Geo Political PR for Russia – Anglo Right Wing Media – US Propaganda Infrastructure

Article on Putin’s Russian attempt to influence US elections after the Brexit EU Referendum and the use of PR public relations agencies.

Relating to Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays who saw PR as in the same ecosystem as propaganda, but brings in the issue of ‘agents’ and foreign agent registers e.g. the US FARA Foreign Agents Registration Act. 

We have seen the outcomes of Brexit, Trump, Russian invasion of Ukraine and in Australia The indigenous Voice referendum promoted via right wing or conservative media, influencers and social media.

Further, it has had the desired effect on many of the faux anti-imperialist left who both accuse Ukraine via NATO of being an aggressor versus Russia, then many of the same support Palestine, but avert their gaze from Hamas?

Many, including the right, criticise right wing media cartels like Murdochs’ Fox News, influencers and ‘left’ media of following Kremlin talking points on Ukraine; see Fox News, GOP Republicans including the Koch Network’s ‘Freedom Caucus’, influencers like Farage and Bannon, hard right authoritarian leaders like Orban, Netanyahu etc.

It would appear that Putin’s people have been successful in adopting US Murdoch led right wing media e.g. Fox News, fossil fuel Koch Network think tanks and nativist Tanton Network agitprop, via PR agencies and ‘agents’, to negatively message against Ukraine including anti-semitism directed at Zelensky while describing Ukraine as Nazi?

Fast Company:

‘How Western PR Firms Quietly Push Putin’s Agenda

Another front in Russia’s effort to shape the hearts and minds of Americans has received little attention in mainstream U.S. media since the election.

BY SUE CURRY JANSEN

The Russian attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, using what intelligence agencies call “active measures,” has dominated U.S. headlines.

There is, however, a second front in Russia’s effort to shape the hearts and minds of U.S. citizens, and it’s received almost no attention in mainstream U.S. media outlets since the election.

As someone who studies the growth of global public relations, I’ve researched the roles PR firms play in shaping public perceptions of international affairs. For years, Russia has been involved in public relations campaigns that have been developed and deployed by prominent, U.S.-based, global PR firms–campaigns intended to influence U.S. public opinion and policy in ways that advance Russia’s strategic interests.

LEGAL PROPAGANDA?

Public relations is an industry that seeks to cultivate favorable impressions of corporations, products, individuals, or causes. A company or public figure might hire a firm to increase visibility, advance marketing agendas, promote strategic initiatives, or manage a crisis.

But things can get tricky when foreign governments get involved. When they hire PR firms to influence public opinion in other countries, they could undermine the domestic values and goals of the targeted nations.

In the 1930s, the PR firm of Ivy Lee–who, along with Edward Bernays, is regarded as a “founding father” of the public relations industry–was accused of circulating Nazi propaganda in the U.S. In response, Congress enacted the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 1938, which required foreign propagandists operating in the U.S. to register with the government. In 1966, FARA was amended to cover people promoting the economic and political interests of their foreign clients.

In what has become an infamous example of political PR, Kuwait hired numerous U.S. and U.K. firms to drum up support for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. As part of that effort, PR giant Hill & Knowlton audaciously created a front group to hold hearings, led by two U.S. Congressmen, on Iraq’s human rights violations. Called the “Human Rights Caucus,” the group wasn’t actually an official congressional caucus.

More routinely, foreign nations hire PR firms to attract foreign investments and promote tourism and trade. Such efforts are completely legal, and business as usual for corporate PR firms and lobbyists. All they have to do is register under FARA.

While foreign government-funded advocacy campaigns are legal, they can be far from transparent. PR strategies are generally designed to hide the persuasive effort because, as the industry saying goes, “the best PR is invisible PR.”

BURNISHING RUSSIA’S IMAGE

Russia’s domestic PR business has grown rapidly since the end of the Cold War, but Russian authorities prefer to use Western firms when targeting Western audiences. Since the U.S. is both a dominant force in PR–15 of the 20 largest global firms are American–and a prime target of Russian influence efforts, it’s not surprising that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces would turn to U.S. firms for PR services.

Industry publication PRWeek reports that Russia has spent $115 million on Western PR firms since 2000, with most going to the U.S. firm Ketchum, a division of Omnicom. (To put that in context: According to the Center for Public Integrity, the 50 countries with the worst human rights violation records have spent $168 million on American lobbyists and PR specialists since 2010.)

From 2006 to 2014, Ketchum had ongoing contracts with the Russian government and its state-owned energy company Gazprom.

Charged with improving Putin’s and Russia’s image abroad, Ketchum facilitated op-eds by Russian officials in publications around the world, including Putin’s 2013 New York Times article warning the U.S. on Syria.

According to ProPublica, Ketchum also placed what appeared to be independent opinion pieces praising Russia in the Huffington Post, on CNBC’s website (where links to those stories are no longer active), and in other publications without acknowledging their sources. 

The firm lobbied Time magazine to name Putin “Person of the Year,” which it did in 2007.

That same year, according to Reuters, Ketchum tried to convince the U.S. State Department to soften its assessment of Russia’s human rights abuses. The firm also contacted reporters who cover Russian human rights abuses and urged them to tone down their criticism.

Faced with intense criticism after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Ketchum formally ended its contract with Russia in March 2015, tersely announcing that it “no longer represents the Russian Federation in the U.S. or Europe with the exception of our office in Moscow.” However, one of its partners, GPlus, continued the relationship under similar terms.

EXPLOITING THE LOOPHOLES

Late last year, Russia’s Minister of Communications Nikolay Nikiforov announced that the Kremlin would be seeking new contracts with Western PR firms this summer to improve its global image, with the intent of spending between $30 and $50 million a year, and possibly more. He indicated that Russia is seeking smaller, less expensive, and perhaps less visible firms than Ketchum.

PRWeek quoted a leading Russian political analyst, Stanislav Belkovsky, who told the publication, “There are a number of schemes that can be used to avoid U.S. accounting rules on lobbying and PR.” In other words, he was pointing out that there are ways to avoid registering with FARA, and thereby concealing the sources of the pro-Russian messaging.

Indeed, the Project on Government Oversight, an independent nonpartisan watchdog group, cites loopholes in FARA that make it difficult to police violations. Even when violations are discovered, prosecution is rare. Instead, lapses are usually remediated by late filing. This is what happened in the recent cases of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who represented pro-Putin forces in Ukraine, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who represented Turkey. Though they had both been working as foreign lobbyists for an extended period of time, they only recently filed with FARA as foreign agents.

And because the U.S. regulates lobbying, and not PR, another common legal loophole involves contracting with firms that have both public relations and lobbying arms. Clients will then channel as much of their business as possible through the PR arm.

THE BLURRY LINE BETWEEN PR AND NEWS

PR as a subject is rarely covered by the mainstream media in the U.S., but nonprofits like ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the Sunlight Foundation, and NPR fill some of the void.

It’s in contrast to the U.K., where publications like the Guardian extensively cover the nexus of public relations, politics, and policy. During Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure, PR grew rapidly in Britain as politicians and businesses adopted U.S.-style electioneering and promotional techniques. Perhaps for this reason, British media outlets are more attuned to the ramifications of public relations.

The Trump administration’s attack on mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and its promotion of “alternative facts” has rallied journalism to a vigorous defense of the First Amendment, and has led to calls for critical media literacy.

Yet research indicates that as much as 75% of U.S. news begins as public relations. For transparency advocates, this is a problem. By definition, PR is a biased, monetized form of communication that seeks to advance the vested interests of clients. Even some public relations industry figures have recently acknowledged their field’s role in the dissemination of “fake news.”

During the past two decades, the newspaper industry has contracted, with advertisers and readers migrating to the internet. Conversely, the PR industry has experienced growth in both employment opportunities and salaries. In the U.S., there are now nearly five PR people for every reporter. Americans are now being exposed to more public relations than ever before.

While some PR serves worthy causes–promoting health, education, charity, and disaster relief–I believe all PR deserves closer scrutiny because it bypasses the norms of democratic processes: transparency, accountability, and the right of all interested parties to have a voice in civic debates.

To Bernays, the terms “public relations” and “propaganda” were interchangeable. We should think of PR the same way, scrutinizing it with as much critical rigor as we view propaganda.

---

Sue Curry Jansen is ‌‌‌professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College. This essay originally appeared at the Conversation.’

For more blogs and articles on Conservatives, Cultural Dimensions of Marketing Communications, EU European Union, Evangelical Christianity, Koch Network, Marketing Strategy, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics and Russia click through:

Putin Owns Trump’s GOP Republicans & UK Conservatives?

Posted on April 19, 2024

Observed over the past several years confusion and surprise around the success of Trump, GOP etc. and UK Conservatives’ mutual admiration for authoritarian Christian nationalists, including the likes of Vladimir Putin and Russia?

Firsts signs emerged around Brexit promoted by Murdoch led media inc BBC, along with Barclays, Legatum (now behind GB News), Atlas Koch Network think tanks at Tufton Street and nativist right wing influencers including Nigel Farage, Boris Johson etc. and leveraging ageing, low info and regional voters.

Media Misinformation and Distrust – Fox News – Rupert Murdoch – Roger Ailes – Vladimir Putin

Posted on April 16, 2024

Relevant article from the past on methods of media communication, misinformation and shared techniques between Putin’s Russia e.g. IRA Internet Research Agency troll farm, Fox News and related media outlets.

While Roger Ailes was apparently not well liked by Lachlan or James Murdoch, he was left to his own devices at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch to assist in creating narratives and talking points for the right and profits, especially amongst the GOP Republicans, developing mistrust amongst voters.

Russian Influence and Propaganda in Anglosphere – GOP Republicans, UK Conservatives, Media and Think Tanks

Posted on April 12, 2024

Analysis via Rolling Stone article on GOP Representatives being informed by and using Russian talking points e.g. to denigrate Ukraine, EU European Union, the west and liberal democracy.

However, this assumes that the same GOP representatives have always been informed well, while avoiding media, influencers, Christian groups and think tanks?

One would argue that no man or woman is an island, let alone purely objective and original as most of our knowledge is gained from media, especially in US and Anglosphere, that is informed by Atlas – Koch Network think tanks, Murdoch led right wing media e.g. Fox News and influencers, while many Christian groups have had long term links with Russia from Soviet times (and influence operations?).

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

Posted on October 19, 2022

Many nations, at least in the Anglosphere, have experienced disinformation whether related to climate science or fossil fuels, Covid science, education or democracy, and of late witnessed ‘Trussonomics’ in the UK, another version of Buchanan’s ‘Kochonomics’ or ‘radical right libertarian’ ideology.

However, where does this disinformation come from?

According to historian Nancy Maclean it’s a ‘deny and delay’ strategy of Koch Bros. or Koch Network which includes astroturfing, ‘Dark Money’, creating research, gerrymandering, SLAPPs, universities, Christians and conservatives.

Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

Posted on April 20, 2022

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine many commentators, journalists, academic and political activists, of both left and right, who have seem to have acted in the interests of Putin’s Russia, why?

Many within or influenced by the US radical right libertarian Koch Network of think tanks and related organisations e.g. Fox News, which have promoted views that seem to support Putin e.g. claims of fake news on Ukraine civilian deaths, blaming NATO, appeasing Putin and demanding no economic sanctions.

Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

Posted on July 26, 2023

Very good insight into and overview of Putin’s Russia and the ‘west’ including the Anglosphere from Alexander Etkin (CEU Wien) in Russia’s War Against Modernity.

Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.

Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

Very good insight into and overview of Putin’s Russia and the ‘west’ including the Anglosphere from Alexander Etkin (presently of CEU Wien).

Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.

A link of interest is in Hungary Central Europe where a few entities promote Christian nationalist conservatism, namely The Centre for Fundamental Rights (linked to US CPAC), MCC Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danubius Institute (linked to the Koch Network Heritage Foundation).  Further former Murdoch – Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson would promote both Hungary and Putin’s Russia (vs. Ukraine), with dog whistling of Soros via the anti-semitic ