Last Tango in Moscow

 Credo quia absurdum

Despite doubts cast upon the CIA’s revelation that Vladimir Putin has chosen the next president of the United States (especially here in the Counterpunch node of Pax Mongolica), it is obvious that Trump is Moscow’s man. I differ only on certain details with the Agency and the Washington Post, several little things quite irrelevant in themselves but which, when taken together, will expose the panorama of Muscovite intrigue with far greater clarity to the informed eye.

Por exemplo, Putin is indeed behind Trump’s devious rise to power, but he had no direct hand in the proceedings. He merely wishes his enemies to believe he did. He has achieved the same result without using all the vulgar tools of the standard hands-on coup, without the risk, without even spending a dime. Anyway, he is not a man given to nostalgia.

He has even been able to meticulously control the blowback, an extraordinary feat far beyond the ability of previous influencing agents (witness the fighting on the streets, where all participants will be treated by law enforcement as outside subversive elements, as Russians). Although it is true that he favors a Trump regime, he is nevertheless willing to sacrifice his proxy in order to achieve his ultimate aim: sowing mass confusion and discord into an already bankrupt political structure (‘The end justifies the means’, as Lenin didn’t say). Smearing one’s own operative is a well-known ploy of intelligence networks the world over. It may also be the initial step in the cunning public rehabilitation of this fiery-haired buffoon anointed on the Nevsky Prospekt.

Мои университеты

CIA must have known that its dark history of coups, death squads, and black ops stretching back to 1947 might make it somewhat dubious as a source of information for the liberals it has sought above all to ensnare. By spreading the tale of Putin’s skullduggery to ostensibly centrist organs, it does not need to back up its findings because the only criticism it will get will be from Trump’s inner circle, universally despised by the press, or from outré leftists, easily dismissed as paranoid killjoys. The CIA’s Report[1] was assured a wide audience, especially given the climate of Russophobia spread by hawkish Democratic Party operatives. Once-Left papers like England’s Guardian have also helped carry the Crimean load and have raised the archaic Red Scare from the grave of John Birch to the lofts of gullible liberals everywhere.

How do you see it? Street smarts are something beyond the pale of the education system. By calm analysis or by fighting for a name, you learn. There is no one on your side. This is the power of power.

Harry Lime for President!

The wily Putin has adopted the role of Oblomov, rather than the Grand Inquisitor. He has done nothing but vaguely insinuate through some fifth party that he threw the US elections without ever leaving his sofa. Perhaps, like Tolstoi, he has even forgotten his sofa. Eager for some alibi in the face of their own massive electoral failure, the DNC formed an alliance with a CIA terrified of Trump’s overtures to Vlad. FBI Capo Comey’s recent attacks on HRC have driven him de facto into the arms of Putin, who has granted a first favor by reducing his bureau’s old adversaries in Langley to a bunch of suckers recycling Operation Condon.

The result is the same whether Putin has been responsible for miming the tricks CIA and Samantha ‘Genocide’ Powers pulled in Maidan Square or whether he did nothing at all. Therefore, Putin is unquestionably responsible for the Trump victory. We must agree with middle class liberals because they are invariably correct. They are the most revolutionary class and this is their world.

Trump is now forced expose the caviling of the CIA, which has blotted its own charter by interfering in domestic affairs (Orlando Letelier et al. notwithstanding). Positioning himself as a pigmented, racist parody of Allende, he will try to either:

1/ Make nonsense of the CIA report (a document that comes replete with its own waver), with help (‘natch!) from Vlad the Fox and the Russian Playbook, or:

2/ Add the entire staffs of the Post, CIA, and Clintonite cabal to the Kill List he will inherit, ironically, from Obama. This will legally allow him to execute these awful traitors who would reject the democratic choice of the American people, including the outgoing president, without even bothering to charge them with treason. Aside: Obama was the first Nobel Prize winner to kill another Nobel Prize winner (Médecins Sans Frontières at Kunduz); he may be the first Ex-President to be executed by a President owing to his own extrajudicial decree.

By implicating Trump in a Russian coup (which is true, midnight calls in broken English regardless), Putin has put powerful weapons in The Don’s large hands. Trump may throw himself on the mercy of the American people by exposing the ineptitude and deceit of his mainstream critics, who will soon be left with very little power due to their own increasingly ridiculous ploys to reverse the results of what passes for a democratic election in our Republic (viz., Golden Shower Gate). The CIA will inevitably abandon its assets and the Washington Post will resemble an intellectual mirror of the rooftop at old Hanoi Station.

