Monday, March 7, 2022

Seeing Clearly Through War’s Fog

 


  Allegedly a captured Russian lieutenant colonel, in a Ukrainian propaganda clip

 

Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative


Seeing Clearly Through War’s Fog

I imagine that most Russians support their government in this war. But if they don’t, look at what happens to them if they dare to speak out:

 

Take a look at this incredible video made allegedly of three captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine. This is war propaganda, of course, so caveat emptor. And it is wrong to compel soldiers to make propaganda statements against their own government in times of war. That said, I don’t see the slightest sign of duress here, or fear. 


If you don’t have time to watch the entire 22-minute video, start here, at the 7:56 mark, and listen to what Lt. Col. Dmitry Astrakhov in the middle says. He comes across as deeply sorry for what he and his fellow Russian soldiers have done to the Ukrainians. The officer speaks plainly, saying that he and the rest of the Russian people have been propagandized into hating Ukrainians and believe that they (the Russians) were participating in an operation to free Ukraine from the yoke of Nazism. Listening to him, I thought about this passage from Live Not By Lies, from an interview I did in 2019 with a Russian Orthodox priest:

Father Kirill was thirty-three years old when the Soviet Union fell. This man who grew up in the culture of official lies, and who has given his life to maintaining the historical memory of Bolshevik crimes, emphasizes that propaganda did not die with the USSR.

“Despite the fact that there’s so much information available, we see that so much propaganda is also available. Think of what’s happening now with Ukraine,” he says, referring to the armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Kiev government.

“We have seen the way TV changed us Russians from thinking of them as our family to being our enemies,” he says. “The same methods from the communist era are being used. People today have a responsibility to search out more information than what they are offered on TV, and to know how to look critically on what they’re reading and seeing. That’s what is different now than before.”

His point was that the cultural memories Russians have of closeness with Ukrainians are being erased thanks to propaganda.

So I am primed to believe this video because it fits what I have been told in the past by a source I know and trust. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that there is more to this video than meets the eye. Dutch analyst Henk van Ess breaks the video down, and casts serious doubts on its credibility (though not definitively debunking it).

I’m posting the video not because I think it is credible (though I believe it might be), but rather because it’s a great example of why the truth is so difficult to grasp in this war. Good propaganda is built on truth. I know it is true that the Russian people have been propagandized for years against Ukraine. I’m also against this war. Therefore, though the real audience for this clip is the Russian public, it is being widely shared on the Internet outside Russia. If this is real, Astrakov and the other two are dead men if they ever return to Russia, so what they’ve done is very brave. On the other hand, it’s almost too perfect.

How can any of us know if this is real or not? We could say the same thing about so much. It is remarkable to follow social media, and to see how enraged so many people are, on both sides of this war, by anyone questioning the narrative that critics prefer.

Here is one effect of important people believing certain narratives:

Sen. Manchin gullibly believed Zelensky’s claim that if Kyiv falls, so might the rest of Europe — and because of that, he’s not willing to rule out a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine, even though that would mean World War III. I have been assured by pro-Ukraine readers in the comments section of this blog that nobody serious believes we should impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. But there you have one of the most important Senators in Washington declining to rule it out, because he believes a scary story that President Zelensky told him.

And you know that at least two former NATO Supreme Commanders last week endorse the no-fly zone proposal. On Friday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham took to social media to call for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. People are losing their minds, and drawing us all closer to nuclear war. What’s particularly bizarre to me is how many Americans, who have no dog in this fight, seem so eager to join in it. Our country has been at war for over twenty years, and lost both of the major conflicts we started (yes, having turned Iraq into a Shia puppet state of Iran is a loss). And yet, as a dog returns to his vomit, here we go again.

On Saturday morning I accepted the invitation of a Hungarian friend to join him at the Rudas Baths, an Ottoman-era thermal spa down by the Danube. It was really wonderful. We simmered like dumplings for two and a half hours in the pools fed by thermal springs. There were others there, both men and women, and lots of conversation. Amusing to think about how many times over the centuries men (only men were allowed until sometime in the 20th century) gathered there to bathe and talk about politics and war.

My Hungarian friend — I’ll call him Gabor — lived for many years in Britain, and holds dual citizenship. Like most Hungarians I know, he is very, very worried about this war. He is no fan of the Russians — members of his family fled Communism in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion — but said how much he hates the moral panic that is causing Western cultural institutions and others to cancel Russian artists and culture. He said that no country has given the world more cultural greatness than Russia, and that we could not understand ourselves as human beings without the gifts of the Russians.

He’s right about that. I fully stand with him in opposing and deploring cancel culture turned against Russian artists, writers, musicians, and others. It is precisely in a time like this when all of us need the testimony of beauty and humanity, and truth communicated to us through beauty. Rachmaninoff doesn’t make the bombing of Kharkiv okay, but the bombing of Kharkiv doesn’t negate the greatness of Rachmaninoff. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington don’t make Hiroshima and Nagasaki go down easier, but those twin horrors in no conceivable rational universe negate the greatness of those American musicians. Think, people!

Gabor is also disgusted by what he regards as the West’s hypocrisy. He went on a tear about the UK.

“London is the money-laundering capital of the world,” he said. “But now they’re going to lecture the rest of the world about morality, and think that because their prime minister speaks so many languages and went to Eton they have credibility.”

Why is it, Gabor asked, that Russians have “oligarchs” but Americans have “billionaires”? “Jeff Bezos is the biggest oligarch on the planet,” he said.

Well, the difference could be in how the rich made money in the two societies. Bezos didn’t make his fortune by cozying up to power-holders and exploiting those connections to get rich. Nevertheless, I take Gabor’s point: everybody knows that the superrich, whether on Wall Street or in the tech sector, run our country, and always have. Ukraine’s Zelensky, by the way, is a true hero for the way he has conducted himself in this war, but do not forget that despite his public stance as an enemy of oligarchical corruption, the Pandora Papers revealed him to be a hypocrite.

What brought this up was my mentioning Viktor Orban’s recent interview in which he said:

We know what the world is like under Anglo-Saxon dominance. But we don’t yet know what the world will be like when there’s Chinese dominance. One thing is for sure: the Anglo-Saxons want the world to recognise their position as morally right. For them it’s not enough to accept the reality of power; they also need you to accept the things that they think are right. The Chinese have no such need. This will definitely be a major change in the coming decades.

This is what set Gabor off on the subject of how the West cloaks its own exercises of power in morality. We talked for a bit about how distorting the morality lenses are when it comes to recognizing vital national interests. Nobody wants a totally amoral foreign policy, but at the same time, a policy that is primarily driven by moral concerns, absent any other, is dangerous. Think about how the US relates to Saudi Arabia. That is a highly immoral regime, the Saudis’, but if we don’t do business with them, we would be in serious trouble. I’ve written here before about how I once spoke to a retired senior US diplomat who served in Saudi, and he told me that the unhappy truth is that the al-Saud family is the most liberal force in the country.

I am not home in America, so I have no access to US television, and outside of the newspapers, I don’t know what the narratives being presented to the American people are. You tell me, Americans: are narratives like this one, which faults the US for meddling in Ukraine’s internal politics to overthrow the elected pro-Russian leader in 2014, seeing the light of day? If not, why not? Do Americans even care? We know that the state media in Russia only offers a single narrative about all this. But see, we are a liberal democracy, one that cares about free speech, and an open exchange of ideas, because that’s the only way we can find the truth. Right?

No wonder Gabor thinks we’re all a bunch of hypocrites. David P. Goldman (“Spengler”) writes a piece about how the world is sleepwalking into a 1914-like catastrophe. Excerpt:

We look back to 1914 in horror, and wonder how the leaders of the West could have been so pig-headed. Nonetheless, we are doing it again today.

That should be an object lesson for today’s Ukraine crisis. Vladimir Putin acted wickedly, and illegally, by invading Ukraine, but also rationally: Russia has an existential interest in keeping NATO away from his border. Russia will no more tolerate American missiles in Kyiv than the United States would tolerate Russian missiles in Cuba.

