Hidden motives?

Well, it seems I got quite the response on social media to my last ‘political’ blog post here. Much of it was… let’s just say, uninspiring, but predictable. Allow me to quote some of the responses here, verbatim and unedited, to give my readers some idea of what they entail and the general tone and intellectual quality – or rather, the distinct lack thereof – of their contents.

Seems like you simply suffer of the reveres [sic] of Trump derangement syndrome.

Did I just catch a nauseating whiff of someone’s positive opinion of Donald Trump?

No. Of Putin.

So you’re saying that those of us who have witnessed Trump’s deference to Putin on TV and who have been told of his silence on Russian aggression and the payment of rewards for the killing of American soldiers in Afganistan [sic] are just intellectually lazy and basically gullible fools? I say, sir, what are your hidden motives here? Do you believe that the Orthodox Church in Russia is the servant of Putin, in view of his being the untitled Czar of Russia? Are you one of these people who believe that the Church should walk in lockstep with the Emperor, no matter what his title?

Practically all of this is utter rubbish. One needn’t dig very far into my writings, either here, or on Silk and Chai, or on Facebook, to understand that, to put it mildly, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the current president, that I did not vote for him, that I have criticised ‘leftists’ who did support him, and that I have no intention of voting for him this November. And the fact that even a passage like this, in the piece of writing in question:

A historical connexion with Orthodox Christianity does seem to correlate to a certain hostility to capitalism of the sort that Trump represents, although that anti-capitalism cannot be said to be causally linked to the corpus of Orthodox doctrine or Liturgical practice (which is a shame!).

… can be taken as evidencing any sort of warm feelings or latent sympathy for Trump is so far removed from reality or even basic reading comprehension that it rather beggars belief. Particularly when my opposition to everything Trump stands for – greed, corruption, capitalism – is so clearly stated; and particularly when the Caucasian gentlemen proudly evincing such a lack of even the rudiments of basic English rhetoric are soi-disant fans (and one actual family member) of noteworthy English-language rhetorician David Bentley Hart. I’m not entirely sure what that actually says about how Dr Hart interacts with his family and his fan base. Suffice it to say that the most charitable tack in this case would be to not pass any comment at all.

And with regard to the last quote, again, even a modest perusal of my comments on church-state relations on this blog – both in general and specifically – evidence that I give a rather strong answer, and much the opposite of the one the author of the last comment assumes, to the question of: ‘Do you believe… that the Church should walk in lockstep with the Emperor?’ My answer is, quite simply, no. Allow me to direct you, sir, to my following pieces of commentary on church-state relations in Russia, which form a rather consistent thread going back over eight years:

• Where stands the Church?
• More silliness: the theological orientalism of SoJo
• Defending Russian Orthodoxy as Orthodox and as Russian
• More thoughts on Orthodoxy and nationalism
• (In)vested interests
• Americanism and intégrisme: theopolitics abound
• China, the Vatican and the Open Church
• Mechanöcephäly
• The Moscow Patriarchate and pension reform
• Why the worldview of Patriarch Kirill matters now
• Theopolitical questions abound

As you can see from a brief perusal of these posts, the common thread that unites them all is an equal-opportunity suspicion of all neatly-hierarchical configurations of the relations between church and state – including all three of papocæsarism, cæsaropapism, and sæcularism. Even with regard to Russian politics in particular, I am very far from being an uncritical supporter of Putin. In fact, I acknowledge and celebrate the instances in which the Russian Orthodox Church does support the civil rights of Putin’s domestic critics and those who protest his policies, as well as the instances in which clerics themselves do this. I am more than happy to see, for example, the Church speak out on behalf of Russia’s social safety net, or on behalf of the unborn, or on behalf of Russia’s indigenous ethnic minorities – and it usually has to critique state policy in doing any of the above. I am more than happy to see the Russian Orthodox Church speak truth to power, and it actually manages to do so far more often than the American churches collectively do with all their much-vaunted (and largely taken-for-granted) supply of freedom from state interference.

A bit more troubling, though, is that it seems that anyone who stops to examine, or seeks to question, the dominant Blob-driven media narrative surrounding foreign affairs in the United States – even doing so from the standpoint of wanting to preserve peace – is taken as having sinister ‘hidden motives’. In fact my motives are quite open. I don’t want America and Russia to go to war. I don’t see anything productive, or useful, or positive in the current frozen conflict, and ‘hot’ proxy conflicts, we seem to be in, all around Russia’s rather broad and wide front porch. I truly do not believe that Russia is intrinsically any worse than any other large nation-state with its own values, its own history, its own path dependencies and its own interests. I truly do believe that war is a racket that hurts ordinary Americans, and that consent is continually manufactured to keep that racket going, whether in Afghanistan or in Iraq or in Syria or in Yemen or in Somalia or anywhere else. Those are my motives; judge them as you please.

