The Dastardly Russians Are Tampering with Our Democratic Elections! 1/2

It’s Them Pesky Russkies Again

The United States is up in arms against Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The Council on Foreign Relations affirmed shortly afterward that “foreign power interference” in the election had grave national security implications that touched off multiple federal inquiries questioning the security of the U.S. electoral process. The Council expressed fears that a rival power could influence an election’s results. That “rival power,” they maintained, was Russia.

The CFR is not alone. The CIA, FBI, and NSA issued a joint statement affirming that the Russian government conducted a “sophisticated campaign” to influence the 2016 election. According to the American intelligence establishment, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the effort in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and undermine the U.S. democratic process. “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” a declassified version of the 2016 report said. Russia denied these allegations.

Writing for The New Yorker,  Masha Gessen, National Book Award winner in 2017, casts some doubt on the official version of the election interference, affirming that Russian election hanky-panky, though it apparently existed, was more of a cacophony than a conspiracy, amateurish and unfocused, with virtually no impact on the election results.

In Any Case, Don’t Worry, the United States Still Leads the World in Manipulation of Other People’s Elections, Governments and Lives

Though most Americans might not notice, this latest election-tampering brouhaha comes accompanied by a generous dish of house-specialty hypocrisy, insofar as no other country in the world has promoted, sponsored, financed or organized so much election tampering and “regime change” around the world since the Second World War as the United States of America.

Just for the record, I want to list here some of the most flagrant examples of U.S. American interference in other people’s governments. The source of this material is an absolutely-necessary book written by William Blum and published in the year 2000 called Rogue State, A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. It’s necessary because it shines an authoritative light on issues and events that the American establishment– the government, the corporate media, and the military-industrial complex–has no interest in disseminating. Blum’s book, meticulously footnoted and indexed, with places, names and dates, is the best source I know of for this information (except his other book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II), expressed clearly and dispassionately.

The List of Beneficiaries of US Intervention Is a Long One

Let’s approach this list of victims of United States’ geo-meddling chronologically, starting with China, 1945. With the war against Japan recently concluded the U.S. jumped into the Chinese civil war on the side of Chiang-Kai-shek’s Nationalists against the Communist forces of Mao Tse Tung, even though Mao hade been a more valuable and loyal ally than Chiang in the fight against the Japanese in China. In fact, the United States employed Japanese troops against Mao, an expedient decision as the Japanese were handily still in China after their 1937 invasion. The Chinese adventure, in which the United States provided Chiang with heavy arms and aircraft, and supplied his armies by parachute drops from American planes, was to set a pattern for later CIA interventions in sovereign nations around the world.

This was a time when the CIA was still the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under Allen Dulles, the notorious cold warrior/geo-meddler. Just the introductory paragraph of Dulles’s Wikipedia biography will give you an idea of his style.

Allen Welsh Dulles; (April 7, 1893 – January 29, 1969) was an American diplomat and lawyer who became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest-serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état, Operation Ajax (the overthrow of Iran’s elected government), the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dulles was one of the members of the Warren Commission.

Liberated from the Nazis, Europe Receives American “Aid”

In 1947 it was France’s turn. Many (most?) of the heroic members of the French resistance were Communists, including many Spanish, who were valuable allies of the Americans during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the United States went to extreme lengths to deprive them of any post-war participation in the French government. Their efforts were many and various: financing the Socialist Party, the Communists’ principal electoral adversaries; sending American Federation of Labor (AFL) experts to subvert the Communists’ dominance of French labor unions; sponsoring gangs of Corsican thugs to bust up Communist strikes, burn down their offices and beat up and murder party members and strikers… The coup de grace was refusing much-needed aid to France until they had dismissed all their Communist government ministers.

The US Brings Democracy to the Mediterranean

Italy was next on the Americans’ list of countries to be “corrected.” Before the 1948 elections the US forced the Italian government to rid itself of its Communist and Socialist cabinet members in order to receive American economic aid. With all the countries in Europe devastated physically and economically, this deny-aid card was successfully played all over Europe. One suspects that the US-British “special relationship” dates from this time.

Part 2/2 coming soon

Read more rantings in my ebook, The Turncoat Chronicles.

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Author: Michael Booth

Michael Booth, the creator of TrumpAndAllTheRest.com, is a US-born publicist, author and online publisher who has lived in a Spanish village in the foothills of Sierra Nevada for the past five decades. Though better known abroad for his fine-art printmaking sites and online magazine, Booth's day job for the past decade and a half, until recently, was his communications agency, dedicated principally to designing and implementing Internet strategies for Spanish companies and institutions. It took him a long time to get out of publicity and into writing but it was worth the wait. View all posts by Michael Booth