"The dictatorship of the West or how Washington and Brussels appoint presidents" (Putin, salaries)

[Mikhael Osborn]

«The United States has its own history of meddling in other countries’ political campaigns and elections. The United States is simply not engaging in electoral meddling in a manner comparable to Russia’s approach». Bravo! What a great idea! This is not a quote from American boy-scout’ speech during the Hillary Clinton’s rally in Arizona. These words belong to highly respected Thomas Carothers – Senior Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It’s even more surprising that this thought can be found in one of the eldest American journals – ‘Foreign Affairs’, which is considered to be oriented to people who has a habit to think and analyze.
In the beginning of the article Thomas Carothers admits that «one can identify a few cases over the past 25 years when the United States has tried to manipulate foreign elections with the aim of getting its preferred candidate into power». However, later he presents with great persistence what he thinks to be convincing arguments that meddling into internal affairs of other sovereign countries undertaken by Washington and its allies is justified and reasonable.
First of all, Mr. Carothers tells us that there are some “clear differences” between numerous cases of US meddling into elections in many countries during the Cold War era and analogic activities after its end. Allegedly, America was less interested in the elections’ results in other countries and that’s why Washington was less active in undertaken measures to alter electoral processes in its favor.
As an example the author tells that the administration of Bill Clinton provided “a little economic help” to Russian President Boris Yeltsin during the presidential elections of 1996 in Russia. However, it looks that Thomas Carothers is cunning. He should know about the 15th July 1996 Time’s article ‘Yanks to the rescue’. That article describes with details the 10,5 billion USD credit provided to Russia by the IMF because of the American request. The credit helped Yeltsin’s government to partially cover huge pensions and salaries debts. He couldn’t not know about three American intelligence agents who organized Yeltsin’s presidential campaign headquarters and coordinated its work for four months. Having almost unlimited budget from US government and using all political technologies you can even imagine (including dirty ones) they were able to ensure success at the elections for “democratic” Boris. The January’s report presented by American intelligence community concerning the “Moscow intrusion” into US 2016 presidential elections tells us that American influence on internal political situation in Russia was determined by the desire to help Boris Yeltsin in his quest to build democracy in the Russian Federation. But it was him, “Boris the democrat” who 3 just years earlier ordered panzer fire on his own parliament, contributed to the widespread of corruption in the country, which would later led to huge debts and the same person who started the bloodshed and war in Chechnya!
The second “important” argument in Washington’s defense according to Thomas Carothers is that by “spreading democracy” and assisting “democratic” powers in sovereign countries Washington is aiming to organize there stable and resilient “democratic” governments which will be able to deep and comprehensive partnership with USA on the basis of shared values. Herewith, America allegedly is not using “prohibited” mechanisms like strengthening social, political, ethnic or religious differences. It’s interesting, what did Mr. Carothers mean? It looks like that he is not talking about the series “colored revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia or Kyrgyzstan which were financed ant orchestrated by the US and its allies. He is also seems to forget about the “Arab Spring” which has led to chaos, ethnic conflicts and civil wars with thousands of civilian victims in half of the Middle Eastern and North African countries. He seems to forget that the “Arab Spring” and its outcomes were triggered by Washington and its NATO partners.
Probably some counterparts will tell me that the majority of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa which was overthrown by the West were non democratic and even dictatorial and criminal. Ok, let’s take this opinion into consideration. However, what can be said about the fact that in 1999 Bill Clinton’s aides were assisting Ehud Barak to struggle against Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s elections? What can be said about the fact that Washington spent millions of dollars to help opposition parties and “independent” mass media outlets which became the major factor in Vojislav Koštunica’s victory in presidential elections on Serbia? Who can say that Tel-Aviv is non democratic?
