Tom Southern writes in WIRED about the spectacular collapse of Putin’s well-oiled disinformation machine after he ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Very few people—other than a small number of extremists on the right and the left—were fooled by his claims that he was “liberating” Ukraine from its “Nazi” government.
Southern writes:
FOR DECADES NOW, Vladimir Putin has slowly, carefully, and stealthily curated online and offline networks of influence. These efforts have borne lucrative fruit, helping Russia become far more influential than a country so corrupt and institutionally fragile had any right to be. The Kremlin and its proxies had economic holdings across Europe and Africa that would shame some of the smaller 18th-century empires. It had a vast network of useful idiots that it helped get elected and could count on for support, and it controlled much of the day-to-day narrative in multiple countries through online disinformation. And many people had no idea.
While a few big events like the US’ 2016 election and the UK’s Brexit helped bring this meddling to light, many remained unaware or unwilling to accept that Putin’s disinformation machine was influencing them on a wide range of issues. Small groups of determined activists tried to convince the world that the Kremlin had infiltrated and manipulated the economies, politics, and psychology of much of the globe; these warnings were mostly met with silence or even ridicule.
All that changed the moment Russian boots touched Ukrainian soil. Almost overnight, the Western world became overwhelmingly aware of the Kremlin’s activities in these fields, shattering the illusions that allowed Putin’s alternative, Kremlin-controlled information ecosystem to exist outside its borders. As a result, the sophisticated disinformation machinery Putin spent decades cultivating collapsed within days.
RUSSIA’S NETWORK OF influence was as complex as it was sprawling. The Kremlin has spent millions in terms of dollars and hours in Europe alone, nurturing and fostering the populist right (Italy, Hungary, Slovenia), the far right (Austria, France, Slovakia), and even the far left (Cyprus, Greece, Germany). For years, elected politicians in these and other countries have been standing up for Russia’s interests and defending Russia’s transgressions, often peddling Putin’s narratives in the process. Meanwhile, on televisions, computers, and mobile screens across the globe, Kremlin-run media such as RT, Sputnik, and a host of aligned blogs and “news” websites helped spread an alternative view of the real world. Though often marginal in terms of reach in and of themselves (with some notable exceptions, such as Sputnik Mundo), they performed a key role in spreading disinformation to audiences in and outside of Russia.
Please open the link and finish this important article.
And this … only the tip of what’s been going on.
I wonder how many got Rubles from Russia?
The Kremlin invested ‘hundreds of millions’ in Twitter and Facebook through Russian-American tech billionaire Yuri Milner
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-invested-in-twitter-facebook-through-yuri-milner-kushner-2017-11
Wednesday, Vice News reported that Russians are showing up at the border requesting asylum. While the US is not commenting on the situation, some Russians gained an easy admittance even though some refugees have been waiting at the Mexican border for more than two years. We have no further information about who these people are, or why they were given priority. You can find the story at about the 22 minute mark on the link. https://www.vicetv.com/en_us/video/wednesday-march-23-2022/61df44ab75351d48987eac05
The only way to get rid of Putin is for him to be assinated or Russia invaded. Coddling him enables him to take more of Europe. 🤔☹️
Getting “assinated” must hurt.
“….assinated….” Love the pun! One can only hope that this ass-tyrant is taken down one way or another and the slaughter in Ukraine stops.
While Biden got criticized all around for supposedly “alarmist” language when Putin was amassing troops, I thought that absolutely set the tone for ruining Putin’s propaganda efforts in which Putin and his troll farm and right wing enablers always plays the so-called liberal media perfectly. It worked at the beginning — right wingers, the left and the so-called liberal media was bashing Biden for stating such dire warnings, but Biden didn’t budge. (Probably no one even now remembers the chorus of chiding media saying Ukraine was very angry because of Biden’s warnings!) Finally a Democrat whose media team understands how the Dems get played by a brilliant right wing propaganda effort where the left and the right are both helping push the right wing narrative — the left often unwittingly.
Because of Biden’s clear message that Putin intended to invade, when Putin actually did invade, the media had to do a 180. And for once, the media didn’t embrace the very right wing talking points in which Biden’s dire warnings about Putin’s intent were blamed as the reason Putin invaded! I was surprised, because the so-called liberal media always falls for the talking points no matter how ridiculous they are (and many conservatives tried) but finally they got too embarrassed to keep saying that Putin amassed forces at Ukraine’s border and had no plans to invade but Biden telling the world that Putin intended to invade made Putin invade! Yes, many people were saying that idiotic thing for quite a while, but luckily it was too inane to last.
And I give a lot of credit to the people of Ukraine and Zelensky. They stood so strong and firm against Putin, that none of his talking points worked, and those who spewed them, from Tucker Carlson to some folks on here, just looked dishonest or deluded.
I hope Tucker Carlson gets his someday….Carlson and all the other lowlife blowhard scumbags at Fox News who have done so much damage to this country.
YES!
The Kansas City Star reported, “Popular Information Revealed a Network of Pundits and Groups Funded by Koch have been publicly advocating against imposing economic sanctions on Russia.”
Where does Carlson get his funding?
This October Putin turns 70. I think that his age influenced him to invade Ukraine to build the empire he wants faster. As he grows older, the number of years he has left to achieve his apparent draconian dreams/goals to rule the world is motivating him to change his tactics.
For decades, Putin was slowly, patiently turning the world into his puppet empire, but then age and male menopause may have played a role in changing his mind to speed up the process by taking more risks.
https://www.webmd.com/men/guide/male-menopause
Apparently Putin is also a malignant narcist and maybe also a psychopath and/or sociopath and destroying the world if he can’t achieve his dreams and goals is okay with someone with a brain like that. In his warped mind, if he can’t have what he wants then he will punish everyone on the planet, an old man throwing a tantrum and willing to destroy everything if he doesn’t get what he wants before he ages out and dies.
In that way. Traitor Trump and Putin are exactly the same. Both old men that know what it is like to have power with dreams of more power but seeing that power slipping through their fingers as they age closer to death. When we are young, few if any of us think about death but, for me at least, I’m aware that the time I have left is a lot less than it was when I was decades younger. When I was in the Marines fighting in Vietnam I didn’t worry about dying even though we risked death everyday in that place with the Vietcong and North Vietnamese wanting us dead and gone.
Interesting, Lloyd. I think you may be onto something about age. Last week, I got to visit Ft Pulaski, an instalation near Savannah that was built as a part of the national defense after the War of 1812. It is a nice display, being a national monument and being administered by a National Park Service helped by volunteers who are interested in its history.
One of those volunteers was a retired Marine whio told me he served in Vietnam. I cannot recall how we got to the subject of his service, but he loosened up a bit when he realized I was an interested observer and not a fanatic of some sort.
“Those little pecker-heads found some way to get at us no matter what we did, ” he recalled. “We would have mines and barbed wire and everything else and there they were shooting at us.”
He was trying to interpret what fighting on home soil meant. I think maybe even Putin understands now.
I think you’re right, Lloyd. There’s some similarity about what Mary Trump has said about it45–the more he gets painted into a corner (which, to many, is what getting older means)– the more it’ll want to take others down, as well. It’s like the very cowardly who are compelled to commit suicide but must also take others with them, whether they be family members or strangers
BTW, the DSM 5 just came out. Especially in these times, it should be worth a look. (Although I happen to know that Senor Swacker will read it from cover to cover.)
It is a different country, age. You are absolutely right about this, Lloyd.
All the hundreds of videos and photos coming out of Ukraine tell the story. Many cities like Mariupol are being utterly destroyed as the populace cowers in basements or wherever they can find shelter.
Russian Defense Ministry said today they had “achieved their goals” and were now focused on protecting Donbas, which they previously seized. Face-saving.
They are carpet bombing Mariupol. If there was any question in anyone’s minds that Putin is a War Criminal, this is now settled.
Should Putin attend G20 meetings? Yes, and the moment he sets foot outside Russia, into any but a servile client state, he should be arrested and remanded to the ICC for trial.
I support Biden’s barring him from the G20, but it would be awesome, should Putin survive the catastrophe of his invasion of Ukraine and the evil he has visited upon his own country, if he attended one of these and was arrested at it. The International Criminal Court has observers on the ground in Ukraine gathering evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It has jurisdiction to charge Putin with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, even though Russia has withdrawn from the ICC and Ukraine has not ratified the Rome Statute. Putin could be charged with the Crime of Aggression by a Special Tribunal of the UN but not by the ICC. Both should happen.
OMG I know JK Rowling gets mixed reviews for some of her positions (and I say that as the parent of a kid who is quite anti-JK Rowling now) but her tweet when Putin tried to play victim and compare himself to her was BRILLIANT:
“Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics. #IStandWithUkraine”
The Putin-defenders on this blog should take note.
He is a mass murderer. He should not have even been responded to. Going back and forth on twitter with him was beneath JK Rowlings.
I didn’t read anything about a back and forth. She called him out and it was done. That was perfect, because it took away a talking point that you would have heard Tucker Carlson et al repeating endlessly.
We live in an open society, and so it is very easy for Russia to embed agents and recruit assets here to spread its “truths.” We are awash with both agents and assets, and we must be correspondingly vigilant about calling out ******t. Here is Putin’s fav philosopher, Alexandr Dugin, clarifying what “truth” means in Putinese:
“Everything is relative, and we need—we, in Russia, realize that we could use Postmodernity to explain to the West that if any truth any truth, is relative, so we have our own special Russian truth that you need to accept as something that maybe is not Europe truth. But if the truth is relative, that doesn’t mean that the truth doesn’t exist. . . . I think that now the situation is in Syria for example, if the United States continue to view itself as unipolar power, it says, “No more Assads, “and Europe repeats, “No more Assads,” and other civilization says, “Stop. Let’s have Assad.” And after that there are very ease our nuclear and military power beside, uh, behind Assad. So, and that is serious, and if you are boss, you could not let the other decide, if you really are boss, decide what you are to do in this conflict, and Russia says, “No. You are not boss. You are not any more boss. That is very serious. There is multipolarity, and behind us is, there is nuclear weapon, and that I will to defend for example the little case of Assad—defend Assad. Not because we have so much interest there. That is the situation of who rules the world. That is the problem, and only war could decide, really, who is the boss. If United States doesn’t want to start the war, you should recognize, United States should recognize, for all humanity, all mankind, that United States is not anymore unique master, so let’s recognize that, there will be no war, but we understand, and our position is that we are going to fight up to the end in order to show to any, to everybody, that United States is not any more unique master. It is serious. Very serious. Because we are seriously going to show and to confirm that we are entering to a multipolar world and the situation in Syria, in Ukraine, and anywhere else, that’s only the case to prove that. We don’t want that, but we understand that if we are not ready to pay ALL the price for that, we could not get it. . . . Postmodernism teaches us to understand, and also sociology. I am sociologist as well, and and this total fact, according to Durkheim, the founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim, that total fact is the fact that the society believes. . . . The truth is the question of belief, an Postmodernity show that every so-called truth is a matter of belief, so we believe in what we do. We believe in what we say, and that is the only way to define the truth. The truth is a matter of belief.”
2 + 2 = 5. Why? Putin says so. And if you dare disbelief this, he will have you shot or poisoned.
All this while, the West thought it was bringing Russia into the fold of modern nations, extending respect and cultural and scientific exchanges and the hand of friendship, but Putinist Russia saw everything in Putin’s paranoid KGB/FSB, breathtakingly backward medieval strongman way, as conflict, to be waged clandestinely through propaganda and payoffs and poisonings and openly through violence and threats of violence, over who is to be the Krestniy Otets, Big Boss. What is “truth”? All the silly fights over this through the years! It’s whatever the Boss says it is.
“Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine.”
“You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and our Press Secretary Sean Spicer gave alternative facts,” Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to Putin’s dog, Trump, infamously said.
I imagine this conversation between Putin and wannabe Krestniy Otets Don the Con, who lives in an alternative fact world inhabited only by himself and his admirers (perhaps even one where he doesn’t have a foreign handler), a world where any nasty, un-Donalish realities are fake news:
DON THE CON: So, what should I call the new social media network?
TSAR VLAD: Well, in the old days, we called the Soviet propaganda newspaper Pravda.
DON THE CON: OK. Pravda. Crazy name, but OK.
TSAR VLAD: No, no, Donald. Pravda is “truth” in Russian
DON THE CON (thinking hard): Hmmm. OK. OK. I see. We’ll call it “Truth in Russian.”
TSAR VLAD: No, Donald. [turns to National Security Director Patrushev] Take Donald away and explain this to him. However long it takes until he understands.
Stalin used to take his senior people, after work, back to his dacha just outside Moscow for a drinking party that would last until the wee hours. And there he would play a favorite game. He would say something ludicrous and ask people’s opinions. And each would fall over himself to agree. Then he would say, “That’s idiotic,” and say the opposite. Then, he would point to someone and say, “What do you think?” And that person would tremble and try to figure out what he was supposed to think. And then everyone would know that this was the next one of them who was going to be arrested, tortured in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison, extended a chance for reprieve, forced to confess on state TV, subjected to a show trial, and then killed. It is this precise Stalinist/Putinist technique that George Orwell describes in 1984, when O’Brian tells Winston that The Party is not satisfied with confession and groveling from those arrested for Thought Crime. No, it wants perfection. It will make people see that 4 + 4 is 5.It will make them love Big Brother. And then, when they have reached this state of perfection, when they are completely servile and harmless, it will put a bullet through their heads.
Putin, Trump, an entire political party in the United States–all are trying to usher in a post-truth world, a world where the facts are whatever Glorious Leader said they were today. Go back and listen to Ted Cruz’s slimy grilling of Judge Jackson yesterday. He doesn’t believe a word of what he is saying. But truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is power, winning.
“You’re gonna win so much, you’ll get tired of winning.” –Donald J. Trump
Maria Butina, the woman that stirred up the NRA and spent time in jail for being in unregistered agent, is now a government “representative” in Russia. She has moved up in the world as a local Russian folk hero.
yup. Here to stir up the gun nuts and citizens militias of the far right Trumpanzees
Maria Butina gets around- was a girlfriend of Patrick Byrne. There’s a video on-line of Byrne talking about what he did to help Doug Logan of the infamous Cyber Ninjas.
I made this word-for-word transcript from a BBC interview with Dugin, who is speaking in English, not his native tongue. I tried to be as accurate as possible in the transcription. Thus the unevenness of it.
cx: if you dare disbelieve
cx: 2 + 2 is 5
I read that Putin had recently ( in the last five years) begin to pull away from Duggin somewhat, regarding him as quaint. Whatever suits the master, I suppose
This is not surprising. Dugin is a poseur, a fake, and to a reptile like Putin, any person is only of this or that immediate instrumental value. But his stamp is all over Putin’s imperialist screed, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
Putin still uses the idea of western moral degenerative ideas Duggin subscribes to. This fits with the erzatz traditionalism that is a perfect lure to tie to the line to catch disgruntled American culture warriors.
God, gays, guns, glory, and gore.
OK, having been brought back up to speed on philosophy by your recent blog post, Bob [& thanks for the heads-up on WordPress], I’m seeing through Dugin’s word-salad. He is borrowing a few tidbits from post-modernism (which he apparently thinks, because it’s taught in Western universities, dominates their public/ govtl views hahahaha) to dress up Russia’s clearly 20thC worldview.
