Why Is Trump Spouting Russian Propaganda?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
It was only one moment in a 90-minute stream of madness.
President Trump convened a Cabinet meeting, at which he invited all its members to praise him for his stance on the border wall and the government shutdown. There’s always a lively competition to see which member of the cabinet can grovel most abjectly. Newcomer Matthew Whitaker may be only the acting attorney general, but despite—or perhaps because of—that tentative status, he delivered one of the strongest entries, saluting the president for sacrificing his Christmas and New Year’s holiday for the public good, and contrasting that to members of Congress who had left Washington during the Trump-created crisis.
But that was not the crazy part.
The crazy part came during the president’s monologue defending his decision to withdraw all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria and 7,000 from Afghanistan, about half the force in that country.
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union,” he said .
Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia … The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.
Let’s go to the replay:
The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.
To appreciate the shock value of Trump’s words, it’s necessary to dust off some Cold War history. Those of us who grew up in the last phases of the Cold War used to know it all by heart, but I admit I had to do a little Googling to refresh my faded memories.
Through the 1970s, Afghanistan had been governed by a president who was friendly to the Soviet Union, but it was not reliably under Soviet control. That president, Mohammad Daoud Khan, became convinced that the local communists were plotting against him. He struck first, assassinating one communist leader in April 1978, and arresting others.
Instead of preventing the plot, this coup-from-above triggered it. In April 1978, the communists—enabled by their strong presence in Afghanistan's Soviet-trained military—seized power.
The new regime launched an ambitious modernizing agenda: women’s rights, land reform, secularization. That project went about as well as expected. While the communists appealed to a small, educated elite in Kabul, they offended the ultra-conservative countryside. Violent guerrilla resistance gathered. The guerrillas called themselves “mujahideen,” holy warriors. The Kabul government dismissed them as “bandit elements” and “terrorists.”
By the end of 1979, the Kabul-based communist government was teetering, nearing collapse. The Soviet authorities in Moscow blamed the incompetence, corruption, and internecine violence of their local allies. In December 1979, they overthrew and killed the then-communist leader, installed somebody more compliant, and deployed 85,000 troops to enforce their rule over the countryside. The Soviets had expected a brief, decisive intervention like those in Prague in 1968 or Budapest in 1956. Instead, the war turned into a grinding Vietnam-in-reverse. The Soviets withdrew, defeated, in 1989.
Here’s why Trump’s lopsided view of this story is so telling. Inflicting that defeat on the USSR was a major bipartisan foreign-policy priority of the 1980s. The policy was designed by Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and executed by the Reagan administration.
It’s amazing enough that any U.S. president would retrospectively endorse the Soviet invasion. What’s even more amazing is that he would do so using the very same falsehoods originally invoked by the Soviets themselves: “terrorists” and “bandit elements.”
It has been an important ideological project of the Putin regime to rehabilitate and justify the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Putin does not care so much about Afghanistan, but he cares a lot about the image of the USSR. In 2005, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as (depending on your preferred translation) “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” or “a major geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”—but clearly a thing very much to be regretted.
The war in Afghanistan helped bring about that collapse, not because it bankrupted the Soviet regime—that was an effect of the break in the price of oil after 1985—but because it forced a reckoning between the Soviet regime and Soviet society. As casualties mounted, as soldiers returned home addicted to heroin, Soviet citizens began demanding the right to speak the truth, not only about the war in Afghanistan, but about all Soviet reality.
It’s fitting that Putin’s campaign to reimpose official lying would culminate in a glorification of the catastrophic Afghanistan war. And clearly, that campaign has swayed the mind of the president of the United States.
As of mid-morning on January 3, the day after the president’s repetition of Soviet-Putinist propaganda in the Cabinet room, there has been no attempt by the White House to tidy things up: no presidential tweet, no corrective statement. The president’s usual defenders—Sean Hannity, Fox & Friends , the anti-anti-Trump Twitter chorus—have likewise ignored the whole matter. They’re back to denouncing the Steele dossier, fulminating against Mueller, and reprising the Clinton email drama. There’s apparently nothing they can think of to say in exoneration or excuse.
