I knew there was something abysmal going on in the US when I first started encountering the CIA's troll army propaganda-bombing the comments sections of every major (and some minor) Western information and entertainment websites with a vast web of unhinged Orwellian lies. If it had just been limited to the laughable canned slogans with bad grammar and incorrect spelling, which were also ubiquitous, then the campaign would have been easy to dismiss as the pathetic and tone-deaf sausage of a solipsistic corporate dictatorship swimming in its own small and heavily polluted intellectual pond.
But it went beyond that - it was no mere depraved advertising campaign waged by amoral ciphers drawing a paycheck from Arlington. There was deeper structure to the madness that hinted at sincere psychotic beliefs and cultivated social delusions. Even while saying things that on their face amounted to "2 + 2 = 5" you could sense that some of these people were not just cavalierly flinging around nonsense as a job - they were in fact engaging in the kind of psychological self-torture that genuine ideologues engage in to force their minds to believe things that the universe continually tells them are not true. However vast the legions of pay-per-keystroke troll whores were, there were among them a number of people engaging in a kind of Information Jihad they clearly believed in.
If it had just been the former, I could have dismissed the phenomenon entirely and laughed it off, but sensing the latter made the propaganda campaign so much more menacing in a country with a dead superpower's nuclear weapons arsenal. These bizarre points of inky darkness in the idea space were not cynical bureaucrats hollowly lip-synching to a memo, but zealous advocates for a vision completely and deliberately divorced from both reality and accountability. These few seemed to be people driven by a bottomless hatred so complete that even the lack of rational motivation for it merely gave it fuel, as if the "Russian conspiracies" they railed inchoately against were all the more monstrous for arrogantly daring not to exist despite the Corporate Media's demands that they do.
What their attitude represented was so abhorrent that I've mostly avoided thinking about it, but then I read a piece in the New Yorker detailing the strange trajectory of post-Soviet US-Russian relations from chaotic experimentation with democracy to being devoured body and soul by "realist" versus "interventionist" vision and attitudes. And suddenly the whiff of Death and shadow of circling vultures that always seem to hover subconsciously whenever arguing with the CIA troll network started to make sense in concrete terms. In the (lengthy) article, we see some anecdotal experiences of former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, loosely combined with other observations, mostly from the author's discussions with Russian media contacts. Look at these excerpts and judge for yourself:
The Administration’s neoconservatism and McFaul’s liberal interventionism overlapped in the desire to press the “democracy agenda” in the former states of the Soviet Union.
Rice declared that the group’s thinking had broken free of the traditional clash in American foreign-policy thinking between realist power politics and liberal idealism.
Russia was barely on the agenda—until the summer of 2008, when Russia and Georgia went to war. “McCain wanted more conflict, and we were the ones pulling back,” McFaul said. “That was the whole analytic frame of the campaign. ... We were on defense.” McFaul was among those who pressed Obama to toughen his language and prevailed.
McFaul told me, on the “big debate” over realism versus internationalism, he could never quite figure out Obama. “For Barack Obama, it is essential to end those two wars”—Iraq and Afghanistan—“and this retrenchment is in the national interest,” he said. “What I never knew at the time is where he came down on the question of hard interest versus values.”
Obama’s advisers and the Washington policy establishment have all spent countless hours trying to square the President’s admiration of George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft—classic realists—with his appointments of interventionists like McFaul, Rice, and Samantha Power. In the end, one leading Russia expert, who has worked for two Administrations, told me, “I think Obama is basically a realist—but he feels bad about it.”
When Secretary of State John Kerry came to town for the first time, he and McFaul went together to see Putin. At one point, Putin stared at McFaul across the table and said, “We know that your Embassy is working with the opposition to undermine me.”
“Putin has a theory of American power that has some empirical basis,” McFaul went on. “He strongly believes this is a major component of U.S. foreign policy. He has said it to the President, to Secretary Kerry. He even believes we sparked the Arab Spring as a C.I.A. operation. He believes we use force against regimes we don’t like. ...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse
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