"Russian Hacking", a dangerous delusion
by Kit
The Guardian published this short opinion piece today, its headline reads:
America lost a cyberwar to Russia in 2016. When will we have truth?
Refuting the stale claims repeated in the headline, and expanded upon in the prose, is but the work of a moment. Hitchens’ razor states that any claim made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. A Yale professor should know that. Therefore the refutation of the claim “Russia hacked the election” can be made in three simple words: No, they didn’t.
Job done. I consider the article dealt with. But now we have to deal with the undertone. Now we have deal with why this article is scary.
The scary part of this article isn’t the war-like talk about Russia.
The scary part isn’t that this seemingly delusional man is apparently a professor at one of the most auspicious institutes of learning in the Western world (although, that is cause for some concern).
The scary part isn’t an elitist “academic” sweepingly dismissing the electoral process of his own country, and ignoring the majority will of his countrymen.
No, the scary part is that he really, really means it. This isn’t propaganda, in the old sense of that word. This isn’t misinformation to spread an agenda. This is full-blown delusion. He genuinely believes the Russians are at “cyber war” with America.
To be crystal clear about this – there is literally ZERO evidence to support this. The Mueller investigation is limping along, revealing absolutely nothing (except that the FBI wanted Hillary to win). The Steele dossier is revealed to have been paid for by the DNC.
There is no evidence. And yet he believes.
Russia has become the great, Orwellian “enemy”. The unseen force behind all our ills. Russian trolls are to blame for Brexit (even though they’re not), and Catalonia (again, untrue) and Donald Trump. Russian trolls were even blamed for hacking the winter Olympics.
This is scary. Scary because it demonstrates that the liberal elite of the USA, and its vassal states, have totally lost their minds. They live in a fantasy world, an un-reality. And they will believe anything that is convenient, anything that supports their un-reality, even if it puts them on a path to real war.
That should terrify everybody.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
This Timothy Snyder is a deranged Zionist.
Emphasis on deranged.
“Hitchens’ razor states that any claim made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
I haven’t heard that one but it’s an excellent motto.
It’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked (by Russia), and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
— Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Julius Caesar warned about political leaders who can all too easily manipulate the citizenry to their bidding by manufacturing crises that purportedly threaten national security and making popular appeals to patriotism.
The big problem of accusing somebody of something without any evidence is that for the accused ,it presents a case of proving innocence ,in effect ,an impossibility .That is why in a court of law ,one is innocent until proven guilty.
We certainly do live in a world today where everything seems to be upside down.
It appears delusional to believe either narrative. Regimes such as the US and Russian administrations are hardly in the business of propagating truth unless it serves their purpose, a purpose we can only guess. Given the layers of deceit and duplicity from all who claim our interest is it any wonder such a circus exists?
It’s not a question of believing. Factually and objectively the “Russian narrative” is closer to the truth, not because Russians don’t lie but because they don’t need to in order to win the propaganda war these days.
Total farce. Mccarthyism was ridiculed for decades and now its embraced. The article spells out how its dangerous. Russian hacking propaganda narrative will be used to censor independent media aka grass roots real progressives. In fact it already is. All the social medias are seeing mass censorship.
Totally bizarre moral equivalence. The Putin Government is nowhere near as mendacious, hypocritical and hyper-belligerent as the regime in Thanatopolis DC.
Anyone know what war Timothy is referring to as a ‘win’ when he writes;
”The problem today is that the United States has not just won a war, but lost one. ”
I’m puzzled.
@jammy. You are rightly puzzled. That sentence is meaningless. Below is a picture of an illustrious Yale graduate famed for his inability to repeat a simple English proverb correctly.
I used to blame that student (or rather, pity him for mental deficiency). But your sample of Snyder’s prose suggests that coherent English is not necessarily the strong point of a Yale professor either.