The United States could have averted a crisis by adhering to the Minsk II framework of local rule for the Russophone provinces of Eastern Ukraine within a sovereign Ukrainian state but chose instead to keep open Ukraine’s option to join NATO. That was rational, but also stupid: It backed Putin into a corner.

There is no excuse for Putin’s action, but there is an explanation that’s similar to one that applied to his forbears of 1914: Putin chose to attack before the West had the opportunity to arm Ukraine with sophisticated weapons that would raise the future cost of military action.

It’s a thoughtful analysis … but not one you’re going to find in a US newspaper, apparently. Goldman appended to his column, which appeared in Asia Times Online:

Note: The essay below was solicited by the editorial page of a major US newspaper, and then rejected because it did not fit its prevailing narrative. Not only are major channels of discussion closed off to dissenting views in the United States, but major news sources are blocked by internet service providers. Interfax, the post-Communist independent news service, is inaccessible from Western IP addresses, but accessible through Hong Kong, for example. The West is fighting for democracy, but using the propaganda and press control methods of authoritarian regimes.

Here’s a piece from the NYT about the frustration of Ukrainians whose family members in Russia don’t believe them when they tell them what’s happening in the war. Excerpt:

When Valentyna V. Kremyr wrote to her brother and sister in Russia to tell them that her son had spent days in a bomb shelter in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha because of the intensive fighting there, she was also met with disbelief.

“They believe that everything is calm in Kyiv, that no one is shelling Kyiv,” Ms. Kremyr said in a phone interview. She said her siblings think the Russians are striking military infrastructure “with precision, and that’s it.”

She said her sister Lyubov, who lives in Perm, wished her a happy birthday on Feb. 25, the second day of the invasion. When Ms. Kremyr wrote back about the situation on the ground, her sister’s answer via direct message was simple: “No one is bombing Kyiv, and you should actually be afraid of the Nazis, whom your father fought against. Your children will be alive and healthy. We love the Ukrainian people, but you need to think hard about who you elected as president.”

Ms. Kremyr said she sent photos from trusted media sites of mangled tanks and a destroyed building in Bucha to her brother, in Krasnoyarsk, but was met with a jarring response. “He said that this site is fake news,” she said, and that essentially the Ukrainian Army was doing the damage being blamed on Russians.

“It is impossible to convince them of what they have done,” Ms. Kremyr said, referring to Russian forces.

You might remember my writing here a while back about an interview I did back in 2002 with a Catholic seminarian, who told me about his unhappy experiences in his previous seminary full of sexually active gay seminarians, whose romps were known of and supported by the seminary administration. He told me that his mom and dad refused to believe him when he told them about it. They chose to believe their own son was a liar, because they were so bought in to the narrative that this kind of thing does not and cannot happen in the Catholic Church. Fortunately, the seminarian found a Catholic priest who well understood that he was telling the truth, and helped him transfer to a decent seminary.

I bring that up here to point out how susceptible we all are to propaganda narrative. If you are at all active on social media, you know how hard it is to dissent from what people want to be true about Russia and Ukraine, or even to question it. Never, ever, ever speak ill of Zelensky, who is Luke Skywalker to Putin’s Darth Vader! But:

Seriously, selling your mind out for the sweet emotional rush of narrative could get us into World War III. Read Harry Kazianis’s piece.  

Look, the major event that turned me against the Iraq War was learning back in 2005 from an anguished friend, a straight-arrow conservative Christian who was very highly placed in the US natsec world, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was straight-up lying to the media about what was happening in Iraq — and the press was dutifully reporting it, because this man was the Defense Secretary, after all. My friend was torn up over this. He hadn’t believed this kind of thing was possible. He had believed in his country and its leadership. He had believed in the war. And then he saw what was happening with his own eyes.

I’ll finish by bringing up a point that reminded me of my conversation with Gabor on Saturday:

Thomas Friedman seems giddy about the way that “the globalization of moral outrage” is bringing Russia to its economic knees. Okay, but remember: everything that is being done to Russia right now is one day going to be used on domestic dissenters. Mark my words.

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/narrative-seeing-clearly-through-fog-of-war/ 

 







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