Putinformation

Traveling recently in what might be called “new frontline” states—Estonia, Ukraine, and Moldova—I was struck by the depth of concern I encountered about Russian propaganda. And not just propaganda aimed at the Russian population and neighboring countries. At a conference in Tallinn, a Politico reporter and experienced Russia hand who had just covered the parliamentary elections in Britain told me voters he’d interviewed in Wales and Scotland had brought up clearly identifiable pieces of propaganda spread by Russia’s state-owned global television and radio network, RT. In the United States, the State Department and Congress have been sufficiently concerned about the Kremlin’s worldwide propaganda offensive to advocate increases in budgets for U.S. public diplomacy, which includes international broadcasting.

And for good reason. The Russian propaganda machine is being credited with almost magical powers of penetration and persuasion. NATO’s military commander, General Philip Breedlove, has called it “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen.” David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the Washington Post, calls RT “darkly, nastily brilliant, so much more sophisticated than Soviet propaganda.”

Indeed, the global reach of Russian propaganda is impressive. RT, the flagship operation, broadcasts news and talk shows in five major languages with a potential audience of over 700 million people in 100 countries. It also garners a significant following on YouTube. In December 2014, RT announced that its family of YouTube channels had racked up 2 billion total views, besting such media titans as CNN and Al Jazeera by sizable margins. Launched last year, the Sputnik news network plans to broadcast in 30 languages in 34 countries.

Then there is the shadow army of Kremlin-paid Internet “trolls” who closely monitor social media as well as major Western news sites, ready to pounce on critics of the Kremlin. The aim of the Kremlin’s messaging, as one expert put it, is “not to persuade (as in classic public diplomacy) or earn credibility but to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods.” These outlets echo Kremlin narratives, while using conspiracy theories and anti-Western rhetoric to appeal to segments of their audience that are skeptical of official narratives, notably the far left and the far right.

Sold as an “objective” alternative to Western media expressing the Russian point of view, this is propaganda in the guise of factual reporting. “Question more” is RT’s official slogan. Naturally, RT never identifies itself as created and funded by the Russian government.

The overarching objective seems to be less to bolster the “Russia brand” than to degrade the reputation of the West and thus deny it the moral high ground. Yes, we are corrupt, yes, we are authoritarian, incompetent—but look at your own governments! At least we don’t lecture others! You won’t catch us pontificating about “democracy” and “human rights.”

Thus, when the CEO of the French oil company Total, who had vociferously opposed economic sanctions on Russia, was killed when his plane slammed into a snowplow operated by a drunken driver at a Moscow airport, Russian commentators asserted that he had been assassinated by the CIA.

Or try looking for information on the web about the growing presence of Russian nationals among ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq. You’ll find your way quickly to one of Russia’s most popular Facebook-style sites, VKontakte.ru. There you’ll see, pictured in the sidebar at the top of the page, a cartoonish Uncle Sam holding a baby jihadist clad in the familiar black uniform with a Kalashnikov on its back. The caption: “ISIS is a creation of America’s two-party system.”

This effort is generously funded. This year the Kremlin bankrolled RT to the tune of $400 million, while the global news agency Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) received $170 million. For comparison, Voice of America’s budget this year is $212 million and that of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty $104 million—in a country whose GDP is nine times Russia’s.

Generously funded, slick, and unconstrained by moral scruples, Russian propaganda nevertheless owes some of its ostensible success to a powerful factor not of its own making.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Secretary of State John Kerry complained that Moscow was guided by 19th-century ideas. But it turns out that when a 19th-century mentality clashes with a 21st-century one, it is the former that has certain advantages in the struggle to control the narrative—at least initially. This is because the dragon’s teeth of Russian propaganda fall into soil already prepared by postmodern attitudes, especially among the West’s political, media, and cultural elites.

Long before it got its name, postmodernism was anticipated by Friedrich Nietzsche’s two postulates: “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

This is hardly a coincidence. For if God be dead (and Nietzsche used God as a metaphor for a universal system of ethical imperatives) and, as a result, we have to choose our own personal ethics, then by definition one choice is no better than any other. No one is right or wrong, just different—“diverse,” as we would put it. And truth, which used to be considered the foundation of both virtue and beauty, is also relative.

