ROTTEN ESTABLISHMENT

ROB URIE—This is to suggest that it certainly makes sense that the Russian political leadership would want to keep American militarists, a/k/a the Clintons and their neocon ‘crazies,’ out of White House. But as of now, the evidence is that the Russians changed no votes in the 2016 election. As far as inciting dissent— the charge that protests were organized by Russian ‘interests,’ not only does this reek of prior misdirection by the FBI and CIA, but there is no evidence that any such protests had an impact on the outcome of the 2016 election.

MoA—The New York Times is now running a virtual public relations campiagn for the Deep State: “President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.”

WILLIAM H WARRICK—During the summer of 1894 Czar Alexander III began feeling “not well”. His symptoms continued and worsened into September and the Czarina had to write her family in Denmark to cancel a planned visit. The Czar then went to the Crimea to try and recuperate in the warmer climes there. His health then rapidly declined and he died on Oct 20, surrounded by family after reading 2 prayers, taking communion from Father Yanyshev and prayers by the priest from Kronstadt.

Pushback with Aaron Maté Stephen F. Cohen argues that cracks are emerging within the NATO-led consensus that has pushed Moscow from the West. Guest: Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University, contributing editor at The Nation, and author of several “War with Russia: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.”

JOHN LAUGHLAND—The dangers of using legislatures to write history are even greater when, as in this case, the purpose of the resolution is polemical. The general idea of the text is that Europeans must remember their dreadful past in order not to repeat it in the future: everyone knows that the European project was born in the ruins of the Second World War. But the goal of this resolution is to recalibrate the usual memory of the Nazis and the Holocaust to put the memory of Communist totalitarianism on an equal footing with Nazism. Communism, the resolution says, was Nazism’s ideological twin, and the USSR shares equal guilt with Germany for starting the war.