Nina Khruscheva, Dreyfus & Vindman, Taxil & Trump

Nina Khruscheva, who is a year younger than me, has the rare distinction- rare, that is, for a graduate of Moscow University- of being stupider and more ignorant than even I aspire to be in these socioproctological blogposts.

She writes in Project Syndicate- In many ways, the Dreyfus Affair was the last violent spasm of the French Revolution. The Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards – the revolutionaries and the reactionaries – were each fighting for their own idea of France and were blind to any other. One side wanted to restore the old order; the other was desperate to fend off counterrevolution and the undoing of all the reforms since 1789.

This is nonsense. Nobody wanted the Ancien Regime back. The Code Napoleon was too useful. Land Reform was irreversible. There was a constituency for 'Boulangerism' but no French General could actually deliver 'Revanche' against Germany. What would later be called the 'Poujadist' element was Anti-Semitic and Anti-Masonic.  The chief anti-Dreyfusard was Edouard Drumont who founded the Anti-Semitic League in 1889. But he considered himself a Socialist.

This was the heyday of 'fake news'. Consider the Taxil hoax. The Pope, whose self-professed 'infallibility' compensated for the loss of his territorial possessions consequent upon the French defeat in 1870,  had published an encyclical saying that the Masons were Satan's minions on earth. For the faithful, this meant something false had to be 'truer than true' in the sense of being infallibly true.

So Leo Taxil, who had hoodwinked the Pope into thinking him a 'born again' penitent,  produced a book purportedly by one Diana Vaughan- descendant of an English alchemist- who was an eye-witness to all sorts of infernal goings on involving the Masons. The Catholics and associated nutters fell for it. Even after the hoax was revealed, they persisted in the belief that the thing was a double bluff. The same was true of the Dreyfus affair. If Dreyfus was innocent then, as Chesterton suggested, it was because Dreyfus was so guilty that he had planted false evidence against himself so as to get exonerated the better to pursue his vile plan. 

Kruscheva's own beliefs regarding her adopted country are as bizarre as anything Taxil could have dreamed up. She writes-

The parallels to America in 2020 should be obvious. Trump came to power by inciting hysteria among whites who think their privilege and control of the country are slipping away. 

How did Trump 'incite hysteria'? Taxil supplies the answer. Satan turned into a crocodile and played the piano at Trump's rallies. Whites got very hysterical. Not just Whites. 14 percent of African American males got so hysterical they voted for Trump. 

And everyone else, from progressive to conservative “Never Trumpers,” is desperate to preserve the rule of law and the institutions of American democracy.

Because, as Taxil's prophetic books show, Trump is causing Satan to turn into a piano playing crocodile. When Kruscheva was a student, the  magazine 'Krokodil' was quite popular in Moscow. It seems, nobody explained to the poor girl that the thing was meant to be satire. 

Dreyfus was originally arrested and convicted on charges of selling military secrets to Germany – France’s historical enemy. But because he was a Jew, his guilt was assumed from the start, particularly by most of the French officer corps. 

Why the fuck would the 'officer corps' have entrusted a Jew with secrets in the first place? The answer, obviously, is that Satan had turned into a piano-playing crocodile and beguiled the French General Staff with nocturnes. 

To ensure that the charges would stick, various conspirators fabricated evidence against Dreyfus, including a secret file that only the judges who handed down the conviction and prison sentence were allowed to see.

This sounds a bit like the files compiled by a former British Intelligence Operative which contain evidence that Trump got a lot of golden showers in Moscow and thus has been a Russian asset for many years. 

There is another Trump-era parallel here. Picquart could not remain silent after discovering that the key piece of evidence against Dreyfus was a forgery, and his resolve was strengthened when the French General Staff still insisted on Dreyfus’s guilt even when they knew the identity of the real culprit (one Major Ferdinand Esterhazy). 

What is the parallel? Does the American military know that that it wasn't Trump who got pissed upon but Biden whose son got showered with gold? 

Likewise, Colonel Alexander Vindman, the US National Security Council employee who testified about Trump’s abuse of power in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment, could not look the other way, and stood firm in the face of abuse and threats.

