Chris Hedges of Salon Acting As Putin Lawyer Pro Bono-
Chris Hedges of Salon Acting As Putin Lawyer Pro Bono-
(*A kind of introduction to my upcoming article on the strategic threat of Russian-steered third party operations.)
This Salon article by Chris Hedges, which is largely a collection of Kremlin talking points on Ukraine, is carefully curated disinformation, which as per standard ID format, includes a pile of truthful facts to make his arguments plausible in the minds of his majority progressive readership, but is at least enough to provoke substantial elements of doubt or outright opposition to US policy among that easily duped ideological strata of left/reactionary knee-jerk populists.
From the time Joe Biden announced his candidacy there has been a vile hate campaign against him coming from this grouping of Russian assets in the left/progressive milleu. Thankfully they are not a majority, just an embedded cell of long cultivated voices running Russian psywar.
Just in case you are wondering how I drew the conclusion from his article that he is bought and paid for by the Russian government, that's easy. I didn't need the article to prove anything. According to his CV on his profile page, he was an employed host of "Russia Today's" program "Contact," before that network was banned in the US under the last round of US sanctions. So, given that RT is a subsidiary of Russian State TV, and it's management are State employees, he is and has been "theirs" for some time, if not for the entire three or more decades he has operated as a journalist.
And just to make it personal, two long-time former associates and ex-friends from my old think tank were "turned" by Russian intelligence during their several year long run of interview appearances on RT, beginning no later than 2008. They sounded just like Hedges in their defenses of Putin's actions in Georgia in 2009, and annexing of Crimea in 2014. They too issued the siren call to the US "anti-war" left in order to undermine support for these invaded nations, citing America's history of lies to drag us into "forever wars." And to be clear, that term, "forever wars" is a Prigozhin/Putin scripted buzzword which you will hear coming from a wide variety of Russian assets, from former "faux-progressive" Tulsi Gabbard, to "Mar-a-Lago" Taylor Greene, two people who have an FSB "Seal of Approval" monogrammed on their underwear.
Some people might bite on much of what Hedges serves up here, especially those who are aware that we actually have been lied to by our government with respect to our military involvements over many years. That is how propaganda is designed. It plays upon a pre-existing condition of crippling cynicism, of rage, anger, victimization, distrustfulness, and mindless skepticism. Their message is to sell us a package of credible sounding disinformation which on the surface appears to fit the patterns of events past, and therefore induces a degree of "doublethink" on those matters which were previously our bedrock of knowledge, based on long ago proven points of reference.
The incitement of doubt in the very things we have known to be true, and as well scientifically verifiable, followed by paralysis, is the point of Russian disinformation. It's a subtle form of gaslighting which sneaks up on us, and poisons our relationship to our own acquired knowledge. Psywar and disinformation makes its gains on the margins, chipping away at those things we do know to be true, and introducing confusion and distraction in its place. Aside from voter suppression and gerrymandering, it is the most effective weapon in a quietly run war against Democratic unity, which takes its worst toll on our resolve to maintain our own mission orientation. Which is to rid the world of the Putin/Trump menace.
For example, take the extreme case in assuming that everything Hedges says is true, that the Biden administration are "war pimps" who have joined a long list of reckless lying warmongers willing to waste hundreds of thousands of human beings to prop up an undemocratic regime in pursuit of geopolitics and resource grabbing. (Hedges' characterizations, not mine) If true, what does that mean for us? What does it imply when he says "Putin is a war criminal, but not our worst enemy, rather, the war pimps are," meaning of course Joe Biden? It follows then that we should agree to a partition of Ukraine, remove the undemocratic Zelensky and reinstall the "democratically elected" Yanukyovich party, (installed with help from Russian agent Paul Manafort) the fascist Putin puppets ousted in 2014.
What also follows within the bizarro Hedges universe, is that the US should act to revoke or deny any recent or future applications by nations who wish to join NATO, because these are all to be denounced as "provocations against Russia." And likewise, since progressives can't ever trust Biden "the war pimp," they should stay home or go third party in protest in 2024. So, sure enough, these are some things which Hedges insists upon as being needed in his piece, none of which is acceptable in the real world.
