A talk in RUGBY
Rt Hon MICHAEL GOVE MP and IVAN GOLUNOV (Иван Голунов) contrasted
Simply appalled that following the news about Ivan Golunov’s dreadful arrest on a street I know and imprisonment on cooked-up cocaine charges, today one of our Cabinet ministers admits cocaine use and is interviewed as a potential leader of the party and consequently our Prime Minister.
It beggars belief that this dreadful hypocrite, Gove, has not withdrawn from the leadership race and resigned. We know, from the way he stabbed Boris in the back, that he has no honour and this confirms it. It is made even worse, as Marr pointed out that, under his tenure, the education dept launched a principle that teachers caught in possession of a class A drug would be debarred; Gove countered by saying this principle was introduced by someone else, and that of course he had never lied about his own drugs use, as indeed he had never been asked. Marr pressed him about whether he had lied in filling out the declaration to enter the US. Gove did not think he would be debarred should he become PM.
He cannot even claim that this was some silly thing he did when he was at school or in university. No, in Gove’s case he was 30 and he should have known better. However, we also know Gove makes a great play about his own Christian belief and practice – here was an opportunity for a man to do the decent thing and point to the great injustices elsewhere in the world. Like Gove, Golunov has been working as a journalist but unlike Gove, Golunov says he has not been playing around with Cocaine. Ironically it is Gove and not Golunov who thinks he is, therefore, destined for the top job!
Simply astounding.
This is on a day, incidentally when the Russian government starts to block VPN’s in Russia. This effectively stops voices from the West getting through to the locals in Moscow and elsewhere. We know that Russian TV censors and distorts what they publish, and soon there will be no alternative source of information. Incidentally, Kaspersky is all in favour of the VPN ban. Russian-owned Kaspersky, an almighty office-block that I pass every time I am driven from the airport into central Moscow, is one of the major internet security providers around the world. It is all very worrying.
WHAT GOVE wrote in 1999
Thierry Henry
Grow up Galloway
More Labour anti-semitism -from George Galloway this time
Lisa Forbes resignation
More worries that dodgy social media likes can prove to be misplaced as the Labour candidate who wants to replace the equally dodgy Onasanya cannot resist aimlessly liking anything she sees on twitter in an effort to grab as many votes as she possibly can. There is no time, now, for her resignation and replacement so she will have to plough on despite loud condemnations of her stupidity.
Denials and assurances have followed this morning and may well be eclipsed by the Trump cavalcade and by Sadiq Khan’s attempts to pull focus with an article saying that Trump is a neo-Nazi.
What does all this mean? – well, just as Russia tightens its grip on what can and cannot be published, the UK reveals rather well that we are absurdly liberal in what we say and allow to be said here both publicly and privately. What needs to change is not the limits of censorship, castigation and monitoring but a better way of thinking that is more inclusive and kinder. Incidentally, it’s what needs to change in Russia too.
More on Russian Censorship
I got called to task yesterday for barking on about Russia’s censorship of gay issues when I drew a picture of Elton John. A well-meaning pundit wrote to me and complained that my concerns about russian state homophobia were ill-judged when there are still states like Saudi Arabia that execute people for being gay.
My concern however, is about censorship and dubbing. The Elton John issue is just an example.More than that, it demonstrates as does all the HTB rubbish, that I personally witnessed, that Russian censorship is effectively privatised. As Putin’s regime loses power, individuals and their companies vie with one another to do what they think the state would like to see- they are all currying favour and their common tool is to manipulate the media.
What Russia is doing today goes back really to the time of Suleiman the Magnificent who simply stopped the developing media in its tracks. The Western-style free press was forbidden, and this vigorous censorship persisted until the 19th Century. It was, in fact, a very successful attempt to foster nationalism. So, when we see this happening in our own time, in whatever country, we need to look beyond the censor to see what is actually going on. It is not just about what we are trying to stop, and how it is stopped but also what is being encouraged.
Modern Russia plans to set up a form of confessional religious studies across secondary schools. This alone I find worrying.
