Putin’s Dangerous Blend of Propaganda and Hypocrisy

If democracy is a corrupt ‘Western’ concept, why pretend what you’re doing is democratic?

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Vladimir Putin. (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images.)

Vladimir Putin is a murderer and tyrant. He’s also a hypocrite.

“It is no coincidence that the West claims that it is its culture and worldview that should be universal,” Putin explained last week at a pro-Putin Moscow think tank, the Valdai Discussion Club. His remarks echoed previous statements of his worldview, which many of his apologists—at home and abroad—take to be a very serious thing.

In July, he declared that “a new stage in world history” is coming, spelling the end of “the model of total domination” by the West. In 2019, he told the Financial Times that the “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose.”

Putin has long propped up his rule by claiming that the West was at war with Russia. So that’s not new. His more recent rhetoric, however, is pitched at explaining the catastrophic failure of his Ukrainian invasion.

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  1. Calvin Harris

    How can Fox tolerate having Carlson generate opinion gleefully used to buttress Russian propaganda? Last night, one of them actually corrected Tucker’s facts against their own interest. He is making Bertrand Russel and all the original Fellow Travelers look like pikers.

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  2. Pohl

    Sounds about right, Jonah. I always appreciate a good takedown of scumbag dictators.

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    Ed P

    I think I’ve recently come to understand this conflict, Putin’s motivations and strategy. Please give this reading a shot as I feel it is vital to our national security to recognize the awful game he is playing. The answer is making our liberal democracy work again by realizing compromise is not only acceptable, it is the only solution to domination of one side over the other.

    Putin wages WW3 against us and the West currently. The hot war in Ukraine is not the main front but it is a vital one of course.

    The main front of the war is US elections, with other fronts in other democracies elections. He has already tainted the Republican party with the seeds of fascism and the signs are everywhere now, from a coup attempt, to paramilitary violence to violence against politician’s families, to total disrespect for voting results.

    Fascism is here.

    And this is Putin’s game. With mutually assured nuclear annihilation making hot war between great powers incredibly risky and so far, off the table, Putin’s former soviet security apparatus innovated some key new tools and weapons for the 21st century. They’d actually trained these on Ukraine, with Mr Manafort himself to help elect an easily corruptible goon. Sound familar?

    But when democratic protests toppled his democratically elected agent of influence in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, Putin felt the post WWII world order had been violated.

    He knew the western liberal establishment formed a victorious coalition with the Soviets to defeat fascism and this would seal the security arrangement until the next world war: a partnership of western liberal democracies with authoritarian security partners Russia and China.

    So Putin perceived democracy creeping East as a direct attack. Mr Goldberg is absolutely correct about all the hypocrisies - Mr Putin needs to tell himself some tall tales to justify all that tyranny. But he is fundamentally rational and quite effective, despite his biases.

    So he turned his new innovations on the USA. Using his intelligence services to “Watergate” every race and spill the results publicly to benefit their strongman candidate, Putin could lay a finger on the scales of our elections. With this Putin helped to seat Mr Trump, with Mr Manafort’s helpful thumb drives of polling data and polling strategy passed to his Russian spy handler to coordinate strategy and messaging with those who know Americans fears and biases and dreams best - our political campaigns with those with no boundaries - post soviet intelligence services.

    Having helped to elect an easily corrupted strongman, a walking pile of ego and greed and previous bad behavior, grievance and the rest, the opportunities for a kgb agent to exert influence over Trump are comically grand. He is so easily manipulated by his ego, Howard Stern would get him to say the most outrageous things on the air. A trained KGB officer like Putin could shape him even without a tangible, nefarious link, particularly because he is fundamentally a fascist far-right pig. But who knows what are the mechanisms of influence aside from some Russians? It is just crystal clear that exists from their behaviors. And he went about punishing the left wing, trolling and insulting approximately half the population as a central feature of his presidency. When Russian spycraft wasn’t enough to secure an electoral victory, Russia pushed the fascists to serve their mutual interests and attempt a coup. But thank goodness, Biden, as uninspiring as he may be, displaced Trump.

    Unfortunately the conservative establishment has mostly stood by Trump’s Republican party, if not Trump himself. Unfortunately this has resulted in the party being totally overtaken by those who would not oppose a fascist takeover. I admit, it must be far more difficult to see from one’s own side of the aisle, but this has clearly now occurred. The party has dismissed Liz Cheney for example, for daring to tell the truth about a coup attempt by this same fascist contingency. The takeover is complete. If you remain a Republican much longer, it makes you more a supporter of fascism than conservatism. They are clearly no longer seeking to conserve the Constitution. This is something darker, and I warn you if you don’t hop off now, it may consume you.

    Meanwhile, Putin has another important new weapon of influence - the internet. Merged with sophisticated psychological manipulation expertise and population control developed over decades of Soviet rule, and some nifty new AI algorithms to impersonate Americans and calculate positions that would divide us further. Any way they could widen our rifts and poor sand in grievances and work either side of the aisle, they do.

    So if we really want to beat these authoritarian goons, we need to moderate and compromise- those of us remaining and willing to reach across the aisle - before one side captures permanent authoritarian power, toppling the liberal world order and handing Putin victory in ww3.Show less

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      Probably Wrong

      I agree with your prescriptions at least. Moderation and a return to stable compromise as a counterweight to the centrifugal forces of extremism are the right move.

