – have you ever seen a solemn procession of citizens in the Middle East or elsewhere carrying portraits of British or American soldiers?
A common theme with Russiagate is the impulse to depict Putin as a one-dimensional super villain bent on destabilising the West, apparently he's no more complex than that, in turn, anyone who puts forward a strong argument against the collusion story is perceived as carrying water for the Kremlin or are thought of as supporting Trump and so risk being labeled as 'alt-right' – further compounding this problematic situation because Russiagaters then enlarge the Alt-Right to include a diversity of rational, clear-sighted thinkers. Where will this end? The already dangerous neo-McCarthyist blacklisting and the smear campaigns can only increase as this battle led by arrogance and stupidity continues to expand on many fronts.
Rational statement: "there's no proof of it."
Response: "I don't accept that, I don't think that's the case"
... I guess uh, sort of, there's um, kind of, a wider context... kind of you should go to Russia and meet the tools of US intelligence there to hear how Putin murders journalists and the CIA has never murdered anyone, sort of um ah...