Category Archives: Tyranny and Fascism

Demolishing Factuality

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trust and Distrust, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Why do oligarchs prefer fascism?  There can be little doubt that oligarchs like fascism. There are very few fascisms of the left. Why is that?

 

Oligarchs naturally turns to fascism because it is so congenial to their outlook.

 

Timothy Snyder described Russia at the time this way:

“Russia in the 2010s was a kleptocratic regime that sought to export the politics of eternity to demolish factuality, to preserve inequality, and to accelerate similar tendencies in Europe and the United States.”

 

The Russians wanted to disrupt American democracy for decades, but for decades lacked any success at all, and found instead only derision for their efforts. But in the 2010s they found remarkable success. In large part that was because Russians efforts found such fertile soil for confusion and American minds astonishingly receptive to the most incredible stories. The soil in America had been fertilized through generations by credulity. In America the death of truth had laid the groundwork for successful interference in their election to such an extent that they were like lambs being led to the slaughter.

 

Snyder posits the following as political virtues: individuality, endurance, cooperation, novelty, honesty, and justice.  He claims these are not merely platitudes, but actual facts of history.  All of these virtues are important, but one of them has proven particularly significant in the age in which we live—honesty. When all is lies all is permitted. That’s what we must avoid at all costs. We discovered that in American politics, in the pandemic, and significantly, but little understood, in both wars of Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022.  However, “virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish.” Without trust in those institutions it is very difficult for truth to grow to avoid being crowded out by lies.

 

Sadly, those institutions are no longer robust anywhere. They are covered in rust from years of abuse. Yet those institutions are needed to preserve democracy. As Snyder said,

“An institution might cultivate certain ideas of the good, and it also depends upon them. If institutions are to flourish, they need virtues; if virtues are to be cultivated, they need institutions.”

 

Since those institutions in the west are under merciless attack by the forces of unfreedom (both inevitability and eternity in Snyder’s terminology) it is difficult for one to remain optimistic about the future of freedom and democracy in the west. When people suggest fascism in the west is a real possibility one can only harbour grim humility. As Snyder said,

“It is the politics of inevitability and eternity that make virtues seem irrelevant or even laughable: inevitability by assuring that the good is what already exists and must predictably expand, and eternity by assuring that the evil is always external and that we are forever its innocent victims. If we want to have a better account of good and evil, we will have to resuscitate history.”

 

We will certainly have to resuscitate truth. We desperately need honesty and truth.

 

The Rise of authoritarians

American Fascism, Death of Truth, Modern History, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

 

It was shocking to some that in the 2010s, America and Europe saw the rise of authoritarian political leaders and the serious decay of democracy.  Many of us never believed this was possible. The Russians gave up on Europe and turned instead to Ukraine. The Brexit referendum seemed like a trip into madness, but was really another case of the people asking for and getting a wrecking ball for a leader. The Americans did the same thing in 2016 when Trump was elected. When the establishment is no long trusted, the masses turn to anyone who promises to blow things up.

 

Russian oligarchs took advantage of the vacuum of reason and good government along with the weakness of democratic institutions, When the establishment is no long trusted, the masses turn to anyone who promises to blow things up.

to pillage their county and deposit the spoils of what were once public enterprises under communism that were sold,  into offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and engineered dark deals. It seemed that capitalism was eating its young.

 

After a brief flirtation with democracy, that basically ended soon after Boris Yeltsin  selected Vladimir Putin as the next leader, to succeed him, Russia went from Communism direct to predatory capitalism of the most extreme sort.

 

Surprising to many, political practices that found favor in the Russian oligarchic state found fertile ground in the United States and Britain. The politics of inevitability had presumed  that influence would travel from the west to the east, but reality turned the tables. We learned from Putin not the other way around. Timothy Snyder explained it this way, in his book The Road to Unfreedom:

 

Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word “fake,” as in “fake news.”  This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed it, as his own, but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began it’s career in the United States. It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claimed that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real.

