Saturday, March 05, 2022

Truth and lies in Putin's Russia

Truth, as they say, is always the first victim of war. But the sheer enormity of the porkies being spread in Russia boggle the mind. 

The country has already had at least eight years of highly-censored, state-directed media to drill Putin's idiosyncratic personal vision of the country and the world into the minds of the Russian public, and the propaganda has only intensified since the invasion of Ukraine. So, the Russians could be perhaps forgiven for being so gullible and credulous, brainwashed as they are. 

The Russian media is severely circumscribed in what they can report and how they can report it. Most of the main media organizations are owned by the federal government anyway, and they are specifically "obliged to only use information and data they have received from official Russian sources". Fake video footage, both sophisticated and sometimes embarrassingly unsophisticated, is commonplace on Russian TV and social media. Most Russians apparently have no idea that a full-scale war is taking place on their western flank, involving tens of thousands of soldiers and causing thousands of deaths on both sides.

Since the invasion began, most of the very few independent media outlets left in Russia have been closed down or severely censored; the Internet, particularly Facebook and Twitter, has been muzzled; hot-button words like "war", "invasion" and "attack" have been banned in news reports; and, most recently, the Russian Duma has passed a law criminalizing the intentional spreading of anything that Mocow considers "fake news", under pain of a 15-year prison sentence, leading to the suspension of Russian services by the BBC, CNN, CBS, Deutsch Welle, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, among others.

Consider just some of what the Russian people are being fed:

"Orwellian" doesn't even come close. Some or all of these things may or may not be Putin's actually beliefs, despite the internal inconsistencies, and that just makes it all the scarier.

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