‘Anti-Russian witch-hunt in US becoming surreal’

If you build up an atmosphere similar to the McCarthy era, you get people reacting in the way they did, said former British MP George Galloway, commenting on the Twitter conspiracy craze after an RT broadcast interrupted C-SPAN live.

On Thursday the US TV network C-SPAN was interrupted for ten minutes by a broadcast of the RT Channel. C-SPAN said the network does not believe it was hacked. An initial investigation into the incident has shown it was caused by "an internal routing issue," as RT is one of the networks C-SPAN regularly monitors.

Meanwhile, social media platforms have been flooded with conspiracy theories.

RT: Do you share the suspicions of some members of the public over the incident?

George Galloway: There is no end to the genius, to the reach of President Putin. He was obviously sitting there in the Kremlin deciding to invade the time of C-SPAN, which not very many people in the US watch. What’s next? The Disney Channel? The Mickey Mouse Club House will suddenly look like the Kremlin and instead of Mickey – President Putin, or Mr. Sergey Lavrov, or someone will give a speech to the nation?

It is becoming surreal this whole anti-Russian witch-hunt in the US, much of it generated here in London in fact in a building just a couple of hundred yards from me here in central London. What it really probably means – is that the staff at C-SPAN, like all sensible people, are watching RT, much of the day, and somehow that which they were watching ended up on their network…

RT: Why do you think we saw the reaction we did, to what happened?

GG: Clearly if you build up an atmosphere, as they did in the 1950’s during the McCarthy period of mass hysteria of people literally looking under their beds at night for Russians with snow on their boots getting ready to subvert their family life, never mind their national life, if you build that kind of atmosphere, you’re going to get people…on social media reacting in the way that they did. I am sure C-SPAN are right – it was a routing matter...

RT: Do you think this incident will be used against Russia later, despite what C-SPAN says? After all, we've previously seen how some high ranking US officials are making serious accusations despite a lack of evidence?

GG: Who knows. Perhaps our interviews are about to be invaded by the Disney Channel, by Peppa Pig, or one of the other heroes. I have very young children, so I am an expert on that channel. I think the surreal nature of this was best summed up in the press conference that Donald Trump gave the other day, relating to a fake dossier like the dossiers that were produced about Iraq before the war was written by a British intelligence agent…given to a British ambassador to Moscow, and he too has been outed; and then into the hands of the leader of the war party John McCain; then to the FBI; then to the CIA. Of course, all fell apart under the spotlight of any kind of forensics within hours of having been made public by the fake news channels – CNN and BuzzFeed.

So within a very fetid, febrile atmosphere now as the days are counting until a man who promised good relations with Russia and an end to the drive for sanctions and war against Russia is about to become the President of the US. They won’t give up trying to stop him, and if they can’t stop him, they are trying to put him in a corner. If that means blackmailing him with nonexistent tales of disreputable moral behavior in Moscow or anywhere else, they’ll be ready to do that. The blackmailers are them, not in Moscow.