There's been a lot that occurred since I started this thread, which wasn't very long ago.
I didn't really know anything about Qanon until after the recent drama. It's hyper bizarre conspiracy theory is something that's so wacky, I frankly didn't pay much attention to it. Still, I've now, over the last month, heard a couple of people spout off comments that clearly originate from it.
You'd think that following the recent insurrection it'd be dead as a doornail. Nope, it's most diehard adherents still think that President Trump is going to arrest Joe Biden and that the Democrats will turn out to be a child pornography ring or something. That's not going to happen, and people who believe that this point are in full blown self delusion. But there are people who meet that description.
So how on earth did this oddity get rolling?
I have a theory. . .
And frankly, I think the source of all this nonsense is pretty obvious.
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Which means that all of the people who are spouting its theories, in whole or in part, are dupes of Russian intelligence.
This is one of those topics where a little knowledge of history makes things pretty plain, but which also means that when you look around the world and what's going on, it's just baffling. Isn't this really obvious? Well. . . of course it is, but you have to have a sense of history in order for that to be the case.
Okay, let's set out the evidence.
Russia has a long history of having one of the best deceptive services in the world. Indeed, the playbook that's being played here has been played before. Here's the cover of the first edition.
Eh? You don't recognize volume one of the Qanon playbook? Well more on that in a moment.
Imperial Russia had an extensive intelligence network. It had to, as it was constantly faced with revolutionary movements that contested the idea that one man, the Czar, actually owned the entire country. Indeed, the absurdity of that monarchical theory in the modern age is what gave rise to extreme counter movements. Extremist governments produce extremist reactions. To counter that, the crown needed secret policy.
When the Revolution came in 1917, its claimed that those policemen didn't transfer over to the new regime. Well, I'm skeptical. The Red Army would have failed in the Civil War if some of the better Imperial Russian officers didn't throw in with the Reds. It's not uncommon at all to find in biographies that so and so "had noble roots" even if serving the Communists. I'm guessing that a lot of Ivan's and Igor's in the secret police went right into the Cheka.
At any rate, and irrespective of whether that occurred or not, the Soviets certainly knew a lot about secret policing and spy craft as they'd been victims of it themselves. There's the old phrase about how to "catch a thief". Well, in a lot of instances, the best spies are made up of people who spied on you. Turning spies is an ancient part of spycraft.
The Soviet Union developed the best deceptive spycraft set of skills in the world following the Civil War. It's truly impressive. Part of that involved disseminating propaganda and controlling or infiltrating institutions. And part of that involved agents and sleeper agents.
It's well know that the Soviets had thousands of sleeper agents in the West. The USSR only fell in 1990 and it isn't as if the new emerged Russia called them home. They just stayed where they were, and as the KGB continued right on into service, under a new name, serving the new regime, the contacts largely just stayed there. If you watch The Americans you might charmingly believe that the sleeper agents just became normal people when the USSR fell, but it almost certain did not.
Vladimir Putin was a loyal member of the KGB.
At any one point in history its' been difficult to tell what the goal of any Russian government is. Russian is, as Churchill noted, "a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma". A lot of the time, however, the goals of the Russian government are simply to be a menace to everyone else. Russia has preserved a culture of political paranoia that is only matched by the one that Germany had prior to 1945. Believing that everyone else is out to get them, they seek to disrupt everyone else.
Only a fool would believe that the KGB didn't have plans to massively disrupt Western governments by any means possible. People like to imagine that means blowing things up and the like, and no doubt those sorts of plans existed. But to get to that point would have been regarded as a Soviet foreign intelligence service failure. Before ever getting there, influencing politics and disrupting political processes would have been resorted to. They probably in fact were more often than we might like to imagine.
Well, in actuality we don't have to imagine it to much, as we can read the Venona Files.
More on that in a moment.
Putin has stepped right into the role that Brezhnev and the like occupied in earlier eras. He's not a Communist, apparently, but he's not a trustworthy nice guy either. And its very clear that a principal go of his is to disrupt the US.
And the evidence is overwhelming he's doing it.
And Qanon is Russian work.
If it wasn't originally, and my guess is that it actually was, it is now.
Now the book above.
The book pictured above is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most anti Semitic lies ever perpetuated on the Earth. It came out of Imperial Russia prior to the Russo Japanese War and prior to the 1905 Revolution, and spread. The best evidence is that it wasn't a product of the Imperial Russian secret service, but people have speculated about that in the past. It certainly circulated in Russian circles before breaking out in the West. Henry Ford paid to have copies made of it and to have them distributed.
The lies it tells about the Jews are lurid and absurd, but there are still people who believe them.
And here's the interesting part. . . those lies read a lot like what Qanon is putting out now.
Too much alike, in fact, for that to be mere coincidence.
While the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are absurd, the lesson the Russians would have learned about them is that distributing an absurdity in a free society works. It worked with this racist tract from the early 20th Century, why wouldn't it work again.
Indeed, it's easier to distribute absurdities like this now, than it was in the early 20th Century. Then you had to find somebody to print them and distribute them. Now all you have to do is to get it on the net.
And the Russians are proven masters of that.
And that's what's going on here. Qanon is almost certainly one of the variety of Russian efforts designed to destabilize Western democracies. It's likely an official effort of Russian state security, and it probably mostly comes out of troll farms within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire, but it likely also has some help in some ways from sleeper agents who where here before 1990 and still are.
So now, in 2021, this effort not only had some role in persuading some voters in the 2016 election (denying this is now acting contrary to the facts), but it set up the atmosphere for an insurrection last week. And not only that, the theories have been tolerated to the point of near endorsement by the sitting President of the United States. The country looks pathetic as a result.
So what can be done about this?
Well, something has to be done. You'd think that after last week people would have woken up on this but there are plenty who have not. This morning (January 11) in checking Twitter you can find that "Insurrection Act" is trending and that some now believe its been invoked and the world is going to be shocked by an arrest of Joe Biden on January 20, and that all the facts will come tumbling forth.
That's not going to happen.
The facts have come tumbling forth. There's nothing there at all and a lot of people have been duped. But the Protocols of the Elders of Zion duped a lot of people and there are still people who believe them.
Something definitely needs to be done, and right away. Part of that involves prosecuting and holding to account those who set things up for last week, and that includes politicians who endorsed these things for their own cynically self serving reasons. Some of the newly elected to Congress are so deluded as to probably believe the lies they've been telling, but very few are. Being able to tell them and get away with it is not an option.
And something needs to be done about the underlying root cause of all of this, and quickly.
A modern democracy can't carry on with a large percentage of people believing in obvious deception, no matter what the source.
And the party's ultimately responsible need to be revealed, and soon.
The Venona files were compiled as early as the 1940s, but the government didn't release them until after 1990. There were reasons for that, but it did mean that many of the guilty escaped punishment for being complicit with Soviet espionage, and it further meant that for fifty years deceptive covers about some individuals who were involved with it were allowed to circulate. I can't help but feel that the Federal Government knows a lot about Qanon right now. We don't have the luxury of fifty years this time. And efforts like this track back to somebody, or somebodies, and they need to pay some price for that.
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