Putin-style glorification of the Soviet regime is entering the mind of the president, inspiring his words and—who knows—perhaps shaping his actions. How that propaganda is reaching him—by which channels, via which persons—seems an important if not urgent question. But maybe what happened yesterday does not raise questions. Maybe it inadvertently reveals answers.
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Let me ask everyone a serious question -
Does that really sound like something Donald Trump would come up with on his own ?
When was the last time that Trump was on the phone with Putin or an intermediary of Putin?
Today...
No idea, but I'm sure you will regale us with something...
I asked a very obvious question because why else would Donald Trump be pushing Russian cold war propaganda? How much evidence will you need before you accept that Donald Trump is a compromised Russian asset?
Whis the POTUS repeating Russian cold war propaganda when we have troops in the same country? It would be normal for him to be defending US ideas instead of a Cold War adversary.
Donald Trump never gave a moments thought to why Russia invaded Afghanistan until very recently, I guarantee you.
Someone put the thought and perhaps even the words, in his head.
Every thinking person is appalled.
Someone Putin that thought into his vacant cranium.
What do you think he hired John Bolton his top foreign policy adviser to do?
Wally, where ever do you get your adverbs ???
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We justifiably entered Afghanistan, after they gave safe haven to Osama Bin Laden, u know, the 911 Saudi Arabian
John Bolton is a Russian puppet too? Yikes.
Trumpsters are grabbing at straws.
Putin does have two hands you know
To be a warmonger?
thought they were illegal as well...
Actually yeah it does.
It helps justify his decision to withdraw. He's using the USSR as an example of how a country can be destroyed by fighting in Afghanistan. It makes the point more effective to claim the USSR had a reason to be there, just like we do. It's not about "glorifying" the USSR (which claiming it was destroyed by Afghanistan doesn't), it's about selling his plan for withdrawl and using the example of the USSR to scare people.
It's bullshit, but it's the type of thing he does. He's bending facts to make his argument stronger.
You must think he has no brain at all. Anyone who lived at that time would agree with that statement or was capable of making it. Try and remember John, he was smart enough to get elected President. He beat a strong field or Republicans and the most powerful political machine in America. He has a degree of intelligence.
He may know a little sumpthin sumpthin about real estate and how to con people into buying condo properties, but other than that he has never shown the knowledge of a high school sophomore. He is a phenomenally ignorant person about national and world affairs. He thought Frederick Douglas, who was born in 1818, is still alive for god's sake.
Actually he was among the first to identify the negative effects of globalism and take them on. The new NAFTA deal now makes sense for the US. The US in now an energy exporter no longer dependent on the middle east. I say that took a bit of ingenuity.
He thought Frederick Douglas, who was born in 1818, is still alive for god's sake.
So? Obama thought Abraham Lincoln FOUNDED the GOP!
Lincoln is often understood to be the spiritual figurehead of the GOP.
Vic to compare the level of knowledge between Trump and Obama, in regards to American politics or national or world affairs, including history, is a fool's errand on the part of Trump backers.
And even though Lincoln didn't personally found the Republican Party , it's foundation does trace to the time period when Lincoln was a rising and then the pre-eminent figure in US politics.
Where is it? Up his big fat ass?
Lol, nice try, but No he was not the founder of the GOP. I think Obama got confused because Lincoln was the first Republican President. Somebody as well educated as Barak Obama has no excuse. BTW PBS covered for him and REMOVED the statement from Obama's comments.
John, Obama was well educated and fancied himself as an intellectual. He was a master politician and probably the best political public speaker in my lifetime. He was also a radical who deeply resented this country. Trump is course and blustery but as I told you before has a degree of intelligence and above all an uncanny instinct for what the working class is feeling. That leaves Abraham Lincoln with no formal education, the greatest President in this nation's history and a man who loved America.
