Better Red Than Red
published in The Zero Point
It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right. — George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”
By the early morning of February 9th, 2016, there was still a sizeable gaggle of political rhetoric graduate students sitting in my living room, many lightly sniffling, most staring blankly at the 32-inch screen flashing image after image of red states with Donald Trump’s name next to them. I tried to read their faces; I could only see the reflection of my own.
One young, ashen-faced woman with an “I’m With Her” t-shirt proudly donned managed to sputter, “Dr. Huber — What just happened?”
Before I could successfully retrieve my professionalism, I said, to no one in particular, “Fu@king Russia.”
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On February 3, 1945, the U.S. Treasury Department sent a request to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for an opinion on why Stalin’s Soviet Union seemed reluctant to either join or endorse the newly-formed International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It fell to George Kennan, counselor to Ambassador Averell Harriman, to write the memo in response.
It sounded like a simple, straight-forward question: Why don’t the Soviets want to join our little club? I mean, we had just come off a great run as kinda-mostly-sorta-allies during World War II. The Red Army and us, we worked together to punch Nazis, right?
Kennan’s response, now famously known as “The Long Telegram,” was sent to President Truman on February 22. The effects of Kennan’s rhetorical construction of the Soviet mindset changed U.S./Soviet/Russian foreign policy in ways with which we are still contending today.
Rarely does an embassy report by itself reshape Washington’s view of the world, but what later came to be known as the ‘Long Telegram’ emphatically did…Kennan sketched the American dream of a peace achieved by conversion of the adversary. — Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
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In 2014, members of the Russian-born Internet Research Agency (IRA) entered the United States to take photographs and gather cultural information in preparation for the 2016 election, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election. Their intent was to engage in активные мероприятия (active measures) to either influence or mis-inform the American population through the creation of fictitious social media accounts and pages. It is estimated that the IRA reached 1.4 million people through its Twitter accounts and 126 million people through its Facebook accounts.
PubliusGaius@TheRickyVaughn, who tweeted out this Russian-created ad aimed at African American voters, was later outed as a known white supremacist.
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George Kennan’s suggested “conversion of the adversary” strategy eventually became known as containment, or prevention of hostile influence, in this case through rooting out communism globally, including here in the homeland.
“The Long Telegram” is really…um…long. So perhaps a summary will suffice:
1. There can be no peaceful coexistence between the US and the USSR. (Well, that’s a bummer.)
2. The Soviet Union will no-doubt infiltrate the American left to take the US apart from the inside. (Wait? Doesn’t the American left consist largely of pro-civil rights and pro-union groups? Uh oh.)
3. The Soviet mind is diseased — “bearing within itself germs of creeping disease and [is] destined to be wracked with growing internal convulsions”-; prone to delusion; and rooted in an evil devoted to overthrowing decency and goodness. (Egads! That sounds super biblical, no?)
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Researcher and Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in her book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, writes that most Russian social-media posts were aimed at churchgoers and military families who were unlikely to be enthusiastic for a ‘pussy-grabbing’ candidate.
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A little-known fact: The first chapter of my doctoral thesis was a rhetorical analysis of “The Long Telegram” and its importance to understanding our own eventual political retributions against the Left during the Cold War. As I said in my first post, I’ve been trained to see bears.
As early as June of 2016, something had been niggling at the back of my consciousness. I was seeing social media posts and other public rhetorics with language that felt familiar to me beyond a simple ‘politics-as-usual.’ Furthermore, the ‘politics-as-usual’ of it all, from the Republican primaries to the nominating convention on July 19, 2016, just weren’t…usual.
Nothing was playing out as it should. Nothing made sense. Nothing except…
On July 22, 2016, days before Russia was publicly asked to locate Hillary Clinton’s emails, Wikileaks published some 50,000-plus emails and documents hacked, we now know by Russia, from the Democratic National Committee. Within 24 hours of Trump’s request to find more, phishing emails were sent by Russian intelligence officials to the accounts of 300 people associated with the Clinton campaign.
Russia was in the bag for Trump. And millions of red hats had no idea.
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I think it’s instructive for future arguments I may make to supply one more extensive piece of “The Long Telegram.” Its familiarity should shake you to the core:
It should not be thought from above that Soviet party line is necessarily disingenuous and insincere on part of those who put it forward. Many of them are too ignorant of outside world and mentally too dependent to question self-hypnotism, and who have no difficulty making themselves believe what they find it comforting and convenient to believe. Finally we have the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in this great land actually receives accurate and unbiased information about outside world. In atmosphere of oriental secretiveness and conspiracy which pervades this Government, possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite. The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth — indeed, their disbelief in its existence — leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy — George Kennan, “The Long Telegram”
Works Cited
Hawkins, Derek. “No, you can’t text your vote. But these fake ads tell Clinton supporters to do just that.” Washington Post. 3 November, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/03/no-you-cant-text-your-vote-but-these-ads-tell-clinton-supporters-to-do-just-that/
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Cyberwar. How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know. Oxford UP. 2018.
Kennan, George. “The Long Telegram.” 22 February, 1946. Memoirs: 1925–1950. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1967. 547–559.
Kennan, George. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs 25.4 (1947): 566–582.
Mueller, Robert. F. “Russian “Active Measures” Social Media Campaign” Section II. Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election. Vol. 1. March 2019: 14–15.
“The social media ads Russia wanted Americans to see.” Politico. 1 November, 2017. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/01/social-media-ads-russia-wanted-americans-to-see-244423
