Tutor HuntResources History Resources
How Natwest Bank Became A Player In The New Propaganda War Between Russia And The West
Date : 03/01/2017
Author Information
Uploaded by : Francesco
Uploaded on : 03/01/2017
Subject : History
The recent
decision of the National Westminster Bank to freeze the UK accounts of Russian
international broadcaster RT sparked a furious row, with talk of Kremlin
disinformation pitted against accusations of British suppression of free
speech.It s the
latest blow in a propaganda war that has raged between Russia and the West
since before World War II and which characterised the cold war era. If, as many
people are now saying, the world is now descending into a new cold war , then
it seems fitting that the first casualties appear to be truth and free speech. How
did we get here?RT was
launched as Russia Today in December 2005, with the purpose of improving
Russia s image in the West with the catchphrase: Question more . The network,
which broadcast 24-hour English-language news from studios in Moscow, was and
is run by Margarita Simonyan at 25 when appointed, the youngest ever chief
executive to run a TV news network.RT s reach
was gradually expanded until it was broadcasting out of Moscow, Washington and
London and, in October 2014, a dedicated 24/7 UK news channel was added. RT s
job, said Vladimir Putin, was to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on global
information streams .This idea
of a balance for the flow of Western information has, however, quickly come
into question. Instead of just depicting Russia in a positive light, RT s
output focuses strongly on painting a negative picture of the West. The network
particularly trained its sights on the BBC. In 2015, one of RT s flagship
programmes, Truthseeker, accused the BBC of staging a fake chemical attack
for Saving Syria s Children , a report on the Syrian war. Ofcom (the UK
regulator for communication industries) later ruled in favour of the BBC,
calling RT s claims materially misleading .Another
episode of Truthseeker from 2013, Genocide in Eastern Ukraine which claimed
that the Ukrainian government was carrying out ethnic cleansing and crucifying
babies was also judged by Ofcom to be in breach of the UK s broadcasting
code. These are just two examples of many.But the
question remains whether all this is enough to justify the actions of NatWest
which, it should be remembered, is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland group
which is majority owned by the UK government. The fact that NatWest has already
taken some steps back, announcing that it is reviewing the situation and
contacting the customer does not change the basic facts. Trying to close down
RT will be used by Russia to support the thesis that there is no freedom of
speech in the supposedly democratic West. Simonyan has already tweeted as much. Selling
StalinDuring the
original cold war, the propaganda arm of the Soviet un ion in the West was the
Cominform, the Communist Information Bureau, founded by Stalin in 1947. While
its official purpose was to encourage international communist solidarity, the
Cominform s true goal was to oppose the Marshall Plan, which aimed to foster
stability and prosperity by rebuilding Europe s battered economies.Stalin
believed that the Marshall Plan would stifle the growth of Communism in Europe.
Meanwhile Washington, seeing that propaganda was going to play a decisive role
in the cold war, set up Voice of America, which still exists today as a US
government-funded multimedia news source. Voice of America which had been set
up to broadcast into Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, began
broadcasting Russian language programming in 1947 and became a powerful tool
during the cold war.More
recently, in 2015, the US Congress passed a law to as TIME Magazine put it:
Make the state-funded Voice of America a more direct mouthpiece for US foreign
policy, shifting away from its mission of providing uncensored local news in places
where it s hard to find .It is very
easy then to draw a parallel with RT which, according to Putin, plays the same
role for modern Russia the same function that Voice of America did for the
United States. Voice of America today, however, is governed by a strict code
that is enshrined in law something RT cannot claim to do. Bevin s
babyBritain s
own answer to the Cominform was the creation in 1948 of the Information
Research Department (IRD), under the aegis of then foreign secretary, Ernest
Bevin. The IRD was founded to gather confidential information about Communism
and produce factually based anti-Communist propaganda .The BBC
Overseas Service was used as a powerful vehicle for the dissemination of IRD
production overseas a strategy plotted by the Foreign Office and carried out
with the approval of the BBC itself, for all its much vaunted editorial
independence.Bevin
firmly believed that the cold war would be won on the ideological battlefield.
He thought that promoting the values of Western and British democracy was the
best way to fight Communism in the world without increasing international
tensionsSo
NatWest s decision, if interpreted as the latest act of this modern cold war s
media warfare, seems very far from Bevin s vision. It has done nothing to
decrease tensions and in terms of promoting Western values such as freedom of
speech unilaterally shutting down a broadcaster s account seems more
something that would happen in Stalin or Putin s totalitarian state than in
liberal Britain.
This resource was uploaded by: Francesco