Admiring Putin for his "leadership" means admiring his state sponsored terror/police state tactics to control his country. Putin is popular in Russia, but the country is an economic mess, so I do not understand why? Bannon is clever, but wrong.
"All the President’s Men— Part One: Putin and Bannon’s Shared Ideology"
An ongoing series of Trump’s main influencers by Sasha Stone and Ryan Adams
by Sasha Stone, 1 Feb 2017
Read the article if you care. Then read below if you want to see how Russia can aid the alt-right. They do it in Germany, so no doubt they do it in the USA.
"Russia's Propaganda Campaign Against Germany"
The brief disappearance of a girl in Germany recently become an international political issue. Russia is exploiting the case for propaganda purposes as part of its strategy of a hybrid war aimed at destabilizing the West and dividing Europe.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/putin-wages-hybrid-war-on-germany-and-west-a-1075483.html
"Svetlana F. is sitting at the kitchen table in her duplex home in the Berlin district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf. A slim, 39-year-old woman, she wrings her hands as she relates what happened to her daughter more than three weeks ago. The conversation stops each time she is unable to hold back her tears. This will be her only interview with the media.
"My daughter," says the mother, "is not doing well." When SPIEGEL and SPIEGEL TV met the family a week ago last Thursday, the girl was in the hospital. "She has been in the psychiatric ward since Monday."
Nothing has been the same for the family since the 13-year-old girl disappeared one morning on her way to school. The case has become an international political issue since it was picked up by Russian media and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attacked the German authorities investigating it."
Russia gets the story wrong, and I am wondering if Bannon is observing and ready to agree that Germany deserves blame.
"According to the Russian version of the story, the case has all the necessary ingredients: the rape of a teenage girl, violent refugees, police that use political correctness as an excuse not to investigate and politicians who are afraid of the truth. This is the story Moscow is telling, regardless of the facts."
Sadly the German girl used fear of immigrants to create the crisis of truth.
"Since the latest edition of SPIEGEL went to print, the Berlin police have been able to clear up this mysterious case of alleged kidnapping and rape. As it turns out, the girl was simply with a 19-year-old German acquaintance during the time in question. Prosecutors say the girl had apparently decided to hide at the friend's apartment because of problems at school and later invented a story to explain her absence.
And when it came to creating an alibi, she did not skimp on the details. According to Svetlana, her mother, the girl returned home on Tuesday afternoon. "She was wearing a bra, leggings, shoes and a jacket," says the mother. "Her T-shirt, cardigan and backpack, wallet and ring were gone. She was crying, and she had scratches on her face, bloody lips and a bruise on her nose."
At first, the girl told her mother and the police that three unknown, Mediterranean-looking men had pulled her into their car while she was standing at a streetcar station and had taken her to an apartment, where she claimed she was abused and raped. Svetlana says her daughter told her that the men did not speak German."
The police had to reveal more than normal due to child's young age (13)because of the fear of immigrants.
"The Berlin police reacted to the accusations with a press release stating that the girl had not been raped. There was nothing in it about an investigation into child molestation. The case presented the police with a dilemma: If it published additional information about the investigation, it would be revealing details about the private life of a child. If it did not, it could be accused of a cover-up."
More.
"The perfidious aspect of Moscow's strategy is that by spreading so many targeted lies, it has a "boy who cried wolf" effect. It blurs the lines between what is real and what is fabricated. Rather than try and beat its opponent in its battle for the truth, Russia simply sabotages the whole game. "Russian propaganda does not put out one version of a story but many, and in doing so it pollutes the realm of information," says an EU insider. "In the end, people no longer believe any version" -- including the one that's true.
This is the weakness of democratic, pluralistic societies. In a democracy, the state organizes the contest for the truth instead of dictating it. The system is based on trust and the power of persuasion, and it is relatively powerless to protect itself against abuse. It has no other choice but to continue championing the search for the truth.
"Our goal is to bring the truth to light," says NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. "We believe that critical journalism and an open political debate are the best ways to counteract propaganda.""
By Melanie Amann, Markus Becker, Benjamin Bidder, Hubert Gude, Konstantin von Hammerstein, Alexej Hock, Christiane Hoffmann, Martin Knobbe, Peter Maxwill, Peter Müller, Gordon Repinski, Sven Röbel, Anna Sadovnikova, Matthias Schepp, Jörg Schindler, Christoph Schult
