The Cold War can return with revenge, and the top opponents of the US are scattering the Soviet tactics from the old school.
Russian and Chinese government officials recently teamed up to publicly accuse the U.S. of creating biological weapons near their borders and suggest that Americans be responsible for creating COVID-19.
Nikolai Patrushev, the Russian secretary of the Security Council, told the Russian daily Kommersant on Thursday: “I suggest you note that biological laboratories under US control are growing by leaps and bounds around the world. And – by a strange coincidence – mainly near the Russian and Chinese borders. ”
Patrushev, who previously served as director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) – the main successor organization to the Soviet KGB – added that “outbreaks of diseases not characteristic of these regions” have been recorded in areas adjacent to them. suspected bio-laboratories. He then openly accused the US of developing biological weapons in those facilities.
Like an hourglass, the Russian state media reflected and spread Patrushev’s accusations against the United States. But this time it was accompanied by an official statement from China’s spokesman Lijian Zhao, tweeted“American bio-military activities are not transparent, safe or justified. In Ukraine alone, the US has set up 16 bio-laboratories. Why does the US need so many labs around the world? What activities are being performed in those labs, including those in Fort Detrick? ‘
Zhao made the same accusations during an official press conference, where he identified Russia as his source on the matter. “I noticed that Russia recently asked the US again about its military and biological activities in Fort Detrick and in Ukraine,” Zhao said. “Other countries have expressed similar concerns.”
The unfounded allegations against the US and Ukraine came at a particularly convenient time for Putin, who recently intensified the Kremlin’s efforts to absorb the Donbas region. In February this year, the Russian president ominously promised that ‘[The Kremlin] will never turn [its] back on Donbas, no matter what. ‘
Margarita Simonyan, editor – in – chief of the Kremlin – funded RT and Sputnik, has doubled in support of Russia’s takeover of eastern Ukraine, with repeated urgent calls to ‘Mother Russia’ to ‘take Donbas home’. By presenting Ukraine as a national security threat to Russia and claiming to be involved in the production of deadly bioweapons, the Kremlin can further justify its increasingly aggressive stance towards its highly coveted neighboring territory.
Just as Trump aided an outbreak of violence against Asian Americans by calling COVID-19 the “China virus” and spreading unfounded allegations that the virus was made in a laboratory in Wuhan, US opponents said afterwards. strived to cultivate that kind of hostility against America on a global scale. Both Russia and China are benefiting from blaming the US pandemic, and if Ukraine can also be theoretically implied – all the better for the Kremlin.
This is not the first time that Russia has claimed that the US creates and spreads deadly diseases around the world. In 1992, Russia continued a KGB disinformation campaign that falsely claimed that the AIDS-causing virus was the product of U.S.-led biological weapons experiments. During the Ebola epidemic 2014-2016 in West Africa, Russian propaganda offices spread conspiracy theories about the virus created by the US in collaboration with Great Britain and South Africa.
There is another common denominator for this disinformation tactic: In addition to accusing the US of global biological warfare, the Kremlin simultaneously places itself as a lone savior.
‘[Russia] saved Africa from Ebola, “said Olga Skabeeva of Russia’s state television 60 minutes last month proudly declared. While trying to discredit Western-country-created COVID-19 vaccines, Russian state media regularly praised “Sputnik V” as the world’s best coronavirus vaccine, even though there is still worrying information about the Russian-made vaccine. vore.
To overcome the suspension of unbelief and promote the idea that the US is capable of the worst kind of abuse against humanity, Russian propagandists are now using an all-too-well-known dehumanization tactic: America paints like a super-villain.
‘[Americans] does not even have the word “soulfulness” in the English language, ”Margarita Simonyan of RT recently announced on Russian television. “We are soulful. They are not like us. ‘