And even though Lincoln didn't personally found the Republican Party , it's foundation does trace to the time period when Lincoln was a rising and then the pre-eminent figure in US politics.
And a 5th grader would know the difference.
How exactly did Obama resent the USA?
Donald Trump is a liar and a conman. Anyone who falls for his bluster deserves to be scammed, just like the thousands who Trump has scammed in the past.
I'm sure, to you, he was a reasonable moderate. You were over at Newsvine when I was there and have read my comments on Obama over and over. Need I repeat all the things Obama did in order to (in his own words) "transform" America? For what ends?
Donald Trump is a liar and a conman. Anyone who falls for his bluster deserves to be scammed, just like the thousands who Trump has scammed in the past.
You & your fellow progressives say that in just about ever seed. The rest of us will vote for him again in 2020.
What did Obama do?
With John's permission I will gladly revisit the Obama years and what he did to this country.
John, it's your call?
That would require him reading from sources other than Fox, Twitter or The National Enquirer.
maybe he bribed Barron. Red Snoopy to Trumppy as well
Don declared "i love Lucy!" ,as he played with his peanuts, again.
Cause he has no new cash shoes, but, probably just another one of Trump's
Linus's .
I'm betting they find out Cohen had to cut a check for some PP
No, not that PP, Peppermint Patty! As she
proclaimed PP boy was the source, of all the leaks.
Of hot air as well.
Note: Red Barron was not harmed during this stereotyping
Not the idea, but that word salad is all his.
Besides, can trmp find Afghanistan on a map?
Most entertaining conspiracy theory of the day. 👌🏽
What’s your explanation for the latest revision of history by der Führer?
So, are we supposed to stay in Afghanistan forever dumping billions of dollars every year to prop up a weak corrupt Afghanistan government? It doesn't matter how long we stay; or how much money we spend- it will still fail. Just like it did with the Soviet Union.
Blame Bush Jr, hell the left does for everything else. He was too weak of a leader to tell NATO and the UN to kiss off; and allowed them to rope the US into a failed nation building scheme (Which they then bailed on). Afghanistan should have been search and destroy only from the start. We could have left a small fleet with one aircraft carrier drones, and special forces to insert as needed and accomplished far more for far less cost financially and in human lives.
Trump is doing something logical by removing US forces (what Obama campaigned on, before turning into Bush on steroids). We can always leave a small fleet and play wack a terrorist whenever Al Qaeda, Taliban, or ISIS/ISIL pop up.
Mark the calendar! I agree with Ronin!
WALL ST. JOURNAL
The terrifying depths of Donald Trump’s ignorance, in a single quote
The president’s recent claim that the Soviets were ‘right’ to invade Afghanistan is worse than idiotic—it’s downright frightening
It’s been two years since a reality-television mogul, billionaire real estate grifter and sleazy beauty-pageant impresario who somehow ended up on the Republican ticket in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, failed to win the popular vote but fluked his way into the White House anyhow by means of an antique back-door anomaly peculiar to the American political system known as the Electoral College.
We’re now at the half-way mark of Donald Trump’s term in the White House, and the relentless hum of his casual imbecilities, obscenities, banalities and outright fabrications has become so routine to the world’s daily dread that it is now just background noise in the ever-louder bedlam of America’s dystopian, freak-show political culture.
And yet, now and again, just when you think the president has scraped his fingers raw in the muck at the bottom of stupidity’s deep barrel, the man somehow manages to out-beclown himself. Such was the case this week, in a ramble of fatuous illiteracy that should drive home the point, to all of us, that the Office of the President of the United States of America is currently occupied by a genuinely dangerous maniac.