 

Again, to many (like me) this was a shocking event. Some attributed the appearance of fake news in the west as a surprising and completely unanticipated development, but that only proves how blind the political elites were in the United States. No one foresaw the rise of fascism. That is what the politics of eternity, as Snyder called it, is all about.

 

This is what happens when all trust in institutions is lost.

Bedlam follows. Just what authoritarians like to take advantage of.

The Politics of Eternity

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

Timothy Snyder’s second difficult concept in his book The Road to Unfreedom was the politics of eternity.  This was the successor to the politics of inevitability.

As Snyder said,

“The collapse of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity.  Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the threats from the past.  Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

 

In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation  and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”

 

The politics of eternity follows closely behind the politics of inevitability. There are two versions of it one western the other from eastern Europe, though the lines of separation can be porous. The politics of inevitability come first. After that,

“Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarchy spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle.  As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin escorted another, Donald Trump from fiction to power.”

 

Putin was Russia’s eternity leader and Trump was America’s version.

I don’t think it is fair to characterize Donald Trump as a fascist. Not quite anyway. He was an authoritarian who wanted to be a fascist, but he was held back, so far at least, and just barely, by the institutions of American democracy and honest government officials who thwarted his intentions in 2020 when he spelled out for the world to see that he wanted tyranny. The frightening thing is that more than 73 million Americans voted for him, after he made his intentions clear. After 4 years in power no American who paid any attention at all could honestly say they did not know the real Trump. Trump put himself front and forward at all times for all to see. He did not hide, he announced his intentions for all to hear. No one in the history of the world has been more in the public eye than Trump.

 

Yet America escaped tyranny by the thinnest of margins. It took a courageous Supreme Court packed with 3 members of Trump’s personal choosing, stalwart Republican and Democrat officials who refused to give in to his claims of a fraudulent election, solid lower courts, and a determined party of Democrats to hold Trump back from his goal—i.e. tyranny.

 

Of course, as we all know, Trump did not die. He is still hanging around. He could come back and realize his dreams of fascist power and there are many enablers, many in the Republican party, doing all they can do to bring about that result. We don’t know what will happen.

Inequality Breeds Contempt

American Fascism, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Modern History, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

 

I want to continue talking about Snyder’s idea of “the politics of inevitability” just a little bit more.

One of my readers pointed out that this theory that was employed by people in the west as well as the east is really a version of determinism.  And the problem with determinism is that even if  events are determined it is extremely difficult to predict the future.

 

What the Americans thought was their own inevitable dominance after that collapse of the Soviet Empire turned out to be one more dangerous illusion. The road to heaven turned out to be more complicated than that. In fact, the road to heaven turned out to be a road to unfreedom. Inevitability turned out to be a churlish illusion. As Timothy Snyder said,

 

“The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.”

 

The decline of America was set in motion. Nothing was inevitable except the crushing power of wealth.

Americans don’t believe this even though they so powerfully demonstrate it. Inequality breeds contempt. First inequality ushers in resentment, then contempt. First, the lowly feel resentment about their “betters” and then they feel contempt for themselves for failing to live up to their own ideals. They see themselves as losers. Their self-respect is curdled by envy.  It had happened earlier to African Americans enslaved for centuries until many of them lost their ability to love even themselves as shown in the novels of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We need a writer of equal power to tell us the truth of what happened after 2008. Instead, we have too many people who don’t want to look at the truth of modern North American society and prefer the contentment of looking at comfortable myths.

Such a situation is ripe for the demagogue.  America got exactly that. It got Donald Trump to make America (and of course Americans) great again. What a wonderful illusion. All they had to do was keep out the undesirables and have faith in their new leader. He could do it. And astonishingly, millions of Americans believed him, without any evidence that he could do it. They believed it because they wanted it so much to be true.

The same thing happened in Russia. They got Putin. He promised Russians that the Soviet Empire could be revived.  He would do that in Ukraine. So far he has just brought ruin without empire.  In Russia, as in the United States, some people achieved enormous wealth while ordinary people were left to suck socks. And that created huge problems in both countries.