There is nothing really new about delusional people – in elite institutions or anywhere else. Most people are not deliberate liars but they can convince themselves that something is true even if they have a niggling feelings of doubt. Especially if holding a certain belief benefits them personally or professionally, or not holding it harms them or their ability to make a living in their chosen field. It is true that the claims the DoS and US/UK intelligence agencies make about Russia are false or highly exaggerated and no hard evidence supporting them has been produced. The accusers can’t even make up their minds about what Russia is supposed to have done…”hack” the DNC, conspire to swing the 2016 election in favour of Trump, influence the election via extremely powerful subversive Facebook memes…or all three. It is demonstrably true that the US has done, and continues to do, far worse… Read more »
@Eric. “While rank corruption, undermining all within, infects unseen”. UN Statement on Extreme Poverty and the Lack of Human Rights in the USA:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533
It’s not just the Graun. Below, fresh from the Mailonline (just the beginning of the article, which gets more and more wild-eyed and foaming as it goes on). As I see it, the problems are: a) a lot more people read the Heil than the Graun – though admittedly they might not get past the bashings, murders, starlet bikini pix and celebrity who’s-dunnit-with-whom stories; b) it’s nevertheless dangerous background noise which undoubtedly seeps into what passes for consciousness in Heil readers; and c) as the article says (despite the weird syntax), British MPs are being fed this slop, sorry, ‘research’. Here it is anyway. Does Off-Graun have an official Daily Heil policy? Russian propaganda about Brexit had more impact on Twitter than the Leave campaign, new study claims • Research by 89up said Kremlin-backed channels pumped out pro Brexit article • Found channels RT and Sputnik ran articles viewed up… Read more »
We don’t have an official Daily Mail policy, but we cover all media
The Netherlands now has a Russiagate of its own, as the Dutch foreign minister Halbe Zijlstra has been caught lying about Putin and now faces increasing pressure to resign. He claimed that in 2006 he was personally present in Putin’s private dacha when he was working for Royal Dutch Shell. There he claimed to have heard Puting talk about his desire for a resurgance of a Greater Russia, which in Putin’s own words (according to Zijlstra) would include Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states and preferably Kazakhstan. Zijlstra repeatedly used this anecdote during his political career to stir up fears of Russian military agression, but now it turns out that he has never set foot in Putin’s dacha. The ever-revolving door between Royal Dutch Shell and the Dutch poltical elite tells you all you need to know about why Dutch foreign policy is always so eager to undermine Russian interests: western… Read more »
Royal Dutch Shell — a Rothschild shell company, like British Petroleum, and the United States Federal Reserve.
It doesn’t seem to be up on the current UK Guardian opinion page anymore!
Though you can still do a web search to find it on their website.
Maybe they’ve figured what a shocking journalistic embarrassment the opinion article is?
Normally opinion articles stay around for days but slowly migrate down the page.
The new gem article is about the benign wisdom of George Soros (:-))
They’re making up this stuff thick and fast today.
Maybe trolling their readers is some cunning way of generating extra clicks to raise desperately advertising revenue?
The paper must be deeply into its final death throws to wilfully destroy is credibility and blatantly stoop so low.
I am not convinced they do believe it anymore, it is just toxic to careers to come clean, so everybody is locked into the ridiculous charade.
It happens with everything in places where you are sacked for not being omnipotent every day of your life.
Clinton is finished anyway: she lost to an anti-establishment woman groper. That takes serious talent in election losing….
The problem is all the folks in the Democratic tent who think they are not finished but are bound up in Russia hating.
The best solution is for a third candidate to emerge for 2020 who obliterates the DNC machine so badly that the brand is finished.
Then America could start again……and the world could relax. Maybe….
From what I have observed they do believe it, simply because, as human beings, it’s almost impossible to exist in a group situation wherein the lies you need to tell are acknowledged as such. The only way the group can sustain the moral authority to keep lying is if they agree to also believe the lie.
