Wednesday 21 December 2016

Putin "manipulates transatlantic votes"

UK Progressive relays the United States establishment view that Russian computer experts acting on behalf of Vladimir Putin deliberately released confidential data which harmed the Democrat campaign for the presidency. In the UK, the referendum result is alleged to have been fixed by the Russians.

I incline to the view, expressed in  War on the Rocks  passed on by Liberal England, that Putin's aim has been less specific but rather more dangerous. He seeks to sow general mistrust in the pillars of Western democracy. I would place the message that "capitalism has failed" in the same bucket of disinformation. (Capitalism is permanent; what has failed has been the willingness and/or ability of elected governments and supra-national bodies to regulate financial and other markets.) So effective has this virus become that some otherwise respectable commentators have been passing it on.

So far, so defensible. A wilder speculation is that the BBC is genuinely the Bolshevik Broadcasting Company and that they have deliberately given Nigel Farage and other 'kippers extravagant air-time in order to spread the same mistrust of all our established figures.

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