And so, in a slightly more civil vein, addressing this comment:

Hmm, I get the sentiment that the media harped on Russiagate to the point of absurdity but I’m not sure why you seem unwilling to admit that, per the senate committee, there seems to certainly have been in regular secret communication with state actors and utilized the intel they received…

I’m not sure what polling data tells us either… I don’t think anyone cares whether or not the majority of babushkas like Trump or not, nor do I think the claim was that the Russian public was helping or something.

Seems obvious that a country we’re (still) a global competitor with would benefit from a bit of chaos and destruction of our trust in our political apparatus (even if that doesn’t make them uniquely evil and the system was already in bad shape).

First of all, I think there is a bit of a double standard here, in the form of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Russiagate is an archetypical Big Lie in the sense that it posits Trump as a literal asset of the Russian state, and it operates the way most Big Lies do, in simply making elliptical references to this position without ever explicitly articulating it in its most overt way. Repeat it often enough and people will believe it. Take, for example, that recent billboard in Manhattan telling people to ‘VOTE’ – for Biden, naturellement – ‘Because Russian lessons are expensive.’

It’s smarmy. It’s a snarl. It actually works on the same level as Trump’s own allusions to Mexico or to Muslims. That is to say: the authors of this billboard know that what they are saying is literally indefensible. If Trump wins reelection, he isn’t going to force us all to speak Russian, nor is Russia going to annex America at Trump’s behest. But by making the insinuation that he will, they are tapping into a broad web of innuendoes that was assiduously built up in the wake of the 2016 election that Trump is actually a Russian asset. It is also subtly making an inference about Russian language, or about Russian culture, that runs under the semiotic surface. Saying ‘Russian lessons are expensive’ in this pejorative context is almost to call Russian-speaking people – not the government, the people – frauds and cheats. It’s to look on the language as dirty, on the culture as dirty, on the people as dirty. Because the people who put up this billboard are, without a doubt, nice lily-white northern liberals, any response to an insinuation of bigotry on their part will be met with a chorus of craned necks, rapid disavowals, fervent hand-wringing and voluble umbrage of various sorts. But there is simply no avoiding the fact that at its root, Russiagate apologias of this sort are an expression of base, ugly, knuckle-dragging xenophobia. So, yes, sir. It is a materially-important fact that the ‘majority of babushkas’ have no love for Trump, have no use for Trump and have no desire to see Trump elected. Because that is the level of discourse we are at right now, sad to say.

But this is what Russiagate apologia looks like at its most kneejerk, scattershot and intellectually-lowbrow: its ‘motte’ form. The ‘bailey’ form of Russiagate apologia – that is to say, the most intellectually-defensible form of the Russiagate myth – is the continued prosecution of the DNC email hacking scandal of 2016. To refresh my readers’ memories, the story goes like this. A hacker, or group(s) of hackers, supposedly working on behalf of the Russian government, managed to access nearly 20,000 emails from a server operated by the Democratic National Convention, and submitted this email archive to WikiLeaks which then published them on its website. This was done, supposedly, with the collusion of certain members of the campaign to elect Donald Trump, with the express intent of discrediting Hillary Clinton and materially compromising her chances of winning the election.

Even at its most intellectually defensible, Russiagate is still a total fiction. As I pointed out before, and as a number of reputable journalists of the American left (such as Matt Taibbi) have pointed out repeatedly, the Mueller investigation turned up nothing and went home. The problem is that that hasn’t stopped the political class from making hay of it for the purposes of distraction. So, when the investigation has already been done, found nothing, and thrown in the towel, it really doesn’t mean that much that the DNC has opened a new lawsuit (after having lost one already) or that a Senate Commission has issued a statement that contravenes much of what the actual investigation it is based on has said or failed to say. At this point, further harping on an already spectacularly-poor showing by the Democratic Party in a national election does little but point to the pathetic impotence of said party: its creative bankruptcy, its lack of ideas, its moral impotence and its abandonment of any semblance of responsibility for its own failures.

Let Trump’s record on Russia speak for itself – it’s voluble enough, and there’s little in it for a peacenik like me to like. Trump has, according to the Brookings Institute (no friend of the administration or of Russia):

• identified Russia and China as America’s ‘adversaries’
• restricted exports to Russia
• repeatedly issued sanctions against individuals in the Russian government
• authorised provision of lethal weapons to the Ukrainian government
• bombed Russian and Syrian forces in Dayr az-Zûr (2017)
• expelled Russian government workers in New York, Washington and Seattle
• unilaterally withdrew from the INF treaty limiting nuclear armament buildup
• sanctioned Russian banks providing aid to the Venezuelan government

Saying that Trump is somehow an agent of the Russian state when he continually attacks Russian state instruments and economic interests, often with far blunter instruments than Obama did, is rather ludicrous. That more than anything else, is why I commend the ‘babushkas’ of Russia, and the people of East Germany, Bulgaria and Slovakia, for not buying the cockamamie that the American intelligence community keeps pumping out, for not buying the pusillanimous self-pitying sob stories of the American Democrats, and also understanding that Trump is not their friend. On all points, in consideration of the available evidence, I happen to agree with them.