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The real enemy of the people
The real enemy of the people
“What’s it like being a traitor?” John Sweeney being just as subtle, unbiased and classy as you expect from the BBC Panorama team.
We are all familiar with the terms ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘apologist’ used by the establishment and media to smear independent journalists, experts and other commentators. For some time this has been particularly evident in the debates we see over the Middle East wars and Russia. It’s common knowledge that people who use these terms can’t argue rationally so resort to smears.
Western government support for terrorism, staged events and spreading disinformation via groups such as Integrity Initiative has come under closer scrutiny recently. As more revelations of wrongdoing by our governments and misreporting by our media have been exposed, the censorship and smears against independent media has intensified.
A DISTURBING NEW RHETORIC
I’m sure some of us have noticed that the language used has been ramped up yet again. I came across one example recently of someone promoting the anti-Russia narrative on Twitter making an analogy between one researcher’s legitimate investigation and criticism of Integrity Initiative and the actions of the World War II traitor, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. And I think many readers will be familiar with this post from John Sweeney of the BBC and clip from his programme on Sputnik News.
Here’s our @bbcnewsnight film on Sputnik News in UK. With tensions between Russian and UK growing I was on my diplomatic best behaviour. 1st Q: “what’s it like being a traitor?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxWv7yYhkf4 …
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46904935 …2489:32 AM – Jan 17, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacyFacebook targets Russian fake news sourcesThe pages campaigned for months creating and sharing stories that were fake, said Facebook.bbc.co.uk
To call someone a traitor is probably the most serious accusation you can make so let’s look at its meaning:
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Once Known As Preeminent Soviet Scholar, Stephen Cohen Now Seen As Putin Apologist
Once Known As Preeminent Soviet Scholar, Stephen Cohen Now Seen As Putin Apologist
On a recent Friday evening, the prominent Russia historian Stephen Cohen took the mic before an audience of 3,000 in Toronto to debate Western policy toward Russia in light of the Ukraine conflict.
Over the next 90 minutes, the man renowned for his pioneering scholarship on the Soviet Union accused the West of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin with NATO expansion, stoking potential war with Moscow, and failing to acknowledge its responsibility for what has happened in Ukraine in the last 15 months.
For those who have followed Cohen’s commentary, it was hardly surprising that many of his arguments dovetailed with a narrative pushed by the Kremlin, which portrays its seizure of Crimea as a response to Western meddling in Ukraine.
But toward the end of his debate with two strident Putin critics — former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and journalist Anne Applebaum — Cohen delivered a preemptive aside tailored for those who dismiss him as a dupe for the Russian leader.
“I am not pro-Putin,” Cohen, a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University, told the crowd. “I have no sentimental attachment to Putin whatsoever. He’s a subject — as a historian, to me — of study.”
It was a caveat unlikely to convince critics of Cohen, 76, whose fierce condemnation of the West’s role in the Ukraine conflict and more forgiving assessment of the Kremlin’s have made him arguably the most divisive American public intellectual commenting on the crisis today.
Widely seen as one of the preeminent scholars in the generation of Sovietologists who rose to prominence in the 1970s, Cohen these days is routinely derided as Putin’s “toady” and “useful idiot.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
