Do you remember the film 'Wag the Dog' starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. It was about duping the Amercian public that there was a war going on to take their mind of sleaze allegations concerning the President as he ran for re-election.
Hoffman played a Hollywood film director employed to provide the images to capture the public imagination and support for the war and he did that by featuring a young girl carrying a dog running away from a burning building.
Similar images, albeit it real ones this time, are being used in every daily newspaper and on TV of distraught old Georgian women in front of burning or destroyed buildings in trying to whip up sympathy for Georgia which is under attack from Russia. There's very little mention that the whole conflict started because Georgia invaded South Ossetta attacking Russian peace keeping forces station there to protect its people from Georgian aggression.
This wasn't mentioned either in a blatant piece of propaganda on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. The appalling James Naughtie was squeezing every ounce of sympathy he could for Georgia in his interview with a member of the Georgian Ballet Company in Edinburgh. The creep Naughtie appeared to be having trouble holding back his tears as he talked to a Georgian ballerina about what was going 'back home', but he conveniently failed to mention that it was Georgian aggression that was responsible for the whole conflict in the first place and it was that aggression that had put the dancer's family and home under threat.
There's an excellent article by Steve Johnson on the main website this morning on this very issue. And I have nailed my colours to the mast in the past hour by emailing the link for the article to the Russian Embassy along with a note of support.
Monday, 11 August 2008
Wag the Dog
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2 comments:
I think it turned out to be the same with the Chechin shindig a few years back.
We might of course be seeing a re-run of the kind of fragmentation of the Austria-Hungarian Empire that gathered momentum in 1914.
Maybe all it needs is another Gavrilo Princep to really kick things off in earnest.
A quite remarkable interview of David Bakradze, Chairman of the Georgian Parliament, by Stephen Sackur on BBC News' Hardtalk
... Russian forces have driven Georgian troops out of the tiny separatist enclave of South Ossetia, and they have the firepower to go much further, if the Kremlin wants them to.
Georgia's President calls it the cold blooded murder of a small country. Is Georgia now paying the price for a massive strategic misjudgement? ...
David Bakradze was pressed repeatedly on why Georgia instigated this recent conflict and in my opinion failed to explain Georgia's actions.
This interview is definitely worth a look.
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