British Journalist Expelled from Russia Warns America [View all]

[orangecrush]

Last edited Fri Jan 27, 2017, 04:40 AM - Edit history (2)

"Harding understands how Russia's reach extends far beyond its borders, and he takes very seriously the issue of Russia's interference in the U.S. election. "I don't want to sound too hyperbolic, but it's really an assault on the Western liberal order," he says.

Harding adds that Putin's aim is to disrupt the politics that have dominated America and Europe for the last 70 years. "[Putin] wants to turn the clock back to an age of great powers, to almost an imperial era of the 19th century, where strong sovereign nations didn't talk about values or human rights or anything like that," he says. "They cut deals, they had summits, they made grand bargains ... and they divvied up, they divided the world into spheres of influence."

<snip>

On Putin's tactics for creating false stories

"This is one of Putin's tactics that he first learnt as a junior spy in Leningrad when he joined the KGB — essentially lying, if you're in the KGB. There's nothing wrong about it. It's simply a kind of tactic. It's a kind of operational strategy. And what we've seen, essentially, is that the Kremlin has kind of perfected these postmodern techniques, first of all, by squashing domestic criticism and taking over TV inside Russia, but really, over the last seven or eight years, willing this out to an English language audience through things like Russia Today, the English-language propaganda channel of the Kremlin.

The goal is essentially to persuade some people that the Kremlin's view of events is true, but also to kind of confuse and bamboozle everybody else by floating conspiracy theories, so there are 10 different explanations for an event, by doing fake news, by hiring armies of trolls. ... And so it's clever, it's clever because it allows, actually, the Russian regime to get away with all sorts of things, and increasingly, I guess, exploiting the openness of Western societies and America in particular."

(About the author - "Journalist Luke Harding has an insider's understanding of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Harding served as Moscow bureau chief for the British newspaper The Guardian from 2007 until 2011. During his tenure, Russian agents followed him, tapped his phone and repeatedly broke into his home.&quot



http://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511786803/journalist-russias-interference-is-an-assault-on-the-western-liberal-order


Heard this interview on the way home yesterday, and it chilled me to the bone.

Harding's opinion is that the Trump administration is operating straight out of the FSB playbook, though NPR did not put those comments in its summary. (NPR also issued a statement earlier the same day on why it would not call out Trump’s false statements as lies.)

My conclusion - Putin has successfully executed a coup on the United States government.