The Politics of Inevitability

American Fascism, Books, Capitalism, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

I thought I would skirt around 2 concepts that are actually very important to Timothy Snyder’s thesis in the book The Road to Unfreedom. These are the closely related concepts of “the politics of inevitability” and “the politics of eternity” as he called.  I thought I would leave both of these concepts  out of my posts, but have realized I already  included a reference to these ideas without explanation.   I also decided that just because I had difficulty understanding them, did not mean my faithful readers would find them difficult. After all most of them are much smarter than me. So I am backing up here to explain them now.

I will first try to explain the politics of inevitability. As I understand it, Snyder describes the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity as 2 steps on the road to unfreedom.

According to Snyder,

“The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that ‘there are no alternatives. To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a pre-marked grave in a pre-purchased plot.”

 

Of course, if there are no choices there is no personal freedom, for we can’t do otherwise. We only have personal responsibility if we also have freedom. How could we be responsible for something we cannot possibly avoid? That is the sense in which responsibility and freedom are conjoined.

But freedom can be lost. First comes cynicism then comes tyranny whether in the form of authoritarianism, fascism or totalitarianism. That is the end of the road to unfreedom. The other two are stops along the way. At least this is how I interpret these difficult concepts.

In the United States the politics of inevitability meant that “capitalism was unalterable and democracy inevitable.”  Things could have been very different for Russia and Ukraine had the Americans not been under the spell of this illusion. That contented state did not last long. By the 1910s people were beginning to realize that his had been a pipe dream. Nothing was inevitable or unalterable. As Snyder said, “The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time.

Until then,

 “Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about “the end of history,” by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.”

 

As Snyder posits: Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 it too had a version of the politics of inevitability:

“nature permits technology, technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turns out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americas reasoned that the failure of communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so a millennia generation without history.”

 

Americans thought they had achieved a new world order of which they were the sole superpower. The Americans believed they were the inevitable driving force of history that would push the world to the utopia of capitalism without rivals. That was an illusion—a deadly one at that. From that mistake a lot of misery for Russia and Ukraine was born.

The Rise of authoritarians and Worse

American Fascism, Books, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

I am continuing my exploration of what happened in Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Much to my surprise, what has happened in Ukraine explains a lot about what has happened in the west. To do that, I am referring to what we have learned recently as a result of the second invasion of Ukraine be Russia and a wonderful book that I recommend to one and all, The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder a history professor from Yale University. That book written in 2018, helps us to understand what is happening there now.  And here too for that  matter.

It was shocking to some that in the 2010s America and Europe saw the rise of authoritarian political leaders and the serious decay of democracy.  Many of us never believed this was possible. How could so many countries, such as England,  the United States, and many others seem to lose faith in democracy? The Russians gave up on Europe and turned instead to Ukraine. The Brexit referendum seemed like a trip into madness, but was really another case of the people asking for and getting a wrecking ball for a leader. The Americans did the same thing.

Russian oligarchs took advantage of the vacuum of reason and good government along with the weakness of democratic institutions to pillage their county and deposit the spoils in offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and engineered dark deals of capitalism eating its young. After a brief flirtation with democracy, that basically ended soon after Boris Yeltsin  selected Vladimir Putin as the next leader,  Russia went from Communism direct to predatory capitalism of the most extreme sort.

Surprising to many, political practices that found favour in the Russian oligarchic state found fertile ground in the United States and Britain. The politics of inevitability had thought that influence would travel from the west to the east but reality turned the tables. Snyder explained it this way,

Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word “fake,” as in “fake news.”  This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed it, as his own, but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began it’s career in the United States. As Snyder explained in his book,  “It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to  spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real.” [I will explain his idea of eternity politics and inevitability  politics in a subsequent post]

Again, to many this was a shocking event. Some attributed the appearance of fake news in the west as a shocking and completely unanticipated development, but that only proves how blind the political elites were in the United States.

We in the west had a lot to learn from what happened in Ukraine.

