Hollywood Magic Does Not Work on Russia

The director of the Center for Political Information, Aleksey Mukhin, believes that the next U.S. attempt to create an anti-Russia propaganda center will fail because Americans have discredited themselves to their partner countries with lies and aggression.

Julian Assange and Edward Snowden’s tandem activity revolutionized information policy: It arguably changed the reality of the world as we know it forever.

The secret of the success of these figures and their successors lay in the fact that they acted out of idealistic motives. In any case, the opposite has not yet been proven. It has always been complicated to work with idealists for those who attempted to manufacture a certain virtual reality and force others to believe in it — which is exactly what the United States is doing with the help of gargantuan propaganda tools such as Hollywood, the State Department, a nonprofit organizations network, the Pentagon and 50 intelligence services — alternating “soft” power with military power.

The other side’s attempts to replicate Assange and Snowden’s success have led to the publication of the so-called “Panama Papers,” which have mainly hurt American allies that actively use offshore accounts. Interestingly, this large-scale publication is not so much leading to exposures (which, of course, will take place) as to the global ferrying of clients from offshore accounts to American ones. Why this is being done is understandable: The United States needs additional resources to support its economy.

For a long time, the United States has tried to create a special reality for the global community in order to benefit its national interests, or rather the interests of certain financial-industrial corporations, and it is making entire autonomous countries believe in it, entire collectives of countries — those they deem useful for supporting its mega projects.

The problem is that keeping these large-scale PR stage sets in good working order requires more and more new resources and the complete subordination and obedience of satellites, which, for some reason, the United States calls its G7 and NATO partners.

So long as global institutions (the World Trade Organization, the United Nations) were needed, Americans kept them in good working order, but when it became clear that their functioning impeded the fulfillment of Washington’s plans for absolute domination, those institutions began to be dismantled and discredited — covertly, of course.

When it became clear that those institutions no longer functioned as needed, the United States de facto renounced them with ease, preferring other platforms, including the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships currently being established — forms of economic subjugation that clearly contradict WTO norms.

All these actions were undertaken against the backdrop of anti-Russian propaganda of unprecedented severity, which was presented as an “information war” and the “Cold War 2.0,” as personally announced by U.S. President Barack Obama. In reality, this war was a way to pressure a partner country and constituted illegal competition with quite concrete goals: to punish the Kremlin, which dared oppose the United States in that very same U.N. Security Council; force Russia out of the markets (first from the military-technical partnership market in India and then from the European energy market); and ultimately weaken it as a competitor.

To that end, the most varied tools and resources were used, starting with direct political pressure on Russian politicians and government, and ending with attempts to limit the activity of Russian scientists and financial institutions and artificially lower the country’s ratings among international agencies. Sooner or later, such exploitation of global media resources and agencies, violations of market rules, and interference in the scientific sphere led to overall losses of reputation for the majority of outfits implicated by the United States. This was inevitable because the United States itself had previously declared the “independence” and “professional soundness” of Western institutions, which it then maneuvered in the most obvious and crude way.

Today, anti-Russian propaganda is ineffective mainly because the first scare and confusion it had spread among its partners has dissipated, and those partners have recognized the dangers of a confrontational route. And Russia has developed its own, if pragmatically minded, allies — China, India, Iran and a whole host of countries that saw a real threat to their national interests in the United States. A simple conclusion can be drawn from all this: Washington has obviously not succeeded in its role of global policeman, which it bravely took on after the collapse of the USSR.

There is also no hope that this will take place in the future: Despite the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama regularly recalls American exceptionalism to Congress and the entire world in his addresses, this has had little effect on the reality of the circumstances. Hollywood magic has already stopped working on the majority of countries that have seen firsthand the consequences of Washington’s policies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.

The author’s opinion may not reflect the position of the editorial staff.