September 08, 2010
Pravda’s online English version is only nominally descended from the communist print-media megaphone founded by Leon Trotsky in 1912 and dissolved by Boris Yeltsin in 1991 as the Soviet Bloc fell apart. Although it no longer speaks on behalf of the Russian government and is largely funded by non-Russians, someone apparently forgot to tell its editors that the Cold War is over and the Russians lost. Until reading the modern Pravda, I had considered Russia to be a former enemy of the United States, but now I”m not so sure the Russians agree with me. The current Pravda, although never hesitating to fellate Putin, seems far more obsessed with America than it does with Russia.
Specifically, it is fixated on the ideas of America’s innate corruption and its imminent demise, a topic in which it joyously exults. One article after the next details the USA’s pending collapse due to a crooked monetary policy, its lack of a cohesive culture, and its gullibility in the face of global financial elitists who seek to undermine its very foundations. It portrays the United States as so innately wicked that its overlords masterminded the 9/11 attacks and even the recent Wikileaks scandal. It makes no attempts to hide which side it favors in the current Middle East conflicts, accusing America of “committing genocide against the Iraqi people” and stating without blinking that Jews have it far better in Iran than Palestinians do in Israel.
Ironically, I tend to agree with most of Pravda’s dire prognostications regarding the US, but I”m not so sure they needed to be such dicks about it. It’s all rendered a bit cheaper and more tawdry by a tabloid-style sensationalist approach in which the constant anti-American agitprop is surrounded by pictorials of swimsuit models, banner headlines screaming about sea monsters and UFOs, and salacious pieces regarding German sex cannibals. The overall effect is as if St. John had been a Soviet sympathizer disgruntled that the Reds lost the Cold War, so he swallowed some acid and decided to write a new, even more apocalyptic Book of Revelation, one in which the bad guys finally lose this time around.