By now several generations of elites in the United States and Europe have been reared on notions of morality and truth splintered into myriad personal choices. Writing in the New York Times four months ago, an American philosophy professor complained that students do not, as he put it, believe in “moral facts.” They recognize only “moral claims”: opinions that are true or not true only “relative to a culture.” (This should not come as a surprise: History, which used to teach these “moral facts” by example, is now also suspect as “constructed narrative,” a form of fiction.)

Even as it has weakened its moral defenses against propaganda, the West has been made intellectually vulnerable by postmodern epistemology, which is just as uncertain about what sources of knowledge are valid. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan taught in the 1960s. Fifty years later, the message is increasingly detached from the medium, words from those who utter them. As postmodernism postulates, “There is no author, there is only the text.”

There are “two sides to every story,” both presumed equally valid. Asked why the privately owned First Baltic Channel had chosen to air Russian television’s main newscast, Vremya, in prime time, in Latvia and Estonia, while Euronews, founded by the European Broadcasting Union of public service broadcasters, was on at 6 a.m. and midnight, the spokeswoman for the channel replied, “There is no such thing as objective fact.”

Did the U.S. government orchestrate 9/11? Twenty-three percent of Germans thought so, as did 15 percent of Italians. Seven years after the fall of the Twin Towers, between a quarter and one-fifth of Britons, French, and Italians told pollsters they had no idea who was behind the attack. Well, then: Did the CIA help the Ukrainians shoot down the MH 17 Malaysian airliner (as suggested by Russian propaganda)? Plausible. Did the Russian opposition kill its own leader, Boris Nemtsov, to embarrass Putin? Conceivable. Almost one in three Germans were reported last month to find Russia not responsible for the violence in Ukraine.

Relations between states are similarly affected. Whether in Minsk or Lausanne, promises and treaties are divorced from the credibility of the regimes that sign them, as if the word of a dictator were just as valid as the word of the freely elected and accountable leader of a liberal democracy.

With right and wrong derided as subjective value judgments, entire concepts seem to disappear—concepts civilization has relied on for millennia. “Just” wars and “aggression” are all but gone from the vocabularies of the elite Western media. Only “conflicts” remain—with the obvious corollary that both sides are equally at fault. So wishing for the “victory” of one side is not done in polite society. By contrast, “peace,” no matter how short-lived, fraudulent, or beneficial to the aggressor, is to be sought at any cost.

This creates an enormous disadvantage for the postmodern West: It wants peace; the other side wants victory.

There is what might be called a belief imbalance in the East-West struggle to control the narrative of past and contemporary events: As Yeats put it famously, one side lacks “all conviction,” while the other is full of “passionate intensity.” For while Putin’s propaganda flourishes amid the fragmentation and provisionality of postmodern thought, the Kremlin admits no relativity to the credo that guides its leader in his historic mission.

Putin gives every indication of believing passionately that Russia has never been wrong, only wronged. The end of the Cold War, as he sees it, is Russia’s equivalent of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles for Germany: the source of endless humiliation and misery. Following his favorite philosopher, Ivan Ilyn, Putin knows that the nefarious West plots against Russia, jealous of her incorruptible and saintly soul as well as her size, riches, and most of all exceptionalism, a God-given destiny and historic mission as the Third Rome, the light among nations. He believes that Russia’s very sovereignty is in danger, and Ukraine, in Putin’s words, is “NATO’s foreign legion.” With his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, he believes that he, Putin, is “the defender of Russians wherever they live,” and with his deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin, he proclaims that “there is no Russia without Putin.”

True, we are not in Cold War II. We don’t face a centrally directed global network of states and movements guided by a coherent millenarian ideology. But we ought not deceive ourselves regarding the time and effort it might take to prevail in our current confrontation with an ideologically inflamed, even messianic, highly personalistic autocracy that seeks to correct alleged historic “wrongs” and expand its “sphere of influence,” if necessary by invasion and annexation, and armed with 1,582 strategic nuclear warheads.

After all, the elites who fought Cold War I believed in the superiority of their political, economic, and cultural systems. They believed in liberty, human rights, and democracy as the foundation of human dignity, and they affirmed it with a depth of conviction that might appear out of place today. More important, the millions of voters who lent these leaders their support—over decades, freely and democratically—believed in these things as well.

In the end, the West is likely to prevail in the new confrontation with Putin’s Russia, whatever label history attaches to it, because eventually dignity and truth tend to prevail over dishonor and lies. This is what happened to the Soviet Union when its people withdrew their support from the regime.

But we ought to be aware of the considerable handicaps with which we enter the battle.

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