Vindman testified that Trump was twisting the arm of the new Ukrainian leader- an ex-comedian whom Kruscheva reviled- to get dirt on Biden. But Vindman had worked for the Obama administration in the region. It was in his own interest to cover up wrongdoing because he himself, along with his family, might be implicated. 

The scandal here is that Biden's son got a lot of money from Ukraine for doing nothing. Why did Vindman not blow the whistle on this? 

If you abuse and threaten a guy to get him to confess his wrongdoing, but he stands firm because he does not want to hand back his ill gotten gains and is very definitely of the opinion that a spot of jail-time would not look good on his C.V, then no great moral heroism has been displayed. 

That last point suggests an even more dismaying parallel: an epidemic of elite corruption that makes the broader crisis possible in the first place. 

Trump never held any sort of public office till he became President. There may have been 'an epidemic of elite corruption' but it would have involved Biden and Hilary and so forth. Not Trump. 

In the Dreyfus Affair, a savagely right-wing press fanned the flames of anti-Semitism and intrigue among elites, just as Fox News does today against Trump’s enemies. 

No. The French General Staff weren't decided about prosecuting Dreyfus. Then an Anti-Semitic rag broke the story and forced their hand. In what followed, it was the anti-Semitic Press which continually kept the pressure on the French Army to persist in this horrible travesty. The whole thing was 'fake-news' driven. But, Kruscheva is indulging in nothing else and Project Syndicate is letting her do it. Why? The thing is clickbait.  Also, because Kruscheva is so ignorant and stupid, her argument is counter-productive. Maybe, that is the point.

Incidentally, Anti-Semitism isn't Left or Right Wing. It is a disease Khruscheva should have been familiar with from her earliest years in Russia. Her grandpappy, as Premier of Ukraine came down particularly hard on the Jews, becoming the first premier of a Soviet republic to prohibit Jewish theaters and schools; issuing regulations barring Jews from important local positions; banning writing and acting in the Yiddish language; and giving his unofficial blessing to an anti-Semitic outbreak in Kiev. 

Trump isn't part of the power-elite. He made his money in real estate- not selling out the interests of the American citizen. Project Syndicate also published an article titled 'America's sacred politics'  by a Dutch nutter named Ian Buruma who suggests that Trumpistas are sinister Opus Dei types! There's a pattern here, is what I'm saying. But only coz Satan has turned into a crocodile and is playing the piano. 

Returning to the no less nutty Khruscheva, we read a sentence which, despite the lady's Doctorate from Princeton in Comparative Literature, isn't English, can't be French or German or even Russian. Why? Existentialism means something in each of those languages. What she has written is meaningless.

Owing to these malign efforts, truth itself becomes blurred, and politics assumes an existential character. 
Malign efforts can't blur truth any more than condign efforts can sharpen its features. Truth, Alethia, does not work that way. One could say that when truth loses salience, politics assumes an 'identitarian character'. But identity is essentialist- even if only strategically so. Notionally, it exists in all possible worlds. However, where politics becomes 'existential', such essences don't matter. Only contingencies do. Bare survival- Utility in its rawest form- militates for intersubjective Alethia as utterly Objective and Economic. Productivity, not Identity; Threat-point based Shapley values, not Ideological hierarchies, are the increasingly predominant determinant of outcomes.

Khruscheva, unlike most victims of her grandpappy's policies, lived a charmed life. Charmed, but fairy tale level cretinous- check for yourself

Hence, when an assassin attempted to kill Dreyfus’s lawyer, Fernand Labori, he fled the scene shouting, “I’ve just killed the Dreyfus,” as if the Dreyfusard cause had become an evil presence in society.

The guy was never caught. Nobody really knows what he was shouting. Maybe, it was  'I've killed the Dreyfus attorney'. What is certain is that the assassin wasn't aiming at 'an evil presence in society'. Otherwise he'd have been killing people wholly unconnected with the case. 

Why is Khruscheva pretending otherwise? Perhaps it is because shite academics like her need to pretend something similar has been happening ever since something they said could not happen in 2016 actually did happen.