 

The Road to Unfreedom: Political Fiction

American Fascism, Books, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Trump the Saviour, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Like most everyone I have become fascinated by what is happening in Ukraine.  What is particularly fascinating to me  is how much of what is happening now happened earlier in the Ukraine in 2014 and how much of this was presaged by what happened in Russia.  We did not learn our lessons in 2014 and now we are paying a hefty price.

In 2018 I read a very important book called The Road to Unfreedom by a historian from Yale University Timothy Snyder.  It described the road from freedom to unfreedom in Russia, Ukraine, Britain, and finally the United States.

 

According to Snyder,

“In the 2010s, much of what was happening was the deliberate creation of political fiction, outsized stories and medium-sized lies that commanded attention and colonized the space needed for contemplation.”

 

This was when people began to speak about the death of truth or decay of truth or living in a post-truth world. In American and the United Kingdom people were shocked to see political leaders who seemed uniquely incapable and unqualified but appealed to large segments of their society nonetheless. Reality was being shredded. As Snyder said,  It was “a time when factuality itself was put into question.” The road to unfreedom was being paved with lies.

 

Journalism during this time was attacked by demagogic leaders for their own nefarious purposes.  Donald Trump for example, did not want anyone to pursue him with claims of being a liar, so he usurped the notion of fake news that had referred to internet lies that crushed the truth. As we will see, this is direct from the fascist playbook.  Call out others for your own faults. That can create the illusion of innocence. Hitler did it. Putin did it.  So did Trump. Trump did that while lifting himself  into an office for which he was uniquely unsuited, but his followers did not care.  His followers wanted a wrecking ball and they got one and were entirely satisfied. Truth was  as irrelevant as morality.

Russia has already completed its road to fascism while America and Europe seem not that far behind. As Snyder said,

“What has already happened in Russia, is what might happen in America and Europe, the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got their first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.”

 

The times were ripe for authoritarian or even worse. The times were ripe for fascism.

 

Oligarch-in-Chief: The Road to Unfreedom

Books, Capitalism, Death of Democracy, Politics & Religion, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

The end of the Cold War saw a slowdown in such foreign interventions.  But it did not mean the end of autocracy of the beginning of democracy around the world. There was a lot of hope that Russia would become a democracy, but it did not happen.

 

The collapse of the Soviet Union saw the country transformed from socialism into a chaotic form of capitalism, presided over by then-president, Boris Yeltsin. It had a free market economy but it never achieved democracy. It was a near anarchic state where all kinds of groups in varying states of criminality competed for dominance. It was a free market free for all.

 

In 2000, Yeltsin was replaced by Vladimir Putin a former KGB agent. His first goal was to stabilize the country, something it urgently needed.  Putin did not affirm a competitive oligarchy, but he did facilitate an oligarchy nonetheless. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder said, “it was a form of oligarchy. What some people would call autocracy.”

 

“So under President Yeltsin in the 90s, Russia was a much freer country,” says Snyder. It was by no means a liberal democracy. As Timothy Snyder said,

There was much greater freedom of press. And there were rival clans of oligarchs. What Mr. Putin has done is assert himself as the oligarch-in-chief and use the organs of the state to crowd out all the oligarchs who didn’t come to an acceptable deal with him.”

Oligarchs were acceptable provided they acknowledged the supremacy of Putin. As Snyder said,

“He’s created a semi-permanent form of oligarchy where there’s just one clan rather than competing clans and that one clan controls both politics and the economy. I would characterize it as an oligarchy with moments of Christian fascism.”

 

Ivan Ilyin was an interesting Christian fascist thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. He is no longer very known. I had never heard of him before I  read Timothy Snyder’s book, the Road to Unfreedom and listened to the CBC Ideas show “Money Rules: How capitalism is destroying democracy”. I think if you want to understand what is happening in Russia and Ukraine this book would be worth a read. I read it a couple of years ago and have recently been perusing it again. It is worth it.   Snyder argued in the 20s and 30s that Russian was going to save the world. He saw the west as a place of fragmentation exemplified by its mess pluralism and that Russia would bring it back to unity. That view, of course, was very attractive decades later to Vladimir Putin. Russia was the country that would return God to earth. Everything would become perfect and total. To me that seems like the roots of totalitarianism.