And we all know who will benefit from these "positions" in a likely return to the White House, just as it happened in 2016, thanks to the Russian engineered Green Party candidacy of Jill Stein, and operations to use the "Never Hillary" progressives to depress the Democratic vote. Therefore, I'm not wasting my energy going "tit for tat" with "facts" in trying to refute Hedges' arguments, because they are made in bad faith with malign intentions.
The truth is that Putin's invasion was not provoked by Ukraine's desire to join NATO. It is a long term project which is eliminationist in character, genocidal in intent, and motivated by an insane religious prophecy in the Russian Orthodox Church known by the term, "The Third And Final Rome," which believes that the Russian empire will become the seat of world Christianity, and the decadent West will be destroyed in a rain of fire. The incorporation of "Kiev Rus" back into the Russian empire, "Ukrainian free" in the same sense that Hitler wanted Europe "Jew free" is what is behind this war. Military, economic, and political considerations all are secondary to this underlying cultural imperative which demands the heads of Ukrainians as the necessary condition for fulfillment of their god-given destiny. And to the rest of the world, they lie and say it is about their security. A religious cult is running this war, which happens to be in league with another like-minded one, white Christian nationalism on the US side.
(For those who want some source links on any of the previous background, go to my blog and type "Jill Stein" and "progressives" in the search bar. Also "Third Rome")
So, in the US, you have a tacit alliance of extremist so-called "anti-war" progressive pundits on the left, with the MAGA/Freedom Caucus anti-Ukraine Putin cheerleaders on the far right, joining hands in effect to pull the rug out from President Biden, to reinstall Russia's favorite, Donald Trump.
Of course, Hedges and his crew know they could never get away with pushing Trump, DeSantis, or any other so-called anti-war Republican while still maintaining their phoney "progressive" credentials. There is only one "anti-Ukraine," pro-Putin, supposedly progressive Democratic candidate running against Biden who could do some real damage by splitting the party. That would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And as we all know, he is no Democrat and no progressive, as he is hooked up with Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and the David Icke cult, which is so bent they make QAnon seem like Scientific American. And no small part of his resume is his ongoing opposition to Ukraine's President Zelensky, and advocacy of Putin's "peace plan" which is the dismemberment of Ukraine. His talking points are written in Cyrillic.
Mark my words, that's what this grouping will align with, for the sole purpose of demoralizing enough Democrats to turn them against Biden, with the goal to suppress the Democratic turnout in November of 2024. That is the operation. They will mix in a handful of others, but RFK Jr. is the Russian horse in the race. I also know this because the documented Russian assets who currently run my former organization are also puffing RFK Jr. That is a virtual "red dye" test.
When reading slick articles such as Hedges, with the slithering snake-like weaving of facts with disinformation and propaganda, it is vital to read between the lines to figure out where and who this is coming from, and why now. "Oh, but I like some of his positions" some folks might respond. Well, I'm sorry, we are in a war to save democracy at home and abroad, or what remains of it. If it's positions you want, read the "Kama Sutra." Any "position" which doesn't end up with a Joe Biden landslide means we all will get it in the end.
Let's tell Putin's lawyer to at least "come out" and admit who he works for, and meanwhile we should make sure we re-elect Joe Biden, then we can all get to work making him the President we want and need him to be through our activism. That is what real democracy is. If you are angry with Joe, or have big-time disagreements, we can sort it out AFTER he is re-elected and MAGA is eating dirt sandwiches. Anyone who disagrees with me on this perspective is not going to enjoy what will be the focus here going forward, and should probably migrate someplace else.
A note--
For those who doubt Hedges really wants to reinstall Trump, here is his piece from March, in which he argues that Trump's prosecutions are not due to his crimes, but because he has disrupted "the dominant political order" of the ruling establishment. He argues Trump's crimes are no worse than other US Presidents for which they were not prosecuted, in effect, supporting the MAGA narrative that Trump is the victim of political targeting. All the while maintaing the veneer of an anti-war progressive.
This guy is bad news. Russian delivered bad news.
