Mar 24, 2015

An Anti-Kusturica Breed of Love: Blackout, Whitewash

Entertainment key to Russia’s propaganda success, West bets on a double blindfold

Despite the Graun’s claims to the contrary, the last time I checked everyone in our small detachment was an ordinary NATO country passport holder. Remember this, the latest news demand that we act in full North-Atlantic loyalty.

Vice News brings it to our attention that NATO has admitted its defeat in the propaganda war against Russia and its fans around the world. In fact, on Sunday, Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said there was a “need [that we] as a Western group of nations or as an alliance to engage in this informational warfare.”

Well, if Russian troops really start their onslaught on poor Old Europe, I would be relieved to know that the generals getting a hefty portion of my bread and butter to defend me, wake up and realize what they should be doing, even if it takes them full 13 months to smell the coffee.

Similarly, we can count on the European Union’s unrivaled efficiency:

“An EU official who spoke to VICE News on the condition of anonymity said the plans were still in their nascent stage.”

We can’t deny there are obvious instances of success, even triumphs even at this “nascent stage”. After the story about Maidan Snipers false flag operation was broken by Baroness Ashton of Upholland and Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet, it took the American media several days to acknowledge this insignificant piece of news trivia. Praise be to the Christian Science Monitor.

When drunken Kiev soldiers ran over a kid and a mother with an APC in Konstantinovka near Donetsk, igniting a city-wide revolt, Western media showed they are slow, but capable learners. Only a handful of blog readers got the word. The rest just kept living in a different time and space, like the people in Kusturica’s “Underground.”

This first skirmish yielded an extremely positive experience. Now, when Igor Kolomoisky is running circles around Poroshenko and Yatseniuk, snapping up the odd state monopoly on his way, good old silence has proved its merits again. Three cheers for NATO’s CCC (command, control, communications) that has managed to shut up tens of thousands “free and independent” media outlets from Warsaw to Vancouver.

And for a good reason. Given the undoubted entertainment value of these developments, their release to the public might have pushed it deeper into Russia’s manipulative tentacles. As Robert Orttung (don’t mistake with Ordnung), assistant director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, told VICE News, that was key to the Kremlin’s deception success:

”

Russian propaganda is effective because there’s some interesting combination of entertainment and regular news with the Kremlin’s message inserted,” Orttung said. “It’s wrapped up in this infotainment mix, and it’s very hard for governments to counter it.”

Well, one has to try really hard to outdo Baroness Ashton’s famous “Gosh!” Dr. Orttung’s attempt at becoming total academic laughingstock gets quite a few points. If Hollywood has ever been denigrated by a comparison to Mosfilm, this is it.

Did it ever occur to Dr. Orttung, or anyone else, that truth may be a much better way to make and prove their point? And that it is truth that makes “Russian propaganda” in fact, unbeatable?

It turns out, the idea has actually dawned on NATO. And as required by bureaucratic tradition and internal regulations, it has emerged in nobody else’s cerebrum, but that of the top dog himself. Enter Gen. Philip Breedlove:

“The way to attack the false narrative is to drag the false narrative into the light and expose it”

Succinct, instructive, wise.

And, for us, the NATO’s loyal soldiers, it represents a direct order. Which we promise to follow to the word. As we have for months. Hoping the rest of NATO finally stands by our side too. For if we are on the side of truth, there is nothing to fear.