The parallel laws against Homosexuality- section 28, Federal law no. 436-FZ of 2010-12-23 (July 2012) and Article 6.21 (30 June 2013). There are similar laws in China.
The much more dangerous issue is about how to present “truth” than simply about suppressing a minority group. And remember that the current law in Russia is no different in intent from the law (section 28) put out under Margaret Thatcher – to protect children from “teaching of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Anne Widdicombe’s comments yesterday suggest that she continues to honour the underlying and homophobic principle behind that law btw, in so far as she implies that homosexuality is something that can, should or might be cured by medicine… ie: it is a disease and, as the russian law puts it, is “not “traditional”. These two laws are simply representations of forms of prejudice that go back to the mediaeval period and probably early Christianity where a great deal of effort was given to establishing what was natural and “against nature”. David Attenborough and others demonstrate very nicely that homosexuality is present in many animal societies – it is therefore fundamentally “natural”, so that argument is demonstrably stupid. The British law was a response to the threat of AIDS and the 2013 Russian law, I suggest, is a response of growing nationalism and a desire to toady to the nastier (sic Trump) realities of Orthodoxy.
Religion
Like Catholicism, Orthodoxy has an aggressively homophobic side and, as we are seeing now, many of the more vocal clerics promoting anti-gay legislation were themselves living double lives and so knew exactly where to look…(think pope Paul VI to start with, the notorious Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo of Colombia, and Metropolitan Serafim/Leonid Mikhailovich Chichagin- but it is all to be found in Frédéric Martel’s book “in the Closet of the Vatican“)…. as for the saudi issue, it is relevant but the history of Islam is more complex- not only did it take a puritanical turn in the 9th century but until the Napoleonic conquests at the end of the 18th century/ 19th Century the Muslim world had a reputation for being a bit louche- the anglican/ scottish churches, for instance, criticised the “East” for its liberal standards- think Henry Mondral’s comments about “voluptuousness” when he visited Syria in 1695, and Thomas Rowe, for example, not its intolerance, and the Ottoman empire as well as nomadic Arabia, Egypt and Morocco attracted western writers- Byron (“I can’t empty my head of the east”), Gide, Genet, Wilde, Forster as well as probably Lawrence of arabia…it is only the advent of the austere and feared religious police, the mutawwa’in and the pincer-grip of Wahabi’ism that we see today in Saudi. (check out another book: Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis) remember that until very recently homosexuality (a very modern word too) described what people did and only recently has become about who they are (identity). Remember that Oscar Wilde was married…in muslim culture, esp in Iran where there is a written Persian record (think of the hedonism in the 9th Century arabian nights, the Mughal figurative art in Islam, the rise of music in islam – despite modern islamic injunctions against music) gay sex was an incidental activity not something that defined a person. And, as in Greece, it was both tolerated and a manifestation of the love of beauty, celebrated in poetry. The love object, incidentally, in alot of arabic poetry (Rumi, Hafiz, esp Bulleh Shah who loves Inayat Shah) is often, maybe because of the fierce protection of women, a boy and not a girl.
I must write something about “Kismet”, the amazing Minnelli film from the 1950’s. It prefigures Disney’s Aladdin and is such a mix of the Arabic, Turkish, Indian and Chinese. Multiculturalism long before Guy Ritchie!
Andrea Leadsom gets rattled by ANDREW MARR
Elton John suffers russian censorship
Here are links to previous blogs about this issue:
https://animate-tim.com/2019/04/18/htv-in-russia/
https://animate-tim.com/2019/04/20/more-on-the-ethics-of-dubbing/
https://animate-tim.com/2019/04/19/masha-and-the-bear/
While Putin himself declared that he liked the music of Elton John, and would meet him, he failed to do so in 2015.
Here is a link to the BBC report that was published about my experience of this (26th June)
https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c200wjny
an update on dubbing in Russia
HTB update, background and summary
Here are links to previous blogs about this issue:
https://animate-tim.com/2019/04/18/htv-in-russia/
https://animate-tim.com/2019/04/20/more-on-the-ethics-of-dubbing/
https://animate-tim.com/2019/04/19/masha-and-the-bear/
Lost in translation
Stories in the Context section are not fakes. We publish them in order to provide greater insight for our readers about the techniques, methods and practices used by the Russian government in its information war. They appear on our site with the permission of their original publisher and reflect the views of the authors and not necessarily the position of StopFake’s editorial board.
