The way the postmodern agenda of modern global politics is formed.
Contemporary political life is the plot of an endless postmodern novel, very similar to the works of the Russian writer Viktor Pelevin. And another, very clear confirmation of this fact was the continuation of the scandal around the alleged Russian interference in the US elections in 2016, which allegedly led then to the victory of the incumbent President Donald Trump.
These allegations were voiced back in 2016, in a report published on the pages of the yellow news portal BuzzFeed. Citing sources in Russian political circles, its anonymous author talked about how Kremlin agents deliberately influenced American voters by influencing them through trolls and hackers. And the headquarters of this residency was the Russian consulate in Miami – which, in fact, never existed there.
The report tried to portray Donald Trump as an undercover Russian agent. It hinted that the recruitment of the future president could have happened in 2013, when he visited Moscow as part of the Miss Universe modeling contest. During this visit, he allegedly invited the ladies of the half-light to the luxury hotel where Barack Obama had stayed, and forced them to desecrate their rival’s bed. And everything that happened, of course, was filmed by the ubiquitous security officers who began to blackmail the American magnate with recordings from hidden cameras, turning him into their obedient puppet.
It all looked like a collection of grotesque and unsubstantiated gossip – especially when it became known that the author of the report was a retired British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who once collected dirt on Trump on behalf of representatives of the Democratic Party. The accusations of Russian interference and anecdotal stories from the life of the American president were not confirmed by any, even the most unreliable facts. However, readers were encouraged to believe that they could be true. Because Steele allegedly communicated with a well-informed and classified confidant, who for some reason cannot be disclosed – probably so that specially sent assassins would not poison him with their “novitchkom”.
On this foundation was built the entire campaign of spy mania and xenophobic anti-Russian hysteria, which to this day defines the political line of the American establishment. However, four years later, the powerful American intelligence services have not found any evidence of Russian sabotage. And in 2019, the team of US Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller handed over to US Attorney General William Barr the results of an official investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections, without revealing any signs of collusion between the Russian Federation and Donald Trump’s campaign headquarters.
However, as you know, this did not prevent the Democratic Party from immediately launching a new campaign, accusing the president of pressure on his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky – following a telephone conversation leaked in the media.
And so, the American public learned the name of the secret source on which the creators of the “Steele dossier” relied – and it also did not go without a Ukrainian trace, which is now a landmark marker for American politics. As it turned out, the classified materials about the Russian intervention were provided by little-known political scientist Igor Danchenko, who was born in Ukraine but has long lived and worked in Washington. He clearly does not belong to the circles of informed experts, and even had problems with local law enforcement officers in the past. However, at the same time, he has good and long-term connections in the camp of Trump’s political opponents.
“For a time, his place of work was the Brookings Institution, which is close to the Clintons. Neither Danchenko nor Steele had any strong ties in Moscow. Especially among informed people. Danchenko has a very long train of violations. A few years before the Steele dossier appeared, he was arrested and convicted on numerous charges of drunkenness in public places and hooliganism in and around Washington DC. The court ordered him to undergo treatment for substance abuse and to consult a psychiatrist. Danchenko first got into trouble with the law when he started working in Brookings, where he struck up a friendship with Fiona Hill, a White House adviser who testified against Trump during last year’s impeachment hearings. Danchenko described Hill as a mentor and Hill praised him as a “creative explorer”. Hill also knows Christopher Steele well – already since 2006. She met with a former British intelligence officer during the 2016 campaign, and later received a “raw”, unpublished copy of the now exposed dossier”, – says the famous Americanist Dmitry Drobnitsky.
After being interrogated by the FBI, Danchenko himself ridiculed the story about Moscow prostitutes and Barack Obama’s bed – according to him, he warned Steele that he was passing him ordinary drinking tales, not based on evidence or facts. However, the former agent managed to create on their basis a whole conspiracy theory, which for years determined the dramatic collisions of American and international politics. Moreover, everything suggests that one of the brain centers of the Democratic Party was initially behind this, with which the defendants of the scandalous case were connected.
“A source in Russia, which turned out to be not a source in Russia, but a source in the United States, told Christopher Steele: “This is what I have, these are conversations in bars, these are rumors, these are innuendos, all this is actually unreliable” – and what he did with this Christopher Steele? He made an adventure novel out of it and sold it to the FBI”, – the influential Senator Lindsay Graham commented on this story.
“And as you know, the FBI convinced Congress, and the media convinced Congress, and in general they convinced the American public that somehow this Steele got hold of a super-secret source that nobody knew about. Well, now it turns out that he worked at the Brookings Institution. There seem to be a lot of threads leading to the Brookings Institution”, – echoes another Republican Senator Devin Nunez.
Moreover, Igor Danchenko has appeared before in such informational stuffing. After doing a little research, I discovered that in 2013 he came out with revelations about Vladimir Putin’s scientific dissertation – claiming that it was copied from a book by American authors. The political conjuncture of those years was completely different, and the American media almost did not pay attention to the fakes offered to them – but they are in great demand now, in the days of the new Cold War.
So do not be surprised if the writer Pelevin himself suddenly turns out to be the secret source of the future exposing report.
Andrey Manchuk, Ukraina.ru