Rat, traitor, mercenary: stop writing for RT

Last Thursday, February 24, I informed the management of Actualidad RT of the termination of the collaboration that I had been maintaining with this medium in its web opinion section since 2019. Although I received congratulations on this, I do not think I deserve praise.

Those of us who write, however small our signature may be, must adapt our words to what we believe to be fair: Russian military aggression against Ukraine is intolerable.

I don't think, on the other hand, that those who work for RT should be singled out by marking their Twitter accounts: beware of stigmas.

Likewise, I believe that the preventive censorship that the EU has exercised sets a dangerous precedent that, under the stress of these weeks, we have not yet been able to assess.

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What I am also convinced of is that the insults I have been the object of on social media —rat, traitor, mercenary— explain, on the one hand, the scant imagination of those who launch them and, on the other, a worrying phenomenon that affects a part from our left: the puerile and uncritical acceptance that multilateralism is patronizing today in Ukraine what we did not tolerate 19 years ago in Iraq.

Those protests shaped many of us politically, as well as as people.

These are not the times to lose jobs or to contradict your readers.

But neither are they to agree with the calculator in one hand and the bottle of sleeping pills in the other.

Much less to compromise with a type of militaristic and authoritarian society.

That same Thursday I was lucky enough to be able to speak into my microphone at

and explain that, in addition to confronting this threat, the European Union should be careful about Atlanticism, which, in my opinion, is a configuration of the world in which Europe is just an extension of US interests.

I think I'm right, what I know is that at least I had the chance to be wrong.

In this business you lie and manipulate, you also work honestly.

The job possibilities decrease dramatically if your positions do not fit with the dominant editorial lines.

But in Spain, for the time being, we are not risking jail for analyzing current affairs as is the case in Russia.

Writing is about telling, above all, that the good and decent thing we have achieved is not arbitrary, but rather an election that took years to build and that can be undone in months.

One of the functions that the State Department attributes to RT is that of "amplifying the protest or civil conflict", that is, one of the main assets of journalism, which should not be a comfort for political and economic powers but a loudspeaker for those without a platform.

The issue is not so much that RT is incisive in the countries where it is broadcast and silent with respect to Russia, but that its soft power is based on occupying the gaps that the traditional media system leaves free, "telling what is not told", creating affinity towards his brand but also towards Putin.

My job opportunity arises from this mechanism, as well as the explanation for the traitor's nicknames.

What I did not take into account, nor do my detractors take into account now, is that Putin is something more than a nationalist conservative with whom to establish complicity,

but its Eurasian turn understands Western Europe, also its left and its workers, as a decadent and despicable entity susceptible to sacrifice.

This does not look like 1947, but rather 1914. It is the same democracy, which we defend here from the ultras, that Putin threatens with his model of society.

Daniel Bernabé

is a writer.

His latest book is

(Akal).

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