Are the Russians right?
Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the disinformative reports, but are happy to pillory the Russians. Many non-Russian commentators, myself included, have been deconstructing this western anti-Russian bigotry for years. Are we all propagandists of Kremlin-inspired disinformation?
A weary Russian Foreign Ministry official Maria Zakharova, said "Many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone." What's a poor Russian to do?
Certainly, WWIII is being (or will be, depending on how apocalyptic you are) fought in the first place in 'hearts and minds', and both the Americans and the Russians know it. "The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals exceeds the force of weapons in their effectiveness," Russian Armed Forces chief, General Valery Gerasimov, wrote in 2013.
If you are a russophobe you will agree with Patrik Oksanen, at Swedish newspaper group MittMedia: "The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left." Their central idea is that "liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic."
But is it possible the Russkies are right? That "European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all American puppets?"
That the West, as depicted by Sputnik and RT, according to MacFarquhar, is "grim, divided, brutal, decadent, overrun with violent immigrants and unstable?" "They want to give a picture of Europe as some sort of continent that is collapsing," Swedish Defense Minister Hultqvist told MacFarquhar.
Vladimir Kozin, a senior adviser to the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, called on the Swedes to keep their neutral status. "Do they really need to permit fielding new US military bases on their territory and to send their national troops to take part in dubious regional conflicts?"
Dmitry Kiselyev, Russia's most popular television anchor and head of Sputnik, on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Information Bureau, defended Russia's attempt to win the world's hearts and minds: "The age of neutral journalism is over. If we do propaganda, then you do propaganda too," he told western journalists.
Even as Swedes fret about the impact of joining NATO, NATO officially launched its "Cyberwarfare" campaign (read: against Russia) which NATO boasts as an "operational domain of war, just like land, sea and aerial warfare." This means that any cyber attack on NATO members can trigger Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. WWIII anyone?
Kiselyev: "Today, it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War II, World War I or in the Middle Ages," he said on Rossiya 24. While the business of "persuasion" is also more expensive now, "if you can persuade a person, you don't need to kill him."
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*The 'time of troubles' is a turning point in Russian history, when there was no heir, and Poland invaded and occupied Moscow in the late 16th century. A popular resistance sprang up and pushed the Poles out, leading eventually to the rise of Moscow as the centre of a new state.
** Freedom, a far right nationalist party, won 37 seats in 2012. It spearheaded the violence in the 2014 coup, in which over 100 died. Three members held positions in the post-coup Ukrainian government. The party dropped to 6 seats in the late October 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election. It is open only to ethnic Ukrainians.
*** Crimea is 68% Russian, 16% Ukrainian, 11% Tatar
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