Guardian's "Putin stealing election” shows new wave of Russia-hate being rolled out
This appeared in the Guardian today (thanks to Peter in the comments for alerting us):
We won’t bother doing an analysis of its lies, stupidities and racism. Simon Tisdall, author of the piece, could easily find out the reason Putin is virtually certain to return as president isn’t because the election is rigged but because people in Russia overwhelmingly support him. Even Gallup admit that much. Even the more level-headed western outlets acknowledge it. It’s a fact beyond dispute. Putin doesn’t need to rig anything on order to win an election.
But Tisdall’s brutish conviction is proof against facts. Any facts, even Western-backed facts. Instead of doing even basic research he prefers to riff for umpteen paragraphs on something that is a total, demonstrable lie.
Fact-based reality is not the one Tisdall and his peers live in any more. They don’t see it. And when it’s presented to them they think it’s Kremlin propaganda. In the matter of Russia they have become over the last few years blind and deaf to reason and fact. They are the most dangerous of deceivers – those who believe their own lies. Even the best of them now truly thinks anyone who questions their Russia=Evil narrative is a paid Kremlin agent. These well-paid supposedly well-educated people are on Twitter literally asking anyone who challenges them what the weather is like in St. Petersburg.
The sheer wanton deception, the outright, blunt and brutal propagandising is getting worse. It’s attaining new heights of spittle-flying hate. And in concert the war drums are beating again in Syria and Ukraine.
And we can be sure this is going to continue up until and for some while after the Russian election is done.
Supposing any of us live that long.
Because, without unnecessary alarmism, we have to be aware xenophobia of this magnitude comes with a risk. In the past it has always been a prelude to war. And if this current case isn’t an exception, humanity is not going to survive. Not even those Guardian journos snug in their cosy hubris. Hubris isn’t bomb-proof sadly.
The Guardian allowed comments on this article for six whole hours. Long enough to make it clear the suicidal, fact-blind, cultist insanity ATL is not shared by most who read it. Yes there are predictable cries of “putinbots” and predictable agenda-setting claims such as that Corbyn needs to be tougher on Putin (look forward to this becoming a major facet of the next UK general election), but for all that it’s the rational observations that get the most upvotes. And that’s even after the mods have scoured and censored as is their wont.
Here are a couple of the best.
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Apart from the traditional distortions about Putin and his political career, some of the comments to this grotesque article abound in the still more typical attacks against Corbyn from the increasingly neo-liberal readership of this once-respected Guardian. According to them, Corbyn sympathises with Putin since both of them are communists (?!) This smearing and fear mongering tactic reminds me of the Telegraph and the Mail’s attacks on every Labour leader who had a pro-peace and pro-working class stance in the past… how many years?
The Guardian began selling out to the Right ten years or so ago. The vicious hatred spewed at Hugo Chavez was an early symptom, and by now, the familiar moral and intellectual ‘race to the bottom’ that one sees with Rightists everywhere, has created a rag VERY reminiscent of Murdoch’s cancer screeds we see in Australia. Tisdall could easily work at The Fundament (‘The orifice of the nation) aka the ‘Australian’, any day of the week.
The outstanding feature of the MSM and particularly the modern Guardian is that it will not under any circumstance allow an alternative view to be put by the pro Syrian side of the argument. They would not dare allow Eva Bartlett or Vanessa Beeley to use their own voices to reply to the fact free claims of Guardian journalists who happily promote the views of the terrorists through the perspective of the White Helmets and the UK based Muslim Brotherhood man who calls himself the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Can anyone recall the Guardian talking to the majority Syrian citizens who want Assad as President and who are not in terrorist controlled areas. There are many Syrians who have become refugees due to the illegal invasion but who never get interviewed, only the Al Qaeda terrorists get a voice.
This is today’s Guardian a mish mash of propaganda, populism! and salacious click bait, while heavily restricting discussion on important issues. Shame on these cowardly traitors of truth.
