People who challenge establishment narratives online likened with terrorist organization
The hearing, hosted by the House
Foreign Relations Committee, was titled “Confronting Russia’s
Weaponization of Information,” and accused Russian state broadcaster RT
of weaponizing “conspiracy theories” to spread propaganda.
One of the speakers giving testimony
was former RT host Liz Wahl, who made a public spectacle of quitting
Russian state media last year in an incident stage-managed by neo-con James Kirchick, himself a former employee of Radio Free Europe – a state media outlet.
Remarking that the Internet provided a
platform for “fringe voices and extremists,” Wahl characterized people
who challenge establishment narratives as a “cult”.
“They mobilize and they feel
they’re part of some enlightened fight against the establishment….they
find a platform to voice their deranged views,” said Wahl.
Referring to comments made in January by
US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) chief Andrew Lack, who
characterized RT as a threat on the same level as ISIS and Boko Haram,
Wahl said the comparison was justified.
“By using the Internet to mobilize
people that feel displaced, that feel like they’ve been on the
outskirts of society, and give them a place where they can find a sense
of belonging, and maybe make a difference in their own way, and it’s a
problem,” she said.
Wahl went on to bemoan the fact
that conspiracy theorists were “shaping the discussion online, on
message boards, on Twitter, on social media,” before asserting that the
web had become a beacon of “disinformation, false theories, people that
are just trying to make a name for themselves, bloggers or whatever,
that have absolutely no accountability for the truth, that are able to
rile up a mass amount of people online.”
Committee Chairman Ed Royce then proceeded to accuse people on YouTube of using “raw violence” to advance conspiracy theories.
Peter Pomerantsev, of the
London-based Legatum Institute, followed up by claiming that conspiracy
theories were no longer “fringe” and were now driving the success of
Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, before lamenting the fact that conspiracy
theories were challenging the “global order” and threatening to
undermine global institutions.
All three individuals that gave
testimony are staunch critics of Russia, leading Rep. Dana Rohrabacher
(R-CA) to wish “we had at least one other person to balance out this in a
way that perhaps could’ve compared our system to the Russian system, to
find out where that truth is, just how bad that is.”
Beyond the inflammatory rhetoric,
the real story revolves around the fact that Washington was caught off
guard by the rapid growth of RT, with Hillary Clinton and others having
acknowledged the fact that the U.S. is “losing the information war,” which is why they are now desperately trying to denigrate the Russian broadcaster.
Without a doubt, RT puts out
pro-Russian propaganda, but it also broadcasts truths about geopolitics
and U.S. foreign policy that Americans will never see on mainstream
corporate networks, precisely because those networks are also engaged in
propaganda.
There’s no mystery behind why RT
has become so big – telling the truth is popular – but because
Washington finds it impossible to compete on that basis, it has been
forced to resort to ad hominem attacks and ludicrous comparisons to ISIS
in a desperate bid to level the playing field.
As linguist Noam Chomsky said,
“The idea that there should be a network reaching people, which does not
repeat the US propaganda system, is intolerable” to the US
establishment.
*********************
0 comments:
Post a Comment