BBC Claim Putin Is Weaponizing Humor (Don't Laugh, That's Exactly What He Wants)
17
December, 2018
The
BBC has published
an article titled “How
Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about
the Kremlin’s latest addition to its horrifying deadly hybrid
warfare arsenal: comedy.
The
article is authored by Olga Robinson, whom the BBC, unhindered by any
trace of self-awareness, has
titled “Senior
Journalist (Disinformation)”. Robinson
demonstrates the qualifications and acumen which earned her that
title by warning the BBC’s audience that the Kremlin has been using
humor to dismiss and ridicule accusations that have been leveled
against it by western governments, a “form of trolling” that
she reports is designed to “deliberately lower the level of
discussion”.
Turns out jokes are a Russian disinformation conspiracy.
Is nothing safe? What will those barbarian Others think of next? Weaponizing our tears? bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…
365 people are talking about this
“Russia’s
move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively
recent phenomenon,” Robinson
explains, without speculating as to why Russians might have suddenly
begun laughing at their western accusers.
She gives no consideration
to the possibility that the tightly knit alliance of western nations
who suddenly began hysterically shrieking about Russia two years ago
have simply gotten much more ridiculous and easier to make fun of
during that time.
Couldn’t
possibly have anything to do with the emergence of a demented media
environment wherein everything around the world from French protests
to American culture wars to British discontent with the European
Union gets blamed on Russia without any facts or evidence. Wherein
BBC reporters now
correct guests and caution them against
voicing skepticism of anti-Russia narratives because the UK is in “an
information war” with that nation. Wherein the same cable news
Russiagate pundit can claim that both Rex
Tillerson’s hiring and his
later firing were
the result of a Russian conspiracy to benefit the Kremlin.
Wherein mainstream
outlets can
circulate blatantly false information about Julian Assange and
unnamed “Russians” and then blame the falseness of that reporting
on Russian disinformation. Wherein Pokemon
Go,
cutesy Facebook memes and $4,700
in Google ads are
sincerely cited as methods by which Hillary Clinton’s $1.2 billion
presidential campaign was outdone. Wherein
conspiracy theories that Putin has infiltrated the highest levels of
the US government have been blaring
on mainstream headline news for
two years with absolutely
nothing to
show for it to
this day.
Nope,
the only possibility is that the Kremlin suddenly figured out that
humor is a thing.
The
fact of the matter is that humorous lampooning of western
establishment Russia narratives writes itself. The hypocrisy is so
cartoonish, the emotions are so breathlessly over-the-top, the
stories so riddled with plot holes and the agendas underlying them so
glaringly obvious that they translate very easily into laughs. I
myself recently
authored a satire piece that
a lot of people loved and which got picked up by numerous alternative
media outlets, and all I did was write down all the various
escalations this administration has made against Russia as though
they were commands being given to Trump by Putin. It was extremely
easy to write, and it was pretty damn funny if I do say so myself.
And it didn’t take any Kremlin rubles or dezinformatsiya from St
Petersburg to figure out how to write it.
“Ben
Nimmo, an Atlantic Council researcher on Russian disinformation, told
the BBC that attempts
to create funny memes were part of the strategy as ‘disinformation
for the information age’,”
the article warns. Nimmo, ironically, is
himself intimately involved
with the
British domestic disinformation firm Integrity Initiative, whose
shady government-sponsored
psyops against the
Labour Party have
sparked a national scandal that is likely far
from reaching peak intensity.
“Most
comedy programmes on Russian state television these days are anodyne
affairs which either do not touch on political topics, or direct
humour at the Kremlin’s perceived enemies abroad,” Robinson
writes, which I found funny since I’d just recently read an
excellent essay by
Michael Tracey titled “Why has late night swapped laughs for
lusting after Mueller?”
“If
the late night ‘comedy’ of the Trump era has something resembling
a ‘message,’ it’s that large segments of the nation’s liberal
TV viewership are nervously tracking every Russia development with a
passion that cannot be conducive to mental health – or for that
matter, political efficacy,” Tracey
writes, documenting numerous examples of the ways late night comedy
now has audiences cheering for a US intelligence insider and Bush
appointee instead of challenging power-serving media orthodoxies as
programs like The
Daily Show once
did.
If
you wanted the opposite of “anodyne affairs”, it would be
comedians ridiculing the way all the establishment talking heads are
manipulating their audiences into supporting the US intelligence
community and FBI insiders. It would be excoriating the media
environment in which unfathomably powerful world-dominating
government agencies are subject to less scrutiny and criticism than a
man trapped in an embassy who published inconvenient facts about
those agencies. It certainly wouldn’t be the cast of Saturday Night
Live singing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to a framed
portrait if Robert Mueller wearing a Santa hat. It doesn’t get much
more anodyne than that.
Russia
makes fun of western establishment narratives about it because those
narratives are so incredibly easy to make fun of that they are
essentially asking for it, and the nerdy way empire loyalists are
suddenly crying victim about it is itself more
comedy. When Guardian writer Carole
Cadwalladr began
insinuating that
RT covering standard newsworthy people like Julian Assange and Nigel
Farage was a conspiracy to “boost” those people for the
advancement of Russian agendas instead of a news outlet doing the
thing that news reporting is, RT rightly made
fun of her for it. Cadwalladr
reacted to RT’s mockery with a claim
that she was a victim of “attacks”,
instead of the recipient of perfectly justified ridicule for
circulating an intensely moronic conspiracy theory.
Ah
well. People are nuts and we’re hurtling
toward a direct confrontation with
a nuclear
superpower.
Sometimes there’s nothing else to do but laugh. As
Wavy Gravy said, “Keep your sense of humor, my
friend; if you don’t have a sense of humor it
just isn’t funny anymore.”
*
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