Bizarre Behaviour

Looking from the outside, the behaviour of journalists, academics and politicians in the United States seems bizarre. I cannot understand how politicians, academics and journalist can make such a song and dance about American democracy, but then work so actively to undermine its results.

They all seem to have accepted the Russians “hacked” the US presidential election story. There is no evidence for this, and no one has explained how it actually happened. Hillary did enough to lose the election by running a weak campaign for the role she believed she was entitled to.

The best suggestion is that the Russians hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and released a stack of embarrassing emails. This was only a problem, because the emails showed that key democratic leaders were engaged in dodgy activities. You can hardly blame the Russians for their bad behaviour. If the DNC emails were boring administrative stuff, as they should have been, they would have been quickly forgotten.

The news media are not stupid, so they know there is nothing in it. The problem is that they hate Donald Trump more than they love the truth.

Before the election, they said that Trump was stupid and that he would not get elected. Trump bypassed them and proved them wrong, about the second point anyway. They like to think they have a big say in who wins the election. They seem to be angry that they were ignored and beaten by a man they do not like.

It seems that they hate Trump more than they love democracy. Trumps character may be a bit dodgy, but he was elected in a national election. None of the politicians, academics and media commentators seeking to undermine him were.

They say that they believe in democracy, but when they don’t like the outcome, they are happy to undermine it. That seems odd, but the elite knows best.

The worst thing about this situation is that the media and many politicians are spewing out hatred towards the Russian. I presume that they like the “Russia hacked the election” narrative, because if that had happened, Trump would not be legitimately elected, so they would be justified in seeking to throw him out.

They are pushing the hatred of Russia to justify their efforts to depose Trump. This is scary. The biggest risk to the word is not global warming, but a nuclear war between the Russians and they United States. A war that caused them to fire off their massive nuclear arsenals would be a huge disaster for the world.

I am old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis. I remember how scary it was, and how relieved the world was when Khrushchev and Kennedy agreed to an uneasy peace deal. The world heaved a great sigh of relief. If McCain rather than Kennedy had been in the Whitehouse, we would still be in the midst of a nuclear winter.

The world does not need confrontation between the United States and Russia. One of the few good things about Donald Trump was that he wanted to stabilise the US relationship with Russia. Unfortunately, that has not happened. Instead the news media and many politicians are stirring tension between the two countries.

Russia is not a threat to the United States. It is massively weaker than the Soviet Union. Its economy is slightly smaller than Italy’s. Russian does not have enough troops to invade and control Eastern Europe, and it does not seem to want to.

So the Russian mania is hard to understand, and the media knows this. The problem is that they need hatred of Russia to support their attacks on Trump. If Russia is not a threat, then Russian collusion with Trump ceases to be a problem.

I can only assume that the media, and many politicians, hate Trump more than they care about the peace of the world. They seem to be willing to risk peace by stirring up hatred of the Russians to bring down Donald Trump.

The irony is that history shows that great nations and empires are not usually destroyed by an invading enemy power. They collapse from within.