FROM RUSSIA WITH HATE….APPALLING
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From Russia With Hate
This is a guest post by Edmund Standing
Can’t get enough anti-Western propaganda and extremism dressed up as journalism? Haven’t got a Sky subscription and missing out on a good dose of Press TV? Worry not, for if you have a Freeview box you can always tune in to Russia Today (RT). Despite being funded by the Kremlin’s RIA Novosti, the direct descendent of the former Soviet Union international propaganda outfit, RT claims to be ‘fair and balanced’ (where have we heard that before?). Not everyone is entirely ‘on-message’ it seems, as John Kluver, a former CNN camera man turned RT correspondent states that while he has joined the channel because he wants to show ‘the positive side of Russia’, it is nonetheless ‘a propaganda tool for the Russian government’.
Kluver isn’t the only American happy to jump into bed with the Kremlin. There’s Alex Jones, for example, who is a notorious and prolific promoter of pretty much any anti-Western conspiracy theory going. Jones does all this in the name of ‘patriotism’, but has no problem using a Kremlin front to push his agenda.
RT features Jones as if he is just another American political commentator and both the TV channel and its website enthusiastically promote his views. For example, here’s Jones on RT discussing President Obama who has, according to him, ’shown himself literally to be an enemy of the Republic, the enemy of what the United States has truly stood for, and Barack Obama is a would-be dictator’.
Another group of Western extremists posing as ‘patriots’ getting publicity from RT is the BNP. On October 14th, RT reported:
The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged 500 more troops to Afghanistan, if certain conditions are met.
Brown told MPs that he’ll boost the British force to 9,500 if they can be properly equipped, if other allies increase their presence as well, and if the Afghan government speeds up the training of its own forces.
Who did RT bring on to represent UK political criticism of Brown and the war against the Taliban?
“To discuss the latest initiative we are joined from London by Bob Bailey, he’s from the British National Party. Thanks very much for joining us.†(No mention of the fact that the BNP has no elected MPs or any context about what it actually stands for.)
As a former Royal Marine, Bailey is presumably seen by RT as someone with an informed opinion on military matters. However, he’s not exactly the kind of person you would expect to see on a credible news channel, as this September 2009 report illustrates:
A senior British National Party member was disqualified from driving today after being found guilty of refusing to take a police breathalyser test.
Robert Bailey, 43, of Chadwell Heath, Essex, said he refused to cooperate with officers because he believed they were part of a politically inspired conspiracy acting upon “a higher orderâ€.
[…]
The former Royal Marine, originally from Scunthorpe, told the court he believed he was being set up because of his political beliefs.
He said: “Well, I spent 14 years in the Marines and spent a good part of this working with the security forces and I know how the system operates.â€
He added that he believed he was under surveillance because of his political activities and that his phone and house had been bugged.
He said: “It adds to my belief it is a conspiracy against me, my party and the indigenous people of this country.â€
Bailey isn’t the only BNP figure to have appeared on RT. Here’s Nick Griffin babbling about the ‘liberal elite’, obfuscating his true beliefs on race, and sucking up to Russia, in a remarkably indulgent interview.
Griffin states: “I believe very strongly that the pressure that’s coming from the liberal elite in the West, the United States in particular, but Britain as well, to somehow regard Russia as hostile or a problem, or someone we have to confront, is thoroughly ill-conceived.â€
What’s the situation like in Russia at the moment?
Searchlight reports:
The rapid decline of Russia’s fledgling democracy, marked by gross violations of human rights during the government’s Chechen campaigns, the granting by parliament of unprecedented powers to the secret service, the abolition of elected executives (governors, mayors etc), the introduction of censorship and political show-trials and murders have changed the political atmosphere. This has enabled nazis and their extreme-rightist allies to stage campaigns as well as using nationalism as an alibi to commit murders, many of which go unpunished.
Meanwhile the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union reports this month:
The lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma, held a roundtable on migration issues that gave far-right extremists a platform from which to spread their hatred of non-Russian migrants, according to an October 3, 2009 report by the web site Kavkazsky Uzel, which covers events in the Caucasus. The October 2 roundtable, entitled “Immigration and Ethnic Relations in Moscow: Present and Future,†was organized by the Duma’s youth affairs committee, which is dominated by ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party, the LDPR.
Another extremist movement in Russia, ‘Motherland’, has support in high places:
Favored by a combination of positive coverage on government-controlled television and the indisputable political talents of some of its leaders, the Motherland bloc’s success was the surprise of the electoral season. Put together earlier in 2003, Motherland unites a disparate group of hard-right to moderate nationalists with left-wing populists under the leadership of Dmitry Rogozin—chairman of the previous Duma’s International Affairs Committee and a close ally of the Kremlin—and Sergey Glaz’ev—an economist and previously a rising star within the Communist Party. The mainstream view in the Russian media is that Motherland was created by Kremlin PR specialists in order to siphon off votes from the Communist Party.
The party’s 57 page platform mixes populist economic prescriptions (reducing unemployment to 1%, jailing the oligarchs, etc.) with a paranoid world view and anti-migrant rhetoric.
Remind you of anyone?
Just as Press TV pumps a slick diet of anti-Western pro-regime propaganda into British living rooms, aided and abetted by its Western lackeys, so too Russia Today churns out cheery pro-Kremlin reports about the situation in Russia and gives a platform to extremist nutters from the West. No wonder the BNP has such an apparently amicable relationship with the channel.
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