The goal, or purpose/raison d’etre of the organisation seems to also be a very powerful propellant. Zygmunt Beauman wrote about this in Holocaust where the overriding aim was for efficiency (evil really is banal). In schools all over Britain, teachers truly believe that the only option for success is to enable students to get as many GCSEs at the highest grade possible come what may. The quality of what’s being taught, the behavioural enforcement that’s needed, the cost to the mental health of students and teachers alike, the lack of a time or space to address sexual harassment/abuse, the indoctrination to support totalitarianism, etc., etc., are not ‘seen’ and woe betide anyone who does try to address these issues. The aim, the goal, the end of the race is to be frantically and hysterically obtained and the devil take the hindmost – and, of course, he does.
What? You mean a mass murder, the Butcher of Libya, the person that voted for the Authorization to Use Force in Iraq, and was in the minority of her party lost to somebody who is supposedly a woman groper?
Oh, how horrific that a MASS MURDERER didn’t win. Just horrific! How horrible.
I see you have your priorities in order.
Hey, let me guess, you were out whining and moaning when Trump placed a temporary ban on refugees on 7 nations, but sat on your hand and tongue when Obama was bombing 5 of those nations, after he won the Nobel Peace of Crap Prize..
HA, ha, ha. This just shows how internet misinterpretation runs riot. 1) For your information, I received death threats back in 2002 for being contemptuously anti Iraq war. So my priorities about warmongering are superbly high in opposing them loudly, contemptuously, vigorously and with disregard to personal safety and prosperity. 2) My views on Obama have been clearly documented as ‘what a pity he traded on his black skin then was just like all the whiteys before him’. Do not dare say the three Republican Presidents before Trump were not warmongers…..I think you would be laughed out of court claiming they were not white. 3) Depleted uranium in Fallujah? REPUBLICAN GENOCIDE. Never, ever, ever moralise about Democrats vs Republicans where inhuman behaviour is concerned. AMERICANS murder inhumanely, period. Pathetic tribal ‘with me or against me’ nonsense as you have posted gets no-one anywhere. And if we are arguing actual vs… Read more »
Let’s say Trump is guilty of everything he’s been accused of.
Who cares? The Butcher of Libya was the alternative.
Both the Republican and Democratic party are against Trump, so is the corporate media, and the intelligence agencies, and the Neocons.
He couldn’t possibly have a higher endorsement than that.
At the worst, he’ll just be another Neocon fascist dirtbag – which is exactly what he ran against.
In that case the American Electorate have no choice
You do understand the ‘woman groper’ has just joined that exclusive ‘mass murderer’ club, don’t you? You cannot become US president without being a pentagon and war lobby shill. You will be removed by force if you somehow miraculous do achieve this feat. Nothing interferes with their profits.
I would speculate (easily) 50,000+ people (men, women and children) killed under ‘woman gropers’ presidency to date. They are all scum. Why people defend one pos over another pos is beyond me. Tribal. Have to back the winner. Look at me I support a ‘winner’.
Trump, Clinton, Cruz (the Reps preferred candidate, a religious lunatic), Pence (a religious lunatic) et al are pos. Line their pockets well halfwits cheer them on.
The president doesn’t control foreign policy. The deep state does.
The use of the Trump presidency is the exposure of who is pulling the strings. Wouldn’t have had that with Clinton.
In 2020? Do you seriously think we’ll still be around in 2020?
What’s the evidence for the claim that we ‘should all be terrified’? Someone says so. Cognitive dissonance is normal for maintaining a narrative drama in place of a true relationship. Finding that out is disturbing and an encounter with fear. The world is not what it had seemed. people are not as I thought. Nothing is as I thought. The desire to ‘see’ blindness and error in others operates the presumption that ‘we’ see what ‘they’ don’t. Then we all learn to see each other’s blind spots while oblivious to our own. In some sense terror operates a sense of coercive limit on human thinking and behaviour. Some of this may be associated with events outside immediate human intent such as comets raining destruction, and others with a malign intent, or a cunning manipulative deceits that hack into our terror and shape it to operate us. When something is ‘set… Read more »
Well I am terrified, and have been for some time. Churchill’s adage about the Americans doing the right thing but only after they had done everything else, is no longer true. They haven’t done the right thing in recent memory, and the power elite have bullied the American people into several logical inconsistencies. So lack of support for mad dog invasions means treason, failure of robotic maudlin support for their so-called heroes means sedition, (no matter those heroes have risked their life because they were unemployable and in need of wages to support their families), failure of Stepford fealty to Israeli raptors means anti-semitism, lack of acceptance of crumbling infrastructure so chemical and nuclear weapons can be maintained and expanded means cowardice, and any number of others.
