(BI) Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange has been actively supporting Catalonia’s push for independence The Kremlin has seized on Assange’s support for Catalonia in an effort to destabilize the EU Edward Snowden, along with other anti-globalization groups, also support Catalonia’s independence
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has seized on a historic independence referendum set for Sunday in the Spanish region of Catalonia, using his Twitter account to pump out a pro-separatist narrative aimed at villainizing the Spanish central government and celebrating Catalan nationalism.
Assange, for all intents and purposes, has become the independence movement’s chief international spokesman. The vast majority of his tweets this month, in many cases written in Spanish and Catalan, have centered around promoting Catalan secessionism and “self-determination” as a bulwark against Madrid’s “repression.” […]
Mark Kramer, the program director of the Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, said that WikiLeaks has become “a convenient propaganda tool for the Russian government” in its effort to wreak havoc among NATO states and the European Union.
“Julian Assange founded Wikileaks because of his virulent hostility toward the United States and other Western democracies, and he has increasingly converted himself into a Kremlin stooge to help undermine NATO and the EU,” Kramer said. “He and the Russian authorities share a deep animosity toward the democratic capitalist West, and Assange has become a reliable mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda and disinformation.” […]
Kramer, of Harvard, said that Russia’s support for western secessionist movements has little if anything to do with “wanting to uphold the principle of sovereignty.”
He noted that Russia has been very selective about which separatist movements it wants to back and which it wants to suppress, pointing to Moscow’s stronghold on Chechnya and refusal to recognize Kosovo as an independent country while backing separatist forces in Georgia and forcibly annexing Crimea from Ukraine.
In Europe, Kramer added, Moscow supported the Scottish National Party’s bid for independence as part of its “vigorous campaign to sow turmoil and division within NATO and the EU…now the Russian authorities are doing the same thing with the Catalan independence referendum.” […]
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