Consider also that perhaps the CIA knows full well that Putin has tricked it, but this will only open the Agency up to further disinformation, which again shows Putin’s constant mastery. Putin may begin planting accurate information, which CIA will dismiss as fraudulent, in an attempt to discredit his discreditors; he may plant accurate information, which the Agency will accept as accurate, but will not act on because it suspects a purposeful leak… and vice versa, ad infinitum. Putin and Co. have employed plot, psychology and form in a way that could almost be called sentimental. “The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock.” – Vladislav Sirkov

The CIA itself might be on Putin’s payroll because once the endless game of incrimination and character assassination starts, the game plays all players and demands the kind of bloody vengeance on one’s internal enemies usually associated with the aftermath of a foreign occupation. “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”, the so-called CIA hacking report, is the work of several intelligence agencies; interagency warfare has already begun. There is apparently a second ‘Red’ report which uses the same ‘sources’ as the first, but absolves Vlad of malfeasance (only to show he is conspicuous by his absence??). This is standard practice in the Agency, in all agencies. But if there are two conflicting reports, then there might be dialectic third which could offer a kind of Schrödinger’s Cat theory: Putin is both innocent and guilty at the same time. This would be the ultimate second strike by the CIA’s Russian author because it validates both previous reports, yet it also renders them null by assimilating both positions to an impossible – but now very plausible – third theory. To get out of this debilitating Mobius strip, a fourth report must be undertaken which will supersede the previous three (which remained classified in certain departments for some time but have now been leaked, with redactions both suspicious and logical, to sources close to Trump/Putin, who in turn leak information, as well as carefully-orchestrated reactions, back to CIA Inc., resulting in a giant feedback loop).

Civil War Games at the Center Extremity

As the Minerva Research Initiative suggests[2], there is a fascination with unleashing civil unrest on the part of state think tanks. The foreign coups and color revolutions can be seen as a rehearsal for the domestic. The state is interested in us again, in the same obsessive way that the middle class is ever fascinated by itself. The inward look and the phantasmagoric characterize our world; the world of Émile Zola is long gone. The Russian coup is the coup at home, which is not a coup at all but an inventory of effects. Caudillo Trumpissimo, raised to the highest power, will vanish into a play-by-play commentary made by the sum of all actors and outlets.

The civil war raging in the halls of power has been moved from the lost cause outside Damascus (where different militia fought each other, sponsored by different organs of the fractured American state) to the homeland itself. The tariff walls have been lowered and HUMINT is in the structural adjustment business, stateside.

How the various warring parties in Washington will seek to control, manipulate, and stabilize the forces they have unleashed is a subject worthy of great attention for any uneducated person or intelligent teenager. So is the manner of their compromise, as there can never be an abrupt outcome but only a narcotic cessation where each compound bleeds into the next. I wouldn’t expect much from a middle class which has always been used by – and which always uses – the darkest powers it has created from the skull-rictus of a city black kid to the killing fields of humanitarian disasters per aspera ad astra.

For these people, every political move is at once a ghastly hope and a requiem. The rules of the game demand that there are two kinds of violence: one for them and one for the poor. The most terrible is always the least offensive. The poor have only their fingers to lie and shirk the blame from man to man, to ingest as broken glass what the bourgeoisie has always taken as the mildest self-recrimination. And abroad? Perhaps the last great hope for the continuous proxy wars waged by the rich on the poor of other lands lies with the revolutionary zeal of a middle class against a bigoted clown who has taken a wrong turn, for reasons of his own eccentricity, and maddened the Washington Consensus.

To come at midnight muzzling
In the pillow of your love – tomorrow I’m off to Moscow!

– A. Kruchenykh

The Butcher with the Sharpest Knife has the Warmest Heart

Maybe the outgoing man will see something in my tears. Mother? What? I’m going. Where? To the vineyard. How could Barack the Blessed ever disappoint? But you must know that life itself is so disappointing, so he cannot. On the tree, he ate of the honeycomb, listening to screams directed at a fig tree in cactus land. There are we and always for us, we middle souls. Name Luqman or Laquan, a chrome over hearts even in guilt, east of Sana’a – but especially guilt, that quality which is most moving in us. It is up to us to forgive; it is up to us only to take terms and arms; it is up to us to only speak.

To sleep, dears, even in him we were always only interested in ourselves and there’s the furies under the educated smile. Now we have momentarily lost hope and feel the turning-over count in trenches. But it will come back to us, by circuitous navigation and a consolation peculiar to its kind.

I dreamed of a satellite record. I dreamed of an eel’s marks on tumid waters, so like a needle’s. I dreamed of the shining white corridor and the General’s house. At the end, I dreamed of myself and saw, end in sight, that it was good when I dreamed of myself. No others. No need to keep watch for the Kindly Ones.

Neither crow weddings nor snowstorms
nor thaws penetrated this limbo
where I lay in disgrace, naked
in my own blood, outside the future’s magnetic pull.

–  Arseny Tarkovsky

Notes.

[1] Here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/06/us/politics/document-russia-hacking-report-intelligence-agencies.html?_r=0

[2] See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown

Martin Billheimer is the author of Mother Chicago: Truant Dreams and Specters of the Gilded Age. He lives in Chicago.