Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 8 – By offering its viewers a 30-minute program attacking the League of Free Nations of Russia and that group’s support for human rights and the right of nations to self-determination, the Russian Defense Ministry’s Zvezda TV network has spread the group’s ideas to an enormous audience inside the current borders of the Russian Federa.tio
As so often in the past, Moscow and its propagandists have faced a Hobson’s choice: if they ignore the activities of groups they don’t like and ideas they abhor, they face the prospect that these groups will gain success and their ideas will spread via a variety of means and thus become stronger.
But if they attack these groups and ideas, the propagandists inevitably spread the influence of these groups and their ideas, especially to a population like those living in the Russian Federation long accustomed to reading between the lines and thus help their opponents and undermine their own position.
That the Kremlin has decided that it must attack groups like the League of Free Nations is thus a mark of both nervousness at the top of the Russian Federation about national and regional activism in that country and a sign that the group and its ideas are gaining far more traction than many in the West think.
(To view the TV program, see rutube.ru/video/f0850d6e652a277f7e862f153c898fe6/; for a brief note on it, see idel-ural.org/archives/v-borbu-s-ligoj-svobodnyh-naczij-vklyuchaetsya-minoborony-rf-i-federalnye-telekanaly/.)
No comments:
Post a Comment