BBC's war propaganda - it's intellectually and morally down the drain from the war gutter
Experienced and knowledgeable people know that a conflict requires at least two. But BBC doesn't. Drop BBC!
Jan Oberg
TFF Director, PhD, peace and future researcher
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Click on this image from BBC on September 3, 2023, and read the Brilliant Bull CoverUp.
I’m dismayed.
I am old enough to remember when BBC was the main media everyone would go to for reliable, diverse information from around the world - and listened to all over the world. In the late 1970s Somali nomads told me that what they knew about the world was what they had learnt from listening to the BBC World Service on the transistor radios.
BBC was the first you listened to in the morning, the last you checked the news at before hitting bed.
Today, at least when it comes to international affairs (I am not an expert on sports, fashion, celebrity stuff, food or film that fills it nowadays), it’s a cheap tabloid-like pro-war propaganda outlet that does not cover wars but participates in them: Pro-Washington. Pro-NATO. Public disservice.
It’s as hateful and Russophobic as the foreign policy of that Great Britain that once ruled the waves but today rather flushes the toilets - if they are not out of order.
In this article, three BBC journalists play the deception and war propaganda game that everything that happened in Ukraine can be explained by President Putin’s cancellation over time of diplomacy and that those left, on his order, overnight became anti-Western. Anti, that is, the West that has been so diplomatic, wanted cooperation and always treated the Soviet Union/Russia as an equal and took its interests into account in the most respectful of ways.
It starts out with the experience of US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland being so very surprised by that change when meeting Russia’s deputy foreign minister. Victoria Nuland is known all over the world as one of the - extremely hawkish - masters of the US-orchestrated and -financed coup, or regime change, in Kiev in 2014 that can be seen as one of the more recent starting points of the present NATO-Russia conflict that plays out so tragically and cynically (by all sides, including Ukraine’s present leadership) in the war in Ukraine.
BBC doesn’t mention it.
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“It might be hard to imagine now, but Mr Putin himself told the BBC back in 2000 that "Russia is ready to co-operate with Nato... right up to joining the alliance".
"I cannot imagine my country isolated from Europe," he added.”
Yes, because you do not understand anything, BBC. You have to frame Putin - whom you call Mr while Biden is a President - as a man who never means what he says.
Then BBC continues with an extraordinary - and extraordinarily unfounded - assertion:
“The first signal that a new Cold War was beginning came in 2007 with a speech Mr Putin made to the Munich Security Conference.
In a 30-minute diatribe, he accused Western countries of attempting to build a unipolar world. Russia's diplomats followed his lead.”
So, the always benevolent and galant West was taken aback because of Mr Putin’s speech there in Munich!
Of course, BBC does not tell you what he said - he is not worthy of serious attention, and diatribes aren’t. Among other things, he asked why NATO had broken the promises that all important Western leaders had given Mikhail Gorbachev, namely that NATO would not expand “one inch” if Russia accepted the unified Germany as a member of NATO.
Not one inch - very well documented in books, archives, and media articles at the time. BBC’s people are either ignorant and do not know about this - or they do but omit facts deliberately. It’s called self-censorship or groupthink/political correctness - and it is the consequence of some kind of censoring influence from countries that have reasons to prevent the public from knowing a larger truth (and also close down access to leading Russian media).
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BBC wants us to believe that there is only one actor; this is a conflict with only one participant: Mr Putin/ Russia, who started the new Cold War and was never-ever responding to anything NATO did, presumably because whatever it did, it was in the common interest of it and Russia and best-intended.
So much so that it doesn’t even have to be mentioned what NATO did…
No, it’s all in sentences like this:
"But it soon became obvious to US officials that their Russian counterparts were simply parroting Mr Putin's growing anti-Western views, says Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to former US President Barack Obama.”
Yep, the President Obama whose administration did one of the US’s dozens of regime changes, by sheer coincidence and unrelated to everything else, in Kiev - as mentioned above. Russian diplomats are parrots - US diplomats like Antony Blinken never parrot what President Biden says. Never!
Mr Putin grew anti-Western for no reason.
Conclude, dear BBC reader: Mr Putin went mad - at least mad at NATO. And for no good reason, probably mad also in a psychiatric sense.
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Moscow’s ambassador is quoted too - BBC knows it has to look ‘objective’ and balanced. He denies the thesis of the article, but - well, no need to take him seriously; let his bizarre lying statement be a stand-alone.
Now on to the - terrible, we understand - Ms Zakharova's arrival as the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman; she is known for “threatrical” press briefings.
The real problem here, in my view, is that she is actually damn sharp and good with words - whereas a series of Western foreign ministry and White House spokespersons are more - well - “farcical” at their briefings.
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BBC’s truth-teller is, of course, a former Russian diplomat, Boris Bondarev, who resigned in protest over the Ukraine invasion. So, he is politically correct and therefore BBC’s crown witness and quoted at length… You see his style and quality in this little one about Ryabkov’s behaviour:
“"It was awful," says Mr Bondarev. "The Americans were like, 'Let's negotiate.' And instead Ryabkov starts shouting, 'We need Ukraine! We won't go anywhere without Ukraine! Take all your stuff and go back to the 1997 [Nato] borders!'
"[Ryabkov] was always very polite and really nice to talk to. And now he's banging his fist on the table and talking nonsense."“
This was January 2022! It was when NATO had turned down yet another - last of many - proposal from Moscow that tried to stop the expansion into Ukraine but simultaneously accepted that NATO had expanded. But, kind of: No more now and move your offensive weapons away from our borders!
NATO’s Stoltenberg and the media misrepresented it - if they took it up at all - and that that anger should have something to do with the NATO expansion and NATO’s presence in Ukraine over 30 years since a few months after it became independent is simply inconceivable to BBC - and therefore not part of any complex reality.
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The BBC reality is so incredibly simple: Mr Putin went mad for reasons we do not know and turned against the West/NATO totally irrationally - remember ‘we’ never did anything provocative, and the Russian invasion was therefore, ‘unprovoked’ - which has only had to defend itself as best it could (with 12 times higher military expenditures than the aggressive Russia) - and must now, we understand, back up Ukraine at any cost because of this madman’s words and deeds.
Towards the end of this ‘analysis,' we are meant to understand that it is OK that “Ambassador Kelin has been banned from entering the UK Parliament. At one point, he says, the Russian embassy in London was almost left without gas and electricity, and insurance companies refused to insure the mission's cars.”
BBC doesn’t comment on such a strange practice vis-a-vis a foreign representation and doesn’t seem to find it bizarre or Russophobic; the UK only responded to Mr Putin’s provocations.
We are also made to sympathise with Ukraine’s resistance to any type of negotiations - and full-blown war as a road, one must presume, to peace. Russia’s policy is only about ‘ultimatums.’ Not a word about NATO’s and the UK’s insistence, with Boris Johnson personally in Kiev several times, that Ukraine should not negotiate anything with Moscow.
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So, to summarise it all: BBC runs deception/war propaganda by omission, defining away that it takes two to conflict. NATO is like a villa with nice and friendly owners who have to watch every day a potential criminal outside the gate provoking them and sending threats to break in and harm them and their property.
It also runs by projection - a psychological propensity to blame others for doing what ‘we’ ourselves do much worse; I mean, read this:
“Russia seems set on relying on its military machine, intelligence services and geo-economic power for influence - rather than diplomacy.”
You could certainly never say anything similar about the US/NATO countries. And if you wanted to say it as a journalist at BBC, you’d better not.
BBC's trajectory is the same as the general West - in intellectual and moral decline. Or free fall to be more precise. Boycott BBC!
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Notes
You may wonder, at least in general terms, why the media are so close to politics and write to be so politically correct. In other words, whether there is what I have coined a MIMAC - a Military-Industrial-MEDIA-Academic Complex. Here is one of many articles that presents a solid analysis of the connections between British journalists and the Establishment:
Steven McCracken & Sean Rankin, Mapping the Establishment - Elitism Among the Top 100 UK Journalists.
There is, of course, also this - now classic and deightful - BBC interview with Jeffrey Sachs in which he reveals the pro-US framing of the climate change issue: