Of Roberto Zavaglia
Power of Russian hackers: thirteen were enough to overturn the outcome of the US presidential elections, dragging Trump to the White House instead of the highly favored Clinton. After months of investigations and cries of alarm from the entire international press over Putin's intolerable interference, last February, special prosecutor Mueller finally indicted 13 Russian citizens and three Russian "entities" who, with their troll activity on social networks, managed to influence the choice of millions of citizens. The rumors about the budget they might have had to camp permanently on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, these tireless manipulators of consensus, vary from 100 thousand euros to approximately double that.

If the level of subordination of the mainstream press throughout the West to the economic and political potentates who had fiercely cheered for Clinton's success was not known, it would be surprising how, after the formalization of such a modest plot, however, there is still everything to try, was not followed by the admission that Russiagate is just a soap bubble or enormous fake news, to use a term often used by the big media against non-aligned information. Even if we ignore the gap in funds used for the electoral campaign between Clinton and Trump (1, 4 billion dollars against 500 millions) it is grotesque to imagine that a small group of geeks was decisive in knocking out the Democratic candidate who was able to count on the support of almost the entire US press which spent months demonizing Trump, keeping quiet about the rather well-known flaws of their favorite. It's gotten to the point where unlikely Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson has received the endorsements of six smaller newspapers, while the Republican candidate had none. The same case of the emails stolen from the archives of the Democratic Party and published by WikiLeaks demonstrates the bias of the media: here too we went in search of phantom Russian hackers instead of placing emphasis on the discovery of Clinton's "casual" behavior, not least the illicit methods with which he obtained the nomination to the detriment of Bernie Sanders.
Rather than worry about surreal Kremlin plots, i watch dog Usa ( journalists, celebrated as the guardians of the Constitution ) they would do well to question themselves about the condition of a political system and a civil society in which all newspapers and television channels support the same candidate only to then discover that citizens concede victory to their rival. If we were accustomed to the rhetoric in vogue among liberals, we could say that across the Atlantic "democratic guarantees are in danger". Despite even a CNN producer, the television that has hammered the subject the most, he admitted, in a “stolen” video, that Russiagate is bullshit ( garbage, to put it mildly), the media still insists why, if they failed to block Trump's election, However, they were able to influence him, especially in the attitude towards Russia. At the beginning of his political career, Trump showed up, unlike Clinton, as a leader who would have characterized relations with Moscow with pragmatism, in the name of that America first which envisaged the maximum defense of the national interest, but not messianic ambitions and ideological crusades. Now, the president, to shake off the accusations of being under Putin's thumb, instead it shows off aggression against Russia, increasing sanctions against it and even threatening the unilateral abolition of the “Inf” Treaty on medium-range nuclear weapons. With the result of putting Europe back at the center of a possible atomic conflict.
As is known to those who know a little about the functioning of the US political system, the will of the president, especially in foreign policy, it is far from being absolute. In addition to the media, the so-called Deep State worked to change Trump's posture towards Moscow, with the Services in the front row, which for the occasion are no longer, in the story of the “progressive” press, the CIA scoundrels of old, but they have become the respected “Intelligence community” whose assessments have oracular value. Even in Europe, Russiagate served to rekindle hysteria against Russia, in a crescendo of accusations of all kinds, by the usual hackers capable of stirring up public opinion, to the spies coming in from the cold who would be found everywhere, up to the accusations of murders commissioned by Putin himself, which are all the more evident the less evidence is shown to demonstrate them. To give just one example, in the Sergei Skripal affair, the former Russian double agent who has long been "retired", poisoned in Salisbury together with his daughter last March, Great Britain has managed to obtain the expulsion of several dozen Russian diplomats from many countries, while claiming not to be able to provide evidence for security reasons... London later "substantiated" its accusation by spreading photos of two Russian guys walking around the English town as "definitive proof". Not to mention Putin's supposedly fabulous riches that, hidden abroad, they would testify to his corruption, of which we have never yet been shown a ruble.
