Will the Next Generation Hate us?

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

How can anyone seeing what is happening in Ukraine not realize that all of the countries currently addicted to fossil fuels are on a dangerous path? Is it not obvious that we would all be better off getting off this addiction to fossil fuel?  Does the war in Ukraine not make this absolutely clear?

 

Fossils fuel is concentrated in a few places around the world. As Bill McKibben said in his recent interview by CBC radio,

“That means that the people who live on top of those places, end up with more power than they deserve. Vladimir Putin, the King of Saudi Arabia. It is not as if he is an interesting dude, he executed 81 people with a sword this week, but because he has a lot of oil everyone has to pretend he has something interesting to say. In my country the Koch brothers (one of whom has passed on to his rewards in heaven which he has paid for) our biggest oil and gas barons, biggest land holders in in Alberta’s tar sands in different periods, use up their winnings to buy up a political party to warp America’s political system.”

 

In Alberta they claim their oil is ethical, but sadly, such claims are dubious. Oil and gas money has for decades in Canada and elsewhere funded campaigns to convince us that climate change is not real so that we failed for those decades to do anything about the wolf at our door—i.e. climate change. In time, even those millions from that not so ethical source has proved ineffective at hiding the truth from us of what they have been doing. But in the meantime, those decades of delay have increased the costs of climate change mitigation immeasurably. Oil sector companies have spent a lot of money  to delay political change, while they have earned enormous extra profits as a result, and are leaving us holding the bag to pay for the consequences. I have a hard time agreeing to call that “ethical” activity.

 

Some of us old timers may escape paying the price of that delay by dying, but sadly, our grandchildren will not be so lucky and they will no doubt wonder why our generation could have been so stupid to buy the lies sold to us by unethical oil. Of course, those grandchildren of ours might not be convinced we were stupid. They might come to the conclusion that we were unjust in not bearing the price ourselves even though we got the benefits of cheap oil for those decades. Instead we made the innocent generation pay for our profligacy.

Let’s hope that when the time comes, we are in a place where we don’t hear what they say about us when they learn the truth!

What can an additional billion refugees do?

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Getting off of addiction to fossil fuels is the best weapon to fight the war in Ukraine but it can also be a weapon in the other vital war in which we are engaged—i.e. the war against climate change. 2 days after the war against Ukraine was launched by Russia, the International Panel on Climate Change issued their latest report on Climate Change  which the Secretary-General of the UN Antonio Guterres said was the single most dire study he had ever seen on climate change. And he has seen a lot.

 

First according to UN Secretary-General our current course, even if all promises countries have made are kept, which on the basis of past performance is highly unlikely, we are “firmly on track toward an unliveable world.”   The latest studies show that temperatures on earth will shoot past a key danger point unless greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than countries so far have committed.

 

The UN predicted that we could see a billion refugees from climate change over the next decades. Imagine the havoc a billion  refugees can inflict on our societies.

 

Right now the world is having a hard time trying to absorb the 4 plus million refugees coming out of Ukraine. Multiply that by 200 times! 2 &1/2 million refugees from Ukraine in Poland right now. More are coming. Middle East refugees and South American refugees are still looking for sanctuary. Where are all these people going to go?  Where will an additional billion go? Our world is headed for some serious problems but most of us are looking the other way. We don’t want to see what is in front of us, but blind eyes are seldom very helpful at avoiding problems.

 

We have been paying a lot of attention to the Ukraine, as we should. But our problems do not end there. Not by a long shot. We need to get off fossil fuel addiction or all of us are in trouble, not just Ukrainian refugees.

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.

 

 

It’s Dangerous to Believe your own Lies

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

 

The 2021 remake of the film Nightmare Alley was worth seeing for many reasons. I have blogged about it earlier  (Under the category of Movies), but did not comment on an important theme in the film. The movie is about the carnies in a carnival, and in particular about a conman who has impressive abilities to convince people of lies. He is what used to be called a magician but now we call an illusionist.  Bradley Cooper plays the part of Stanton Carlisle the illusionist.

 

One of the carnies, Molly, tells Stan about her father. She says, “he could charm his way out of anything.”  Stan replies, “A man after my own heart.” That is exactly what Stan is. Until he isn’t. Molly too deceives people into thinking she is being electrocuted. Naturally, they fall in love and Stan promises her, “I’ll give you the world and everything in it.” She should know better, but she falls for that illusion.  The most effective illusions of course are those which you want to be true.  Those illusions are almost impossible to resist. And illusionists take advantage of such desires. Like the illusion that after you die you will go to paradise in heaven. Let’s face it there is not much evidence to support it, but many people want it to be true, so they believe it.

 

In the film, the rich man Ezra badly wants Stan to materialize his dead wife.  He wants it so bad he will believe it. Stan asks Ezra if he thinks he can buy his wife back. Ezra’s answer was this: “Not to be crude. I know I can.” This is the deadly illusion of the rich man who believes he can buy anything.  When Stan says he wants Molly to help him to convince Ezra that his wife has materialized he says to Molly he is just helping Ezra to unburden his guilt: “Far as I can tell, that is what preachers do every Sunday.”

 

At one time Stan rescues the geek who was lying in a puddle dying in the rain. He knocks on a door hoping they will answer and save the geek. But Clem, who “owns” the geeks tells Stan to get out of the rain and join him, telling Stan to quit pretending that he cares about the geek. That is an illusion he suggests.

 

Pete who teaches Stan the art of becoming an effective illusionist warns him that the book he has prepared on those arts is dangerous. That’s why he quit. Pete says, “When a man starts believing his own lies—that he’s got the power—He’s got shut-eye. Because now he believes it’s all true.”

Despite this good advice, Stan eventually starts to believe his own lies.  That is hard to avoid when you are worshipped by adoring fans and your reasoning powers are numbed by the applause. When the illusionist believes he actually has the power to see the future  he is done. Eventually, Stan learns the truth that he has been deceived. Then he is in nightmare alley. He has become the pitiful “poor soul”—i.e. he is the geek.  Stan says, begging to be the geek, “I was born for it.”

Believing one’s own lies is particularly dangerous in times of war or pandemic.

That is exactly what may have happened to Vladimir Putin. Recently U.S. intelligence has reported that Putin has been misinformed by his military advisors about the poor performance of the military.  Would those advisors dare to lie to Putin? Or rather, would they dare not to lie to him? In any event, Putin seems to believe the lies of the Russian propaganda machine. He wants his own lies to be true.  He apparently, doesn’t even realize Russia is suffering grievous economic harms by his war. Does he also believe that Ukrainians are welcoming Russian soldiers as liberators? Does he believe his own lies?  Has he gone down Nightmare Alley? What a poor soul indeed.

 

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.

 

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.