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Britain
British Spy Novelist Reports POTUS Destroying US Intelligence Community
2017-11-26
[Guardian] The Guardian has reported that John Le Carre, the famed British spy novelist, recently said of the Trump presidency: "something truly, seriously bad is happening and we have to be awake to that." Chillingly, he expressed alarm about the "toxic" parallels between the rise of President Trump and hard right regimes in Poland and Hungary and the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

Mr Le Carre may be overstating the risk of rising fascism but he is surely right to warn that many of Mr Trump’s early actions and words challenge fundamental tenets of democracy.

These challenges include his assertion that the media is "the enemy of the people", that news he doesn’t like is "fake news," that there were "good people" among the neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, and that the Senate should change its rules to abolish the requirement for 60 votes to end a filibuster, thus eliminating the single most important protection of minority interests in our system of government.

At the same time, the Trump administration has mounted a systematic effort to "deconstruct the ’administrative state’" as his recently departed chief strategist, Steven Bannon, was fond of saying.
Posted by:Besoeker

#13  Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, stating that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".[25]

Except Rushdie was writing about Islam, so no "great religion" was "insulted".
Posted by: Rob Crawford   2017-11-26 23:46  

#12  thus eliminating the single most important protection of minority interests in our system of government

That's the Constitution, not the filibuster.
Posted by: Rob Crawford   2017-11-26 23:45  

#11  #10 - the style & tone of that rhetoric invalidates itself, just like Duckspeak in "1984". No need to read much farther than that.
Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418   2017-11-26 19:38  

#10  “an American jewel (the State Department) is at stake, a place where honorable patriots take an oath to the Constitution” That is crazy talk from a crazy man.
Posted by: Tennessee   2017-11-26 19:17  

#9  “an American jewel (the State Department) is at stake, a place where honorable patriots take an oath to the Constitution”

...and then his lips fell off.
Posted by: Herb McCoy7309   2017-11-26 13:26  

#8  "Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about."[29]"

Funny, I've visited both places--one this year--and, gee, I must have been in my hotel room and missed that "up and running" part.

Just go away, Le Carre. And, you just made me not want to ever read any of your books.
Posted by: Clem   2017-11-26 11:53  

#7  His Politics
Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, stating that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".[25]

In January 2003, The Times published le Carré's essay "The United States Has Gone Mad".[26] Le Carré contributed it to a volume of political essays titled Not One More Death (2006). Other contributors include Richard Dawkins, Brian Eno, Michel Faber, Harold Pinter, and Haifa Zangana.[27] [28]

In 2017, le Carré stated: "These stages that Trump is going through in the United States and the stirring of racial hatred ... these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about."[29]

Cornwell said he did not know his mother, who abandoned him when he was five years old, until their re-acquaintance when he was 21 years old. His father had been jailed for insurance fraud.

Insert joke.
Posted by: Woodrow   2017-11-26 11:29  

#6  Not too long ago I read The Looking Glass War by John Le Carre. The point of the book seemed to be that a great many people in the British intelligence community are full on bat shit crazy, delusional and longing for their glory days in WWII. It was so depressing I could barely get through it and I resolved never to read another one of his books. Many years earlier I read A Perfect Spy about an MI6 double agent who ended up committing suicide. Real inspirational stuff...not. The only redeeming theme in these books is that good old Smiley manages to police the organization and weed out the nut jobs. But who wants to rely on the one sane person in the mad house for national security?

If any little bit of what Le Carre writes is based on actual people and events then Trump is absolutely correct in his efforts to dismantle the intelligence community because it is full of delusional and dangerous freaks. OTOH, if Le Carre is a clinically depressed nut case, he should be ignored and so should his books. Either way it's no surprise that al Guardian is attempting to promote him.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2017-11-26 11:18  

#5  Did he mean to write "American bowel"?
Posted by: no mo uro   2017-11-26 09:13  

#4  And some people - not necessarily Russian, Chinese, of Muslims - say "long overdue".
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2017-11-26 09:08  

#3  ...POINT OF ORDER: LeCarre - real name John Cornwell, career civil servant in Her Majesty's Foreign Office - loathes America. He does not like us.

Not one. Little. Bit.

He held it together through most of his books (including his best, the Smiley Trilogy) but let it go full blast after that. Quite frankly, if DJT is pissing him off, then may it please God to send the President to do so every day.

Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski   2017-11-26 07:45  

#2  It's a feature, not a bug.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2017-11-26 07:27  

#1  Mr Cohen concludes that “an American jewel (the State Department) is at stake, a place where honorable patriots take an oath to the Constitution” – not to any given president.

"American jewel".... ha.
Posted by: Besoeker   2017-11-26 07:17  

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