      We are not in major thrall to Putinist influence campaigns, however. Driving Americans mad is in Russia’s interest, and their Internet Research Agency would love to claim that it has done so, but we’ve done a lot of this to ourselves. Residual tools of Soviet influence have endured and perpetuated the Cold War payloads of reflexive anti-Americanism that they were built to deliver, but all of this is a rounding error compared to the basic homegrown partisan animosity and extremism that we are dealing with.

      Putin’s war in Ukraine is a model for how well the Russian state can execute a complex operation with many moving parts. They aren’t supernaturally competent with their influence operations and merely corrupt and shambolic on the battlefield.

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        Ed P

        Fascism is all over this Republican Party . They just tried a coup attempt, and yet even as they’ve purged their party of any offenders that would dare complain, America is ready to hand them back Congressional power.

        It is befuddling to think folks think we have things so well lined up in the face of such glaringly obvious danger.

        We seem to be sleepwalking into easily preventable disaster…again.

        And again, the military front in Ukraine doesn’t mean much if political
        power is captured in Washington by fascist thugs, democracy is dead. Russia wins.

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  4. Pschneider_9332

    Battles may loom--may!--but the war is over...

    ...all over but the Americans thrashing about, in fulfillment of Obama's precise characteristization: Joe's preternatural ability to fffk things up...unimaginably more.

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  5. Pschneider_9332

    "...rejection of racism is central to the contemporary West’s liberal ideals..."

    Says Goldberg the "liberalism" propagandist.

    Maybe Jonah needs to Duckduckgo CRT, BLM, the Biden regime's perverse and policy-informing doctrine of "equity," and our decades old pernicious and pervasive affirmative--for certain races--action dispensation.

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      This comment has been deleted

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      Brianboyce

      Perhaps I should take my own advice...but I will not for now. One shouldn't respond to Russian bots such as "Paul."

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      1. Pschneider_9332

        Do you have any idea how pathetic that tired smear is?

        You should have stuck to your lazy and unimpressive guns.

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          Brianboyce

          Amazing how realistic these things are these days! Bravo!

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    3. Ingenero.lux

      Look up “Classical Liberal” and compare to the modern use of Liberal as a label in the US intended to replace the old (then tarnished) label of Progressive. Using “liberal ideals”to indicate “classical liberal” ideals makes sense in context, as does discussing the “liberal order” which predates the more modern use of liberal to indicate Social Liberalism. The dictionary gives this sense as well. Maybe try Merriam-Webster first next time.

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        Ed P

        Agree.

        Liberals and progressives are not one and the same.

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      2. Pschneider_9332

        "Contemporary" liberal ideals.

        JG's designation.

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        1. Ingenero.lux

          No, the contemporary West’s liberal ideals, not the West’s contemporary liberal ideals. The contemporary West still holds to classical liberal ideals in the very senses Jonah is mentioning - Democracy, rule of law, human rights, rejection of racism. It’s like you didn’t read the context and just zeroed in on statements to let you pontificate on something he never said.

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            Ed P

            Agree except rejection of racism was an original concept, rather an original hypocrisy - the source of so much silly conflict about the merit of our founding. As if perfection by modern standards is the appropriate measure for 250 years ago.

            The wonder of liberalism isn’t the devotion to those original concepts tho - its the measured system to effect compromise in order to avoid domination of one group over the other.

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          2. Pschneider_9332

            "The contemporary West still holds to classical liberal ideals in the very senses Jonah is mentioning - Democracy, rule of law, human rights, rejection of racism."

            Did you mean to write that?

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  6. Chiefb

    I think Putin has been watching too much Tucker, given how much he has been ranting about these cultural issues. It is especially ironic how he complains about "cancel culture" in the west, given that in Russia you can get up to 15 years simply for protesting the war, over even merely calling it a war.

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    1. Christophergeis

      It seems to me the callouts to "cancel culture" are probably aimed primarily at Western audiences, rhetoric intended to give right-wingers a reason to think "Ah, he opposes what I oppose. The enemy of my enemy must be my friend!" This tactic worked well for the Soviets, but they targeted the political left instead of the right. Of course, for those in the West who think Vladimir Putin is their friend have made a huge mistake. First of all, even the worst proponents of what we call cancel culture in the West are NOT your enemy. They might not be your friends, and they might be your opponents, but "enemy" they are not. Someone who is perfectly happy to have his soldiers shell and torture civilians most certainly is.

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  7. Raincheck

    Putin is used to ruling by limiting access to information and having his declarations serve as reality in his country.

    It is less effective when he tries to use propaganda on the rest of the world, which has free access to information. It isn’t really useful in a war, where the facts of the ground trump whatever BS he is spreading.

    But he has ruled for so long in a world where what he says is treated as truth that he cannot understand that we see that he has no clothes on.

    He seems very unprepared for this moment. Unfortunately, he is backing himself into a corner which makes his actions unpredictable and dangerous.

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  8. Natty Bumpo

    Funny that ol' Vlad the Impaler reminds me of some other politicians....

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  9. Dennis.Trask.Z

    Black is white night is day etc etc etc

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    The Bell Tower

    You aren’t kidding. Get a load of this gem making the rounds on the right:

    https://vimeo.com/758297131

    It’s ironic that the right is now buying this crap given conservatism’s historic anti-communism. Putin’s like a Russian mutt. Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality sprinkled with a bit of Soviet communism and plenty of Ivan the Terrible. It’s a pretty good fit for the new nationalist right in America and that makes me sad.

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    1. Chiefb

      You must sacrifice your sons in this useless war, or you will have to run into lesbians on a plane!

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    2. Tom Doniphon

      Well then. Looks like the Russians are getting desperate.

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