Here in Austfailure the entire fakestream media sewer, including the Government run ABC and SBS are ENTIRELY Rightwing and spew NOTHING but Imperial Goodthink. The Groupthink is TOTAL particularly in regard to Syria and Evil Putin. The ‘ethnic’ SBS has been FANATICALLY pro-jihadist and anti-Syrian from the beginning. Almost every news broadcast begins with the latest takfiri propaganda, complete with female talk-over where the dears almost hurt themselves in their efforts to spit out the invective. Debates and discussions never present any but Imperial loyalists. Similar treatment is directed at China, suddenly the monster of monsters, seeking to ‘interfere’ in our country. Evidence is redundant, and the few dissenting voices, like former Foreign Minister Bob Carr, were quickly ‘disappeared’. The appointment of the Sinophobe lunatic, Harry Harris as Viceroy from the USA (aka ‘Ambassador) was greeted with adulation and joy, and some of the more unhinged presstitutes were actually rather ecstatic in predicting that he would drag Austfailure into the USA’s coming war with China. If you think your Rightwing fakestream media is bad, I’ll back ours to prove even more deranged and frenetic. All hate and fear, all the time. It’ how they divide and rule, and how the Right harvests the votes of the haters, voting being compulsory.
Does Mr Tisdall claim to be a journalist as I see no evidence of this, unless being employed by a state organ qualifies one for such?
I have real Russians in my large and extended family, and they all admire and pretty much adore Putin, especially after the shameful years typified by… Yeltsin.
One of the amusing things about Russia, is that the leadership have discovered and understood that they don’t need to produce ‘propaganda’ about the West, like the old Soviets did, all they need to do is tell the truth about the West and use openly available western sources; which is somewhat ironic.
As an aside, sorry; I’ve just watched the movie ‘Kill the Messenger’ about the journalist Gary Webb who wrote a series of articles linking the CIA with gun-running and drug-running on a massive scale in the 1970’s. Webb’s
story, unfortunately, was… to big to tell and the rest of the quality press turned on him and basically destroyed him and his career. What struck me about the movie was how closely Webb’s story, what happened to him, the reaction of the rest of the press to his staggering revelations about massive criminality at the heart of government, echoes the way Assange has been savaged by the Guardian and the rest of them. Webb, like Assange… became the story, diverting attention away from the information they gathered and released. There are so many parallels between what happened to Webb and the way Assange’s reputation has been undermined and how both of them were taken ‘out of circulation.’
In the movie Webb says that he was never fired by an editor and never told what to write… because nothing he’d written really mattered or threatened any vested interests or powerful people or the state.
Simple Simon.
Shock Poll: Most Countries Prefer Putin Over Trump – Forbes
https://www.forbes.com › 2017/08/16 › s…
[I wanted t, present a similar global poll for PM May but could not find one]
80% of Ukrainians would prefer Vovo to any of their current leaders.
https://www.google.co.il/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.globalresearch.ca/scandalous-poll-84-of-ukrainians-want-vladimir-putin-as-their-president/5556904&ved=2ahUKEwiC1ey8rZnZAhXJ5qQKHawDBWwQFjAAegQIDBAB&usg=AOvVaw1dJ8uM48Q5YLz033lQ05m1
Anyone done a poll in Britain?
Tisdale pukes lies and disinformation and Guardian readers choose not to swallow it – no wonder CiF was closed.
Reblogged this on Worldtruth and commented:
Excellent
One of the things that irritates me about the ‘liberal’ Guardian is how they simply love to preach and moralize about… well, almost everything… everywhere, as if they and the West represent so kind of ‘moral civilization’ superior to everyone a ‘progressive vanguard’ with a mandate from providence to lead the world in the right direction in all things. They truly believe that they are both ‘right’ and ‘good’ and have a duty to help and save other countries and peoples from their backwardness, ignorance and darkness. The Guardian’s writers are… innocent, to a degree that’s staggering as well as being incredibly dangerous, because, fundamentally they are self-delusional and soaked in a form of ‘liberal imperialist’ dogmatism and faith that’s been the mainstay of western thinking and beliefs for centuries, and allowed us to justify crimes we’ve committed on a vast global scale, wiping entire countries and civilizations off the map, holocaust after holocaust after holocaust. And now, since the fall of Soviet Russia we’ve been on a roll smashing state after state and leaving a great swathe of mass-destruction and mass-slaughter behind our military juggernaut, which the fools at the Guardian honestly believe isn’t a giant killing machine covered in body parts and gore, red and monsterous to behold; but a gleaming, white ambulance covered in peace signs and slogans about ‘peace’ ‘love’ and ‘human rights’.
