The Ukraine War will be remembered for many things, chief amongst them that it is not merely a war by conventional means, bombs, tanks, planes, but it’s also a war of images and ideas. We see the Ukrainian people valiantly defend themselves against not only the Russian military invasion but what may be worse, the Russian lies. Everything coming out of Russia right now is a lie. And the magnitude of damage that that is doing has not yet been assessed. Wartime propaganda is one thing, that we’ve seen, but the manipulation of the internet and television to the extent that it has been manipulated in the past two weeks is something entirely new, and as I am wont to observe over and over again, it is Orwellian.

I call your attention to one small detail from “1984” and that is the telescreen, which is what we know now as a flat screen TV. The telescreen could watch you and talk to you and so can the monitors we have if it’s a Zoom call and the camera is on.

Add to that Vladimir Putin, who was born to play Big Brother and we are there. Putin is taking us down a very dark and dangerous path. Frank Bruni, New York Times:

We are only as good as the information we get. Only as grounded, as enlightened, as capable of forming rational opinions about our political leaders and making intelligent decisions about our lives. If we’re fed lies, we’re lost. If we subsist on fiction, we dwell in a fantasyland.

Russia right now is to some degree a fantasyland. It’s a place where the government-promoted narrative about what’s happening in Ukraine is ruthlessly edited, audaciously manipulated and almost diametrically opposed to the truth.

And while that hasn’t quelled many Russians’ opposition to the war, evident in courageous protests throughout the country, Vladimir Putin’s fictions are prominent and pervasive enough to have profoundly negative implications for any possibility of peace: Why would a decisive majority of his people pressure him to end his brutal land grab when they’re made to believe that it’s a limited operation blown wildly out of proportion by a Russia-hating West, a necessary act of self-defense and a noble, altruistic bid to liberate decent Ukrainians from brutal Nazis in their midst?

To win people’s hearts, a leader can do the hard work of improving their lot. Or a leader can take the cheaper and easier route that Putin has chosen and try to wash their brains. That’s what censorship of this magnitude amounts to: brainwashing. Putin is providing a definitive tutorial about the paramount importance of a free press and the fatal destructiveness of its antonym. We should heed it closely — because the warp of reality that Russians experience at the hands of a repressive government we in the West often inflict on ourselves.

 

Putin is Mr. Alternative Facts incarnate. If you listen to him, Ukraine is filled with Nazis and the United States is developing chemical warfare weapons. Oh, yes. The U.S. is responsible for the war in Ukraine, not the insane Russian dictator who invaded it. Here’s what’s being spewed on Russian media right now. Daily Beast:

Resorting to the traditional propaganda tropes prevalent in Russian state media, [TV host Karen] Shakhnazarov accused the United States of starting the war—and trying to prolong it indefinitely. He speculated: “What are they achieving by prolonging the war? First of all, public opinion within Russia is changing. People are shocked by the masses of refugees, the humanitarian catastrophe, people start to imagine themselves in their place. It’s starting to affect them. To say that the Nazis are doing that is not quite convincing, strictly speaking… On top of that, economic sanctions will start to affect them, and seriously. There will probably be scarcity. A lot of products we don’t produce, even the simplest ones. There’ll be unemployment. They really thought through these sanctions, they’re hitting us with real continuity. It’s a well-planned operation… Yes, this is a war of the United States with Russia… These sanctions are hitting us very precisely.

“This threatens the change of public opinion in Russia, the destabilization of our power structures… with the possibility of a full destabilization of the country and a civil war. This apocalyptic scenario is based on the script written by the Americans. They benefit through us dragging out the military operation. We need to end it somehow. If we achieved the demilitarization and freed the Donbas, that is sufficient… I have a hard time imagining taking cities such as Kyiv. I can’t imagine how that would look. If this picture starts to transform into an absolute humanitarian disaster, even our close allies like China and India will be forced to distance themselves from us. This public opinion, with which they’re saturating the entire world, can play out badly for us… Ending this operation will stabilize things within the country.”

The host frowned at the apparent departure from the officially approved line of thinking and deferred to the commander-in-chief. However, the next expert agreed with Shakhnazarov. Semyon Bagdasarov, a Russian Middle East expert, grimly said: “We didn’t even feel the impact of the sanctions just yet… We need to be ready for total isolation. I’m not panicking, just calling things by their proper name.”

Soloviev angrily sniped: “Gotcha. We should just lay down and die.”

When you can’t get your pumpkin spice latte or your Big Mac, that’s how you’re going to feel, Comrade.

Everybody suffers in a war of lies. Make no mistake, Dictator Putin is seeing what flies and what doesn’t and what adjustments he can make as he goes along. The latest media device to come under attack is fact checking. Ukraine has had a flurry of people claiming to be fact checkers, who are not. You remember the famous Spy v. Spy cartoon? This is Lie v. Lie, to see what lies can slip through.

Confusion reigns and it rains confusion. And that’s what Putin and his ilk need to do their best work, a confused, angry populace that is going without and has gone without for too long. Perfect soil for fascism to grow in.

 

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2 COMMENTS

  1. You talk about Orwellian, why do you think that some “smart” TVs have a mic and camera built in? Its bad enough that most people carry a “smart” phone that can spy on them in many ways. 1984 has been here for a while now! That remote cabin in the woods with solar/wind power and no Internet is looking better all of the time!!

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  2. I’m going with Orwell’s Animal House, with the characters representing the USSR. The animals decided to overthrow the farmer, then the pigs became what they originally fought against. His point is everyone who rises to power is corrupted & transformed into oppressors. We threw off the yoke of monarchy but, in reality, the revolution was led by rich elites & the framers didn’t include poor folks, nor did it address slavery cuz they were afraid the south wouldn’t go along. They knew it was going to be a problem down the road, especially Adams & Jefferson. Propaganda has factored into everything from the beginning. Fact. Jefferson & Adams lost their friendship over it. They later repaired it & both died on July 4th within hours of each other. Real history is much more nuanced and complex than most people know. Thick, pulitzer prize winning books never get read, except by a few of us. When our ‘citizens’ just watch fox, Facebook, Twitter, etc., then we are ripe for tyranny. I think Churchill once stated if u want to know the problem with democracy, spend five minutes talking to the average voter.

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