Unfortunately, since the BBC doesn’t let people outside the UK access its programs online, I wasn’t able to watch Monday evening’s episode of Panorama entitled ‘Trump: The Kremlin Candidate?’ I have therefore had to limit myself to an article on the BBC website by what appears to be the main journalist behind the episode, John Sweeney. Captioned ‘Who are the figures pushing Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin together?’ the article makes me realise that I didn’t miss very much by not seeing the show, except perhaps to have an opportunity to excoriate another piece of dismal reporting.
Sweeney says of Trump and Putin that, ‘the two men think alike’. He adds:
Mr Trump’s belief in American traditionalism and dislike of scrutiny echo the Kremlin’s tune: nation, power and aversion to criticism are the new (and very Russian) world order. You could call this mindset Trumputinism.
Three men have egged along Trumputinism: Nigel Farage, who is clear that the European Union is a far bigger danger to world peace than Russia; his friend, Steve Bannon, who is now Mr Trump’s chief strategist; and a Russian “penseur”, Alexander Dugin.
With his long hair and iconic Slavic looks, Mr Dugin is variously described as “Putin’s Brain” or “Putin’s Rasputin”. …Mr Dugin is widely believed to have the ear of the Kremlin….
Messrs Farage, Bannon and Dugin are all united that the greatest danger for Western civilisation lies in Islamist extremism. …
The danger is that in allying yourself with the Kremlin in the way they fight “Islamist fascism” in say, Aleppo, you end up siding with what some have called “Russian fascism” or, at least, abandoning democratic values and the rules of war and, in so doing, become a recruiting sergeant for ISIS.
Yikes! So Farage, Bannon, and Dugin are not only the architects of the new international order, but they’re also recruiting sergeants for ISIS (whereas, of course, Anglo-American military interventions in the Middle East haven’t helped ISIS recruit people at all!). It’s quite a claim.
Now, I can’t say that I know much about Steve Bannon, but the idea that either Trump or Putin has been strongly influenced by Nigel Farage strikes me as quite preposterous. Even more so is the idea that he is somehow responsible for bringing the two together. Farage as the creator of the new Russo-American alliance? Give me a break!
As for Dugin, I have to ask Sweeney, ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Widely believed to have the ear of the Kremlin’, Sweeney says. Widely believed by whom, I wonder. Not any scholars of Russian affairs that I know. Most people dropped the ‘Dugin as Putin’s brain’ meme several years ago once it became clear that it was obvious nonsense. I typed the word ‘Dugin’ into the search engine on the website Kremlin.ru, which contains all of Putin’s speeches. ‘Your search returned no results’ it told me. Putin has never mentioned the man, not even once. It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that he’s one of the major forces ‘egging on Trumputinism’.
Panorama has been running since 1953. It averages a little over 2 million viewers an episode. It pains me that so many Britons would be subjected to analysis like this without having the chance to hear anybody tell them what utter rot it is. After walking out of an interview with Sweeney and his team, Dugin tweeted that the BBC reporters were ‘Utter cretins. … Pure Soviet style propagandists.’ I have to say that I sympathize.
IRRUSSIANALITY 
I’d be interested if any readers in the UK saw the episode, and if so can enlighten us a bit about it.
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Apparently, it’s available on youtube here, though I haven’t yet watched it myself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8fWkseuV0I
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I watched and I agree with you Paul, a shocking piece of pure propaganda drivel from start to finish.
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Is this the Panorama program in which it is finally revealed that Mr Putin and Mr Trump send messages to each other in (Iraqi) aluminium tubes?
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Ha, amazing. I made the mistake of reading this piece yesterday – y’know, thinking: after all, this is the BBC, how bad can it be? – and I had exactly the same thought about Dugin: you invent the notion that he’s oh so influential – and then you write that everyone knows that he is so influential. What a travesty. I don’t see him being influential at all: kicked out of the Moscow University (for nothing, I might add), and never invited to any talk shows anymore…
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Watching this TV programme of the FIERY TRUTH convicned me of one thing – the Ukrainization of the planet is marching by seven league strides! SUGS!
>No attempts whatsoever to argue with stuff some nearly random people are presenting their “revelations”.
>Quoting Mikhail “2%” Kasyanov as their go to expert on all things sexual and as support for the “pissagate’s dossier” verity… Makes sense!
>Quoting Anne Appelbaum… just because. She is having trouble sleeping after “Kremlin’s invasion of Crimea”. What – for 3 years now?! If this is true, well:
>The journo in charge of this propaganda piece, in front of Lyubanka square: “This is the HQ of the FSB – that’s how the KGB is called now. And Vladimir Putin was it’s head!”. The ill informed viewers (98.54% of the Westerners) will eat wholly the lie, that FSB is no different from the KGB (and it is already established for propaganda purporses that the KGB was totally worse than the Holy Jadi’s of MI6 and CIA) and that Putin was the head not of FSB (for a very short time), but of KGB itself!
Again, level of journalism – “Ukraine”.
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a clip of the journalist John Sweeney, The man has no credibility after this = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxqR5NPhtLI = anybody who melts down like this is frankly a liability
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With more elections coming in Europe this year we will have more fun. There will be more “Kremlin candidates”, and reports full of “facts” , and god-like, almighty Putin everywhere. So, please, do not despair, this is just the beginning.
Regards,.
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I can supply further evidence in support of Dugin’s assessment of Sweeney.
