07-27-2018, 01:26 PM
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Banned
Join Date: Apr 2013
Posts: 2,791
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Quote:
The Elite Fixation With Russiagate
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Suppose, however, that all of the claims about Russian meddling turn out to be true. Hacking e-mails and voter databases is certainly a crime, and seeking to influence another country’s election can never be justified. But the procession of elite voices falling over themselves to declare that stealing e-mails and running juvenile social-media ads amount to an “attack,” even an “act of war,” are escalating a panic when a sober assessment is what is most needed.
Pundits and politicians have even compared Russiagate to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Kristallnacht, accompanied by bellicose calls for revenge. According to Democratic Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, a sufficient response would be “a cyber attack that made Russian society valueless.… If they all fell underneath the Kremlin and buried together, it’d be too soon”
Perhaps just as troubling is the degree of imperial myopia that Russiagate’s complainants unwittingly lay bare. Richard Haass, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, solemnly intoned that Russia, through its annexation of Crimea and meddling in the 2016 election, has broken the “international order for 4 centuries” that had been “based on non-interference in the internal affairs of others and respect for sovereignty” and thus should be dealt with “as the rogue state it is.” It takes more than mere historical amnesia to make such pronouncements in the face of the United States’ leading role throughout the preceding centuries in meddling in and attacking foreign countries—as did the George W. Bush administration that Haass served in. It also requires the entitlement and hypocrisy of a US exceptionalism that insists on holding others to standards that we strenuously reject for ourselves.
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