That Western Supremacism is most marked in regard to China, where the racists and civilizational bigots simply DEMAND that China change its 5000 year habits, and imitate Utopias like the UK and USA. And they really mean it, racism being one of the bed-rocks of the Rightwing Authoritarian Personality.
It is difficult to believe that crude and crazy Western propaganda convinces anyone in Russia: https://thesaker.is/re-visiting-russian-counter-propaganda-methods/
People here must by now be finding it increasingly tiresome and predictable.
” Control the Media”
” Ruin the youth with sex & drugs”
These are 2 of the 25 points in a strategy for world domination drawn up by Adam Weishaupt, ex Jesuit professor of canon law, in 1773 for the Rothschilds Banksters.
This is dealt with in William Guy Carr’s 1955 book: Pawns in the Game.
I first saw this book referenced in a 1 hr 4 mins youtube video by Ted L. Gunderson. Worth the hour.
Put in youtube search box: Ex Head of FBI Tells All.
John Doran.
I think it’s a sign of terminal decline when the leading members of a ruling elite begin, seemingly and in public, to act like they actually believe in their own propaganda, regardless of how far it is from reality and truth.
They keep sermonizing like religious fanatics and they’re increasingly dogmatic and aggressive in their utterances, clinging to their beliefs no matter what.
That there’s more actual evidence that there was far more ‘stealing’ and ‘rigging’ in the last US presidential elections, especially inside the Democratic Party, doesn’t bother them at all. That the US has a system that structurally allows electoral ‘stealing’ on a vast scale, where the will and votes of the people can be overturned and the candidate with the most votes… ‘loses’, doesn’t register with them. And what about the UK? Here… magically a party with only 42% of the votes cast in an election, can be transformed into a powerful government with a huge majority over all the other parties combined! And this happens over and over again. 42% becomes a ‘landslide’ and a ‘mandate’ from the electorate, and this is called ‘democracy’ and gives us the right to lecture everyone else and the Russians?!
‘… “For years,” the [US Senate minority report] said, “Vladimir Putin’s government has engaged in a relentless assault to undermine democracy and the rule of law in Europe and the US. Mr Putin’s Kremlin employs an asymmetric arsenal that includes military invasions, cyber-attacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, and the weaponisation of energy resources, organised crime, and corruption”…’
Dear Mr Tisdall, are you sure the people who researched and compiled that report weren’t hired hacks from Hollywood who normally write scripts for science fiction movies?
Has anyone else noticed that the arsenal Moscow supposedly employs to undermine democracy and the rule of law in Europe and the US is the very same arsenal (plus more, such as using other countries’ impeachment laws to get rid of Presidents the US doesn’t like, as in Brazil in 2016) that the US uses to erode and weaken democracy and stability across the world including Europe?
Pots & Kettles Projection?
You have to wonder what they’ve got on him to make him put out such insane drivel?
John Doran.
It’s simply the crudest and most deranged projection, by the greatest and most destructive interferers in other countries affairs in all history. The scary reality is that they probably believe it themselves. A ruling elite entirely composed of psychopaths of varying intensity, where NO intelligent debate whatsoever is allowed, will follow a path of increasing hysteria as the lunatics continually prove their loyalty to Groupthink by seeking to outdo their colleagues in the intensity of their diatribes. The Fraudian is long down that path.
“obviously rigged poll” – er, Honduras?
“screams of outrage from the West” – er, whimpers of ‘where’s that?’ AND – isn’t that where we sent an awful lot of electronic surveillance equipment to help that nice man we got into government last time? You know, the one that let’s us use the country for a military base – sopoooo strategically useful. Was a little worried there that closing down the computers when the opposition was obviously winning was a tad blatant, but, no. That nice man has been endorsed by US and UN. Oh, you are worried about the UN delegation investigating the election fraud, er, sorry, result? One’s from Guatemala, one’s from El Salvador and one’s from, yes, of course, the US. No problems there. I don’t think anyone’s reporting the riots in the streets, the protest marches and the 30 dead. Result.
Boris Johnson or Sergei Lavrov? End of……….
The easiest way to dismember this nonsense is to talk to ten real Russians. Real Russians were seriously alarmed by the ‘nuke Russia’ Hillarybilly psycho nonsense in 2016, not because they seriously believed it, but they worried that in a mad world, could they easily disregard it? Amazingly enough, real Russian people who hope to have babies do not want depleted uranium in their neighbourhoods.
These ordinary Russians have no interest in invading eastern Europe, bombing America and really have no desire for war with Ukraine. They are interested in things like going out with friends, having a nice holiday, meeting interesting people, finding a partner to marry and raise a family with. They are, in other words, exceedingly normal people.
They do not take kindly being told that the man they desire as President does not represent them. I can say with certainty that President Putin represents Russians considerably more diligently than the Washington patsies found in Western European offices of state. If I were a Russian citizen, I would vote for him, despite him not being either Jesus Christ MkII nor a drunken puppet of Western bankers.
As a UK citizen, I do not expect President Putin to agree to win-lose deals with the UK, his job as Russian President is to ensure that dodgy UK charlatans do not screw his country something chronic. I would consider him amenable to deals which benefits both parties. Watch Washington try and trash anything like that….
Mercifully, Russians take little notice of UK media. Hopefully they realise that fewer and fewer Brits do either……
What I find grotesque, bizarre and frightening is the attitude of the journalists in relation to grooming the public to support war, as if they won’t end up frying too like everyone else! They reallys seem immune to rational thought and the dangers of demonizing Russia and the seemingly inexorable momentum towards WW3. Do they believe they’ll escape the nuclear holocaust ’cause they write for the Guardian? The way they appear to think is truly frightening and underneath the brittle liberal gloss their extraordinarily reactionary too. They are all, basically, neoconservatives with a dreadful, sanctimonious tone that’s insufferably smug. They love putting their virtue on display and preen themselves like peacocks.
I honestly think they are so ignorant of history, politics and human behavior generally that they cannot make the connection of cause to effect. They aren’t afraid of being fried because it hasn’t occurred to them that such a thing is even possible. It’s pretty slow-going in the minds of the folks who live in imperially privileged fantasy-land.
Not just Gallup, The Pew Research Centre found high levels of confidence (amongst Russian citizens) in Putins leadership.
http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/20/president-putin-russian-perspective/
But as we all know, the Guardian long ago abandoned fact based journalism – its one of the reasons so many articles are evicerated BTL.
By the way, which leader is Tisdall referring to?
Does he seriously expect the laughing stock of Europe, or at least her own party, Theresa May, to make weighty pronouncements about a sovereign leader who enjoys the kind of national goodwill she can only dream about?
In contrast I can hardly wait for Zoe Williams next bout of tabloid style sycophancy for the horrific HRC.
Odd that his diatribe against Russian elections is a description of British ones.
As already said, Catte is VV Putin’s gf.
Vera? as in polycythemia vera. You should definitely see a doctor
Polycythaemia vera RUBRA-she’s a Red!
Is this original with you or did you lift it from a public toilet stall ?
The Guardian is actually getting worse and worse when covering foreign policy and especially the West’s official enemies, who are slammed in the dock, with the charges shouted at them, but rarely, if ever allowed to come with a word in their defence or even the opportunity to deny the charges or protest their innocence.
Let’s face it, the western media is grooming the public for the next war… WW3, yet the hacks at the Guardian seem strangely and frighteningly sanguine about the prospect. I often wonder, just how stupid does one have to be to write for the Guardian these days?
