Filenews 15 April 2024 - by Andreas Kluth
As America's support for Ukraine hangs in the balance, so does its commitment to truth versus falsehood and its determination to stand up to Russian disinformation. The good news, after a lot of bad news, is that the resistance for the truth, for Ukraine, is mobilizing now, finally, even within the Republican party in Congress.
The troll and bot armies under Russian President Vladimir Putin have been waging active information warfare against the US and other Western democracies for years. And Putin's tactics seem to be working: Consider the aid package to Kiev that has been frozen in Congress for half a year, and is now likely to come back to the table within weeks. One reason for the delay, which is costing Ukrainian lives every day, is that Putin's lies have confused the minds of some Republicans in Congress — few in number, but enough to cause trouble and deadlock.
Distortions of reality
Distortions of reality include Kremlin messages suggesting that Ukraine and its president are corrupt or even responsible for the war, that Putin isn't really bad, just like his invasion, and that all sorts of other problems — Joe Biden, the southern border, whatever you want — are more urgent. The most influential "useful idiot" (an art term dating back to Soviet times) regurgitating Putin's narratives is, of course, former President Donald Trump, who is increasingly tweeting direct instructions to his MAGA friends in Congress.
That's why it's encouraging to see Republicans like Michael McCall, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, openly admitting that "Russian propaganda has reached the U.S., unfortunately, and infected much of my party's base." Such honesty allows other Republicans to speak. Representative Michael Turner, chairman of the intelligence committee, said McCall's assessment was "absolutely true" and that some of the Russian memes "we hear uttered even on the floor of the House."
Highlighting and dismissing disinformation from any source is the only way to counter this threat, as another Republican, Ronald Reagan, demonstrated in the 1980s. Back then, long before most of us went online, the Kremlin's disinformation machines were already up and running, as the New York Times has documented. All KGB agents had to devote at least 25% of their time to deception campaigns to make Americans hate and distrust each other and their government. And one of these KGB agents was the young Vladimir Putin.
A prime example was Operation Infektion. In 1983 the KGB placed an invented narrative in an unknown Third World newspaper, Patriot Magazine in New Delhi. The lie was that the U.S. government had engineered the AIDS virus to kill black Americans and homosexuals. Then the Soviets waited for a few years. Eventually, they published the same story in a Moscow newspaper, citing Patriot Magazine as the source. They also found useful idiots (again, they really use this term) in the form of a married couple in East Germany, who gave a scientific background to fabricated history. Newspapers in Africa and other regions, including the United States, reported the report. The climax came in 1987, when Dan Rade read the allegation on CBS's evening news.
The difference between then and now is that Reagan confronted Mikhail Gorbachev for lying, and the Soviet leader publicly apologized. The similarity is that even this recall does not prevent millions of people from believing in this nonsense to this day.
The same recipe
From the moment Putin became Russia's president and the freshly made social media of the Internet invaded our lives, the Kremlin has continued to level up its game. But the recipe remained the same. Moscow looks for pathologies in the target society (racial tensions, immigration concerns, or partisan polarization, say) and then manipulates distortions or lies to exacerbate them. He usually looks for some kernel of truth (e.g., a real pizzeria in Washington mentioned in an election email) and then builds a Big Lie on it (that the Democrats run a paedophile ring from the pizzeria in question). Russia always hides and denies its own role in spreading the lie, while letting useful idiots in the media or in the politics of the target society do the job of spreading. The overall goal is to make us divide among ourselves.
U.S. elections
This is how Moscow interfered, for example, in the 2016 US election and continues to interfere today, as revealed by the Washington Post, after obtaining internal Kremlin documents. The Russians instruct their trolls to impersonate Americans and create posts, videos or articles — often on social media accounts that are deleted as soon as misinformation spreads — to foment hysteria about immigration, inflation, crime or the Biden administration.
And, of course, the Kremlin wants to challenge Ukraine as a victim of Russian aggression and as a defender of its own freedom and the entire international order. Here is a related lie spread by the Kremlin. The Russians, through various intermediaries, placed a fabrication in an American online post that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had stolen American aid money to buy himself two luxury yachts. It was nonsense obviously. And yet, people, including the stupidest of the useful idiots, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that "whoever votes to fund Ukraine is funding the most corrupt money plan of any foreign war in the history of our country."
Trump
And where is Trump in all this? In 2016 he profited from Russian disinformation, although he may not have "conspired" with it. His Big Lie that there was "fraud" in the 2020 election is also something Russian trolls really like. His first impeachment focused on trying to pressure Zelensky to dig up dirt about Biden. After Putin attacked Ukraine in 2022, Trump called the invasion "genius." More recently, he has "encouraged" Putin to attack "offending" NATO countries (which he defines as those that don't pay enough for defense). And he boasted that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, using his supposedly unparalleled negotiating skills.
How he would do that is not clear. But his idea appears to involve forcing Ukraine to cede large portions of territory conquered by Russia, including Crimea and Donbas. How or why this would prevent Putin from rearming and regrouping and attacking again a few years later, in Ukraine or elsewhere, is unclear.
Zelensky
One person who remains remarkably disciplined in this geopolitical show is Zelensky. The Ukrainian leader knows that he needs the United States for his country to survive, but that Trump may well return to the White House. Aware of Russian infiltration into the American political system, Zelensky repeated the invitation to Trump to visit Ukraine. One can only hope that such a trip will lead Trump to a moment of truth or what Freudians call an "encounter with reality."
Performance – Editing: S. Ketidjian
