INDECENT SLIMEBALLS

MEDIA LENS—As Oborne noted, Assange is ‘responsible for breaking more stories than all the rest of us put together’, ‘each and every one in the public interest’, ‘which any self-respecting reporter would sell his or her grandmother to obtain’. One could hardly think of a more powerful example of someone not ‘pissing around at the margins of the problem’. [Meanwhile] Monbiot is hardly alone in ‘focusing on other issues’, year after year, while Assange rots.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—And how sick is that? Obviously Trump has advanced a lot of toxic agendas which need to be ferociously opposed, but how warped does your mind have to be to make a religion out of that opposition which is so all-consuming that it eclipses even the natural impulse to avoid inflicting death and destruction upon your fellow man? How viciously has the psyche of American liberals been brutalized with mass media psyops to drive them into this psychotic, twisted reality tunnel?

P. GREANVILLE—Since Trump came to power, Maddow has led the choir in seeking his toppling, using, as do all Democrats, the spurious Russiagate scandal as the battering ram. Maddow is obviously capable of shedding tears for Latin babies caught in the insane anti-migrant policies of the US government (which Trump has exacerbated but not created, Obama deported a huge number on his watch) but pays little regard to children in Gaza, or Libya or Syria, where US criminal interventions rage on with no sign of letup.  Not to mention that a nuclear war between the superpowers would cause a helluva lot more suffering than she’s already supposedly decrying

PANKAJ MISHRA—merican liberals, Samuel Moyn wrote last year in Dissent, have never broken ‘with the exceptionalist outlook that cast the United States as uniquely virtuous’, but having Trump in the ‘cockpit of American power’ will reveal ‘just how terrifyingly normal a nation we are, with our populist jingoism and hawkish foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed the ‘big moment’: ‘Donald Trump,’ he said, ‘became president of the United States last night.’

DIANA JOHNSTONE—Historically, Westernizers in Russia have repeatedly gained influence and then lost out, because their overtures to the West were rebuffed on one pretext or another. (The British geopolitical tradition, based on the timeless dictum divide et impera, has traditionally favored policies to keep the continent divided) This merges easily with the Brzezinski doctrine of maintaining separation between Western Europe as a whole and Russia to maintain U.S. global hegemony. Western rejection of Russia naturally favors a rise of the Slavophiles. It also obliges Russia to look to Eurasia rather than Western Europe. This is happening again.