Sections of the American population are still crying foul over the results of the Presidential elections and the Washington Post on Friday put the blame on Russian intervention.
The story is right out of a Cold War spy novel. The Post said intelligence agencies had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government that had provided thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to WikiLeaks. That these people were part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and reduce Clinton’s chances of winning the election was “The consensus view”.
The consensus view- not what has been proven, but what US security officials think may have happened. Just like how Indian officials think that all anti-India protests and attacks in Indian Held Kashmir are engineered by Pakistan. While Russia is again being painted as a global bogeyman, we here at home can understand their pain quite well.
And even if we accept that the Russians made Hillary Clinton lose, why is not one within the CIA not worried about why Mr Trump is so attractive to Russia? The obvious answer is that Mr Trump is a Russian pawn and must be a danger to national security, something the CIA cannot say, but is letting the global community implicitly believe. This is neither smart nor strategic, just childish. All in all, the speculation is laughable. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has also said that the Russian government was not the source of the hacked emails.
A conspiracy theory is extremely attractive at times when nations feel internally unstable. The American people, through their representatives, voted for Donald Trump. While other countries can spread propaganda, the person at the polling booth was not a Russian spy. While Russia has interests in bending the US to its point of view, to suggest that a rag tag bunch of email hackers influenced the national election of the most powerful state in the world gives too much credit to the keyboard warriors, and the Russian spectres standing behind them.
This one is on America, and it is time they own their decision.