Trump mocked India—a highly-valued friend of Afghanistan and contributor of $3 billion in infrastructure and community-development funding—with a weird reference to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “constantly telling me he built a library in Afghanistan.” Officials in Modi’s office say nobody knows what the hell Trump was talking about. Then Trump complained that Pakistan—a duplicitous enemy of Afghan sovereignty and a notoriously persistent haven-provider and incubator of Taliban terrorism—isn’t making a sufficient military commitment to Afghanistan. Which made absolutely no sense.
But then Trump went right off the deep end with a disquisition on the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and his remarks betrayed a perilous, gawping ignorance of the very reason why Afghanistan became such a lawless hellhole in the first place—which is how it came to pass that al-Qaeda found sanctuary there with the deranged Pakistani subsidiary that came to be called the Taliban, which is how al-Qaeda managed to plan and organize the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—which is the very reason the American troops that Trump keeps saying he wants to bring home are still there at all.
Soviet M-72 tanks on the highway to Kabul in April 1988 (AP PHOTO/Liu Heung-Shing)
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,” Trump began. “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”
They were right to be there.
You’ll want to let that sink in for a moment: on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019, Donald Trump endorsed a revisionist lunacy that is currently being championed by a bunch of cranks at the outermost neo-Stalinist fringe of Vladimir Putin’s ruling circle of oligarchs. They’ve already managed to cobble together a resolution in Russia’s Potemkin parliament that is to be voted on next month. It’s jointly sponsored by lawmakers from Putin’s United Russia and the still-existing Communist Party.
The resolution would overturn a declaration adopted by the Congress of People’s Deputies at the time of Soviet communism’s unravelling in 1989, 10 years after the Soviets’ catastrophic dismembering of Afghanistan. The 1989 resolution frankly declared that the Soviet invasion and the nine-year war the Soviets prosecuted in Afghanistan deserved “moral and political condemnation.” The 1989 resolution was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev himself, who at the time was chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
The resolution slammed the former Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko and Dimitri Ustinov for turning Afghanistan into an apocalyptic wasteland of more than a million corpses and forcing a third of the Afghan population to flee the country as refugees, costing as well the lives of 15,000 Soviet soldiers, for good measure.
And now, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is saying Gorbachev was wrong, and Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko and Ustinov were right, and so are Vladimir Putin’s creepy neo-Stalinist revisionists. Further than that, the idea the invasion bankrupted the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse, and that the Soviets rightly invaded Afghanistan “because terrorists were going into Russia,” as Trump claimed, is a whole-cloth fiction.
The USSR’s 40th Army crossed the Amu Darya River into Afghanistan on Dec. 25, 1979 at the invitation of Hafizullah Amin, whose communist-led military regime had overthrown Afghan President Muhammad Daoud in 1978. The communist coup had provoked a democratic uprising, owing largely to the regime’s habit of carrying out mass executions and jailing tens of thousands of people it didn’t like. The regime was initially led by Amin’s co-conspirator, Nur Muhammad Taraki, who had been tied to a bed and suffocated with a cushion on Amin’s orders. Immediately upon arrival in Kabul, the Soviets dispatched a phalanx of Russian Special Forces (the Spetznaz) to Tajbeg Palace, where they murdered Amin and his family.
The next decade was a living hell for the Afghan people. In the broader scheme of things, the Soviet invasion put an end to the U.S.-Soviet detente engineered by former president Richard Nixon. The U.S. boycotted the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow, President Jimmy Carter started funding Islamist insurgents to wage an anti-Soviet jihad from Pakistan, and Iran joined in with jihadist proxies of its own. These were the years of Afghanistan’s worst years of mayhem and terror, far and away more horrific than anything since.
Why is everyone always picking on Donald Trump? It's Trump Derangement Syndrome !!!! The fricking WALL ST JOURNAL is now printing mocking articles critical of our sainted hero.
Does anybody know if Trumppy realizes Rambo III was not based on a true story ?
I thought that video was the entire segment, but it's not. MSNBC didn't have the second part on their YouTube channel, but someone else uploaded it, so here it is.
Part 2: