Before

Tagged: China

Political

On RT: Russia Today

(I wrote this in 2018.)

Last year, we learned that during the 2016 election campaign, millions of Americans were exposed to social media posts sponsored by Russians operating out of the “Internet Research Agency.” The Russians pushed hot buttons in domestic politics from gun rights to gay rights to “blacktivism” and anger at police abuses. The campaign was designed to foam up division on both ends of our political spectrum. The Russians were so sloppy in covering their tracks, sometimes they paid for their ads in rubles.

Recent indictments of Russian individuals have revealed exactly how the Russian government also hacked into domestic political outfits such as the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. The ties between “DC Leaks” and “Guccifer 2.0” and Russia’s state and Wikileaks are laid out in black and white and, I hope, will soon be proved in court. It is already the assessment of all U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russians interfered in our elections. As President Trump’s current lawyer said on Twitter, “The Russians are nailed.” (Julian Assange appears on the verge of finally being thrown out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, as well.)

Today’s news development is that Facebook announced it had uncovered evidence of a new and ongoing false influence campaign, aimed at promoting both the “Unite the Right” and “Abolish ICE” movements–two fringe elements, one on each side of our political spectrum. Facebook says it doesn’t know who was behind these, but it’s straight out of the 2016 Russia propaganda playbook, and some of the fake accounts followed Russia’s “Internet Research Agency” (propaganda) accounts. So it’s not a stretch at all to believe this is the Russian state’s work again.

One entity which does not hide from its ties to the Russian state is RT: Russia Today television. After years of insisting it was editorially independent, Russia Today was forced to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and it finally admitted it serves the Moscow regime within the United States.

RT’s longtime editor-in-chief is Margarita Simonyan. In 2012, she openly admitted the purpose of RT is to provide an outlet for the Russian state’s views:

It is important to have a channel that people get used to, and then, when needed, you show them what you need to show. In some sense, not having our own foreign broadcasting is the same as not having a ministry of defense. When there is no war, it looks like we don’t need it. However, when there is a war, it is critical.

Just as the Internet Research Agency’s propaganda campaigns were focused on American social ills, RT also frequently runs stories on our domestic problems, such as racism, drug abuse, police abuses, education woes, budget problems, government dysfunction, and so on. The problems are real, but the coverage is wall-to-wall. If there is a scab in the U.S. body politic, RT is frequently moved to pick at it. This is entirely in line with Russia’s strategy of sowing discord here in our country as well as in other nations abroad. For example, RT gives a whole show to the divisive Alex Salmond, who was behind the Scottish National Party’s losing 2014 campaign that would have torn the U.K. in half by taking Scotland out of it.

RT also, of course, uses its domestic platform in the U.S. to advance a Russian slant on events. In its version of today’s Facebook story, RT highlights that Facebook did not accuse Russia specifically. RT also covered the farcical “re-election campaign” of Putin in complete earnestness. And it runs the mirror image of the scab-picking stories whenever it talks about Russia. “Most Russians approve of Putin,” RT notes today. This straightforward coverage of Putin as a democrat or ordinary candidate is designed to make him something other than what he is: a murderous autocrat who’s ordered the deaths of multiple journalists within his borders.

Let there be no doubt: RT is not just built to tell news tales. It’s meant to change the very values of other societies. Here is a screen capture from a speech Simonyan made in China last year:

Yes: media like hers “changes the entire value system of societies,” and that’s RT’s explicit aim when it comes to the U.S. Here she is with another chilling passage:

(Whenever Russian figures complain of “international terrorism,” they are usually cynically referring to acts committed in opposition to Russian positions. So, freedom fighters in Syria opposing ISIS and opposing the murderous Assad regime become “international terrorists.” Orwell knew the power of the word.) But here she is offering to work with Chinese media to oppose “media terrorism,” which she basically defines as free western media that expose Russian crimes.

China’s media are no freer than Russia’s. And that tableau, of Simonyan, President Xi, and President Putin, on the same dais and singing in harmony terrifies me. It should make crystal clear that Putin sees RT as his long claw into the U.S. marketplace of ideas, and it was an invitation by Putin to Xi to join him in spreading their anti-American views on a global scale.

