Several times I have said on the Judging Freedom program that “Russians are not bunny rabbits.” By this I was reminding my peers and the audience at large that Russia is not a country of chumps, as for example Paul Craig Roberts has been saying for some time in his critiques of what he considers Mr. Putin’s excessive caution and turning the cheek when slapped by Washington. No, I insist that Mr. Putin and his government can bring to bear the mailed fist when so required. And while the Kremlin is not very capable of fighting the Information War externally, as for example via RT, they do pretty well at home with their own citizenry via state television.
Now, to be sure, disproportionately high Russian news coverage of media and events in the USA and Europe compared to what the USA and European media have to say about Russia is purely in line with the balance of news coverage in the USA, foreign and domestic, versus the same balance in countries of the Rest of the World. The USA is, by definition, the center of the universe and has far less interest in the ROW than vice versa.
But Russia is in an Information War with the USA, so the rather fair-handed coverage of our major media is worth remarking here.
So much for Russian state coverage of Western major media. But what about Western alternative media? What I say here is based on the coverage of the two interview programs with large U.S. and global audiences in which I have been taking part for the past several months: Judging Freedom and Dialogue Works.
The best known of their interviewees, for example Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson, have long been shown in video clips from these and other Western interview programs posted on Sixty Minutes or Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, for example. Not on a daily basis, but from time to time.
As a newcomer to this media game, I have not been shown on Russian state television in any coverage of the Western interview shows. But I have received short newspaper and news portal coverage for isolated statements I have made on these shows which the media bosses in Russia found useful to reconfirm the Kremlin’s positions on things like U.S. direction of the Kursk invasions as a casus belli. Here we have a kind of closed loop: foreigner hears a position on Russian state news, foreigner repeats that position in a Western televised interview, foreigner is then featured in an article appearing in Russian media as proof of the validity of the Kremlin position.
With respect to my saying that the American close direction and supply of the Kursk invasion is a casus belli available to the Kremlin, this was picked up and presented as a self-standing article in the past two days by not one but by a dozen Russian major newspapers and portals, including that of the main carrier of all Russian state television programs on the internet, smotrim.ru
I am not being judgmental, just describing what is going on. Does this conform to the ‘useful idiot’ slander that Neocons have always applied to us, the Opposition? Of course, it does. HOWEVER, what those slanderers would miss in this case is that the closed loop was being used to make a programmatic statement or warning to Washington, which Messrs Blinken and Austin and Sullivan would do well to remark: “we Russians are ready to declare war on you.” To which side is this ‘useful idiot’ being more useful?
There is more to the story, and that is what I present to you now.
A Russian news portal has just posted a summary of my remarks on my latest chat with Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works under the title given above, which is an appropriate translation into Russian of my remark that ‘Russians are not bunny rabbits.’
I post this article below in the Russian original for those readers with a command of the language, or to those who want to run the text through Google. You will find that they are repeating everything I said about American experts on Russia in universities keeping quiet lest they be fired, so that their expertise is not being brought to bear on the very important policy questions being decided now in Washington behind closed doors. Still more interesting, they repeat what I said about the Kremlin using my peers who are on youtube daily to disseminate false or deceptive information given them by their backchannel buddies in Russia. That last point is not at all flattering to the Kremlin, yet it is in internet portals there.
Moreover, complete broadcasts of Judging Freedom and of Dialogue Works are now being re-posted on rutube.ru and on dzen.ru, the Russian counterpart to Google, with Russian language voice over in what is often a very professional translation. This means that Russian internet users can access a very good sampling of what the Opposition to the Washington narrative is saying, regardless of whether compliments or brickbats are being sent to the doors of the Kremlin. I invite you to give this a try: both interviews from the last three days are up on the Russian internet.
With this I end my case that whatever Iron Curtain exists today between Russia and the West has been lowered on the Western side, not on the Russian side.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024
Website: https://www.9111.ru/questions/77777777724130983/
Гилберт Доктороу о вторжении Украины в Курск Первый истребитель F-16 Украины уничтожен