It can be said, that all these examples are quite old. Nevertheless, there are a lot of fresh examples of the same kind. Let’s consider the presidential elections 2016 in Czech Republic. This young democratic republic was one of the first former Warsaw pact States (which consisted of USSR and its allies) to join NATO in 199 and EU in 2004. For more than 10 years Washington and Brussels were happy with the success of democracy in this ex-communist country. Prague was used as an example to other “young democracies”. Nevertheless, this idyllic picture came to an end at the moment when incumbent president Miloš Zeman articulated his doubts concerning the expediency of anti-Russian sanctions, expressed his disagreement with dictate of bureaucrats from Brussels and made a stand against accepting migrants from Arabic countries to Czech Republic. In this case Zeman was trying to defend national interests of his country, nevertheless it didn’t bother Washington and Brussels which brought down upon him the power of Western media. “Xenophobe and a puppet of Putin”, “heavy smoker with weakness for alcohol”, “useful idiot of Kremlin” – these are just some examples of labels tagged on him by “independent” Washington Post, Deutsche Wellе, Al Jazeera etc. By labelling Zeman’s supporters as alcoholics and idlers the West began to trample the European ideas about equality of all the people. At the same time the aggressive PR-campaign promoting Zeman’s counterpart Jiří Drahoš which was presented as “independent pro-European liberal” who supported the continuation of anti-Russian sanctions and increasing role of European bureaucrats. The result is well known. The majority of the Czech people supported Zeman’s desire to distance the country from heavy pressure of Brussels’ demands including letting migrants inside the country and economic losses due to the US sponsored anti-Russian sanctions. However, even with a failure to provide victory for their candidate, Washington and Brussels succeeded in splitting the country in half by the West-East line, the urban society of “European cafeteria” and rural society of “oriental inn”.
The next on the line is Russia where the presidential elections will take place on Sunday. The same scheme is already applied. European and American media are almost competing in their labelling of “Putin’s regime”, its aggressive foreign policy, the spread of corruption, the suppress of opposition and limitations of democratic freedoms.
What are you talking about? The major opposition candidate Kseina Sobchak during the presidential campaign has visited the USA in order to “form the non-governmental ties with American administration”. During her visit to America she also held a lecture about “Post-authoritarian future of Russia” at the Center of Strategic and International Studies and later on even participates in the prayer breakfast with Donald Trump. However, she is not in the “Lefortovo” (the secret FSB prison) or in Gulag. Sobchak continues to criticize Putin and even suggests and upholds the return of Crimea to Ukraine. By the way, she is talking about this in the state-owned federal TV channels using her time there as a presidential candidate.
Now, let’s imagine for a while what American democrats and republicans would do with Hillary Clinton in October of 2016 visited Vladimir Putin for breakfast or officially proclaimed the idea to return Texas to Mexico. I would like just to remind you that some nonbinding phone calls made by Trump aide Michael Flynn to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak led to Flynn’s loss of his position and his whole political career. The former head of Trump’s election campaign Paul Manafort conducted several trips to Russia. Since the October of 2017 his under arrest.
The West clearly understands that it is impossible to significantly influence on the declaration of will of Russian people, due to the really big public support of Putin and huge antipathy to “liberal opposition” supported by the USA and EU. Even conservative Washington Post admits that Russian leader has a great support of his people, especially among the youth, who has a greater access to the information and international society then older generations.
In the current circumstances Washington and Brussels trying to discredit the Russian electoral process itself and even calls for disrupt the vote. The main example is the material by Deutsche Welle “5 Strategies of protest behavior during the Russian presidential elections” where it described how exactly boycott is different from protest vote and how it is possible to reduce the voting attendance to the minimum.
In such unprecedented “democratic intervention” by America and EU we can only wish Russian good luck and hope that they can choose a leader they want to choose as it previously was done by the people of the Czech Republic.
In the end I would like to say that the notion DEMOCRACY in ancient Greek means “POWER OF THE PEOPLE”. Only people in the real democratic society can have a right to choose their leaders. It would be great if bureaucrats from Brussels and strategists from Washington remember that.