Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnR
This.
Russia DID try to influence the election. It is what they do.
Yes, but, as TDF noted, you use the key word here--"influence." That is significantly different from the words used in the other posts--"interfere" and "disrupt".
They did not HACK the election. That would involve tampering with the results.
No they did not. If they actually were able to physically change the vote count, especially if that reversed the results, that would be significant enough to void the election.
What they did is more or less what they always do to us and to others.
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Yes, as do most other countries, including the U.S. That is, we try to influence the policies in various ways including cyber. During the so-called "cold war" we broadcast pro-American, anti-communist messages over their airwaves. We bribe with trade deals and foreign "aid", coerce with military pacts and military buildups, disrupt enemy economies by creating economic pacts with their competitors, and other clandestine ways. And yes, we even "interfere" in elections such as how Obama tried to do against Netanyahu.
But the most dangerous kind of influence is actual penetration of governments with agents in high government places which are actually able to direct policies--as the Soviets did in the U.S. in the 1930's to 1950's era. Moscow had agents, both foreign as well as American Communists or fellow travelers or just useful idiots who were able to influence our policies in Asia and Eastern Europe to the point that China and all of Eastern Europe were basically handed over to Mao or Moscow.
We all know about Oppenheimer and the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss. But there were others equally or even more importantly, in the State Department, or Treasury, or Agriculture, or labor departments, as well as other influential places, and those who were close key advisers to FDR. And there were, very importantly, turncoat or sympathetic journalists and academics who spread false reports and propaganda.
China need not have become Communist. Chiang Kai Sheck
was actually defeating Mao with our provision of military equipment. He actually had driven the reds into Northern China where they tried to hold off Chiang's forces even though the Communists were badly equipped. But before Chiang could finish off the Reds the U.S. abruptly changed its stance toward him, forced a cease fire, and the Communists were able to recover and get re-equipped by Moscow, even with equipment we had given to it as an ally against the Nazis. And our military aid to Chiang dwindled or ceased. And he was driven to Formosa (Taiwan), which is the non-Communist remnant of China today.
This was all accomplished in various coordinated means of direct influence. There was false journalism (fake news long before the current crop), as well as key figures in our government cabinets and agencies. These were all used to influence the U.S. to desire the countries along the Soviet borders to be friendly to the Soviet Union.
Pro-Communist journalists who were either sympathizers or actually Communist Party members advanced Communist interests through organs such as Time Magazine and its Moscow correspondent, Richard Lauterbach who was confirmed by Venona as a Communist Party member, Guenther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor, Israel Epstein of The New York Times, Mark Gayn of Colliers, Edgar Snow of The Saturday Evening Post, and other smaller publications such as the New Republic and a Communist front publication Amerasia.
They wrote stories praising Mao and denigrating Chiang. Made it appear that Mao was actually doing the heavy fighting against Japan while portraying Chiang as doing little and ineffectivey when just the opposite was true. They painted Mao as the true and future leader who would make China the future haven of a free, egalitarian, productive, and happy nation. And made Chiang out to be a throwback to the old oppressive imperial regime.
They bolstered the efforts of diplomats such as Communist sympathizer John Stuart Service and others to return to the FDR administration reports glowingly, and falsely, favorable toward Mao and the Soviets. And this in turn made the work easier for those in high places as advisers to the President such as John Davies in State, and others such as Harry Hopkins, Laughlin Currie, and many more, who were at FDR's side and elbow.
In short, it was the advice of actual Soviet agents in FDR's administration which persuaded him to give China to Mao and Eastern Europe to Stalin. Needlessly so.
FDR was persuaded by them to believe, as he said, as told to his first envoy to Moscow, William Bullitt, that Stalin "wanted only security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for world democracy and peace." FDR also wrote to Churchill "I think there is nothing more important than that Stalin feel that we mean to support him without qualification and at great sacrifice." AT Yalta, the conference where he effectively handed Eastern Europe over to the Soviet sphere, he told British Field Marshall Alan Brooke "of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist."
Among many others, FDR was influenced in his pro-Stalin thinking by Soviet spy and sympathizer Joseph Davies of the State Dept. and Soviet agent Harry Hopkins, a Soviet agent who was ensconced in the Agriculture Dept.
The U.S. Army cryptographers who "hacked" Soviet correspondence to Communist agents in the U.S. government were able, under a project named "Venona, to decode about 3,000 coded messages which confirmed the names of hundreds of Communist agents in our Federal Gvt. agencies and departments. These Venona papers were declassified and released in the mid nineteen nineties. The FBI already had, since the early 1930's, several of these names listed as possible Soviet agents. And the KGB files which were released in the mid nineties also corroborated and confirmed the names and others. There had also been in the 1930's House UnAmerican Activities Committee ongoing investigation of Communists employed by the Federal government which had about 180 suspected or confirmed employed agents.
For various reasons, the FDR administration was lax or totally averse to removing those exposed by the FBI and the Army cryptographers and the House committee. The laxness, tardiness of dismissing the infiltrators lasted into the Truman administration.
The maligned Joseph McCarthy in 1950 restored the fight, this time in the Senate, to investigate, expose, and remove the enemy agents. For various reasons he was rejected, vilified, and destroyed for trying. In the end, he was proven right.
That is the kind of influence, interference, and disruption that is truly destructive to "our democracy." It is the kind which comes from within. And it only can happen within if we have those in high places who are supportive of it. Who are its agents.
The chicken-chit stuff that Putin does is more annoying than anything else. And, since we must spend time and energy talking about it, shouldn't we be as much, or more, concerned with if the information is true? I find it strange that we are more concerned with hacking and attempted influence than if what is revealed is true. Even more strange that we consider the truth to be an interference or a disruption.