Q. – “how stupid does one have to be to write for the Guardian these days?”
A. – Very.
The Guardian joins the BBC in attacks of all sorts on Russia, China and Syria. The BBC has been giving almost daily reports of child deaths in Gouta while never mentioning the mortar bombs that go the other way, unguided, into resedential areas of Damascus. No mention either of mass child deaths in Yemen which is being treated like a WW2 ghetto. The same goes for Idlip. Alongside such slanted coverage we also have the “analysts” who assure us “Yes! The Russians really are after our guts for garters. Believe me Old Boy!” The “experts” have never been more obviously run by the MoD, some are right out of the bunker. The recent intensity of this avalanche of propaganda suggests things are being geared up in preparation for War. Maybe there is something they haven’t told us, like the date?
The Guardian has swung hard Right and can never recover it’s reputation. Thank Goodness for sites like this!!
Tried to read the original article but foundered after a few paragraphs. It wasn’t so much the (de haut en bas) tone but the evidence free content. Tisdall is almost unreadable anyway.
You were fortunate not to reach the comments. Albion has become an albatross
There were lot of the usual – and possibly to some extent astroturf – Russophobic comments, but many intelligent ones as well. And, as Catte says, the latter tended to get more up-votes. And that is allowing for the moderator censorship.
I don’t know. Apart from very few, I found the bulk of the comments initially infuriating but ultimately depressing. A disgraceful article, whose putrescence certainly drew the zombies – the guardian readership these days. I’ve abandoned it, and visit only on occasion, eg when highlighted by ‘you’. The sooner its demise the better. Regards, an ex-pat who subscribed to the guardian for 15 yrs (20 yrs ago)
The only Journos in the Graun that were ever worth reading were Jonathan Steele and Seamus Milne. Since their departure we are now left with cossetted, fanatical hacks from the Ministry of Truth telling us what to think. There is not a smidgen of compromise, diplomacy, or God forbid, ‘peace’ as an option from this chorus of jihadist neo-cons seemingly spoiling for a war.
Perhaps the only exception comes in the shape of Peter Hitchens who writes for the Mail on Sunday who adopts a high-Tory realist persective: namely, that war, particularly nuclear war, is bad and should be avoided at all costs, and it is not a good or even legal policy to interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign states.
Oh, how utterly passe, intone the soi-disant enlightened ones. Now doubt we should – they have – adopted the position in International Relations as outlined by Mr Francis ‘end of history’ Fukuyama.
”Dictators and human rights abusers like Serbia’s Milosevic could not hide behind the principle of sovereignty to protect themselves as they committed crimes against humanity, particularly in the multi-ethnic states like Yugoslavia where the borders of the sovereign state in question were themselves contested, under these circumstances outside powers, acting in the name of human rights and democratic legitimacy, had not just the right but the OBLIGATION to intervene.” Yep, ‘White Man’s Burden’ circa 1995.
I don’t suppose it was of any import than Milosevic was acquitted of these ‘crimes’ by the International Court after his death in prison from a heart attack. But simply consider the sanctimonious bluster above and remember the old axiom, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions …’ though truth to tell I am not convinced about the goodness or otherwise of the intentions.
There is a particular passage in Orwell’s 1984 where Winston Smith and two of his co-workers are having their lunch when they overhear a defender of the faith describing the party’s role in the elimination of the enemies of Oceania. From a nearby table a party member – like our Guardian journos – holds forth ”what was horrible was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth, it was almost impossible to distinguish one word. Just once Winston caught a phrase -complete and final elimination of Goldsteinsim – jerked out very rapidly , and as it seemed, all in one piece all like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking …”
Winston’s intellectual colleague sitting at the same table was wont to comment.
”There is a word in Newspeak’ said Syme ‘I don’t know whether you know it: it is duckspeak, to quack like a duck. Applied to an opponent it is abusive, applied to someone you agree with it is praise”
Unquestionably Syme would be vaporised. (1984 p.62.63)
Prescient or what?
Duckspeak, the lingua franca of ‘liberal journalists’ – a group of propagandists not far from clinical schizophrenia
[edited by Admin for typo]
So who, and how, took over the Guardian. I heard it was Mr. Everywhere, Soros, who Freedland so adores (such nepotism)but evidence is hard to find. The rag is now far beyond despicable, but how was it achieved?