In the interviews supposed recorded by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt with Alexander Litvinenko before he died, one finds exchange about the latter’s journey into London on the day he was supposedly deliberately assassinated, it is suggested at the instigation of the Kremlin (‘Carter’ was Litvinenko’s code name):
‘DI HYATT: And when you left home how did you travel? Where did you travel to first?
‘CARTER: I can’t remember whether I took a bus to get to the underground station, or Marina took me to the station.
‘Interpreter. Marina?
‘CARTER: Yes, my wife, Well …
‘DI HYATT: To which, to which, you went, you used the Metro, the tube station.
‘CARTER: It was either East Finchley or … the next one towards the centre of London after East Finchley. I think East Finchley. I paid … I always use Oyster Card for travel. I have had it for about three years so it is not difficult to establish.’
(See https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/INQ016528x.pdf .)
As an ‘Oyster Card’ is an electronic payments device which leaves a record when ever it is used, if it was used it should indeed have enabled Counter Terrorism Command to establish precise details of Litvinenko’s journey.
Supposedly, the record establishes that he boarded a number 234 bus near his home at Muswell Hill at 12.29, changed to the underground at East Finchley at 13.11, and arrived at Oxford Circus – that is in the centre of London – at 13.34.
Accepted into evidence at the Inquiry was a BBC ‘Panorama’ programme, presented, like Monday’s, by John Sweeney, which went out on 22 January 2007.
(See https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000507wb.pdf .)
In this it is explained that:
‘Litvinenko caught the 134 on November the 1st; no trace of polonium on his ticket or the bus; he was clean.’
So, at this stage there is no ‘Oyster Card’, but a ticket, and the bus is the 134, not the 234.
These errors are not the product of journalistic sloppiness. As it happens, from Litvinenko’s house one could either take the 234 and underground to Oxford Circus, or the 134 the whole way to nearby Tottenham Court Road.
Actually, in the first major investigative piece on the affair, in the ‘Sunday Times’ on 3 December 2006, it was suggested that Litvinenko had been given a lift into central London by car, and the car had been found to be clean. In the ‘Mirror’ on 12 December it had been a number 134 identified by a £1.50 ticket, with the bus found to be clean.
Following Sweeney’s ‘Panorama’ programme, in the April 2007 study ‘The Litvinenko File’ by the former BBC Moscow Correspondent Martin Sixsmith, the ‘Oyster Card’ is introduced, but it is still suggested that the 134 took Litvinenko the whole way to Tottenham Court Road. It is only in the August 2008 study ‘The Terminal Spy’ by the ‘New York Times’ correspondent Alan Cowell that it is suggested that Litvinenko transferred to the underground, but at this stage he is still supposed to have made the early stage of the journey on the 134.
A report in the ‘Guardian’ last Thursday was headlined ‘Donald Trump dossier: intelligence sources vouch for author’s credibility: Ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, named as writer of Donald Trump memo, is “highly regarded professional”.’
(See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/12/intelligence-sources-vouch-credibility-donald-trump-russia-dossier-author .)
According to the report:
‘When the agency was plunged into panic over the poisoning of its agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, the then chief, Sir John Scarlett, needed a trusted senior officer to plot a way through the minefield ahead – so he turned to Steele. It was Steele, sources say, who correctly and quickly realised that Litvinenko’s death was a Russian state “hit”.’
I can see no alternative interpretation of the successive transformations in the claims made about Litvinenko’s journey into central London on the day he was supposedly poisoned than a rather incompetently managed cover-up. And I can see no alternative explanation to the hypothesis that the interviews supposedly recorded with Detective Inspector Hyatt are forgeries.
Of course, it may be my logic is wrong. But if this is so, I can quite easily be refuted. All that is necessary is for Counter Terrorism Command to produce the actual audio of the interviews with Litvinenko. If the transcripts can be revealed, what conceivable reason can there by for not producing the audio?
Some of the contradictions which I have outlined, together with a mass of other inconsistencies in the claims made about the circumstances of Litvinenko’s death, were pointed out by me to the team running Sir Robert Owen’s Inquiry, in memoranda I was assured were read.
They were also pointed out by me to all the journalists responsible for the stories I have cited, as well as Luke Harding, co-author of the ‘Guardian’ report from which I quoted, and several of his colleagues. Apart from a courteous but non-committal reply from Sixsmith, I got no answers.
So I think that a reasonable conclusion has to be that Dugin’s contemptuous dismissal is applicable to practically all the mainstream British media, as well as Sir Robert Owen and the team who ran his Inquiry.
Perhaps one should say that in Britain we have reached the perfection of ‘Ingsoc’. It is not necessary to have either the ‘memory hole’ or the terrors of ‘Room 101’ to enforce ideological conformity. No self-respecting British journalist would ever notice contradictions in the ‘general line’ about a matter like the death of Litvinenko, however flagrant they might be.
And there is a really Orwellian joke with which to end. Next to the statue of the author of ‘1984’ which is to be erected next to New Broadcasting House, it is planned that a famous quotation from his writings will be inscribed: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
I do not think Orwell could have thought of something as wickedly funny putting those particularly words in front of the contemporary BBC. It would need Bulgakov.
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If it only were only Sweeny at the BBC who has a problem with Russia. He has a screw loose and has more than once got angry with people he has been trying to doorstep or interview.
But he is not alone. Steve Rosenberg also does vapid, tabloid style reports on Russia, and only yesterday while watching BBC World News of Trump’s inauguration, the BBC’s Moscow Correspondent Sarah Rainsford said “Russian Foreign policy depends on America”. It all only served to remind me to avoid the BBC for news. Drama? 100% News? No. Thank god for ‘alternative’ media on the web.
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