The towering anti-communist dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was laid to rest in a London cemetery on Nov. 19. In Washington, American democracy threw dirt on itself.
Impervious to the irony, the Democrats of the House of Representatives staged another fake impeachment “show trial” in its coup, like no other, to thwart the anti-communist will of the American electorate that sent Donald Trump to the White House.
The battle isn’t drawn in such terms; they have been taken from us. But to understand the desperate, unceasing efforts to unseat President Trump requires a longer lens on recent events, one that can focus on over a century of what Whittaker Chambers described as “the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation.”
Chambers was writing in the 1950s, when the socialist “New Deal” was only two decades old. In 2016, six decades past Chambers, as the socialist ice cap had all but completely smothered our democratic republic, Trump won the presidency. With his agenda to save the United States by restoring the nation-state, Trump became a one-man counter-revolutionary army.
The revolutionaries within—leading figures in what is known as “the Swamp”—responded as true Marxists do: by any means necessary. And why not? Their ideological roots in varieties of Marxism are documented in my short book, “The Red Thread.“
The dangers they pose in these end-stages of our democratic republic cannot be overstated. That makes Election 2020 our D-Day for retaking our Swamp-occupied continent.
Maybe the second time around, a wiser, battle-tested counter-revolutionary Trump will call in reserves who actually support him. This is precisely what our deeply embedded and powerful communistic enemies, confronting this unexpected American “insurgency,” fear more than anything.
Reluctant or unable to imagine the war in these terms, Republicans have rallied as misdirected. In Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-Calif.) kangaroo court of an “impeachment inquiry,” they didn’t call out the treason all around, or even stand up on their hind legs and ask Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman to confirm the identity of the “whistleblower” whom he admitted leaking the Trump–Zelensky phone call to.
While Republicans scored the easy points on contradictions in witness testimonies, many undoubtedly perjurious, contrary to the appalling case of Roger Stone, however, perjury charges will never be referred for indictment, let alone go to trial.
However satisfying, like junk food, in the moment, none of these accrued debating points will cause the House to reject the coup in its impeachment stage; nor will they arouse the sleeping American people to the highest stages of concern for their republic.
Perhaps Republicans came closest to exposing one of the underlying Big Lies of the impeachment inquiry when Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) zeroed in on Vindman’s attitude toward alleged bona fide high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Joe Biden, according to Biden’s own, uncoerced videotaped confession.
Sounding like the mob capo Schiff channeled when the House Intelligence Committee chairman (never, ever forget) read to the American people a call transcript he had made up, Biden had bragged that as vice president, he gave Ukraine six hours to fire the prosecutor investigating corruption at Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company that employed Biden’s son Hunter on its board for an estimated $80,000 per month, or else—the “or else” being the loss of $1 billion in U.S. aid. Talk about “quid pro quo.” Talk about corruption. Talk about bribery. Talk about mixing personal gain with the affairs of state.
What did Vindman have to say about that? Here is the brief exchange.
Rep. Stewart: There are dozens of corrupt nations in the world, hundreds of corrupt government officials. Exactly one time did a vice president go to a nation and demand the specific firing of one individual and give a six-hour time limit and withhold or threaten to withhold a billion dollars in aid, if not. It was the one individual who was investigating a company who was paying his son. I'll ask you: Was that also “wrong”?[Oh really? That’s interesting!]
Any child, however, could make a judgment. It’s former Vice President Biden who should be the subject of this “impeachment inquiry.”
There was one extraordinary revelation to come out of the Vindman testimony. Earlier this year, Vindman confirmed that the Ukrainian government invited him on three occasions to lead the Ukrainian armies by joining the government of Ukraine as its minister of defense.
What?
When asked why the Ukrainians might have tried to hire him away from the White House and his country to lead the Ukrainian military, Vindman said he didn’t know. The question went largely unmined for its rich and deeper possibilities. What was really going on here?
CIA whistleblower and former counterintelligence officer Kevin Shipp wrote on Twitter: “A foreign government pitches a US government intelligence official to come over and work for them? This is called an espionage pitch. What prompted Ukraine to do that? What is in Vindman’s personal life that made him a mark?”
Vindman, meanwhile, made the whole affair sound routine. Other U.S. service members, he claimed, took up positions in “the developing democracies in that part of the world, certainly in the Baltics”—a new one on me—and he even invoked an unnamed U.S. Air Force officer who, he thought, had become “minister of defense.”
Is this true? No idea. Still, why Vindman? What was it in this National Security Council official that made the Ukrainian government believe he had sufficient loyalty to its national destiny to be entrusted with its national defense, not once, but three times?
When Vindman concluded his remarks by saying it was actually “kind of comical” for a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army to be offered “that illustrious a position,” a shaft of sunlight appeared. Were these Ukrainian offers even designed to win Vindman’s acceptance?
Researcher Jeff Nyquist saw through to another possible layer of motivation, writing on Twitter: “I think it was was an ‘atta boy’ from the Soviet Ukrainians.”
Atta boy? Soviet Ukrainians? Such notions will short-circuit the linkage between disinformation and conventional wisdom, a linkage that deceptively or naively asserts that to be “Ukrainian” is to be safe from all Moscow subversion and infiltration, to be air-tight and walled-off from Moscow’s sophisticated, relentless, time- and battle-tested programs of Active Measures. (Active Measures is KGB-speak used, to quote a 1982 interagency definition, “to refer to active operations intended to provoke a policy effect, as distinct from espionage and counterintelligence. ... Specifically, they are intended to influence the policies of foreign governments ... undermine confidence in foreign leaders and institutions, and discredit opponents. ...”)
To disregard the history of Active Measures in Ukraine or anywhere else (of course, including in the United States) isn’t only absurd but reckless. However, such disregard is the basis of consensus across the political and media spectrum.
It’s widely believed that there separately exist purely Russian vectors of influence and purely Ukrainian vectors of influence—that never the twain shall meet or be mixed; that never the long history of Soviet/Russian subversion of Ukraine and every other nation Moscow seeks to influence shall come under even theoretical consideration in trying to understand the facts of the anti-Trump, anti-America conspiracy, let along force them into the light.
As an aside, consider a graph in a 2015 Wall Street Journal article showing that out of all the nationalities in the world, “Ukrainians” topped the list of foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation (1999–2014). “Russians” don’t even make the top 15. Really?
By week’s end, a new phase of Trump–Russia was taking shape, shepherded by the testimony of the curious Fiona Hill (to be discussed in the next installment): We are now supposed to take sides on whether it was this separate state called Russia or this separate state called Ukraine that tried to influence the U.S. election.
Again, consider Nyquist’s notion of “Soviet Ukrainians” offering the defense ministry as a blandishment to the plump White House lieutenant colonel who has been so very cooperative and empathetic to “Ukrainian” interests. ...
Consider also that if there are “Soviet Ukrainians,” there are “Soviet Americans,” too.
Diana West is an award-winning journalist and author, whose latest book is “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”
