Electoral
manipulation is nothing new
The myth of Trump’s ‘mate’ Putin swinging the election in
his favour has now become an accepted factoid in the mainstream media. The real
issue behind the public exposure of Hillary Clinton’s emails have, in the
meantime, been obscured under the mountains of speculation about Russian
interference. Julian Assange’s revelation
of how Clinton was involved in the process of taking weaponry
from Libya and sending it to Syria, and her generally hawkish attitude on the
Middle East has been well documented, but has, in the meantime, been well
buried.
However much the Russian state was actually involved in influencing
the outcome of the 2016 US election, it was actually Hillary Clinton who was doing
her best to sabotage that Presidential Election, according to another Wikileaks
release. It shows that Clinton campaign staffers bribed six Republicans to
‘destroy Trump’. The evidence includes an email from her campaign chairman John
Podesta discussing diverting Clinton campaign funds to various Republicans who
were secretly on the Clinton payroll.
Whether Putin and the Russian state were directly involved
in the hacking of her campaign team’s emails is still an open question, but the
rationale behind it could hardly have been to win the election for Trump
(surely a hubristic and fantasy goal anyway), but simply to undermine the
‘clean’ credentials of a hard-line, hawkish and establishment politician. The
fact that Trump was in the end elected has more to do with the underlying
factors of deprivation, anger and disillusion with mainstream politics by
millions of US citizens that anything the Russians could achieve by subterfuge.
Perhaps the most infamous attempt by the establishment and
secret services to rig an election was the infamous Zinoviev Letter. This
‘letter’ was a controversial document ‘exposed’ by the Daily Mail just four
days before the 1924 general election. It purported to be a directive from the
Communist International in Moscow to the British Communist Party suggesting
that the resumption of diplomatic relations (by a Labour government) between
the two countries would hasten the radicalisation of the British working class.
This scare tactic was intended to lose Labour the election and it appeared to
succeed admirably, as the Conservatives won an overwhelming majority.
In Iran in 1953 the CIA together with the British secret
services launched Operation Ajax and engineered a coup d’état
against the democratically elected, progressive and secular government of prime
minister Mossadegh. Mosaddegh had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company,
cancelling its oil concession and expropriating its assets. The West was
determined to prevent this happening. The coup was prepared by the placing of false
news stories in the press to the effect that Mossaddegh and his ‘communist
friends’ would undermine Islam, thus invoking the ire and outrage in an
overwhelmingly Muslim country.
In Italy and France after the Second World War with the
communists’ role in the resistance against the fascists garnering them much
respect and esteem, they appeared certain to win influential positions in
government once free elections were held. The Mafia (in Italy) and the Catholic
Church in both countries were mobilised to undermine the communists and a
re-invigorated left-led trade union movement. Under the former communist and then
avid red-baiter, Jay Lovestone, the US set up AIFLD (American Institute for Free
Labor Development). It was a covert arm of the US foreign policy establishment with
the aim of preventing the establishment of progressive unions in Europe after
the war. Not only did the organisation help mobilise the Church and press
against the communists, but nor did it shy away from arranging the murder of
leading left trade unionists through its Mafia henchmen.
On 15 July 1948, L’Osservatore Romano, the daily of the
Vatican State, published a decree which excommunicated those who propagate ‘the
materialistic and anti-Christian teachings of communism’, which was widely
interpreted as an excommunication of the Communist Party of Italy. The
excommunication extended to any Italian Catholic who was a communist candidate
in the parliamentary elections. This decree was actively supported by the
Christian Democratic Party which was actively promoted by the CIA. In 1949, the
Holy Office issued the Decree Against Communism, which excommunicated any
Catholic who joined or collaborated with the Communist Party. In a country with
a large population of devout Catholics, this policy was extremely effective.
Twenty years ago, Time magazine reported on the feats
of American political consultants who managed — much to the satisfaction of the
US government — to ensure Boris Yeltsin won re-election to the Russian
presidency.
The report was titled ‘Rescuing Boris,’ and bore a subtitle oddly similar to headline allegations two decades later. The sub-tile was: ‘The secret story of how four US advisers used polls, focus groups, negative ads and all the other techniques of American campaigning to help Boris Yeltsin win.’
The report was titled ‘Rescuing Boris,’ and bore a subtitle oddly similar to headline allegations two decades later. The sub-tile was: ‘The secret story of how four US advisers used polls, focus groups, negative ads and all the other techniques of American campaigning to help Boris Yeltsin win.’
While the mainstream media today scream ‘fake news’ and
dismiss the successes of alternative media’s reporting on corruption in the
Democrat Party and the significance of Hillary Clinton’s emails, by deeming it
all ‘Russian propaganda’, it would seem the entire country has forgotten US exploits
elsewhere. In fact, those American advisors literally meddled in the Russian
election of that year 1991 — and as TIME, itself, pointed out, changed the
course of the country’s politics forever.
The more recent hacking and sabotaging of the Iranian
nuclear programme by US and Israeli agents using the computer virus Stuxnet is
another example of blatant electronic US interference, and what about the
hacking of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel’s phone? All these examples are merely
the tip of the proverbial iceberg concerning Western interference in other
countries’ affairs, but memories are short and deliberately made so.