May 07,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Unz
Review"
-
Listening to the western corporate media one would
get the impression that the Kremlin controls all the
Russian media with an iron grip and that not a word
of criticism of Russia, nevermind Putin himself, is
ever allowed. So bad is this situation that the
AngloZionists are now funding new “information”
efforts to counter-act the Russian propaganda
machine and bring some much needed information to
the Russian people who clearly do not realize that
they are being lied to and deprived from any
truthful or even alternative information.
In
reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
First, while some Directorates of the KGB have
been renamed and reorganized, the Directorate in
charge of dissidents, “other thinkers” and assorted
ideological “enemies of the state” (the 5th
Main Directorate) has been disbanded completely. So
there is no “ideological police in Russia”. Some
forms of speech are, indeed, banned – “extremist”
speech (terrorism, violence, racism, hate speech,
etc.) and some specific organizations, like the
Ukrainian “Right Sector” or the Tatar “Mejlis”.
Other than that, the only control over speech in
Russia is based on criminal charges. So, really,
Russia is not unique in that matter at all – she
more or less does the exact same as European states.
Second, there is *a lot* of criticism of Putin
and the government in general in a very active RuNet
(Russian Internet), not only in Russia, but also
worldwide (USA, Canada, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine,
etc.). Some of the criticism comes from a rather
small pro-US minority, but most of it comes from the
anti-US camp: nationalists, Communists and critics
of the government economic policies all blame Putin
for being too weak and unwilling to confront the
West frontally. Unlike in the Ukraine, foreign media
organizations are not banned, and neither are their
broadcasts or newspapers.
Third, most of the Moscow-based “money elite” (I
don’t want to call them “intelligentsia”) absolutely
loathe Putin and his policies, and they are not shy
about speaking their minds about him. If you want to
test that hypothesis, just talk to wealthy Russian
tourists and you will see that, as a rule, they
don’t support Putin at all. And, as we know, “money
talks” and a lot of Russian money is most definitely
opposed to Putin.
But that does not mean that there is no Russian
counter-propaganda at all. There is, and it is very
effective. But what makes it unique is the way in
which it operates.
I suspect that the fantastically incompetent ways
in which the 5th Main Directorate of the
KGB worked to try to deal with anti-Soviet feelings
has left a deep mark on younger generation of state
security officers who have learned from these
mistakes and have taken a diametrically opposite
course: instead of trying to silencw the western
propaganda – they actually actively promote it!
Yup, that’s right. The Kremlin and the clearly
pro-Putin journalists go out of their way to give as
much air time to the most rabid anti-Kremlin
critiques as possible, especially on Russian TV
talkshows.
The most popular Russian TV talkshows (Evening
with Vladimir Soloviev, Time will Show with
Petr Tolstoi, Right to Know with Dmitrii
Kulikov, Politics with Petr Tolstoi and
Alexander Gordon, Special Correspondent
with Evgenii Popov, News.doc with Olga
Skabeeva, Duel with Vladimir Soloviev) all
make sure that the following groups get as much
airtime as possible:
Russian liberals
Russian-speaking American journalists
Russian-speaking Polish officials and
journalists
Ukrainian nationalists
These four groups are literally the “bread and
butter” of these talkshows were they provide a
constant stream of very entertaining political
debates. Why? Because they utter the exact same
nonsense which they are used to proclaim in their
own countries and if the western audience does not
really know what to make of this propaganda, it
sounds so outlandish to the Russian audience that
these guests always get completely eviscerated
(verbally, of course) by the Russian guests invited
to the same talk show.
And just to make sure that every person in Russia
‘gets the message’, the main weekly news shows (News
of the Week with Dmitri Kiselev,
Postscriptum with Alexei Pushkov) always
feature long excerpts from western propaganda
reports and the most rabidly anti-Russian statements
from western politicians.
For example, the BBC recently made a rather
grotesque propaganda movie entitled “World
War Three: Inside The War Room” featuring Putin
ordering the invasion of a Baltic state and a
nuclear strike on a US aircraft carrier. The Russian
media when crazy over this, and long excerpts of the
show, with special effects and all, were shown on
Russian TV. The Russian public looked at this
footage in awe and dismay at the stupidity of it
all.
More recently, the US magazine posted a video
about and upcoming issue on “Putin’s Russia” . Check
out the video here:
Needless to
say, the Russians absolutely loved it. Not the image
itself, of course, it was deeply offensive to them,
but the fact that Foreign Affairs has so clearly
shown its true face: hate-filled russophobia. Russia
as a drunken, frustrated and wounded bear. They did
wonder, however, why the westerners saw them as
wounded; and wounded by what?
They also
loved the “Making America Great Again” on top of the
page which was obviously the propagandistic goal of
this issue: to show Russia as wounded as a means to
make “Merika” look “great again”.
Believe it
or not, all this gives most Russians both a good
healthy belly-laugh and an acute awareness of the
hatred the West has for Russia. “They only love us
when we are weak, wounded and drunk” is something
which you can hear very often on Russian TV, and the
blogosphere fully agrees.
Another
regular feature on Russian TV which the general
public cannot get enough of are Ukrainian
nationalists. Not only do they systematically deny
any problems in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine and
continue to insist that the Russian military is
operating in the Donbass, they even come “equipped”
with the mandatory “chub”
hairstyle and Ukie flag of the Ukronazi patriots.
