In October the former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai, at the meeting of the Valdai Club, made a rather surprising statement: ‘China and Russia are closing the gap with the West in the media. And it is the good news’. It is easy to agree with the ex-President that such a trend would definitely be a very good news, since any monopoly on truth inevitably leads to its suppression. The media market, like any other market, should be based on freedom of choice for the consumers - alternative, even competing, sources of information are a must for democracies. President Karzai’s words sound, however, somewhat too optimistic, since Western, particularly Anglo-Saxon, media domination is still overwhelming, even beyond the Western world.

       However, there are indeed some changes taking place in the global media landscape that worry opinion makers in Western societies, making quite a few of them rather hysterical. Hence the aggressive campaigns against any alternative narratives, especially if they come from China or Russia, and this certainly is a sign that ‘there is something rotten in the state of Denmark’. No offence, of course, is meant for this small Nordic country, though it should be mentioned that the Kingdom’s ex-Prime-Minister and the former Secretary-General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen is indeed trying to excel in the propaganda war against Russia. What is going on? Why so much fuss about the relatively small, in comparison with the Western media giants, Russian broadcasting outlets? Even going so far as accusing them of tilting the public opinion during the American presidential elections of 2016? Why restrictive measures against them, in violation of one of the human rights – the right to receive and impart information? To answer these questions, it is necessary to take a small step back.

       During the Cold War many human rights lawyers and activists in the West went so far as asserting that the freedom of expression and information was the most important human right, without which all other rights would cease to exist. The First Amendment to the US Constitution forbids Congress to adopt laws that would abridge ‘the freedom of speech, or of the press’. Washington didn’t join the 1966I International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights until 1992 (to say nothing of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that was, and still is, considered to be communist propaganda), claiming that it allowed certain limitations on the freedom of expression, i.e. curbed this sacred right, though this was rather a pretext than a genuine reason. Differently from its European allies, which allowed the limitation of that freedom either, say, vis-à-vis holocaust denials or the spread of some extreme ideologies, or balanced it with the right to privacy, the United States claimed to have only one kind of restriction: don’t falsely yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater. Although one must acknowledge that political correctness running amok had already for some time had more of a restricting effect on the freedom of speech than the more balanced legislation in European countries that joined the run towards political correctness later. In those years human rights mainly served as an instrument of the ideological struggle: while the West advocated civil and political rights, the East claimed to be the champion of economic and social rights.

       However, even the Soviet Union had to pay lip service to the freedom of information, especially after signing of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 with its human dimension basket. The 1977, so-called Brezhnev, Constitution of the USSR stated that all Soviet citizens enjoyed many rights, including the freedom of information, ‘in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system’ and ‘in accordance with the aims of building communism’ (Articles 50, 51). The Communist Party believed, or it rather wanted the Soviet people to believe, in the eventual advent of communism all over the world. Therefore, those who thought of using the declared liberties to obstruct or slow down the inevitable progress towards communism were considered to be on the wrong side of history.

       After the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the emergence of radical Islamism à l’Al Qaida or ISIS, it seemed that only one fighter was left in the ring with nobody to fight. Resorting to the same Hegelian-Marxian methodology of linear evolution of humankind that the Soviet ideologues had used, Francis Fukuyama expressed what many politicians and experts in the West, but not only there, believed: there can be no challengers to liberal democracy and free (unbridled) markets. Even most critics of Fukuyama were indeed crypto-Fukuyamians. So, in their otherwise interesting and balanced article, American professors Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, while criticising Fukuyama, came, however, to the same optimistic conclusion: ’The foreign policy of the liberal states should continue to be based on the broad assumption that there is ultimately one path to modernity [emphasis added] – and that it is essentially liberal in character’, and that ‘liberal states should not assume that history has ended, but they can still be certain that it is on their side’ (D. Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Myth of the Autocratic Revival. Why Liberal Democracy Will Prevail’, Foreign Affairs, January–February 2009). Hence, full steam ahead to the American century. However, in the 2000s, China, continuing its impressive economic rise, decided to take up the call (e.g., from R. Zoellick, the then US Deputy Secretary of State) to become ‘a responsible stakeholder’, though naturally not in American terms, on the world’s strategic map, resorting, inter alia, to tactics known as ‘anti-access/area denial’ in the South China Sea.

       That is why territorial and maritime disputes in that part of the world are not so much between China and its neighbours; they are much more a response to the presence of the U.S. 7th Fleet at the doorstep or the backyard of this rising giant. At the same time, Russia, coming out from the induced coma of the 1990s, started exhibiting signs of the rejection of the medication prescribed by the West and acting in accordance with its own national interests (pace Andrei Kozyrev). However, in the eyes of the Western political leaders and media barons, this was not at all what the 1990s had promised. These two former communist countries had the audacity of demonstrating that liberal democracy and unbridled financial markets were not necessarily the right path for everybody. They also had the temerity to express their displeasure with the ways how democracy was promoted in different parts of the world, from the Balkans via Iraq to Afghanistan. They also refused to welcome the ‘Arab spring’, so warmly hailed in the West. Moreover, these two countries were so arrogant, so disobedient that they started expressing their dissatisfaction with the dominant trend even in the dominant language – English. What made things even worse was that there happened to be people in the West that found that what those non-Western media outlets aired or wrote was closer to what they themselves instinctively believed about the behaviour of their own governments abroad, or sometimes even at home, than what their mass media wanted them to believe. They questioned: how could, for example, the destruction of Iraq or Libya be good for the people who live there, or increase the security of the West? What the hell are our sons and daughters doing in Afghanistan, where things since 2001 are going from bad to worse?

       Therefore, such information flows from the East had to be curbed, whatever the expenses or risks. Freedom of expression and information should, of course, exist and be even wholeheartedly supported, but only for the sake of the promotion and the spread of liberal democracy, as interpreted by ‘democratically’ (e.g., by the Democratic Party elite) controlled mass media. Articles of the Brezhnev Constitution of 1977 had to be dusted and turned against those who had doubts about the inevitable rise of liberal democracy all over the world. Everybody should have the freedom of information ‘in order to strengthen and develop liberal democracy’ and ‘in accordance with the aims of building free-market capitalism’. Whoever challenged this trend was spreading ‘fake news’. Luckily enough the arrival of the Internet and the proliferation of social networks had indeed increased in geometric progression the potential for spreading such ‘news’, which had always existed but not to such an extent. Hence, attempts to restrict the freedom of information – one of the sacred cows in the armoury of the Western approach to human rights. What had once helped to criticise and fight the Soviet ideology and practices revealed, in changed circumstances, weaknesses of the erstwhile proponents of the freedom of information.

       Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.