Sunday, November 12, 2017

Coming in from the Cold War

Czar Nicolas II of Russia was overthrown by Vladamir Lennin and the Bolshevics in 1917 shortly following the first world war and was subsequently assassinated by them. My grandparents were born into a world when the "Soviet threat" was seen as a danger to democracy or at least to free market economies.
           My grandfather was beyond the draft age when world war two started and was more concerned with raising his young family. At that point the United States and Soviets were ideologically juxtaposed, but united to fight a genocidal, xenophobic Austrian nationalist who had convinced Germans they were a "master race." My parents were small children when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg gave the Soviets plans to replicate the hydrogen bomb that we'd used to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and were tried, convicted and executed for treason.
      
        The Soviets would bankroll a civil war in China and we supported the opposition. They supported a communist dictator on the Korean peninsula and we sent young Americans there to fight and die in a proxy war  there which never actually ended but rather turned into a lengthy "cease fire" which is still in effect. When my parents were in high school, the Soviets allied themselves with southeast Asian nationalists in Northern Vietnam and America's response was to send the men of my father's generation to give their lives. it became a quagmire which cost us billions and tens of thousands of American and South Vietnamese lives and went down as the only war the United States ever "lost". In the midst of that a young man named Don Trump. the grandson of an immigrant who'd become wealthy as a slumlord used a mysterious medical deferment to avoid going to the war in question. In 1980 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and we sent weapons and money to a group of guerillas who would later become a terrorist organization that ultimately attacked us and turned Afghanistan into their "Vietnam".
          Over the better part of a century the United States and Soviet Union spied on one another via our Office of Strategic Services which would later become the Central Intelligence Agency and the Soviet KGB.  We had various standoffs in central and south America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa via proxy wars, coup de tats, revolutions and counter revolutions. We'll probably never know how many Americans whose names we'll never know died in back alleys in Berlin, Helsinki and nameless tropic jungles in attempts to gather intelligence on our then enemy.

     I often tell people one of the happiest days of my life was as a young marine standing in an airport in a class A uniform watching Germans chipping away at the Berlin wall which had been a symbol of the cold war since before my birth. I smiled so hard my face hurt because I knew it meant that there would never be another war between us and the communists. While communism as a form of government vanished in Europe (it still exist in China, Vietnam and Cuba) Communist did not.
             Vladamir Putin a former head of the KGB and Russia's current leader has started wars in former Soviet republics to make them Russian spheres of influence again. He's used cyber attacks to cripple their economies, assassinated journalists and political opposition leaders in the case of the Ukraine sent soldiers (who weren't in Russian uniforms but used Soviet equipment) to simply take the country over and called it a "people's uprising."

      In 2016 Hillary Clinton a former senator and Secretary of State and one of Putin's old political enemies ran for president and according to the world's intelligence community, his machine went to work via a series cyber attacks and fake news stories to effect the outcome of America's election.
The election was won by Clinton's opponent a man named Don Trump whom you may remember was the grandson of an immigrant who became a wealthy slum lord and used his family's connectios to avoid a Soviet proxy war in Vietnam.
             President Trump while ironically IN Vietnam took advantage of the moment to not only deny Russian involvement in our election and to claim that he "believed" Vladamir Putin's denials,  but to attack the men who spent their careers in out intelligence community as "political hacks". He went on to say that we should strive for BETTER relations with Putin and the Russians.

         I can't help but wonder, at what point did attempts to subvert our government become acceptable. Over the years many American politician's careers were built or destroyed because they were either "tough on" or "not tough enough" on the Russians.  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg felt it wasn't fair that we had a weapon that could destroy cities and the Russians didn't and it cost them their lives.  Many Americans were sent to prison for selling seemingly trivial "secrets" to the then Soviet Union.
       Why is an American president so enamored with becoming an ally to a government which openly and aggressively spies on us and attempted to influence one of our elections?  Why does that same president seemingly have so little regard for the very intelligence community whose work protects and has protected him and all Americans for the entirety of his life? What is the future of the republic that is the United States of America when our elected chief executive seems to admire a totalitarian oligarch?

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