Ukraine and Propaganda

March 11, 2022

Tags: election, Putin, Trump, ukraine
Posted in: Democracy, Trump

I hate going back, again, to Orwell, but since the world is intent on using his epic novel 1984 as an instructional guide, I have no choice. So proles, take note: this week’s Two Minutes of Hate will be split among Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. They may in fact be the same person, and we are certainly told they share the same goal: destruction of American democracy via the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Something very sinister happened in the American mind space over the last few days. Ukraine, a country of little importance to the United States, suddenly became the sole focus of most media-consuming Americans. Constructed to appear organic, it is impossible to not imagine guiding hands behind the shift of every media outlet to a single story told in a single way. Leap frogging over one another, social media and traditional media competed for the most extreme Ukraine stories, all slanted towards unbelievability. One of the first was the Ghost Pilot of Kiev, who improbably shot down six Russian aircraft. No matter the video was undated and could have been taken anywhere anytime, and no matter when the whole story proved false and the images shown to have been created by home aircraft game sim software. This was followed by a tale of Ukrainian soldiers on some island who died valiantly rather than surrender, which also was not true because we learned days later they did indeed surrender.

America was flooded with images of gorgeous Ukrainian girls with AirSoft toy rifles volunteering for the front. Ukrainian cats are supposedly being trained to spot Russian laser sights. Pictures appeared of plucky people making Molotov cocktails to fight the Russians in the streets. FYI, those cocktails would a) have either evaporated their inflammant through the rag before use, you can’t make ’em days in advance or b) set fire to the thrower. Unless the rag is very, very tightly in the bottle, the inflammant will run down the thrower’s arm and set him afire. Propaganda has no time apparently for WikiHow. But the most intense propaganda has been reserved for the Ukrainian president, who has been labeled by the MSM as both a George Washington and a Winston Churchill. Combat reports of him patrolling the streets in cammies are now a standard feature.

The tell on all this is how unspecific the propaganda is. Yep, that’s Zelensky alright, but exactly where is he? When was the footage shot? We haven’t seen this much veneration of a foreign leader since the election of savior-o-the-day Iraqi Prime Ministers a decade or so ago. Same for all those images of tanks (are they Russian? Tonka?) rolling across snowy fields, or planes firing rockets into wooded areas. The Ukraine coverage is nearly fact-free. It’s all about narratives, hot girls with guns, little clips of tanks. But nothing about what is going on. Is one side winning? It’s all just emotion to stim you into equally meaningless acts on social media.

But it has worked. Shallow Americans are “standing with” Ukraine, throwing Russian alcohol off the shelves, lining up to eat at Ukrainian diners in New York, and of course posting their support across social media. Overnight we as a nation have become experts on the SWIFT system, and patriots ready to pay more at the gas pumps for freedom. My neighbor made a show of pouring out some old vodka but was unaware our state generates most of its electricity off Russian crude oil. Whatever, he’s doing what the teevee says to do. And yes, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider “absolutely” approves Ukrainians using “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as their anthem amid Russia’s invasion.

Alongside all this false and misleading information is the overnight disappearance of those fact checkers that plagued thoughtful journalism through the Covid era. The same people who would jump on an article for misquoting a protein statistic, or cancel an account for not following the party line on masking, are dead silent in the face of a tsunami of propaganda purposely painting an incomplete if not completely inaccurate picture of the war in Ukraine. So no surprise the former Ukrainian president lauded CNN as an “objective source of information as a contradiction against Russian information.” Twitter will label all tweets linking to Russian state media while allowing Ukrainian sources free reign. Everybody’s working the same angle here.

If any of this seems familiar, rewind to the 2016 presidential campaign, and then get back to the future.

The propaganda, having done its job of whipping Americans into a blood orgy demanding Putin’s death, has now begun its morphosis into tying Trump into all this. In doing so, the campaign builds on the remnants of 2016, when the Clinton machine falsely claimed the Russians elected Trump as their agent in place. USA Today writes “Trump’s bromance with Putin was very much on display… as the former president saw it, there was nothing to condemn [in Ukraine] but much to admire.” The NYT says “The American political right… has shifted toward fawning praise for autocrats, even those leading America’s traditional adversaries. Where once Russia and other autocracies were seen as anti-democratic, they have now become symbols of US conservatism — a mirror for the right-wing worldview.  Supporting Mr. Putin, as well as other authoritarian leaders, is yet another way in which the political right is weaponizing culture wars to further divide Americans.”

Salon explains “How Trump’s coup attempt [January 6] encouraged Putin’s Ukraine invasion” and says “Donald Trump and his regime consistently acted as vassals for Vladimir Putin’s regime and Russia’s strategic interests.” WaPo noted “the implications of President Vladimir Putin’s actions against the United States in 2016 will finally sink in, especially for Republicans in Congress. The Vladimir Putin who planned, staged and launched a large-scale war on Ukraine is the same Vladimir Putin who ordered an aggressive, multifaceted, clandestine campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The Atlantic hauls out none other than Hillary Clinton to thunder “It’s a five-alarm national-security crisis. The hard truth is that if Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, they can’t stand up to Putin or Xi.” Has-been with a platform Al Franken predicts Trump will win in 2024 and it will be the last democratic election. It’ll be a dictatorship.”

There are two things to worry about here. The first is the amazing speed with which a massive narrative can be forced across America in a coordinated fashion by traditional media, government, and social media. Overnight no other version of the story could be found. Ukrainian propaganda sucked all of the oxygen from the room so quickly it should scare us. The second thing to fear is how quickly American partisan political forces were able to hijack the initial anti-Russian narrative and repurpose it into a slightly revised version of 2016’s “Trump is a Russian asset.” No matter that that itself has been debunked as Clinton-made propaganda, the story line is somehow — meh, the details don’t matter — Trump and Putin are working together to destroy Ukraine on their way to ending American democracy.

Trump has nothing to do with Putin, or the Ukraine, and the latter two have nothing to do with American democracy. As in Orwell’s world, our thoughts are no longer are own. We are told how to think and increasingly, groomed how to vote.

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