It is 1976. World champion human rights hero Vladimir Bukovsky (above with cig), having spent most of his adult life imprisoned inside KGB jails, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals, is released to the West in exchange for Chilean Communist Luis Corvalan (above smiling with Brezhnev).
You are John Brennan, future Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. A college sudent, you are casting your first vote for president in 1976. Ford? Carter? No. You pull the lever for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall, Comrade Brezhnev's representative in the United States, Lenin School graduate, and convicted revolutionary.
It is 1980. You are still John Brennan. You have already traveled to Indonesia, Egypt and who knows where else. You are completing your masters thesis on "Human Rights in Egypt," and trying to sound like you know what you're talking about (some things never change). Contemplating Sadat's restrictions on the activities of revolutionaries seeking his overthow, you give him a pass for, as you put it, trying to save democacy by undemocratic means -- and decide your logic also applies to Comrade Brezhnev and his violations of the human rights of peaceful, law-abiding dissidents such as Vladimir Bukovsky.
You write:
This explanation [of Sadat’s crackdowns], of course, can provide a convenient excuse for any authoritarian leader in any country of the world. If the preservation of democracy is not given as justification, the preservation of another ideology is.Can human rights violations in the Soviet Union be as easily justified in terms of the preservation of the communist ideology? Unfortunately (taking a Western perspective), yes.
Yes? That's BrennanThink for you. There is much more about the thinking of Brennan and the other anti-Trump conspirators -- Nellie Ohr, James Comey, Christopher Steele, et al -- in my short, new book, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.
One more Brennan thing.
Quoting from pp. 38-39.
The following line from Brennan’s 1980 thesis has an eerie resonance with everything we are learning about the conspiracy today. Brennan is discussing the deeply imperfect state of democracy in 1980s Egypt, noting it is still a “process,” not a “state.” It is no stretch to imagine any Gus-Hall- voter or socialist or Alinskyite or progressive or college professor today considering the state of democracy in America today to be deeply imperfect, too — still a “process,” not a “state.”
Brennan writes: “But if democracy is a process rather than a state, the democratic process may involve, at some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice.”
This is the chilling apologia for the anti-Trump conspiracy. In order to keep the regime moving “forward,” the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice” is justified, whether it is an unpaid campaign adviser being violated (Carter Page) or the National Security Advisor (Gen. Mike Flynn); whether it entails launching a disinformation campaign (Trump- Russia), or reversing an election (the Mueller probe). The ends — their ends — justify any means.
Following the red thread, then, we may begin to see: The anti-Trump conspirators are not trying to save “democracy”; they are trying to save their revolution.
