Halloween week’s Russian propaganda
Even if Halloween is not widely celebrated where you live, who doesn’t appreciate the fun of trick-or-treating or the ancient Celtic traditions behind All Hallows Eve?
But for pro-Kremlin messengers, Halloween is yet another apparition of an invasive Western culture that is hell-bent on corrupting traditional Christian values. Last week, a Russian MP suggested that those who celebrate Halloween today will play with rubber women (ahem… sex dolls) tomorrow. Read the full story here.
The suggestion is as ridiculous as it is sinister. It plays into the larger pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative targeting mainly Eastern European audiences that any step towards the West will lead down a path of moral degradation and loss of national identity. Thus, the Georgians were told last week that in order to join NATO, they will have to legalize gay relationships; warned that George Soros together with pro-Western politicians will destroy Georgian values, culture, and nationality; and reminded that Georgian language and culture were dearly protected under the USSR. None of these statements have any basis in reality.
Last week, the pro-Kremlin media claimed that instead of killing the leader of Daesh, the US may have actually evacuated him. Other times, they disseminate contradictory messages about the same subject. For example, Lithuania is both under external control and a totalitarian state.
Buzzfeed and Bellingcat – which conducted independent journalistic investigations into the downing of flight MH17 and the Skripal poisoning – were accused of spreading anti-Russian disinformation.
And as a cherry on top, French president Emmanuel Macron was accused of “modern-day racism” for calling out RT and Sputnik as agents of influence and propaganda in the past, while Sputnik Deutsch claimed that Russia has never done anything bad to anyone in the information field. Ofcom, the UK media regulator that recently fined RT for breaching the impartiality rules, would probably disagree.
Coincidentally, last week Sputnik also kept hammering the same disinformation message about a “democratic referendum” in Crimea in English, Arabic, and Serbian. This “referendum” is not recognized either by the EU or the United Nations.
Meanwhile, Russian state-controlled TV channels continued to treat their domestic audiences to seemingly endless disinformation about Ukraine, claiming that the EU has turned away from Ukraine, that Ukrainian autocephalous church is a US project and that Ukraine wants to preserve itself as an anti-Russian project.
Source: euromaidanpress.com