This all looks unstable and unsustainable but what next?
I wonder does Churchills old adage about eugenics hold water regarding Trump. Would he have lived long enough to attain such an office under Churchill’s criteria. Probably not…………but then again Churchill did like his WASP supremacy theories. Maybe they would have had a grand old time.
The USA is the great force for Evil, destruction and genocide in history, and its psychopathic elites will happily destroy the human race if they cannot rule over all of them under ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’. And half the US elite are ‘religious’ psychotics who are slobbering for ‘The Fire Next Time’.
One also has to appreciate the extreme partisan nature of American politics, which is tribal to a frightening degree. People and families are often split along these lines to a degree that I’ve always found absurd. As a European I’ve often been staggered that anyone can take US politics seriously. To me it always seemed a grotesque farce, often a bloody one and bizarre. American culture and history, from the very beginning, has been saturated with deep-rooted fear, hypocrisy, violence, massacre, genocide, slavery, puritanism, religious fanaticism, brutality, paranoia, manifest destiny, brazen imperialism, self-righteousness, sanctimony, visionaries and delusions of greatness and one’s place in God’s plan for the New Jerusalem, helped along by providence. That the place was an imperialist project from the very start and has been an expanding empire from the beginning, swallowing everyone and everything in its path… cannot be denied, though it’s a kind of heresy to… Read more »
Where does it stop… the imperial expansion? Within a decade. Look, you being a European, part of this is YOUR fault, or the fault of your nations. We can’t control our government, but we are hardly as much of a victim to it as you are. The EU is a CIA plan, and if you don’t know this or you deny it, well, welcome to Operation Mockingbird. It is a CIA plan. You know why you have a refugee problem in Europe? Because the United States creates the refugees. None of your leaders speak up against this. None of your news does. You realize that if the US goes to war with the Russia, Europe is going to be vaporized. If you think this country is bad, look at your countries, which all, ever single one, has a traitor to your nation in power. Why does Europe have sanctions against… Read more »
If you are British then one has to laugh, A US poodle lecturing Europe on subservience. HAHA. Good one.
Apparently this man Snyder has form. Here he is again, falsifying WW1, WW2 and the destabilization of the Ukraina as “‘acts of de-colonization”: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/05/snyd-j05.html Apparently Snyder also moves in dubious company: The US council on Foreign Relations whose other memGobers include such high profile criminals and public liars as Dick “911” Cheney, Colon “Destroy their Sewage System” Powell, “Mad” Maddy Albright, Ma and Pa Clinton, Paul “WMD” Wolfoshitz and George “White Helmets” Soros. The only star missing from this Galaxy of World Class Liars is the great TB himself; but two of Tony’s employers are represented: Goldmann-Sachs and the Carlyle arms group. Yes, such people can do the world a lot of damage, have proved that in the MENA, the Balkans and the Ukraina, and are obviously planning to do even more by first defaming and then attacking Russia. I got some good advice from the Readers Digest in the… Read more »
Member of the Council on Foreign Relations? Come on, he has to be a propagandist, surely. OMG! He’s won a Hannah Arendt prize, Vaclav Havel prize and a Ralph Waldo Emerson prize. How utterly shameful.
Very embarrassing for Arendt and Emerson to be in such scabrous company.
