IT IS already almost three decades now since Russia was a communist country, so something had to be found to create a new enemy to justify a continued armaments build-up and aggressive policies.

It is now classed as enemy No.1 in the cyber war field.

There is little doubt that the Russians have been involved in probing US cyber security and testing its reliability, but is that such en egregious and dangerous crime as portrayed in the West?

The attempted undermining and destabilisation of other states by the West has been a well-tried traditional means of subverting politics and democracy over many decades in those places where governments didn’t toe the Western line.

Here in Britain, the most infamous use of political destabilisation was the Zinoviev letter, fabricated by MI6 in 1924. It purported to provide evidence for Soviet interference in Britain’s democratic process. It certainly contributed to Labour losing the election.

The ruling class was so frightened and appalled at the prospect of a Labour government being freely elected to power that it decided to try to rig things.

The CIA and MI6 collaborated in 1953 to sow fake news — before it was known as such — in Iranian media in order to engineer the overthrow of the democratically elected progressive prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh.

They did this by accusing him of being a communist and claiming that the communists would destroy Islam, already whipping up Islamic fundamentalism then for their own ends.

Similar methods were taken by the CIA to engineer the overthrow of the democratic government of President Salvador Allende in Chile. The list is enormous.

‘Have we ever tried to meddle in other people’s elections?’
‘Oh probably but it was for the good
of the system to avoid the communists from taking over’

And for the sceptics you can take it from the horse’s mouth. On Fox News on February 16, former CIA director James Woolsey Jr  was asked by the presenter: “Have we ever tried to meddle in other people’s elections?”

Woolsey replied:  “Oh probably, but it was for the good of the system to avoid the communists from taking over, for instance in ’47 and ’49 in Greece and Italy.”

“But we don’t do that now do we?” she asked. He answered with a knowing smile and said simply “Hmmmm!”

What is GCHQ for if not to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of other governments and agencies, including private businesses and individuals, in order to utilise the knowledge to gain the upper hand.

What happened to the revelations that the CIA had hacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile, among others?

While there is evidence to show that Russians have been involved in setting up accounts in the US on Facebook and other social media sites in an attempt to gain influence, it is preposterous to suggest that the Russian government actually could, or even thought it could, influence the outcome of an election.

If anyone actually affected the outcome of that recent election in any meaningful way, it was FBI director James Comey who, only days before the election, on October 29 2016 announced new and damaging evidence on Hillary Clinton’s misuse of emails.

This undoubtedly gave the necessary push Donald Trump needed.

Not satisfied with the risible accusations of Russian interference in US elections, the British took up the baton and accused the country of possibly interfering in Britain’s own EU referendum, but no evidence was forthcoming.

Sounds like a very flimsy fig-leaf to cover the real powerful figures who did blatantly interfere, including five of Britain’s wealthiest businessmen, among them Arron Banks and hotel-owner Rocco Forte.

Other secret donors were the billionaire George Soros and the shadowy Richard Cook, who had links to the Saudi Arabian secret service and gave the DUP a whopping sum to help the Brexit campaign.

The revelations by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden reveal only the tip of the iceberg but have helped to expose US hypocrisy and double standards on this issue.  

Already in 2014 the US accused the Chinese state of stealing electronic information and arrested several Chinese citizens in connection with the case, but China’s foreign ministry turned the tables and accused US “of using its advanced technology and infrastructure to perpetrate the large-scale theft of secrets and eavesdropping against foreign political leaders, enterprises and individuals.”

As early as May 2014, the Chinese said that, “in recent years, the People’s Liberation Army’s international internet terminals have suffered a large number of attacks. IP addresses show that a large number of those attacks come from the US.”

What is certainly clear is that all countries with the necessary electronic know-how will be using it to probe and test other countries’ security systems.

After all, so much of commerce and indeed modern armed conflicts have become almost totally reliant on computer systems and electronic communication.

This electronic skirmishing represents the new cold war, but it is also used as a means of masking the real interference in the democratic process everywhere — the shadowy power of big capital to call the shots.
 

Woolsey Jr went further on in that Fox News interview by admitting that the CIA historically and currently meddles and manipulates foreign elections. His excuse? “Only for a good cause.”

In other words, the US empire gives to itself the right to carry out worldwide, as a matter of policy, exactly what it just indicted the 13 employees of a Russian business for.

There’s no way that a supposed “troll farm” of 80 employees creating fake social media profiles and events had a significant — let alone determinant — impact on US politics, since this is a country of over 300 million people, where a billion dollars was spent on the presidential election alone and tens of thousands of people are employed as full-time political operatives and activists.

If you think this supposed “troll farm” is bad, however, look up the history of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy.