Welcome To the Post-Truth World. Ukrainians Report Their Russian Relatives Tell Them There Is No War

“There’s nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so.” — Shakespeare

If we extrapolate from Shakespeare’s quote, then there’s nothing real nor unreal, but thinking makes it so. Except it doesn’t quite work in the material world, and especially if you’re talking about war. It’s a bit hard to say that bombed out buildings aren’t there, that dead bodies aren’t piling up, that refugees aren’t desperately fleeing and that War isn’t Hell.

But that is exactly what some Ukrainians are hearing, that Comrade Putin is there to give the Ukrainians “warm clothes and food” and in no way is targeting civilians, “military only, and with precision.” In short, Ukrainians are being told to reject the evidence of their own eyes and ears and believe what Big Brother Putin tells them. New York Times:

LVIV, Ukraine — Four days after Russia began dropping artillery shells on Kyiv, Misha Katsurin, a Ukrainian restaurateur, was wondering why his father, a church custodian living in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, hadn’t called to check on him.

“There is a war, I’m his son, and he just doesn’t call,” Mr. Katsurin, who is 33, said in an interview. So, Mr. Katsurin picked up the phone and let his father know that Ukraine was under attack by Russia.

“I’m trying to evacuate my children and my wife — everything is extremely scary,” Mr. Katsurin told him.

He did not get the response he expected. His father, Andrei, didn’t believe him.

“No, no, no, no stop,” Mr. Katsurin said of his father’s initial response.

“He started to tell me how the things in my country are going,” said Mr. Katsurin, who converted his restaurants into volunteer centers and is temporarily staying near the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil. “He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis.’”

Putin has disparaged Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “drug-addled Nazi” to justify his invasion and some people are buying it hook, line, and sinker. They see what they want to see and disregard the rest. And Putin tells them what they want to see. New York Times:

Russian television channels do not show the bombardment of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and its suburbs, or the devastating attacks on Kharkiv, Mariupol, Chernihiv and other Ukrainian cities. They also do not show the peaceful resistance evident in places like Kherson, a major city in the south that Russian troops captured several days ago, and certainly not the protests against the war that have cropped up across Russia.

Instead they focus on the Russian military’s successes, without discussing the casualties among Russian soldiers. Many state television correspondents are embedded in eastern Ukraine, and not in the cities being pummeled by missiles and mortars. Recent news reports made no mention of the 40-mile-long Russian convoy on a roadway north of Kyiv.

On Friday, Russia also banned Facebook and Twitter to try to stem uncontrolled information.

All this, Mr. Katsurin said, explains why his father told him: “There are Russian soldiers there helping people. They give them warm clothes and food.”

It isn’t enough to say that this is adding insult to injury. Committing these atrocities is bad enough but hiding them is something else altogether. It’s a criminal act in and of itself. Hiding the truth about a war should be a war crime on its own merits.

Russia is not at war with Ukraine. Russia has never been at war with Ukraine.

In the Fall of 2016, when Trump came to power, it was novel to compare that occurrence to “1984.” Then in February, 2017 “1984” hit the best seller lists for the first time since 1948 when it was published. Now, with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his concurrent disinformation war, we are living in “1984.” Make no mistake. It.is.here.