Russia is not our friend (Romney, who was widely derided when he was the Presidential candidate for noting that, was close to correct, to a degree).
And the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails, their attempt to do so on the Republican ones, and their general behavior in these regards is so abominable that it must be addressed. Indeed, while I haven't researched it, I wonder if it technically amounts to a causi belli, although it will not come to that.
Anyhow, some history.
By the fall of 1918 the German war effort was shot. They were incapable of winning the war.
Everything the Germans had calculated on, and gambled on, had failed. The United Kingdom did not collapse due to a submarine blockade before the United States effectively fielded an army in Europe. The Micheal Offensive did not break the Allied lines and take Paris, throwing France out of the war. The introduction of poisonous gas had not proved to be a battlefield tide turner, or even particularly effective. The surrender of the Russians under Lenin did not turn out to release a flood of men and supplies as German avarice required the deployment of German assets to keep on at nearly full strength. Backing the Communists in Russia had helped turn the tide in the East but then had gone right to the German navy yards were it was having the same effect as it had in Russian ones.
They had lost.
They still hoped to secure a satisfactory diplomatic resolution, and in fact they actually did, but it wasn't the one they hoped for.
And soon, psychologically, they refused to accept it.
Which is just what the Democrats are doing about the 2016 election right now.
What German society did is well known. By November 1918 they had no choice at all but to accept Allied terms. Those terms, in spite of the way they have been repeatedly portrayed, were not really all that harsh. A big part of this is that Germany had slid into a revolution at home, which strangely gets underplayed in the English language histories. Just as in Revolutionary Russia, in Revolutionary Germany idle sailors betrayed their employers and became an unruly dangerous uniformed mob. As things disintegrated at home the Germans had to deploy its army on its own territory against its own people, a situation which would keep on keeping on after the war with the Allies ended.
By the late 1920s, however, they'd convinced themselves they hadn't actually lost the war at all, and certainly not through their own actions. It was somebody else's fault. And that somebody became, in their imaginations, the Jews, a fairly absurd proposition anyway you look at it. But an absurd proposition that was used to launch the political career of a figure who emphasized the very worst elements of German culture and who attacked the best elements of it.
What does that have to do with the Democrats?
Well, the Democrats lost this election through their own ineptness, just as the Germans lost the Great War through their own fault and miscalculations. I would have thought they would have won, but not because of their great campaign, but because Trump seemed to be incapable of winning. The Democrats, as we've explored already, ran a person well out of her own time, who wasn't likeable, emphasizing, where they emphasized anything, failed positions, while insulting some of their base.
Now, and here's where the stab in the back comes from, we know about some of those insults due to leaks.
It is now known that the Russians penetrated the Democratic National Committee and swiped their emails. That's a criminal act, but we also know that t he Russians tried the same with the Republicans and failed as the Republican firewall worked. Why didn't the Democratic one work?
And the Russian release of information, it's worth noting, did not release anything that wasn't true. It's hard to complain, or should be hard to complain, about the truth of your own views being released. If DNC operatives detested the Catholic Church, for example, they detested us. The Russians letting us know that doesn't mean it isn't true. Rather, they were embarrassed by the truth.
But not so much, apparently, that they now feel they need to change at all. They don't. They've propped up the same old, same old for their leaders and they, or at least those organs that support them, are crying about the Russians. "Stabbed in the back". Donna Brazile and Leon Panetta were both on over the weekend on the news shows addressing the email situation and neither of them would acknowledge that the problem, for their campaign, wasn't that emails were stolen, but what the stolen emails said. Brazile went so far as to claim the emails were "weaponized" but if they were weapons, they were handgrenades with the pins pulled out before they were tossed out the cyber window. The real problem with them is that they let voters see how the Clintonites actually thought.
I think that its time to put Putin and his cronies in a corner. We can't pretend that it isn't a crime, and frankly it creeps up on being nearly an act of war.
But that doesn't mean it actually influenced the election. I highly doubt that, to say the least. At most they tended to confirm what the confirmed already thought. That doesn't excuse it, but nor will there be any excuse for the Democrats to run repeat elections in 2018 and 2020, which right now is exactly where they are headed.
No comments:
Post a Comment