Why are some on the Left So Indifferent About Russian Sabotage of our Election?
Back in school, I used to have this friend Nick. I lost track of Nick a long time ago, unfortunately. But Nick was a cool guy. Nick and I used to talk .. well argue ... politics all the time. But despite our disagreements, I really admired him. He was a smart and passionate and willing to put his money where his mouth was. Last I heard of him, he had been sent by the Communist Party USA (of which he was a card carrying member) to "infiltrate" some union in NYC.
As thoughtful and as passionate and as committed as Nick was, he definitely had his blind spots. He kept trying to convince me that the Red Army, of all things, was actually a force of liberation and modernization in the world. Now this was back in the days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He would say to me that if the US policy establishment wasn't so reflexively anti-Soviet, they would applaud and assist the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan rather than surreptitiously resist it.
I thought of Nick today for the first time in awhile when I read the following three articles, one from a year or so ago, two of which are more recent. The first is an interview with Chomsky. The second is from Counterpunch and is written by Garry Leupp of Tufts University (about whom I know little) and the third is by the journalist Johnathan Chait.
Something is going on in certain quarters of the left these days, that I just don't get. I used to think that it was just tied to intense hatred of Hilary Clinton coupled with an intense desire to undercut any possible claim of her's to actually be the legitimate President of the US, primarily because they were unwilling to do anything that would undercut their own right to bash and bash Hilary for her "utterly failed" campaign.
But I don't think that's right any more. At least it's not the whole story.
It's gotta be something deeper than that, much deeper. But I still don't understand it.
I definitely understood the romance that some idealistic young people like Nick had with Communism. Especially in the early days of that experiment (before the War and before the horrors of Stalin). After all, at the core of Communism was a grand ideological vision for the transformation of society that was deeply humanistic. What idealistic young person dedicated to the betterment of humanity at large wouldn't be at least somewhat drawn to such an endeavor? But long before the time that the Soviets decided to bring modernity to Afghanistan, with tanks and helicopter gunships as their preferred tool, no less, you would have thought that the romance should have long been over. Or so it seemed to me at the time. But it wasn't for Nick. (I know, I know, our own misbegotten wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq smack of exactly the same blind imperialistic hubris. But that's a subject for another day.)
But here's the thing I don't get. Unlike the Soviets, Putin doesn't even have the facade of a grand humanistic ideology on his side. He is to all accounts just a kleptocratic thug , driven at least in part by nostalgia for lost empire and deep resentment over the role of the West in hastening the decline of the Russian empire.
And again, this isn't to say that US policy toward Russia is all sweetness and light.
But frankly, some on the left these days seem as misguided as my old school chum Nick did back in the days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Russian attempt to sabotage our election was an act of extreme hostility. This is not the moment for misguided 'what-about-ism." And it's not a time to seek a live and let live detent with Putin, especially not if such a detent is entirely on his terms.
So I find it passing strange that although most on the left rightly recoil at many, many things about Trump, they seem at the same time very much tempted to embrace his incoherent and potentially deeply destabilizing foreign policy.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-06/noam-chomsky-calls-democrats-obsession-russia-conspiracy-theories-joke
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/27/keeping-russia-as-an-enemy/
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/why-are-so-many-leftists-skeptical-of-the-russia-probe.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Please don't link to that garbage of a website.
At least you didn't provide a link to infowars. 
that garbagehedge article is from over a year ago. Not sure why you're posting that stuff.
