Arrogance, Bloody-mindedness and Chauvinism: The ABC of the British Media

It is all there in these four pages of unadulterated bilge – Russia is “an unstable beast” and “in many ways...a Third World country”, the Russians are patriotic (is that so bad?) and xenophobic, cynical and fatalistic. This coming from an author whose country exported the football hooligan, a study in xenophobia and crypto-fascism, a term he likes to use, the country where knife crime is rife and where a Harry Potter actor has just been stabbed to death in real life. Then there are gems like “Russia has a bloody and tormented history”. What is that supposed to mean? What about England’s massacres in Scotland? What about the Croke Park Massacre in Dublin in 1920 when the Black and Tans murdered civilians at a sports event? What about the Amritsar massacre in 1919? Or the Qissa Khwani bazaar massacre in 1930? Or the Boston Massacre in 1770? Or Natal, 1906? Indeed British history is studded with bloody and tormented events.

A cherry on the cake is provided by the statement that Khodorkovsky “used his oil wealth to promote human rights and democracy” and now (sob) he is in jail…without any mention whatsoever of the small detail that he forgot to pay thousands of millions of USD in taxes.

To round off his insolent, impudent and intrusive piece of nonsense, Dimbleby refers to Vladimir Putin as “autocratic” with a “totalitarian grasp on power”. The truth: Vladimir Putin was democratically elected not once, but twice and unlike Britain’s Prime Minister, enjoys a huge popularity for a very good reason, not because he is autocratic and totalitarian but because he is honest and competent and produces the goods.

Where did Dimbleby, the Daily Mail and the BBC get this from? Like others who have been ably dealt with in this column, they get it from an innate desire to humiliate and scorn, insult and deride Russia and Russians. Brainwashed by decades of Cold War rhetoric and hatred, they simply cannot move on, because the perpetration of this nonsense justifies their positions.

The proof of the pudding is the fact that Dimbleby blows his cover in the first four-line paragraph which describes his BBC-sponsored trip to Russia, which he describes as “deeply disturbing” and in which he tells us that he met “impoverished potato pickers”, a “witch” and “mountain herdsmen who worship fire and water”. Nothing mentioned in his piece of the intelligent, hardworking cultured professionals and intellectuals he would have met anywhere between Moscow and Vladivostok.

Finally, the claim that Communism is “consigned to the dustbin of history” and predictable references to the “collapse” of the Soviet Union provide us with what we knew all along before we even read the first line of the article: it is no more and no less than an attempted exorcism of Dimbleby’s fears and the fears of Russia’s enemies that they have got it wrong. If they write it enough times, even they will believe it. The voluntary dissolution of the USSR was present in its Constitution from the outset and the more we look at the capitalist monetarist model lurching from one disaster to the next, the more we understand that the Communist model, with a few adjustments introduced, will indeed provide a very attractive solution for the future.

If writing pieces like that makes them happy, so be it. If Mr. Dimbleby can look himself in the mirror and feel proud of himself after travelling ten thousand miles across a country and finding what he put in the Daily Mail article to write, how wonderful for him. If the Daily Mail thinks it gains anything by printing such unsubstantiated prattle, bully for them and if the BBC really thinks it enhances its reputation by once again sponsoring Russophobic imbecility, then this corporation really does deserve the nickname we christened it with.

So suppose this schmuck, his supporters and sponsors flushed themselves down the nearest latrine and consigned themselves to the sewer of international journalism where they belong, among the rats, fleas and vermin which like themselves, scavenge like the vile parasites they have become?

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY

and Lisa KARPOVA

PRAVDA.Ru