INFORMATION, disinformation, censorship and propaganda. With the advent of social media the battle for competing realities is laid bare. This is not however the case with the one view orthodoxy of the mainstream media news outlets.
One question you can usefully ask is who exactly is in charge of or ‘curating’ the different narratives? Whose interests does the dominant narrative suit? In the case of the Ukrainian Russian war it is hardly British interests, which makes the account that’s shouted out across Parliament and over all the front pages – West Good/Russia Bad, unless we stand up to Putin we are all appeasers – all the more unnerving.
As one former British Army Office, Jonathon Riley (writing elsewhere in these pages today) put it to me, it reflects ‘a total loss of sense of proportion and a ramping up of the sort of provocation that has driven Putin to where he now is. There are a lot of pretty unpleasant people in Ukraine as well as in Russia; many will doubtless come here bringing organised crime with them. War in Europe? Those who are baying for it are those who have never seen it.’
Despite this reality, facing down Putin has become an overnight orthodoxy that brooks no argument or investigation. Putin is the new Hitler. That, I was told quite authoritatively yesterday by a revered right of centre journalist, is the case. It was Putin who had broken treaties, he said, it was Putin who, like Hitler, was using the same ‘ethnics’ excuse to invade and push forward his frontiers. There was nothing that the West had done wrong except try to embrace the East European countries once under the Soviet yoke, and not to act decisively enough when Russia invaded Georgia. Over and out. That Russia had legitimate concerns, even if Putin was taking advantage of the power vacuum in the White House, was not conceded at all. That Putin (and Russia) feels naked without the buffer zone the post-1945 Soviet empire provided, that the Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008 announced that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of the alliance, that there has been significant Pentagon and other meddling in the Ukraine in recent years, are simply not acknowledged.
This is perhaps why the news reporting for this war, based as it is on limited and selective information with minimal perspective, rings so hollow; as also did Zelensky’s ‘historic address’ as The Times described it, ‘evoking Churchill and Shakespeare’, which catalysed a parliamentary standing ovation of virtue signalling note only.
Furthermore what the binary picture of West Good/Russia Bad excludes, in its entirety, is the role and interests of the new globalist post-democratic order, its elites, its alignments and power. To understand this, or to get any alternative to the MSM’s establishment orthodoxy, we have to turn to social media and the information war being fought there.
The good news is that over the last two years a number of ‘go-to’ substack sites have emerged that present independent perspectives and analysis. Eugyppius is one. His most recent post, Ukraine and the Global American Empire, is an example of a very different way of looking at global politics, one that sensible analysts and reporters must at least acknowledge.
Most importantly he sets the parameters of the conflict as within or part of what he calls the post-political, post-national order which, for better or worse, America is at the heart of. He explains that the western globalists who dominate this don’t just hate Russia but also count ‘us’ – the dissidents, vaccine refuseniks, lockdown sceptics, Canadian truckers, Canberra protesters, Trump supporters – as their enemies too:
‘They have a kind of myopia for internal political dissidents; we are the unaligned domestic element, Russia is the unaligned international element, and so when Donald Trump is elected to the presidency, this must be, for them, the result of Russian interference.’
Most of what is happening becomes obvious, he concludes, as soon as you step outside the crazy media framing and observe things as they are.
You can read the full article here.