His ‘everyone [/every nation] has their own truth and they’re all equally valid’ line is simply moral relativism, which has been debated for thousands of years. It arguably applies in a sense to post-modernism. It also applies to the dominant thought-pattern of modernism which is still with us today– Positivism [& its offshoot Behaviorism]—from which we get sayings like [per your Praxis blog 3/5/22 essay], “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” And also to the tail-end of modernism, i.e., existentialism. The modernists say (one way or another) that your opinion/ belief, whatever it is, cannot be ‘scientifically’ verified therefore it’s of little import/ meaningless/ not ‘real,’ therefore one is as good as another. That can be used to justify enforcing one nation/ culture’s belief-system on another’s. The post-modernists simply point to the disastrous [20thC] results & suggest belief in one’s own “truth” is to blame, there is no “truth.”
Dugin’s entire position is completely undercut by his govt’s decades-long fabrication from whole cloth of political-agenda-aligned “truths”—imposed by force on its nation and proselytized elsewhere by stealth
Thank you for reading that stuff, Ginny!
Well, you nailed the Modernist view. The prevailing Postmodernist views vary. Three of these: One school holds that any “truth” contains traces of its own opposite and is therefore to some degree self-negating (Derrida), another that truth is a name that people give to what they have the power to enforce (Foucault), and still another that it is a matter of social consensus in an interpretive community (Stanley Fish). Dugin accepts both 2 and 3 but adds that the social consensus is a matter of a cultural, national identity and must be absolute and that the enforcement of truth must be done by a single, strong, fascist leader with a pure national vision. Belief in objectively verifiable truths is, to Dugin, a Western “revolt of Earth against Heaven,” against God and country.
There’s a lot of Postmodernist nonsense, but a lot of it comes from people taking too seriously what was actually playfulness on the part of Jacques Derrida, who was a practical joker and loved dancing rings around preconceived ideas but nonetheless held quite strong values. And even though I find most Postmodernist stuff complete drivel, there are things to learn from it. Here, I make some use of, though not peace with Derrida, whose best and primary idea, I think, is that one should question inherited structural binaries that constrain thinking. In this piece, I provide a little taxonomy of ways to do that, some tools to think with:
A warning that I know you will agree with, Ginny: Interrogating a rigid, inherited binary conceptualization such as man v. woman, Capitalist v. Socialist, black v. white–questioning the rigid, inherited concepts, does not, emphatically does not, mean accepting the crazy assertions that there are no verifiable truths, that everything is “just a matter of opinion,” or that everything learned by enculturation is nonsense. These are ridiculous assertions. They are Postmodernist leaps into Looneyland.
But your formulation, that the Postmodernists saw a lot of ugliness resulting from people’s “truths” and simply denied the existence of “truths” sounds to me, Ginny, like a darned good summary of the various Postmodernist takes on truth.
Thank you, Teacher! 🙂
And the exact same sentiment back at you, Ginny. So awesome to learn from you!
I suspect there were veterans of the old USSR army who served their time in Afghanistan and would have winced on hearing about this ‘special operation’. Men who have lived long enough to distil the words of the official media and are now sadly shaking their heads.
I suspect there are those veterans who are frantic as to the whereabouts of their sons currently serving in the armed forces.
I suspect there are those veterans who are weeping bitterly on hearing their son will not be walking through the door again.
Young men sent out by glory-hunters, paranoids & ‘ex-spooks’ none with boots on the ground experience and who did not read their histories. An old and bloody lament.
15-16 thousand of them and counting. It’s unspeakably sad.
As you say, unspeakably sad.
Fighting without really knowing why you are there and trying to stay alive, hardly a morale booster in any army.
And to make it worse for them ‘the other guys’ know exactly why they are there.
There are a couple of U.S. stations that air Russian propaganda and disinformation as reported recently by various media. One of the two stations is in Missouri. The station’s other programming is largely religious e.g. Dr. Tom Curran and TruNews. Critics allege Tru News’ rhetoric is anti-Semitic.
The Missouri station’s owner, Peter Schartel, has a Linked In profile that describes his background.