Between 1936 and 1938 Joseph Stalin moved to fully complete his total hold on Soviet power by purging most every remaining founding member of the Bolshevik party. In a series of farcical show trials, badly tortured and defeated men were paraded in court rooms to confess to crimes that ran the gamut from plotting to assassinate Stalin to mobilizing counterrevolution in service to the Romanov Dynasty. No accusation was too absurd, and the entire sham confirmed for many western observers their worst fears, that Russia was now under the iron grasp of, not only a devout communist, but also brutal autocrat. Many an international comrade saw the spectacle as a tragic crossroads as well, when they realized Marxist ideals had succumbed to individual depravity.
George Kennan, then a young deputy and translator to American Ambassador William Bullitt, would be so affected by the public purges that it would solidify his view of the Soviet system as a grave international threat. The post-war “Long Telegram” he would wire to Truman Administration officials more than a decade later, which provided the foundation for US containment policy until the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in November of 91’, was fully informed by lasting impressions the Moscow show trials had on Kennan.
Authoritarians use a panoply of methods to repress opposition and corrupt government toward their narcissistic whim. Perhaps the underhanded deceit most often employed is the libelous discrediting of critics. Whoever the opponent is, or how lofty their public standing may be, autocratic strategies require whatever is necessary to bring their veracity into question. Rumors, half-truths, innuendo, third-party whispering…. outright lies; nothing is out of bounds if it helps to confuse the issue and cloud the facts. The focus is never on what is being said, but who is saying it and what their motives may be. To actually address the substance of the charges validates them. Far easier to simply destroy the reputation of the person providing the testimony.
Were one to be tasked with making up a resume of distinguished public service, it would be hard to exceed the career of William Taylor. A graduate of West Point, Taylor served in the famed 101st Airborne in Vietnam, where he was decorated for heroism. A subsequent graduate of Harvard’s public affairs program, Taylor served as a staffer for Senator Bill Bradley before moving on to postings ranging from the Department of Energy to the US Ambassador’s office for NATO, Afghanistan to Iraq under Colin Powell. In 2006 Taylor was appointed by W. Bush to be the Ambassador of Ukraine, where, it was later reported, “he took charge of the embassy in a remarkably effective and positive way.” After serving in the Middle East under Obama and eventually becoming the executive vice president of the Institute for Peace, Taylor was called on by Trump in June to head back to Ukraine as interim charge d’affaires, presumably to clean up the mess made when Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch was recalled in May.
Taylor’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee about Trump’s efforts to extort incoming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could not have been more damning. If Trump’s own admissions, or the clumsy public confession of inept acting Chief-of-Staff Mick Mulvaney weren’t enough to confirm nefarious intention, certainly Taylor’s meticulously documented timeline of events and his purely professional and non-partisan concerns got the job done. What he verifies in exquisite detail is far more than a phone call, it’s a systematic extortion effort in plain sight, before the incredulous eyes of a top notch foreign service professional.
If Taylor’s testimony indicted the entire scheme that led to Trump’s fateful July phone conversation with Zelensky, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security staffer with his own sparkling life story, convicted the phone call itself. A decorated veteran wounded by an IED in Iraq, Vindman’s family actually escaped the Soviet Union. His is an idealized vision of America and the Constitution he expects to guide its governance. Calling him a patriot is like calling Tom Brady a QB; it doesn’t near hit the mark.
Like Taylor, his testimony reflected a straight arrow shocked at what he was witnessing, appalled at its sleazy brazenness. Trump and his minions have latched on to the “transcript” defense, claiming the written account of the call with Zelensky the White House furnished offers full vindication, case closed. When Judy Woodruff of PBS, an inquisitor nobody would mistake for Perry Mason, had Trump poodle VP Mike Pence on the ropes the other night, he continually fell back to the Alamo of the transcript and its cascading flow of exoneration. But Vindman told House investigators of his dissatisfaction with the furnished account’s veracity, and made clear he thought it incomplete. Game, set, match.
Taylor and Vindman now join Yovanovitch, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strok, Lisa Page, Robert Mueller and his elite team of investigators, and a host of others who all share two main attributes: they dutifully performed their jobs, which required investigating the most corrupt Administration in American history; and they all boasted previously exemplary careers and reputations as public servants. All are now under scurrilous attack by our real incarnation of Buzz Windrip and a host of cowards whose ambitions can only be pursued as servile expendables to his lies and criminality.
The hideous crescendo of the show trials of Stalin’s Great Terror was the persecution of Nikolai Bukharin, an OG Bolshevik present at the creation of the Soviet State and previous right hand to Stalin himself. At his proceedings, the once vibrant Bukharin was a shell as he listlessly heard the state’s prosecutor label him a cross between “a fox and a pig.” Of course Bukharin’s crucifiers got nothing on Trump in the abasing insults department. Speaking of those he has collectively libeled as “never Trumpers,” the leader of the free world declared: “Watch out for them, they are human scum.”
Right now the Attorney General of the US is devoting the full resources of his office to skew and augment puzzle pieces, jamming them into a conspiracy tapestry recklessly created on the fly with no other purpose than to discredit Trump’s investigators. Whether his efforts end up as the desperate gasps of a criminal enterprise cornered by democratic institutions they failed to destroy, or a specific place and time where previously inept miscreants mutated into cogs of an unleashed machinery for repression, it’s no longer crying wolf to equate the well being of those on Trump’s ever expanding enemies list with our prospects as a going concern. A critical juncture. BC