Category Archives: War in Ukraine (2014)

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.

 

Fossil Fuels and Despotism go together like shit and flies

Climate change, Environment, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

 

In 2022 we in  the west have learned first hand about the ugly consequences of oil and gas addiction. That addiction can lead individuals and countries into some nasty places to deal with some nasty people.

 

Even British Prime Minster, Boris Johnson, not a shining genius, has come to understand that the addiction to oil by western countries, has brought us to disaster. Weaning off this challenge will be particularly difficult. This is especially painful for Europe which is heavily dependent on oil and gas from Putin who has used that money to disrupt Europe like it has not been disrupted since the Second World War. By the time the west had given 1 billion of aid dollars to fight Putin, Europe had paid Putin $35 billion for Russian oil.  Does that make sense?

 

In fact, Prime Minister Johnson made the revelation that he had realized the absurdity of this on a trip to Saudi Arabia  where he gone to try to persuade Arab countries to help out the west by increasing oil production. Of course, why would they do that? These countries liked the new higher oil and gas prices that had started to rise before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Naturally, after the invasion, those price rose even more sharply. It sucks to be us in the west. Literally. We were literally left sucking the hind teat.

 

Somebody who understands this is Bill McKibben of the organization 350.org and other activist organizations such as The Third Act, an environmental organization for those of us over 60.  He was interviewed by Mark Kelly on CBC radio’s The Current. He understood clearly that Boris Johnson was taking the wrong approach. It was the traditional approach, but it was badly out of date and all of us must come to understand that. More of the same is what has got us into so much trouble, and continuing that approach will lead us directly to our doom.

 

As McKibben said, “It’s a reminder that fossil fuel and despotism often go hand in hand.” I think a better metaphor would be so say, fossil fuel and despotism go together like shit and flies. As McKibben said,

“The War in Ukraine is not a war for fossil fuel in the way that so many of America’s Middle East adventures have been, but it very much a war about fossil fuel. Vladimir Putin couldn’t have built an army without it. 60% of his export earnings come from oil and gas. You can tell that by looking around your house for something to boycott. There’s nothing there. Maybe a bottle of vodka in the old liquor cabinet. That’s about it. His main weapon for 20 years has been the threat to turn off the taps to western Europe. If we are serious about standing up to Putin we have to figure out a way to end all of our dependence on oil and gas. It’s a global market and as long as we are depending on it, he and people like him, such as the King of Saudi Arabia, the Koch brothers, you name it, are more powerful than they deserve. “

 

For quite some time Alberta has argued that its oil is the only ethical oil. But really, that is like saying, I am ethical because I am better than Jack the Ripper. Not the most convincing argument.

 

The one good thing , as McKibben pointed out, is that this dependency is no longer necessary. “Thanks to science and engineering in the last 10 years, the price of renewable energy has dropped by about 90%! It’s now the cheapest source of energy on earth.”

 

McKibben said we could get off fossil fuels right now if we set our minds to it. We have to act like we are in a war. And we are in a war so that should be easy.  Business as usual, is no longer a viable option. Those, like Boris Johnson who are pushing that are continuing to lead us to disaster. They are only postponing it a little bit. We have to avoid the vested interests that want to keep us hooked. That’s what pushers do. But there is a better way.

It won’t be easy. Europe relies on Russia for about one third of its oil and about 40% of its natural gas. We need more than good intentions to get to the heavenly city of release from this dependency. What do we do to get there?

McKibben  says investments by the American Energy Department have been so successful that millions of heat pumps could be produced in a few months. The technology is there. All we need is the will. And like all addictions, we must resist what appears to be an easier route, but this is really the way to ruin. Heat pumps are really just air conditioners you can also run in reverse. The technology is not complicated, according  to McKibben. They could be installed in Europe quickly. North Americans have a lot of spare capacity and  can also produce a lot of insulation, also needed in Ukraine if we want to resist this addiction controlled by cartels. We in North American should do more than produce weapons Ukraine needs weapons right now, but they also need other weapons to fight their enemies. One of those is to voluntarily cut the oil pipelines depriving their enemy of the funds it needs to oppress them. Only in such a way can people effectively get free from the oppression of people like Putin and his ilk.

Europe and all of us in the developed world must learn there is a better way.

 

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.

 

 

Russian Disinformation

Death of Truth, Democracy, Trust and Distrust, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Russian weaponized the techniques of disinformation it had used in the first war in Ukraine in 2014. in the Brexit campaign and in the 2016 US election campaign. No doubt those astounding successes, and the lack of resistance from the west led Putin to believe western democracy was weak and ready to have it feathers plucked

 

According to Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian

 

“From 2014 to 2016 Putin had carte blanche across our entire information system. So in St. Petersburg he set up the Internet Research Agency  and we know that thousands and thousands of trolls and fake accounts flooded out information system. And that is the thing that really confused people and distracted people. It wasn’t that Putin set out to support Trump,  or had any political agenda, in 2014 it was simply about spreading confusion, making us more divided, increasing polarization. It was divide and rule if you think of it like that.”

