August 26th, 2008

New Pieler-Laurson OpEd: The Power of Propaganda in South Ossetia

Posted in  Politics 
Author: Erin Humiston || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA

IPI senior fellow George Pieler and International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens F. Laurson are featured today on Forbes.com with a new piece discussing the powerful, artistic propaganda used to paint the Russians as liberators for the ‘oppressed’ South Ossetians in Georgia.

An excerpt:

Apart from the regular bullets and tanks, the South Ossetian war between Georgia and Russia has brought forth some alternative methods of warfare. There was an alleged cyber-attack on Georgian Web sites that served as a premonition to the military action. More significant, though, were the harshly harmonious sounds of Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, performed in South Ossetia's capital last Thursday.

Called "Leningrad," the symphony came to symbolize the Nazi resistance movement during Word War II. By conducting this piece, Valery Gergiev--an ethnic Ossetian and maestro par excellence who performs with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera--propagandized the Russian "liberation" of South Ossetians from the cruel hands of their Georgian oppressors...

To read the full article, please visit Forbes online.