Curious how we blame the Russians for people voting the wrong way, or thinking the wrong thing. A recent article in The Times of London says that the Popovs were solely to blame for the good people of the Greatest of Britains inclining against their better judgement to vote for national suicide, also known as 'Brexit'. Neither the newspapers nor the racists nor the huge gangs of, uh, non-European foreigners taking away their jobs and their women were to blame. The S*n, the Mail and the Express, owned as they are by tax-dodging millionaires, had nothing to do with the sorry outcome. The Russians, you see, influenced the electorate with their tweets, posts and millions of leaflets dropped over the country by their Tupolev bombers.
Not content with this mayhem, the Rooshians also swung the American people away from Hillary - good, honest Hillary - and gave the world Donald Trump. No doubt millions of Rubles were spent by the Czarists to persuade the dumber segment of the USA to support the Orange One. He would never have won otherwise. The Alt-Right news-sites, the tax-dodging millionaires and the hayseeds from West Virginia would never have been enough. Once more, Moscow was responsible for the rout of democracy and human decency.
And so we come to the north-east region of Spain, where once again, the pressure was on from the Castillians with their 'Boycott Catalonia', the monarchists with their 'a por ellos', the newspapers with their single-note reportage and the Government with their imported cops quartered in Tweety-pie ships in the Barcelona and Tarragona harbours while making their grim presence felt.
The Catalonians will have their reasons for supporting an independent republic, but it is unlikely that they were swayed to this course by Russian propaganda as we as repeatedly told by El País and others.
In short, when an electorate does something stupid - let's blame Vladimir Putin.
A really good example of the "When did you stop beating your wife" technique. How do we know that the people in the Greatest of Britains are good, and how do we know that voting for Brexit is national suicide (personally, I think it is, but that is purely my probably biased opinion). How do we know that the better judgement of the good people (what makes them good?) would incline them to vote to stay in the EU but for misinformation supplied by various nefarious sources? Are there really huge gangs of non-European foreigners and do these gangs take away all the jobs (it seems to me that mostly they take jobs that the good people of the Greatest of Britains don't want to do)?
ReplyDeleteThere was a great blizzard of propaganda in the months before the Brexit vote - and a lot of it came from other papers owned by the proprietor of the Times of London. For him to suggest that it was the Popovs wot did it is real chutzpah.