 

He had learned what Hannah Arendt had said. It was enough to sow confusion. The Americans and English would do the rest. Putin must have been stunned at how easy it was and how successful that was it. Even after the FBI marvellously exposed his nefarious efforts, Americans were again deflected from the real issue. First, the Democrats smelled the blood of Donald Trump in the water and attacked him in a misguided frenzy. Not that I think he was innocent. They thought this would be enough to get him impeached. Then Trump hit back saying there was no collusion. When the Mueller report did not come out clearly that there had been collusion, the Republicans, were also distracted and began a similarly misguided frenzied attack on Democrats that deflected attention away from the real issue, the fact that a foreign power and the second most militarily powerful country in the world had interfered with a free election and then nobody seemed to care. He got away it completely!  Both Democrats and Republicans failed to attack the real wolf at the democratic door in their unseemly haste to attack each other. Putin perhaps without knowing how he did it, found an open path to the heart of the democracy he wanted to attack and no one was concerned about what he was doing. Each side was only concerned about what the other side was doing. No one raised a finger to stop the Russians or even criticize them. Putin must have been thunderstruck at this luck or at the foolishness or the Americans or more likely, both. It was the same in England. The opposite parties hated each other they ignored the real danger—Putin.

 

Besides the astonishingly polarization of the country, Putin was aided and abetted by the fact that the international media giants were private closed black boxes that allowed Putin to operate in complete darkness without public objection. As Cadwalladr said,

 

“we had no idea what was going on inside them and it was only in 2016 that the FBI started telling us what was going on, and only after the election journalists and academics slowly picked out the truth of what was happening. It was through the social media platforms that Putin launched this information war against Ukraine and against us. And those social media companies can still be used in that way!”

 

This attack had huge societal impacts, it was discovered and yet it was largely ignored as Americans in America and the English in the UK concentrated on attacking each other rather than the much more vicious foreign enemy that was eating their vital innards.

 

Both sides used language to minimize what Russia had done. In the US and UK the referred to Russian “meddling” in the elections. It was really a declaration of war. As Cadwalladr said,

 

“this was a military strategy and it was carried out in many ways by military intelligence! The GRU which is Russian military intelligence, they are the ones who carried out the hack and leak on Hillary Clinton emails for example. Those intelligence GRU officers are there now playing a fundamental war in Ukraine now. It was those same GRU intelligence officers who helped to poison a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British intelligence agencies Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, in the city of Salisbury England. Again, the English resistance to this was minimal. Again, Putin must naturally have reached the conclusion that the West was weak and ready to be plucked.”

 

As Cadwalladr said, “this was Putin using an unconventional chemical weapon on British citizens in Britain and he got away with it.” We here in Canada are fairly familiar with how many Americans did not want to hear about Russian interference in the US because they saw this as an attack on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency and saw all such claims of election interference as Democrats looking out for their own interests. The same thing happened in the UK. People who supported Brexit did not want to hear any allegations that Russians interfered with that referendum because they did not want to see that vote as illegitimate either. In both cases the “winners” did not want the distraction of foreign interference. In both cases Putin learned a very valuable lesson, namely, to insert himself inside the widening polarized rifts between conservatives and liberals in both countries, was easy and very profitable. In each country, Putin was handed a golden opportunity to wreak mischief and havoc on account of the host countries polarized populous!

 

Carole Cadwalladr pointed out that,

 

“All the way through this reporting we see this really clear line Brexit, Trump, and Russia. And there is a triangulation there. There is a straight and clear line through multiple individuals and organizations and via the tech platforms…I America the Mueller report got bogged down in this question did Trump collude with Russia? And actually the big takeaway from the Mueller report should have been Russia successfully attacked America! This was a military attack and it got away with it. And that same attack was across the information systems which we all use and in that year 2016 they were completely unprotected! And in Britain we have been blind to waking up to that. The US had this massive investigation by the FBI and Congressional committees. In Britain we have had not one single investigation. There was one report and Boris Johnson personally tried to suppress that report.

 

In both countries the political parties think the issue is about politics. It is not about politics. It is about power and Putin. Of course this weak response from the UK and the US emboldened Putin and he is now using the same techniques in Ukraine but not with as much success.

 

Unfortunately, Cadwalladr has been attacked by a wealthy businessman in the UK for libel based as a result of her reporting. It has cost her 1 million pounds and 2 &1/2 years of her life. She was lucky she got crowd source funding. But such efforts have a chilling effect on the search for truth. And that is now common place around the world. It is really truth itself that is under attack. In the US CNN was targeted as a news organization as “fake news” by Trumpsters. The terminology of fake news has been weaponized. These are dark times. This is what happens when we acquiesce with attacks on truth.

And attack on truth is a declaration of war.

Putin, Young People and the Information Wars

Death of Truth, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Recently, Vladimir Putin has indicated he may try to ban What’s App and Instagram as “extremist organizations.”  He has already banned Facebook and Twitter.  Will this work? Can he do it?

 

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr of The Guardian has said this is like “trying to ban oxygen.”  She is the one who exposed the harvesting of social media data for political gain commonly referred to as the Cambridge Analytica scandal. She knows a thing or two about these issues (unlike your faithful scribe). She talked to Hariharan “Hari” Sreenivasan on the PBS television show Amanpour & Co. She recently wrote that Putin had lost the social media war. That came as a surprise to me. For years now, people like me have seen Putin as this powerful magic man who manipulates the social media for his own nefarious purposes.

 

We came to that impression in part because of the joint against truthful media in and about 2014 when he very successfully managed to spread disinformation with great success against Ukraine in the war Russia waged with them at that time and his disinformation campaign he launched very successfully in the United States to play mischief not just with the 2016 political campaign in that country but also mischief on a broader scale. As she said, Putin was considered “the master of the dark arts of disinformation.” Three was solid justification for that reputation as a result in particular of those two campaigns.

 

As Cadwalladr explained “that’s because for years he was allowed to operate in darkness inside the social media platforms.”  As she said,

 

“Since then we have seen him burst into the light, performing moves that Stalin might have done. In 2022 however there is no nuance to this, no subtlety to this. He is shutting down Facebook, he has criminalized journalism. Today we’ve learned that they’re looking to make Instagram and WhatsApp and calling them ‘extremist organizations and looking to ban them. These are the actions of a totalitarian.”

She compares Putin unfavourably to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who has shown that he is a master of modern media.

Putin is operating under the idea that in 2022 you can stop information from spreading and that is increasingly difficult. Of course, millions of Russians get their information from official Russian television, so to that extent information is controlled by the Russian state, but the fact is many people get information from many other sources. Young Russians for example, never go to Russian television for news. They know it is all fake news. Unfortunately, they tend to think all news is fake news. This is very dangerous. We have learned this during the pandemic. We need to know truth can be found.

As a result, Cadwalladr says

 

“as a result we are going to increasingly see an intergenerational war in Russia. There are a lot of older people who do get their news from television that is wholly pro-Kremlin propaganda…But this thing of banning Instagram is going to have a huge impact because that’s how young people communicate. You know in Russia WhatsApp and Instagram and their Russian social media platforms are the air that they breathe and the idea that you can just cut off the flow of that information overnight and people are just going to accept it is a whole other thing coming.”

 

People in the west, particularly to those of us who pay little attention to what is going on outside North America have not noticed that there has been a hot war going on in Ukraine for years. It has been going on since 2014 and the world has forgotten. Even when the Americans were impeaching Donald Trump in 2021 and railing about him holding back Congress approved military aid to the Ukraine in order to squeeze President Zelensky to dig up dirt on the son of his political rival, Americans paid little attention to the fact that this money being held back was vitally important to Ukraine. They seemed solely concerned with attacking Trump. I blame the left in America for this. They were blinded by their zest for getting rid of Trump that they missed this important fact.  It is crazy to think that the west is now opening up to the fact that Russia is now invading Ukraine when he has been there for 8 years already doing exactly that. Frankly, it shows how myopic and self-centred the west really is.

 

In fact, as Cadwalladr noted,

“At exactly the time Putin did that in Ukraine he began that in America and in the west. We know that in detail because of the FBI’s investigation. It catalogues that. We really have to understand that this was a joint military assault on Ukraine and the west at the same time!”

In that war in Ukraine, in 2014, before it sent in troops, Russian used and perfected impressively effective disinformation techniques. This is very ably described by Timothy Snyder in his brilliant book Road to Unfreedom. The first thing Russia did in 2014 was to “penetrate. Ukraine’s information systems and then spread Russian propaganda to destroy reality to confuse people. It did exactly what Hannah Arendt said fascists did. To them, she said, it was not necessary to convince people that their propaganda was true, only to sow confusion for the purpose of rendering them incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. That was enough to give Russia control over Ukraine in 2014 and it has never stopped in that war against truth.

 

The war against truth is not an academic notion of little importance to people other than those interested in philosophy. The war on truth is a fascist assault on freedom and democracy! The Ukraine War of 2022 is a continuation of that war by other means.