Neither nation is our friend. Russia–Putin–has ordered the poisoning of multiple people on British soil; it has interfered in our election and the elections of other nations; it has pushed to shatter the European Union and raged against NATO; it has threatened and intimidated our smaller allies in Europe who need us, such as when it hacked Estonia and threatened Montenegro for joining NATO; it has invaded the Ukraine and annexed Crimea by force and then through a sham “referendum”; it has lied about its involvement in the shooting down of a passenger plane, MH17, with a Russian-made missile; it has hacked into our power grid and tested the ability to shut it down; and God knows what it has on Trump. China has its own litany of sins that include bullying its smaller neighbors, the construction of illegal islands in the South China Sea, aggression against Japan, coddling of North Korea, and a creepy system of domestic repression of its own people up to and including mass executions.

Our country is divided and that is getting worse. So at the least, Americans must learn to see the links back to Russia, and see foreign meddling for what it is. We no longer can assume that we can have an honest political debate here without a hidden foreign voice trying to shout it down. Russia’s offensive campaigns have been designed to aggravate the rawest nerves in politics, so to spread fear, dissent, and make us weak through chaos. We must not forget that Russia’s tentacles extend deep.

But united we stand, divided we fall.

Culture / Political

Chinese news

I’ve been really sick the last four days, and probably spending more time on the Internet than usual.  Nothing is more discouraging than a few minutes at the China Daily website, the English-language “news” site which has become increasingly more professional over the years, and thusly, more dangerous.

The lead story on the BBC News webpage is about severe protests and demonstrations against Chinese rule in Tibet.  There, you can read that activists have released graphic photos of dead bodies showing bullet wounds, and that the police have finally admitted to firing shots at some protesters.  You’ll also read that riot police raided a monastery, causing 300 monks to run for their lives as police committed acts of “gratuitous violence” and kicked monks in the stomach while they lay on the ground.  The phone service had mysteriously been cut.  And the BBC’s own reporters noted that there had been severe limitations on their travel and ability to report.

Cruise over to China Daily.  The lead story is on the Olympic flame.  Click on “China” to get national news stories.  The lead story there is “China’s new cabinet maps out working rules.”  You have to dig for a story about the crisis, and I found one.  105 Lhasa rioters surrender to police.  There, you’ll read that “rioters” killed innocent civilians.  There’s no mention of China’s military actions.  But, there is a link to a story couple of days old titled, We fired no gunshots — Tibetan government chairman.  I wasn’t able to find any article admitting that the government in fact had shot anyone.  Rather, I found a humorous and pathetic grab-all story recounting that local religious authorities were decrying the Dalai Lama (who’s won the Nobel Peace Prize), that Tibet’s 1957 military invasion was “peaceful,” and for good measure, that “mobs” stoned a Han Chinese girl’s head without provocation.  (The Han are eastern China’s ethnic majority.)

Although China Daily never likes airing China’s own dirty laundry, it always enjoys having a good laugh at the United States — a country where protests against the government usually do not result in death.  Some people actually take pride in the fact that this is a country where protesting is legal: a point that seems lost on the site’s editors.  Thus, photos of Iraq war protesters are often prominently displayed on the front page, including today.  This is pretty typical for the website, but what I found truly bizarre is that the CD has created a special slideshow about Eliot Spitzer.  For fans of the absurd, this is not to be missed.  What sounds like plaintive Chinese pop music starts up soon into the slides.  As the captions peter out, it appears that the editors are simply running out the clock so that they can finish the song.  I have asked for a translation.

Also good for a laugh is the commentary, Property boom is here to stay.  After the ritualistic paean to Beijing’s “beaming vitality” and the amusingly gushing reference to “millions of skyscrapers being erected” (do the math — even in China, it can’t be millions), the author gets down to business.  “Are these sprouting buildings constructed on speculated ground, as property prices have been surging at a pace faster than the average growth in incomes?”  The answer is, of course not.  Do I even need to spell out the irony here?  And tragically, the author has failed to learn his microecon 101, confusingly calling the government to impose “price controls to make housing affordable for everyone” (but China must not “resort to administrative means to rein in housing prices”) while at the same time “subsidizing buyers with cash reimbursement” and cutting deals with developers to cap initial sale prices.  Huh?  Even Paul Krugman could not get behind this weird a plan, but “the authorities seem to have acknowledged this approach.”  And despite the opening reference to China’s glittering array of wealth, the column contains the rare admission that it is “a society where the majority of people cannot afford housing.”

As the Olympics near, we are going to hear more and more about how China is doing for itself.  The record continues to be one of shame.  And I remind people that it was just 2001 that China’s military captured and interrogated several U.S. airmen after one of their inept pilots caused a mid-air collision.  They are not our friends.  In the 1980’s, America was obsessed with the prospect of having to surrender our economy to the Japanese, and that was a country we actually got along with.  It is a long road from the China of 2008 to the Japan of 1980.