If Only Stalin Knew

People in thrall of a powerful leader are tempted to believe that all the bad things that happen to them are the fault of the leader’s underlings. For years after the Terror began in the Soviet Union, the people whose friends and relatives disappeared in the Gulag would say “if only Comrade Stalin knew …” From ''Children of the Arbat''. The year is 1934, the beginning of Stalin's terror, when even relatives of the victims could still believe that the unexplained disappearance of their loved ones was some kind of mistake that would soon be set right, if only they could get word to Stalin.

She would take out the newspapers and gaze at the pictures of Stalin, his simple clothes, the kind wrinkles round his eyes, the wise, calm face of a man with a clear conscience. He was 53. His oldest son was probably the same age as Sasha, and there was another son and a daughter. He knew what family grief was - he had only just lost his wife. If only Sasha's case got to him. She was pinning all her hopes on Mark, her brother. He was the head of a huge construction project in the east, a favorite of Ordzhonikidze's. The whole country knew who he was. Stalin knew him, received him and talked to him. Mark would tell Stalin about Sasha. Stalin would ask for the file, perhaps even call Sasha to him. And he'd like Sasha, he couldn't help liking Sasha.

As far back as 2009, Neo-Neocon had people like Peggy Noonan, who was still in thrall to Barack Obama then, pegged. 

But the more basic error Noonan makes is that she assumes that the recent program of character assassination of the health care protestors isn’t what President Obama wants. There’s no evidence whatsoever to back that up, and plenty of evidence from his own mouth that he is fully on board with the program.

But Noonan (and certain others) who fell for Obama hard during the campaign now find themselves suffering the pangs that disappointed lovers often feel, and a similar reluctance to face the truth that they were hoodwinked and used by a con artist.

Happens all the time, I’m afraid. It happened during the Stalin years, as several commenters on the Noonan thread have pointed out (see this, for example). The phenomenon then was called “if only Stalin knew,” and was predicated on the belief that the bad stuff was happening outside of Stalin’s awareness and orchestrated by his underlings, and that if only Good Old Joe knew about it he’d stop it.

It seems laughable now. But as I said, hope dies hard. Very hard indeed. And this is especially true of many of those who voted for and supported Obama in the hope that he’d be the uniting and reasonable centrist he promised.

What was going on with them then, and what is going on now? If I wanted to be crude, I’d say that their bullshit detectors were and are seriously out of whack. Or, if I wanted to be more kind, I’d call it the need to believe in the goodness of this particular smooth-talking politician. Oh, and the fact that’s black, and that voting for him was a chance to strike a blow against racism in this country once and for all, didn’t hurt either in creating a false belief system based on wishful thinking about Obama.
 

What's amazing is how prescient she was.  Read her today, four years later:

White House Counsel Ruemmler was just protecting the president, says the WaPo:

But they agreed that it would be best not to share it with President Obama until the independent audit was completed and made public, in part to protect him from even the appearance of trying to influence an investigation.

This account of how the White House tried to deal with the IRS inquiry — based on documents, public statements and interviews with multiple senior officials, including one directly involved in the discussions — shows how carefully Obama’s top aides were trying to shield him from any second-term scandal that might swamp his agenda or, worse, jeopardize his presidency.

Many of the commenters at the link seem to buy this entirely, which just goes to show you how gullible people can be when they want to believe—or how well they can follow the party line even if they’re not really all that gullible.

There are so many problems with this story it’s hard to know where to begin, but the first one is whether it’s believable at all; I don’t think so, but many people will believe it anyway. The second is whether the lawyer tasked with “advising [the president] on all legal aspects of policy questions…[and] ethical questions” would ever, or should ever, withhold such information, and why. Even the WaPo says that a goodly part of Ruemmler’s motivation would have been political, “to shield him from any second-term scandal that might swamp his agenda or, worse, jeopardize his presidency.”

My translation of those words is that Ruemmler wanted to afford Obama plausible deniability, and also to shield the American people from knowledge that might cause them to turn on the Democrats before the election. I actually don’t believe he was shielded, as I’ve said—I believe Obama was told, but there is no proof and never will be any proof, unless someone decides to spill the beans and has documentation to back it up. But even if he was shielded, a third issue would be: who created an atmosphere where the most important function of the administration was to protect the president from any knowledge that might harm him politically, rather than to help him actually govern knowledgeably and effectively? My answer would be: Obama himself.

Back to "if only Obama knew:" so far the only person dragged out of his bed at midnight to be thrown in jail is Mark Bassely Youssef, Obama's scapegoat for the Benghazi attack and who remains in jail.  But his loyal attack dogs are telling everyone that he knew nothing and as soon as he read about it in the newspapers he worked tirelessly to set it right.

The strange thing is that despite incredible advances in communication, the oldest, hoariest propaganda devices are still being deployed by those who want to protect those responsible for setting injustice in motion.