 

Snyder characterized the society that Putin has created in Russia this way:

“He’s created a semi-permanent form of oligarchy where there’s just one clan rather than competing clans and that one clan controls both politics and the economy. I would characterize it as an oligarchy with moments of Christian fascism.”

 

It is a society that mobilizes capitalist technology such as the television and the internet to support the authoritarian rulers. Putin became surprisingly efficient with such technology as shown in the Ukraine in 2014 and later in what one would have thought the most unlikely place, namely,  the United States in 2016. We are seeing more of it again in Ukraine in 2022. Snyder also called it “an oligarchy with moments of imperialism…and  a media centred oligarchy which has some fascist moments and which has some imperial moments.”

That is what we are seeing now Russia and Ukraine. It ain’t pretty.

 

 

Blitzkrieg on the Truth

Death of Truth, Democracy, Trust and Distrust, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

When Hitler invaded Poland and other countries in the 1930s he famously created a new form of war that he called Blitzkrieg. It was striking how fast European nations caved into his attacks.  Putin has been trying to something similar in the wars on the Ukraine. First the one in 2014 and then again in 2022.  In their own way they were both as impressive as Hitler’s “wins.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza described what happened in Russia this way in the Washington Post:

“While Vladimir Putin’s planned blitzkrieg on Ukraine appears to have stalled in the face of firm resistance by the Ukrainian military and its people, another, much less noticed assault has brought the Kremlin swift and total victory. Within a single week, all — literally, all — of Russia’s remaining independent media voices have been silenced in a co-ordinated effort by the prosecutor general’s office and the government’s main censorship agency.

One after another, media outlets that dared to report honestly on Putin’s assault on Ukraine had their signals cut off and their websites blocked.”

 

One of the early casualties of this war on truth was a famous radio station in Moscow called Echo of Moscow. To many people in Russia, it symbolized the best of journalism in Moscow for over 30 years.  They also shut down TV rain a popular online news source.

Many people who have become cynical about media think western media is as untrustworthy as Russian media.  That is a dangerous illusion. They are not equivalent. Nowhere in the west has media been shut down completely as happened so fast in Russia. We should remember that. If we are led to believe our media is as untrustworthy as that in Russia, we will not trust it when it is vital to trust it, such as during a pandemic. Or a war. The lack of trust crippled our response to a pandemic and cost many lives. The same thing can happen during a war. I am not advocating for blind trust in any media, but trust based on critical reasoning. Blind trust is as bad as blind distrust. We are not the same as Russia. Our media is not perfect, but it is much better than what Russians enjoy.

 

Russia tried to shut down all media during the failed coup d’état by the hard-line communist leaders in August 1991. That closure did not last long because hundreds of thousands of Russians took to the streets of Moscow to quell the putsch. While the Communist failed, Putin has succeeded.  Recently, the Russian authorities have  also completely shut down dozens of other news outlets, both Russian and foreign, which Russian officials claimed had been spreading false information about the activities of the Russian armed forces in the Ukraine. Roskomnadzor, the Russian censorship agency that is obedient to Putin’s will, has also completely blocked Twitter and Facebook, even though both are very popular with many Russians.  Millions of them use these platforms but the agency closed them down.  The CBC and most western news agencies have been kicked out of Russia or left because of the constraints.  As Kara-Murza said, “Near-total darkness has descended on Russia’s information space with frightening speed.”

 Vladimir Kara-Murza described the situation in Russia this way:

“In other words, the journalists’ crime was telling the Russian people the bloody truth about Putin’s war — the truth that is completely absent from Russian state television, which is presenting viewers with an Orwellian reality in which it is Ukraine and the West, not Putin, that are to blame for the hostilities, and in which there is no war and no civilian casualties — only a highly targeted “special operation” directed against the imaginary “Neo-Nazis” in the Ukrainian government.”