Of evidence of enormous espionage activity, also and above all to the detriment of European countries, instead there are solid ones, but they do not concern Russia. It's from 1998 the “discovery” of Echelon, a global surveillance system operated by the US, in collaboration with the "Anglo-Saxon brothers" of Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, demonstrating that someone in the Western alliance, thanks to its "cultural" origin, he is more of an ally than the others. In the same year, a European Parliament report revealed that this network could intercept, select and decode each fax, phone call, email message, and then enter them into a computerized database. From the strategic center of Menwith Hill, in England, information of any interest was finally sent to the National Security Agency headquarters in the United States. The report stated that, after the end of the Cold War, the system had also been oriented towards non-military objectives: “Unlike other electronic spy systems in the Ukusa network, the Echelon system is directed primarily against civilian targets, governments, organizations and companies from practically every country in the world”. To give you an idea of ​​what's at stake, this network allowed the NSA, during Bill Clinton's presidency, to win a contract of enormous value, in Saudi Arabia, to the American Boeing to the detriment of the European Airbus. Echelon's existence was later admitted by former CIA director James Woolsey.
After such revelations, one could imagine that something would have changed and that US spies would at least have shown greater consideration towards their "allies". The change, as seen in 2013 with the Datagate case, it consisted instead in the further strengthening and extension of electronic espionage by the NSA. Edward Snowden's revelations, former agency collaborator, have shown that in Germany alone, the most sifted nation, they are intercepted every day 10 millions of internet data and 20 millions of phone calls, including those from Chancellor Merkel's personal cell phone. American espionage, which seems to be the result of a paranoid desire for absolute control, it gets everywhere: embassies, NATO headquarters, of the European Union, dell'Her, international summits. There's even a program, chiamato Follow the money, which collects data on payments from private individuals made by credit card. In fact, the system continues to be aimed at illicitly giving US companies an advantage over competitors from any other country. Strange that at least this aspect, in a European Union so sensitive to a decimal increase or decrease in GDP and deficit, did not provoke a harsh reaction.
Right, some request for explanation, more or less resentful, the Europeans did it, some generic reassurances have arrived from the United States, but the matter was soon forgotten, without there being any element that would make one think that things, in the meantime, have changed. Really, some secret CIA files, which Wikileaks also managed to gain possession of in 2017, reveal that the US agency, in cahoots with the English twins of MI5, would have developed software to listen to the conversations taking place in the room where the device is positioned through new generation televisions. And despite all this, the real danger we face, in the media story, it is that of Russian espionage. To give an idea of ​​the potential of the information services of the two nuclear powers, just mention a fact that seems almost incredible: In the 2013 Americans spent 53 billions for their own 17 secret service agencies, more than what Moscow allocates for the entire defense sector, atomic weapons included! According to the estimates of 2016, the USA has invested in the war apparatus beyond 1.000 billions of dollars, il 40% of global spending, while "expansionist" Russia stopped at around fifty billion, approximately double what Italy spends which can be defined as anything except a military power.
Putin, Vladimir the Terrible, it remains anyway, for Western commentators, the absolute enemy who puts peace at risk by unscrupulously maneuvering the fifth column of European sovereignists and populists. To demonstrate this, we don't stop in front of the grotesque: Eugenio Scalfari, who must have missed some episodes, he went so far as to state that “Putin is the leader of world communism”. The revelation of the former director of Il Sole belongs to the pure comic genre 24 Hours Gianni Riotta who, away to Moscow for the Football World Cup, he warned all the fans present by warning that "the Russian Supreme Court allows the police to confiscate all cell phones from anyone, Russian or no, if you post criticism of the Putin government on social media". It's strange that huge queues didn't form in front of the stadium entrances caused by the police intent on monitoring spectators' chats...