Once one knows that witches really exist and one believes in them, the next step… a belief in witchcraft, is easy; and those who question, or deny, these facts or self-evident truths, are obviously part of the conspiracy of evil too. It actually gets worse. If one questions too much too loudly, this undermines the fight against evil and indicates one is soft on evil and the evil-doers and one becomes a target for those who know the truth, that evil is all around us and we are under daily attack from invisible forces and all our woes and ‘defeats’ come, not from ourselves, but from the interference of the evil ones and those that collude with them. This is all extremely dangerous. The simplistic way our culture divides people into two categories, the good and the bad, those who know the truth and those in the service of lies.… Read more »
Think of The Guardian’s writers as suicide bombers-ready to explode the last traces of their credibility and prospects of honest employment in the future at a moment of crisis. For that is what Syria represents: a crisis for the Empire which depends upon victory after victory to maintain the momentum without which it will shrivel up and die. The imperial project is to transform the global hegemony of capitalism-from which few corners of the earth are excluded, in which the great majority of mankind are involved-into the total rule of the ruling class of the United States. The object is end all resistance to the system as defined and governed by the American based plutocracy. Imagine your own dystopia-the details may be at issue but the fact of billions being subject to a ruthless caste of exploiters, under constant surveillance, tightly policed, is a given. And Syria stands in the… Read more »
The fault line of Israel – Syria runs right through the Labour Party as well:
http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/letter-to-members-of-labours-national.html
mog. Letter from 200 Labour MPs complaining that a prominent BLiarite, one Jeremy Newman, has been caught with his hand in the till to the merry old tune of tens of thousands. More powero their elbow! Ananias was swruck dead for that sort of thing. But I didn’t see anythig about Syria; and the only mention of Israel is when Mr.Newman over there ran up a taxi fare of 3,000 GBP then refused to pay the cabby.
Good advice from a travel book: Ask the fare before you enter the vehicle.
The Guardian provides direction exactly as a compass needle re-magnetised in opposite polarity. It remains useful for navigation. Travel away from the direction indicated to enjoy safe passage.
Evidence? Damn Kit! The evidence is because they are Russian! That is R-U-S-S-I-A-N! We won against the Soviets and we brought the wall down so we could build it in our country. And so the EVIL EMPIRE fell at our feet! But we are Americans and geography isn’t our strongest suit. And if it is a guy with a Russian name that is hacking the internet that constitutes ALL RUSSIANS and PUTIN himself. It is just logical because EVIL can do that sort of stuff. And if truth be known, Tubularsock misses the little Commie under the bed. It was like losing a childhood friend. So it is comforting for Tubularsock to have a Russian “Threat” back under the bed. Brings nostalgic feelings. And you Kit are looking for evidence. We KNOW those Russian did IT because if they didn’t then we may have to look at or ourselves ……… Read more »
“we brought the wall down so we could build it in our country. ” eggcellent
Well the yolk’s on Tubularsock!
Well, I for one shall not be cowed by your exhortation that “we should all be scared” – why should anyone fear the decline of Western Hegemony ? These are no more than the last thrashings and writhings of the unholy beast.
are you serious? do you know how many weapons the beast has? (well nobody does) what do you think the beast is going to do with those weapons when the walls are closing in? what do you think hes doing with the secret weapons even now? whats raining on you from the sky right now? what are you breathing? what nano particles and microwaves are permeating your body? this should frighten everyone.
Being afraid is not the same as being cowed. Being afraid is a rational response to danger, and we are all in a lot of danger these days. But none of us need be cowed by it. We can face facts and do what we can to save what we can.
Uh is it because of their staggering glut of nuclear weapons? Their unstable simpleton leader? Their deep core of racial hatred? Their nonstop crimes of acquisition? Their delusional thinking? Their preferred defense mechanism being projection?
All dangerous.
A rabid dog in its death-throes is HIGHLY dangerous.
Reblogged this on Worldtruth.
The BTL comments aren’tgoing his way.
Very clear explanation & well put.
Reblogged this on leruscino.