The truth is, Trump wasn't a professional politician or successful ex-General. Yet America elected him in defiance of established epistemic elites. Thus, they feel, some 'evil presence' must have infiltrated Society to make his Presidency possible.  This miasma is omnipresent. It is like Stalinism which her grandpappy denounced but did not exorcise from the Moscow of her own adolescence- as I vividly remember.

Can Khruscheva say anything more stupid than what she has done hitherto? Let us see-

Most depressing of all, though, is the fact that no senior figure in the US has come forward to stand alongside Vindman. There has been no Zola to issue the equivalent of the famous “J’Accuse!” pamphlet, shaming the country’s complicit elites for their lies and corruption. Instead, men like former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have put their personal interests first, remaining mostly silent (perhaps, at least in Bolton’s case, to boost book sales).

Vindman has been imprisoned on Devil's Island. Yet no senior American figure has come forward to rescue the poor fellow. What's that? Vindman and his brother have not been imprisoned? They will be going back, from the NSC (which advises the President) to the Army because the President does not want their advice anymore? Oh. In that case, an American Zola would look an utter fool for trying to make out that a guy who serves at the President's pleasure, but doesn't please the President, has been victimized by having to go back to the Army. Indeed, Trump has shrunk the NSC so they are in the same boat as a hundred other officials hired under the Obama administration.

Following his philippic against Dreyfus’s tormentors, Zola was driven into exile in London. But he remained hopeful that “some day, France will thank me for having helped to save her honor.” Those senior US figures who have soiled their own honor by serving Trump, betraying institutions like the US military that they proclaim to love, still have time to save their country’s honor. But they must speak up soon.

Some Americans think foreign governments should release evidence that senior US politicians are corrupt. The attempted impeachment of Trump was a Democratic own-goal- if, that is, Biden emerges as their front-runner. He and his son have been irreparably tarnished. By contrast, Trump is not thought to have done anything wrong. Presidents should uncover the misdeeds of their predecessors or possible successors.

Vindman was not a lawyer. It was not incumbent on his seniors to be guided by him. Furthermore, he had a family link to Ukraine. He had served as a junior diplomat in that region at a time when Biden was Vice President and his son had got a lucrative deal. Prima facie, that is enough for the President to send the fellow- and his brother- back to the Army. Why? Maybe they themselves were party to a corrupt deal. Perhaps they were trying to hide it. Let them be assigned to some job where there can be no prima facie cause to suspect a conflict of interest. No doubt, if the Democrats win, this guy and his brother will be promoted. Perhaps they may leave Government Service to take very lucrative positions in the Private Sector. If so, good luck to them. They played the game and they won. But, if not and their career stalls and neither ends up very rich, we can't declare them to be martyrs. We can't compare them to Dreyfus.

The author has a bizarre belief concerning what is required of a patriotic soldier or diplomat or politician. She says 'Those senior US figures who have soiled their own honor by serving Trump, betraying institutions like the US military that they proclaim to love, still have time to save their country’s honor. But they must speak up soon.' The plain meaning is 'if you serve Trump, you soil your honour'. Thus you must not serve on the NSC even if you have skills vital for the security of the country. This is not treason but it is next door to it. Why does the author speak of serving a President as possibly having the effect of 'betraying the military'?

According to the US constitution, though an officer may resign for this reason it can never be the case that she can actually be convicted of any such thing. In other words, this is just a subjective matter. A soldier who opposed desegregation of the army had the right to resign from the NSC because she felt 'the military is being betrayed- Whites should not have to serve alongside Blacks'. However, from the legal point of view, this was a purely voluntary, subjective, decision of hers which she was allowed to make. On the other hand, if she encouraged serving officers to disobey the President so as not to 'betray the military which they proclaim to love', then she may be guilty of treason. I do not say this author crosses that line. However, a similar article written by a serving officer might be considered in that light.

Writers should learn to be careful of their words just as Counter-Intelligence should be careful about catching the genuine traitor. That is the lesson of the Dreyfus affair. Zola is celebrated because his intervention was well calibrated. It wasn't an absurd rant. But then Zola was a good writer. When it comes to stringing words together to make a point, being careful is what makes you good. Incontinent babbling amounts to soiling yourself.