Propaganda Show Host Rants About Punishing Children With Drowning, Burning

Michael Hedges October 24, 2022 Follow on Twitter

Media outlets have forever offered a wide range of opinions to readers, listeners and viewers. This is no simple phenomenon like glaciers or icebergs. It’s a feature. Publishers - followed by broadcasters - defended even the most egregious as beneficial to open dialogue, all the while collecting from subscribers and advertisers. The digital age has turned this into a wild feeding frenzy. The remaining hopeful hold out for some sort of moral constraint. Sorry, it isn’t coming.

Last week a commentator on Russian Federation state-owned Russian language channel RT let loose with a chilling blast. RT and other Russian state TV channels are not known for restraint in complaints about the West, Ukraine and everything in between. As many media watchers have noted, this satisfies - or relieves - a certain audience. One particular commentator on state operated Channel One rails weekly about sanctions, notably EU sanctions that locked up his Italian villa.

On the Antonyms program he hosted on RT Russian last Thursday (October 20), commentator Anton Krasovsky, also director of the RT Russian service, said “Russian-speaking Ukrainian children who oppose Russia (should be) ‘drowned’ and ‘burned’,” reported Russian exile news portal Meduza (October 24). “Straight-up drowned, those children. Drowned! Right in the Tysyna (river). This isn’t your method; you’re cultured people, you fantasy writers. This is our method. As soon as they say, ‘The Russkies have occupied (Ukraine),’ throw them into a river with a violent, raging current.” Later in the same broadcast he added “Just stuff them in a spruce house and burn it.”

Hours later RT chief editor Margarita Simonyan, herself never far from the propaganda cactus, wrote on social media that Mr. Krasovsky had been suspended. “Perhaps Anton will explain what kind of temporary insanity caused this and why (the words) came out of his mouth. It’s hard to believe that Krasovsky sincerely believed that children should be drowned. Neither I nor the rest of the RT team can allow even the thought of someone who works with us sharing that kind of lunacy. I’m bewildered.”

There is precedent for severe consequences. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found incitement to genocide against radio channel Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines and four of its employees. In 2003 trial proceedings recordings were introduced. "You have missed some of the enemies. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!” Sentences of 35 years to life were imposed. At the end of September the trial began in The Hague of Félicien Kabuga, founder of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. He was finally apprehended in Paris in 2020.

After his firing Mr. Krasovsky issued an apology. “I’m truly embarrassed that I somehow didn’t see the boundary. About children. But it happens like this: you’re in the middle of a broadcast, and you get carried away. And you can’t stop.” The Russian Federal Investigative Committee - rough equivalent to MI5 in the UK and FBI in the US - ordered a “report on the situation that arose on the television network’s broadcast,” reported Moscow Times (October 24).

See also...

• Hot Topics - Media in the Russian Federation

• Hot Topics - Hate Speech

• Hot Topics - Propaganda

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