To try to explain the general hysteria towards Putin, Guy Mettan, who dedicated his book Russophobia to the topic, wrote in the Limes magazine that the criminalization of the head of the Kremlin must be seen in the context of the historical hostility of European culture towards the great Slavic country: “Russia would be intrinsically expansionist, imperialist and annexationist. (…) This reading grid is infinitely declined, in all shades of gray and black, for a thousand years now, whatever the tsarist regime, communist or liberal- and behavior on the international scene”. (1) Without wanting to underestimate prejudices of this kind, similar, after all, to those nourished by the West towards every culture that is "too different", it seems to us that in the case of Putin's Russia there is also something more. Since the 2018 it was the year of the centenary of the birth and the tenth anniversary of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "celebrated" in the West with embarrassment since his anti-communism cannot be exploited for propaganda purposes, being combined with the love for Slavic cultural roots and the criticism of liberal societies, it is worth remembering that there were personalities who supported Russia, even in the most indefensible cases, it did not harm his political career at all. Commenting on the sentence of exile inflicted on the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the president emeritus Giorgio Napolitano, today a proud Atlanticist, he had the opportunity to write these embarrassed and embarrassing words: “There is no doubt that this attitude – beyond the ideological theses and the already aberrant political judgments- by Solzhenitsyn, had aroused widespread disapproval in the USSR. That this extreme 'incompatibility' was resolved by the Soviet authorities not with an indictment of Solzhenitsyn, but with his expulsion, can be considered more or less “positive”.
The issue is therefore not Russia, but Putin's independent and sovereign Russia: that of Yeltsin, to say, it was good for the West. To understand how the United States intends relations with Moscow, an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs, an "authoritative" international politics magazine par excellence, signed by the former ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, it can be enlightening. The author states that he has a moderate approach to the issue and recognizes that regime change action, of a “neoconservative” type, is impossible as long as Putin is in charge: we have to wait for his exit from the scene in one way or another. However, Washington needs to develop a "grand strategy" to deal with the Russian president because the real problem is, and here we return to the usual obsession, is to counter massive Russian propaganda ( the usual hackers, Russia Today television, notoriously the most followed in the West, and the Sputnik news agency, also visited daily by legions of students and housewives... ) which undermines the unity of the free world. For Mc Faul, much more stringent rules and greater controls on social media are therefore needed. Ecco, for example, one of the practical solutions devised: “Social platforms should provide more reliable news media sources; every time an article or video from Russia Today appears, supported by the Kremlin, it should pop up close ( pop up) a piece from the BBC.”. (2) Furthermore, “Western foundations and philanthropists must give greater support to independent journalism, including the one that creates services in Russian both inside and outside the country. They should establish new organizations with servers outside Russia to avoid censorship and to help journalists, protecting their identities and those of their sources”. (3)
Despite their banality, these simple indications, conceived by a respected analyst with the aim of increasing domestic censorship and trying to destabilize Russia, they highlight the blindness with which the liberal West relates to the rest of the world. For others, what is considered intolerable in one's own home is invoked. Therefore, the "falsehoods" of Russia Today should be corrected, supported by the Kremlin, with the "truths" of the BBC, which is instead owned by the British state, because everything that comes from us, the good ones, it is in itself right, while the others, the semi-civilized, they can only lie and muddy the waters for unspeakable purposes. After the collapse of the USSR and the near failure of the state of the Yeltsin period, the liberal world, both political and cultural, he believed that he had freed himself forever from the Russian national identity and that the dismemberment of its historical geopolitical space into various states could occur, easily controllable, predicted by strategists like Brzezinski. The fact that Russia is back on its feet drives both the trumpeters of journalistic propaganda and the trombones who claim to be balanced analysts crazy with rage.
Note
1) Limes; number 12/2017; pages. 181
2) Foreign Affairs; number 4/2018; pages. 88 (my translation).
3) Ivi; pages. 90
SOURCE: Literary diorama