Washington Post columnist and political revisionist Anne Applebaum is on the warpath against the rising populist forces doing electoral damage to her establishment friends and allies across the world.
The undermining of nation-state sovereignty by the likes of George Soros, the UN, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, the Davos crowd, the City of London and Wall Street, and the Obama/Clinton/Kerry U.S. interventionist foreign policy groupthinkers has catalyzed the recent, revolutionary sea change in Western politics.
Simply, the silent majority do not want to be led by supra-national governing bodies that are brazenly corrupt.
The blowback can be viewed in Hungary, via the Visegrad 4, at the Austrian elections, in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, and now in the biggest and most important political battlefield on the globe: the United States.
Applebaum has written about many of these fronts in the Washington Post, the Telegraph, the Spectator, Foreign Affairs, Slate, the NY Review of Books, Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland’s establishment paper of record) and other supposedly “high-minded” outlets and platforms where the urban sophisticates congregate. Populism (read: will of the people), to these people, is a taboo on par with xenophobia and genocide.
The UK, Poland, and the U.S. are the nations Applebaum have made her homes. She is therefore aghast at recent developments in these three nations especially.
Not surprisingly she played an active role in the “Project Fear” strategy ahead of Brexit to try and galvanize the “Remain” vote. Like most of the establishment, Applebaum is a strong believer in the centralization of power around the Brussels/Berlin/Paris axis. Her husband, scandal-plagued former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, even gave a speech in Berlin in November 2011 demanding Berlin take more control in leading an ever-more integrated and centrally governed Europe.
Poland, her primary residence, has been the setting for the most dramatic rejection of her political worldview. Her husband and their friends were turfed out of power when the Civic Platform party – which continually pushed for “more Europe” were defeated by PiS last year. Civic Platform became renowned, country-wide, for putting EU interests before Polish interests as well as engaging in petty corruptions and duplicity.
Sikorski desperately wanted to replace Baroness Catherine Ashton as EU foreign affairs spokesman. This bid died with the exposure of the Civic Platform corruption. This turn of events ended Applebaum’s dream of being Poland’s first Jewish-American first lady.
And hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned. Following the fall from grace, Applebaum began utilizing her global media contacts, disbursing heavily curated and obfuscated “facts patterns” meant to construct an anti-democratic global news narrative depicting the new democratically elected Law & Justice government as far right fascists and illiberal anti-democrats.
The first major Western media attack orchestrated by Applebaum was printed at her home paper, the Washington Post. Her long-time friend and colleague, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl, wrote a brazenly biased editorial “Poland’s Disturbing Tilt to the Right” filled with lies, innuendo, and invective, and to which I rebutted in the Polish magazine Wprost’s online platform.
Since then a barrage of negative hyperbole has been aimed at the new Polish government by friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and fellow travelers of Applebaum/Sikorski such as Fareed Zakaria, Christiane Amanpour, Ivan Krastev, Edward Lucas, Jan Cienski, Timothy Garton Ash, Norman Davies, Tony Barber, Rick Lyman, Joanna Berendt, Tim Snyder, Henry Foy, Jan Gross, Annabelle Chapman, Matthew Kaminski, Adam Zamoyski, Christian Davies, and many others at politically charged and agenda-laden internationalist media platforms such as the BBC, CNN, NY Times, Financial Times, Politico, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Associated Press, and of course Poland’s own (Soros-bailed out) Pravda: Gazeta Wyborcza.
Applebaum, notorious for blocking all debate and any critics on her heavily trafficked Twitter feed, often used to remark that she never spoke of Polish partisan politics in her “journalism” (which was reasonable given her husband’s positions). But this certainly has not been the case as clearly evidenced by a pair of Telegraph columns she wrote in April and July 2010. These columns centered on the tragic plane crash in Smolensk, Russia which killed the Polish President and First Lady (Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria) and 94 others who comprised the upper echelon of Kaczynski’s Law & Justice party.
In the first column, merely days after the crash, she engaged in a highly coercive form of political journalism much akin to the Russian disinformation stratagem she often excoriates. She gave cover to the many irregularities in the post-tragedy investigation that grossly lacked transparency. This was most likely in an attempt to help influence the coming snap presidential election from which her husband’s party would look to capitalize with their candidate Bronislaw Komorowski (alleged to have been linked to Soviets and post-Communist mobsters).
The manner in which the ruling Civic Platform government eschewed transparency in the crash investigation in order to strengthen their political position still fuels massive and well-deserved resentment among Poles. She played her part for the party with her global media outreach campaign. This was heightened in the Telegraph column July 3rd, published just one day before the election, where a distinctly laudatory tone was applied to her husband’s party and its nominee and a much more foreboding one was applied to Kaczynski and Law & Justice.
But what is past is prologue. Fast forward to this past week (September 19th) we see how true this is for journalists behaving like partisans and propagandists with axes to grind. Applebaum demonstrated a new level of apoplexy when she published an aggressive attack under her own byline in the Washington Post against the ruling Polish party she hates so much for vanquishing her husband and their cabal. In this article she attacks those in Poland she labels “conspiracy theorists” for doubting the integrity of the Russian-led investigation of the downed plane which was shrouded in secrecy and lacked transparency on every level. As all Poles know, the fuselage still has not been returned to Poland despite it being Polish property. A transparent investigation has never been undertaken.
Applebaum‘s lies about the process, whilst singing the praises of the Russians (as she did in the April 2010 Telegraph piece) is absurdly out of character for her given how vociferously hawkish she has been on Russia in her role as a “public intellectual.” To compound this ugly propaganda, she puts forward one of her favorite tropes: that conservative and hawkish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz is an anti-Semite (further proving that on the left when on the attack go to Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals #12– picking, freezing, personalizing, and polarizing your target – usually focusing on the dreaded “bigotry” charge that the media loves to lob so wantonly).
This recent WaPo piece also addressed her most recent and now vocal battle front: her native United States which is in the throes of its own “silent majority” revolution demonstrated by the popular support for and pending victory of Donald Trump for President.
The environment in which Trump is ascendant is very much a byproduct of Applebaum and her Ivory Tower fellow plutocratic elites’ attempts to impose a globalist worldview upon citizenries that reject it.
In the past several months, Applebaum has availed herself of partisan editorializing in the WaPo going as far as titling pieces “Why we need a President Clinton”. The recurring theme, given her hawkishness on Russia, is that Trump is in cahoots with the Kremlin. This is especially rich conjecture given that thanks to Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer we know that the Clintons took cash from those tied to the Kremlin, perhaps even to approve the sale of uranium to Russian interests, which is especially ominous for Poles worried about Russian revanchism.
Other Applebaum WaPo hyperbolic doozies were published this year such as “Is this the end of the West as we know it?”, “How a Trump presidency could destabilize Europe”, and most recently, with her rants and conspiracy-theory-conjecture journalism reaching a fever pitch; “The Secret to Trump: He is really a Russian oligarch”.
This last one was penned by an increasingly unhinged mind after the Trump campaign leadership shuffle.
Given Applebaum’s recent record one has to wonder if the charge, levied in this recent column, of “completely dishonest propaganda” by Breitbart.com is not a classic case of “the pot calling the kettle black.” We have seen from her journalism that she is certainly not above crafting brazenly “dishonest propaganda” to serve her political, personal, and (given her husband’s recent roles in government) financial agendas. And we have not even delved into her “work” in the “think tank” industrial complex yet. Stay tuned.
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