Nations around the world are increasingly growing weary of the West’s incessant use of soft power «junk culture» to score points in an increasingly interconnected world where music, film, and social media are becoming weapons of political warfare.
Nothing exemplifies the use of music as a soft power weapon more than the annual Eurovision song contest. At this year’s Eurovision contest held in Stockholm, the winner was Jamala of Ukraine. Her winning was for her song «1944», an anti-Joseph Stalin song about his deportation of Crimean Tatars at the height of World War II. Stalin feared the Tatars’ collaboration with the German Nazis. Stalin had good reason to fear Adolf Hitler’s links to the Tatars. Evidence of Hitler’s mutual love affair with European Muslims extended throughout Balkan Muslim communities in Bosnia, Sanjak, and Albania, which were absorbed into the Third Reich.
As is the usual situation with today’s Eurovision, Jamala and her song were chosen as a way to bash Russia over the retrocession of Crimea to the Russian Federation in 2014. It did not matter to the Eurovision officials that Russian performer Sergey Lazarev was the odds-on favorite to win this year’s Eurovision.
For Russia, Jamala’s win evoked memories of 2014 Eurovision winner, the bearded Austrian transvestite Thomas Neuwirth, also known as «Conchita Wurst». It was clear that the Copenhagen Eurovision contest chose Neuwirth to send a «soft power» message to Russia and other conservative-minded Eastern European countries, which opposed the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) of the US State Department and George Soros’s various non-governmental organization fronts.
The Eurovision political win for Ukraine’s contestant this year does not bode well for next year’s Eurovision contest in Kiev. Although politics are to be left off of the Eurovision performance stages, per Eurovision’s own rules, the contest has taken a decidedly political turn in being used to attack Russia and advance causes unpopular in the Orthodox Christian east. Russian Senator Frants Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of the Russian Federation Council Committee on Defense and Security, understands well the use of Eurovision as a cultural soft weapon by the West. Pointing to next year’s Eurovision contest in Ukraine, Klintsevich said, Russia may boycott the contest since Ukraine will undoubtedly use the event to score cheap propaganda points against Russia.
As with most cockamamie foreign policy strategies infecting the Western world, the concept of using «soft power» as a strategic force multiplier was conceived by a globalist veteran of US Intelligence-sponsored think tanks and cabalistic power centers. The father of soft power is Joseph Nye, a habitué of Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, which not coincidentally shares its initials with the Central Intelligence Agency – «CIA». Nye has also served as a top dog with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Aspen Institute, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Nye served in the Clinton administration and provides key foreign policy advice to his old friend, Secretary of State John Kerry.
Long an advocate of using soft power to manipulate world events, Nye became a behind-the-scenes guru for Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Nye’s 2004 book, «Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics,» is required reading for the interventionists that infest the Obama administration. Soft power projection was most recently used by Washington in the Obama administration’s support for the «constitutional coup» against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, a few months before this year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Rather than have global focus on Rousseff at the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, media attention will instead fall on Washington’s right-wing replacement for Rousseff, the incredibly corrupt Vice President Michel Temer who, if he is not thrown out of office beforehand for criminal malfeasance, will open the Summer Games in Rio to the delight of the soft power promoters in Washington.
So, according to Washington’s plan for the Rio Olympics, Temer, the right-winger and proto-fascist, will be welcoming world leaders to the first Olympiad ever held in South America. Rather than Rousseff opening the Games to the delight of fellow progressive leaders from Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, and El Salvador, it will be Temer holding court with his fellow proto-fascist Latin American leaders – Mauricio Macri of Argentina, Horacio Cartes of Paraguay, and Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras.
The United States has not hesitated to politicize the Olympic Games in the same manner that Eurovision and the World Cup have been politicized. The American-led boycott of the Summer Games in Moscow in 1980 is a case in point. Ever since the decision to boycott the Olympics, the games saw a Soviet-led retaliatory boycott in 1984 and a US-promoted LGBT series of provocations at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. NBC, which has had sole broadcasting rights for the Olympics since 1988, ensures easy access for US government provocateurs to include political and social commentary throughout the coverage. NBC’s founder, David Sarnoff, was a key player in the US propaganda war during the Cold War.
The scandals that rocked the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) were oddly prompted by investigations launched by the US Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and US Internal Revenue Service. The clear aim was to sully the reputation of FIFA before the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The action by the United States in indicting several FIFA and national soccer officials from countries around the world was one of the first cases of the use of a counter-soft power weapon. Since Russia stood to gain in the soft power war by hosting the internationally-popular World Cup, the United States countered by using its law enforcement mechanisms to attack FIFA and, by association, Russia. Soccer is not even among the top popular professional sports in the United States and it continues to be overshadowed by American football, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey. Therefore, the decision by the FBI and Justice Department to become the world’s policemen for international football becomes even more suspect.
Traditional US soft power dominance over the global news media is why the United States, particularly former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reacted so negatively to the appearance on satellite channels around the world of RT from Russia, CCTV from China, Press TV from Iran, and TeleSur from Venezuela. Because America lacks anything of value in real journalism today, the State Department and its NGO minions resort to castigating the «other» international news networks as propaganda channels and purveyors of «conspiracy theories», the latter the long-time preferred pejorative for the CIA in undermining America’s critics.
Hollywood continues to represent the linchpin in America’s soft power corruption. Generally, Russians, Chinese, Arabs, and Iranians continue to be portrayed as villains in a number of Hollywood thrillers. The fact that the US Department of Defense, CIA, and FBI all maintain «entertainment liaison offices» in Los Angeles points to the close cooperation that has always existed between Hollywood and the US military-intelligence complex.
There are increasing signs that the world is growing tired of American soft power cultural «trash». Many nations are rediscovering their own national heroes who are beginning to draw the attention of children away from such campy American exports as Captain America, Superman, Batman, and Spiderman. In any event, Genghis Khan of Mongolia, Shaka Zulu of the Zulu nation, Emperor Kangxi of China, Czar Peter the Great of Russia, Emperor Xerxes the Great of Persia, and Alexander the Great of Macedon are much more interesting and compelling figures to be proud of than Jamala and Conchita Wurst.