Such a total lie depends on a similarly total monopoly on news coverage. After silencing critical voices on television — the largest source of information for most Russians — early in his rule, Putin tolerated smaller outlets such as Echo of Moscow as part of a pretend democratic facade for the West’s benefit. But under the conditions of war, even small pockets of independent media that could show Russians what heinous crimes their government is committing could present an existential danger to the system.”

Not all news agencies were banned in Russia, but the government made it so uncomfortable for them that almost all of them have left the country. As Kara-Murza said, Russia passed a law with lightning speed that had the effect of “criminalizing honest reporting”.  The penalties for the “crimes”  can run as high as 15 years in prison. A day after the new law was passed the police raided the offices of Lev Scholsberg a well known Russian opposition politician who had until then been a vocal critic of Putin since 1914 when Russia invaded the Ukraine the first time. The police also detained a Russian orthodox priest who spoke out against he war through his sermons.

 

 

As the Guardian reported,

 

“Global news media said they were temporarily suspending reporting in Russia to protect their journalists after a new law cracking down on foreign news outlets was passed that threatened jail terms of up to 15 years for spreading “fake news”.

Britain’s BBC said Friday it had temporarily halted reporting in Russia, and by the end of the day, the Canadian Broadcasting Company and Bloomberg News said their journalists were also stopping work. CNN and CBS News said they would stop broadcasting in Russia, and other outlets removed Russian-based journalists’ bylines as they assessed the situation.”

 

Meanwhile Russian media spreads the now unchallenged party line that Ukraine is led by Neo-Nazis.

The point I want to make is that you might distrust media in the west, but no one can say they spread falsehoods like their Russian counterparts. We would be very foolish to conclude our media is the same as theirs. That would be a dangerous mistake.

 

Truth: The First Casualty of War

Death of Truth, Trust and Distrust, Tyranny and Fascism, War, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

It is not clear who first said truth is the first casualty of war. What is clear is that whoever said it was a very smart person.  It might have been Samuel Johnson for he was a very wise man and he said, “’Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.‘ (from The Idler, 1758). The second part of that statement is also important—the insidious effect of credulity is very important. Many of us have been conditioned to believe without evidence or reasoning. Critical thinking matters and the abandonment of critical reasoning is vitally important. We learned it in the pandemic and we are learning it again in the war.

Apparently in Russia about 2/3rds of the country support the war against Ukraine. Of course, they do that based on false information. Most of them don’t know the truth. They believe what they are told.

Many people in Canada and the US ask how is it possible that so many Russians believe the propaganda?

Are we any better?  It is estimated that in the US about 1/3rd of the people believe that last presidential election was “stolen” by Joe Biden, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence to support this claim and it flies in the face of any critical thinking. As Ioffe said, “it turns out it is not that difficult to fool people.”

I heard a fascinating interview with Russian born American journalist Julia Ioffe who is an acknowledged expert on Russia. She has spent a lot of time there and has friends she can trust and call to find out what is going on now. Her articles have appeared in many respected journals including some of my favourites.

In Russia people have learned that people who ask questions or protest the government actions are often severely punished. Added to that, Russians have suffered a lot of trauma. Over 50 million Russians including Ukrainians, lost their lives in wars, terror campaigns, and pogroms between 1914 and 1945. In the 4 years the Russians fought World War II they lost 15% of their population. This was after waves of political arrests. As a result Russians are among the most cynical and distrusting of all people. This includes Russians who have moved to Canada. I have talked to some of those Russians hers in Manitoba and I understand this.  They have good reason to distrust their governments. That distrust spills over to our governments too.

Ioffe pointed out that we should remember as Ioffe said, “Russians have been living under an ever tightening noose of censorship for 22 years. So, they have been conditioned not to question what they are told.” What excuse do Americans and their Canadian fellow travellers have?

Distrust is dangerous for democracies and standard fare for autocracies.