COMMUNISM, WORLD
A Giant Leap Backward For Russia
by Lonely Conservative • December 16, 2013 •
Vladimir Putin recently shook up the Russian media, and it took no time for them to start doing his bidding with a zeal that would make the Cubans blush and turn President Obama green with envy.
The speed and domestic impunity with which the dictator Vladimir Putin is sovietizing the Russian media is truly breathtaking. Last week it seemed as if Russians woke up in a whole new country, but one which they recognized only too well: the USSR. With every day that passes, ordinary Russians are more and more cut off from basic facts about the world, just as they were in Soviet times. And more and more an international laughingstock.
First there was the reporting by Russian television on the crisis in Ukraine. All of the major broadcast TV networks are state-controlled in Russia, and the lies they told about the massive protests were amazingly bold. The Kremlin strongly opposes Ukraine joining the European Union, preferring to keep Ukraine firmly under its thumb, and has been putting extreme pressure on the Ukrainian government to spurn Europe. But hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians prefer association with the much more potent economy of Europe and access to the far larger European market. And they’ve shown their commitment with gigantic, earth-shaking public demonstrations. They’ve seized total control over the capital city’s main square and occupied many of the government’s buildings. And the momentum is clearly with them.
But you wouldn’t know about them if you got your news from Russian mainstream TV, which grossly distorted the facts to an unrecognizable and neo-Soviet extent.
Read the whole thing. (See next Page) It gets worse. Half the people don’t have internet access, so all they get is propaganda from the state which is censoring everything from blogs, to books to the theater.
The Other McCain notes that this is a step back towards totalitarianism. (Not to mention how the US media’s reporting on the tea parties was similar to the Russian reporting on the Ukranian protests.) Also of concern is the anti-Americanism.
Anti-American propaganda may actually be based on factual reporting. There are things our government does, especially in the area of foreign policy and national security, which we don’t necessarily endorse. However, these actions must be understood in an international context. What are our nation’s enemies and rivals doing? Our nation’s policies cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and especially we cannot permit propaganda by hostile powers to suggest that the United States is uniquely evil, so as to undermine our prestige, demoralize our citizens and weaken our defenses against aggressors.
Am I the only one who has noticed that Russia Today has been a reliable cheerleader for Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, the Anonymous hackers and Edward Snowden?
It’s almost like the cold war never ended. Only now we also have China playing war games and the rapid spread of jihad throughout the globe.
