During the 2016 election, many who could not stomach either Hillary or Donald voted for the Green candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, who had been forced to wear a ‘crimson letter’ for sitting next to Russian President Putin at RT’s birthday dinner.
This time around, Hillary is attacking progressive candidate Tulsi Gabbard, a representative from Hawaii who saw active duty in Afghanistan as a member of the army reserve and who, like Stein, favors negotiations over conflict. Although Tulsi, as she is familiarly known, still polls in the single digits, Hillary claims she is a ‘Putin asset’, based on the fact that a couple of years ago, she met with Syria’s President Assad, and continues — like Trump — to defend talking to ‘the enemy’. Is it a coincidence that the day after Hillary tarred Tulsi, she let it be known that she hadn’t ruled out running again, with Vladimir Putin in her sights?
Like Hillary, America’s Russophobes are apparently amnesiac when it comes to acknowledging that their own country routinely interferes in other nation’s political processes — not only with IT, but with live weapons — at ‘best’ by inciting color revolutions, as the world is currently witnessing from Chile to Hong Kong, and across Africa. (Actually, The US could mitigate the alleged on-line interference in our elections by allowing channels like RT, Al Jazeera or Iran’s Press TV — to be seen and heard. But that is not going to happen, pace freedom of information).
Unfortunately, most Democratic activists believe that writing letters to Congress and encouraging people to vote can change everything. As for the candidates, they overwhelm our inboxes with daily pleas for money, alongside the myriad of volunteer organizations screaming that they will only be able to continue their noble work if YOU ‘chip in’. (American voters deserve to be forgiven if they end up believing that even ‘progressive’ politics are all about money, which appears to serve mainly to maintain websites that ceaselessly beg for money…) As I’ve written in A Taoist Politics: the Case for Sacredness, the arrow of time is irreversible. Once any system, whether hard or soft, achieves momentum, it continues on its trajectory until entropy sets in, unless it experiences a ‘bifurcation’, known in politics as a revolution.
What most accurately describes the current state of the world is the absence of promising bifurcations on the horizon. France 24 hosted a discussion between EU parliamentarians from several different countries and parties about the recent dramatic events in Syria. What emerged was convincing evidence that although Europeans aspire to possess some sort of overarching military capability that allows them to pursue a foreign policy independent of NATO, party rivalries, added to ancient interstate rivalries, still appear to doom the ‘cradle of the Enlightenment’ to second power status.
When Hillary warns Europeans of the threat posed by the mere existence of their giant neighbor, she assumes they will continue to ignore the fact that Europe constitutes one of several giant entities on the Eurasian landmass. In the eighties (Une autre Europe, un autre Monde), I warned the Western half that it could not afford to fear both Germany and the Soviet Union: it had to recognize that reunited with the East, it is one of five giants to inhabit the Eurasian landmass, the others being the Soviet Union, China, India and the Middle East.
As Hillary and her followers continue to spew hatred toward Vladimir Putin (while endeavoring to curry favor with his closest ally, Xi Jin Ping), Americans can only hope that the 2020 election will persuade more Democratic candidates that it is time to follow Tulsi’s lead and stop seeing the world as one big threat to what is still the most powerful nation the earth has ever seen.
Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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