See for yourself:
It is quite
an amazing experience to listen to the evening news
with live reports and video footage of all the chaos
and violence taking place in the Ukraine and then to
listen to these Urkonazi clowns explain that 2+2=3,
that black is white and that the water is dry. I
cannot think of a more effective way to totally
ridicule the regime in Kiev.
Then there
are our former east-European “brothers”, especially
the Poles. Their main source of pride is that they
are now part of NATO and they openly say so. They
actually admit that “we are afraid of Russia so we
joined NATO” which makes them look both as idiots
(nobody in Russia believe that Russia will invade
anybody) and as cowards (from a Russian point of
view, that kind of “hiding behind the bigger
brother” elicits no respect at all). So if the
Ukronazis come across as clowns, the Polish
officials come across as cowards and prostitutes.
And just to make sure that everybody gets it, the
Russian media regularly reminds the Russian people
that Poles are constantly making the ludicrous
accusation that their
government plane crash near Smolensk was somehow
either shot down or bombed by Russia.
Then there
are the American journalists, mainly Michael Bohm –
right of the photo – (who speaks a pretty good
Russian and Mark Knuckles – left on the photo –
(whose Russian is hilariously horrible and who
sounds like a bad movie’s caricature of a CIA
station chief during the Cold War). Oh boy, these
two provide for hours of excellent entertainment.
Michael
Bohn is clearly the smarter of the two, but he is
also by far the nastier. While he tries, hard, to
avoid sounding like a typical US propagandists, he
regularly “breaks down” and begins spewing some very
obnoxious US imperialists nonsense. He also loves to
try to deny any Russian success (all of which he
dismisses as “propaganda”). Knuckles is plain stupid
and arrogant in a uniquely US way. Frankly, I am
amazed that nobody in the USA has found a way to
pull him away form the Russian TV before he further
damages the image of the USA in Russia. Whatever may
be the case, these guys are truly hilarious to
watch, especially when confronted with reasonable
western journalists from France, Greece, Germany or
even a fellow American (see a good example
here).
Last but
not least, there are the Russian liberals. You have
to realize that by now the words “liberal” and
“democrat” have become almost insults in Russia.
Here is a typical Russian joke which illustrates the
typical Russian view of liberals:
A new
teacher comes into the class:
– My name is Abram Davidovich, I’m a liberal. And
now all stand up and introduce yourself like I did …
– My name is Masha I liberal …
– My name is Petia, I’m a liberal …
– My Little Johnny, I’m a Stalinist.
– Little Johnny, why are you a Stalinist? !
– My mom is a Stalinist, my dad is a Stalinist, my
friends are Stalinists and I too am a Stalinist.
– Little Johnny, and if your mother was a whore,
your father – a drug addict, your friends – homos,
what would you be then in that case? !
– Then I would be a liberal.
Notice that
the new teacher has a typically Jewish name, which
illustrates the Russian belief that Jews are the
prime proponents of the kind of “liberalism” folks
like Berezovsky or Khodorkovsky incarnated in the
1990s. This is not some kind of anti-Semitism – this
is simply a typical case of blowback.
So when the
poor Russian liberals get to present their view on
Russian TV, they not only are called to task to
defend or, at least, try to justify AngloZionist
imperial policies, they are also regularly reminded
of the horror which Russia was under their rule in
the 1990s. Just standing in the company of
Russia-hating Americans, Poles and Ukrainians they
look discredited beyond any possible redemption.
There is
really nothing as funny has watching Russian
liberals, Americans, Poles and Ukrainians clamoring
that there is no free speech in Russia on prime time
Russian TV!
Keep in
mind that the internal Russian media is very
different from the English language Russia Today
whose mission is to present an alternative point of
view to a western audience and there are therefore
very few rabid russophobes invited to speak on RT.
But inside Russia the decision has clearly been made
to expose the Russian general public to the exact
same russophobic propaganda as what the western
public is subjected to.
In way you
could say that the Russian counter-propaganda
technique is a form of intellectual inoculation: you
give the body just enough exposure to the pathogen
to trigger an immune response, but not so much as to
infect and kill the body. As a result of this, the
following associations have powerfully molded
themselves into the Russian collective:
Russian
liberals → the horror of the 1990s
American
journalists → US imperial aggression
Polish
officials and journalists → russophobia
Ukrainian
nationalists → the horror of present day Banderastan
This is
very, very effective. The best way to prove that is
to remember that all these groups have the support
of maybe 3-6% of the Russian population, max. A
solid 95%+ is resolutely opposed to them and don’t
want them to have any say or even influence in the
future of Russia.
As an
ex-Cold warrior myself, I remember well how
ridiculous Soviet propaganda was and how nobody
would take it seriously, not in the West and not in
the East. Now the tables have turned and it is the
western propaganda which is not taken seriously
anywhere (well, except maybe in Poland and the
Baltic states) and which ends up damaging the
credibility of the West.
The
Empire’s propaganda is simply counter-factual and
totally illogical and is quite obvious to a Russian
audience. This is why the very last thing the
Kremlin would ever want to do is to prevent the
Russian people from being exposed to it.
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