There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts.<\/p>\n
But now he has won, the same media outlets are cheerleading the establishment\u2019s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of a Trump presidency. That campaign is being headed by the failed candidate, Hillary Clinton, after a lengthy\u00a0softening-up operation by\u00a0US intelligence agencies, led by the CIA.<\/p>\n
According to the prevailing\u00a0claim, Russian president Vladimir Putin stole the election on behalf of Trump (apparently by resorting to the US playbook on psy-ops). Trump is not truly a US president, it seems. He’s\u00a0Russia’s\u00a0placeman\u00a0in the White House \u2013 a Moscovian candidate.<\/p>\n
An assessment of\u00a0the losing side’s claims should be considered separately from the issue of who won the popular mandate. It is irrelevant that\u00a0Clinton gained more votes than Trump. For good or bad, the US has operated an inherently unrepresentative electoral college since the 18th century. That has provided plenty of time to demand electoral reform. Concern about the electoral college now, only because it elected Trump, is simply ugly partisan politics, not political principle.<\/p>\n
Launching last week what looked like a potential\u00a0comeback, Clinton stepped up the establishment\u2019s attack\u00a0on the result. She argued that Putin had personally directed the hacking operation that lost her the presidency. He had sought to foil the wishes of the US electorate in revenge for her claims\u00a0in 2011, when\u00a0Secretary of State, that Russia\u2019s parliamentary elections had been rigged.<\/p>\n
\u201cPutin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,\u201d Clinton told campaign donors<\/a>\u00a0at meeting in New York.<\/p>\n Clinton\u2019s allegations, of course, did not arrive in a vacuum. For weeks the CIA and other intelligence agencies have been making evidence-free claims\u00a0that Russia was behind the release of embarrassing emails from the Democratic party leadership. The last hold-out against\u00a0this campaign, James Comey, the head of the FBI, was reported late last week to have caved in\u00a0and joined the anti-Putin camp.<\/p>\n The Washington Post quoted CIA director John Brennan saying<\/a>: \u201cEarlier this week, I met separately with [the FBI\u2019s] James Comey and [director of national intelligence] Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election.\u201d<\/p>\n Craig Murray, a former British ambassador turned whistleblower on British government collusion in torture, has said he personally received<\/a> the leaked emails on behalf of Wikileaks. The data came, he said, not from Russian security agencies, or even from freelance Russian hackers, but from a disillusioned Democratic party insider. Russia experts in the US have similarly discounted<\/a> the anti-Putin claims, as have<\/a> former US intelligence agents.<\/p>\n But either way, what is being overlooked\u00a0in the furore is that none of the information that has come to light about the Democratic party was false. (Though the US intelligence services did indeed try to make that\u00a0claim initially). The emails are real and\u00a0provide an accurate account of the Democratic party’s anti-democratic machinations, including efforts to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s challenger.<\/p>\n If Russia did indeed seek to influence the election by releasing truthful information that made Clinton and her allies look bad that would be far more legitimate interference than the US has engaged in against countless countries around the globe. For decades the US has been actively involved in using its military\u00a0might\u00a0to overthrow regimes in Latin America and the Middle East. It has also compromised the sovereignty of innumerable states, by sending killer-drones into their airspace, manipulating their media and funding\u00a0colour revolutions.<\/p>\n The NSA is not archiving every bit of digital information it can lay\u00a0its hands on for no reason. The US seeks global dominance, whether\u00a0the rest of the globe\u00a0wants\u00a0it or not.<\/p>\n The corporate media have been lapping up the CIA\u2019s evidence-free allegations as hungrily as an underfed kitten. Not only have they been credulously regurgitating the dubious claims of the same US intelligence agencies that knowingly spread lies about Iraq\u2019s WMD, but they have added their own dangerous spin to them.<\/p>\n The media have suddenly woken up to the supposed threat to western democracies posed by \u201cfake news\u201d. The implication is that it was \u201cfake news\u201d that swept Trump to power. A properly informed electorate, on this view, would never have made such a patently ridiculous choice as Trump. Instead, Clinton would have been rightfully\u00a0crowned president.<\/p>\n \u201cFake news\u201d, of course, does not concern the systematic deceptions promoted by the corporate media. It does not include the demonstrable lies\u00a0\u2013\u00a0like those Iraqi WMDs \u2013 spread by western governments and intelligence agencies through the corporate media. It does not even refer to the press corps\u2019 habitual reports \u2013 demonstrating a seemingly gargantuan gullibility \u2013 that take at face value the endless state propaganda against Official Enemies, whether Cuba, Venezuela, Libya or Syria. Or Russia and now Trump.<\/p>\n No, \u201cfake news\u201d is produced only by bloggers and independent websites, and is promoted on social media. Those peddling “fake news” are writers, journalists and activists whose pay packets do not depend on continuing employment by western state-run media like the BBC, billionaire proprietors like Rupert Murdoch, or global corporations like Times-Warner.<\/p>\n It is worth noting that the leaked\u00a0Democratic emails, whether the leaking\u00a0was done by Russia or not, were\u00a0certainly not “fake news”. They were\u00a0documented truth. But the leaks are\u00a0being actively conflated with “fake news”.<\/p>\n There have always been patently ridiculous stories in marginal, and not so marginal, mainstream media,\u00a0whether it was\u00a0reports of Elvis coming back from the dead or the millennium computer bug that was going to bring civilisation to an end when we entered the year\u00a02000. \u00a0That problem has not substantially changed, it has simply moved on to new platforms like social media.<\/p>\n Much more significantly, the systematic deceptions perpetrated by corporate media for many decades have left swaths\u00a0of western publics\u00a0distrustful and cynical. Social media has only added to\u00a0widespread\u00a0alienation because it has made it easier to expose to readers these mainstream deceptions. Trump, like Brexit, is a symptom of the growing disorientation and estrangement felt by\u00a0western\u00a0electorates.<\/p>\n But the claim of “fake news” does usefully offer western security agencies, establishment politicians and the corporate media a powerful weapon to silence their critics. After all, these critics\u00a0have no platform other than independent websites and social media. Shut down the sites and you shut up your\u00a0opponents.<\/p>\n The\u00a0campaign against a Trump presidency will exploit claims of foreign, hostile interference in the US election as a pretext to crack down on homegrown dissent. Putin is not waging a war on US democracy. Rather, US democracy is proving itself increasingly inconvenient to those who expect\u00a0to dictate electoral\u00a0outcomes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result. A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts. But now he has won, the same media […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,6,9],"class_list":{"0":"post-2354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-corporations","8":"tag-media-criticism","9":"tag-security-state"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}CIA’s evidence-free claims<\/h3>\n
The ‘fake news’ threat<\/h3>\n
Shutting down dissent<\/h3>\n