Imagine that you are a politician or an expert commentator, and a Russian state-controlled TV channel calls you and asks for an interview.
You are aware that some Russian media outlets spread disinformation; nevertheless, you agree to the request, thinking that you simply need to formulate your answers very carefully.
When the interview is broadcast, you appear on the TV screen saying something quite different from what you said when the interview was recorded.
How did that happen?
“Complete misrepresentation!”
The trick is simple: If you don’t speak Russian, and the interview needs to be dubbed, you lose control over your own comments and leave it to the discretion of the TV channel to decide how your words are rendered.
As reported by Stephen Ennis for BBC Monitoring, this kind of manipulative mistranslation was apparently used to change statements by two British pundits in March and in June this year. Both had agreed to be interviewed by the same current affairs programme, Itogi Nedeli (Results of the Week), which is broadcast by NTV – a nationwide Russian network, owned by the state-controlled energy giant Gazprom.
Tim Wilson, a British politician, cartoonist and former member of UKIP, made his own parallel recording of the interview he gave to NTV. The BBC compared Mr Wilson’s recording to what was aired and concluded that when Mr Wilson in the Russian rendering says that Theresa May has her “neck on the block” and that David Cameron has calmly left to watch “the country fall apart,” it bears no semblance to the English original.
Similarly, when the BBC confronted John Curtice, a Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, with what he had appeared to say about Boris Johnson on NTV, his reaction was: “Complete misrepresentation!”
The BBC reports that NTV has now removed and re-edited the items in question, following complaints from the two British commentators. According to Professor Curtice, NTV also offered him an apology, whereas Mr Wilson says he has not received an apology, in spite of complaining to the network. NTV has not replied to requests for comments.
State-streamlined translations
Russia’s political leadership in the Kremlin issues weekly guidelines, instructing the dominating media outlets in which topics and messages should be transmitted; and apparently, all parts of the output – even translations – can become subject to this state streamlining.
In 2016, the state TV channel Rossiya 24 interviewed a number of people in Paris who did not recognise their own words when France’s Canal Plus confronted them with they had appeared in the Russian dubbing.
In 2018, NTV was accused of manipulating interviews with Danish politicians. The story was covered by Denmark’s Radio24Syv and backfired on NTV as well as on Russian diplomats who tried to defend Gazprom’s TV network.
Inosmi – a state-controlled portal which offers Russian readers first-hand insights into international media in the form of translations – also uses manipulations to control the perception of its publications.
Finally, returning to the situation outlined above: Should you, after all, decide to accept the request for an interview with a Russian state-controlled outlet, our advice is: Learn to speak Russian – or at least do what Mr Wilson did and produce your own recording of the interview; it could come in handy.
Bolting the stable door
The media are out in force debating the merits and format of of the Jeremy Kyle show.
Statement from ITV regarding The Jeremy Kyle ShowCarolyn McCall, ITV’s CEO, announced today: “Given the gravity of recent events we have decided to end production of The Jeremy Kyle Show.“The Jeremy Kyle Show has had a loyal audience and has been made by a dedicated production team for 14 years, but now is the right time for the show to end.“Everyone at ITV’s thoughts and sympathies are with the family and friends of Steve Dymond.”The previously announced review of the episode of the show is underway and will continue.ITV will continue to work with Jeremy Kyle on other projects.
The show has been on the air for 16 years- it seems a bit rich to be questioning its ethics after so much time. Even when there was an Ofcom rebuke in 2014, the series continued.
The show was predicated on arrogance. This is what Kyle said,
“Look! These people are dirt! You, we, are better than them! Now let’s applaud their adorable efforts to make something of their paltry lives.” But the arrogance goes well beyond Kyle himself and his band of itv cronies whipping up aggression backstage.
animate-tim.com 