At the Cannes Film Festival’s opening press conference, this year’s filmmaker and jury chairman Spike Lee promoted Captain Rachadinha. Vladimir Putin must have laughed at being called a gangster in the same category as the former MP who fired a ghost-employee brother-in-law because he only returned R $ 3,000 of his salary.
The captain wouldn’t pass a trainee test to hold the suitcase of those who picked up the Russian president’s sniffles on the safe way to his fifth term.
The third gangster, whom Spike Lee called Agent Orange, is, like the captain, a flea in another department, the disinformation department. Let’s be fair, Donald Trump did not usher in the American tradition of falling into the Kremlin’s traps. Little Vladimir was still in his infancy in St. Petersburg when the powerful KGB opened Department D in 1957. “D” stands for “dezinformatsiya”, a term coined during this decade by the agency to refer to propaganda campaigns of the cold war.
That same year, Department D carried out what would be the first international “scoop” of fake news. He planted in an East German newspaper a long – and entirely fabricated – letter from oil magnate Nelson Rockefeller to President Dwight Eisenhower.
In the bogus letter, Rockefeller called on the US leader to bribe countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, using foreign aid to secure US domination. The text embodied all the demonic clichés on big capital. The letter has been translated and published by newspapers around the world.
In the 1970s, Department D was already budgeting for the much younger CIA. The Kremlin’s superiority over the dissemination of disinformation during the Cold War continued with the fall of the Berlin Wall and was perfected for the digital age in Russia by Putin, a former KGB agent who inherited the seasoned spy apparatus, disgusted by the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
When Moscow began to spread rumors that the AIDS epidemic was produced by the Pentagon in 1983, the story traveled the world and has passed over a year without effective factual challenge.
While Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were mistaken in the credulity of the rosy tale of the triumphal outcome of the Cold War, the same establishment that attempted the military coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 continued to do what it did that any intelligence community in the world did.
With Ronald Reagan’s first election in 1980, which began with a desire to suspend detente with the Soviets, the Americans organized a multi-agency task force to understand and coordinate responses to D-Department campaigns.
But the same Reagan let the effort be corrupted by the gang that organized the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 and began to spread disinformation in his country, seeking support for authoritarian adventures in Central America.
The task force suffered the ultimate sabotage when led by FBI agent Robert Hanssen, since 2001 rotting in a cell with the distinction of being the most damaging spy in Kremlin service in the history of the United States.
By the end of 2022, we will sink deeper into the sewers of pocketnarist disinformation. But delusional tweets about pedophilia and temper tantrums from unhinged offspring are things for amateurs who are afraid of the big stick. It’s up to us, consumers of reality, to plug our noses and resist, until we get rid of the Rio de Janeiro crime syndicate.
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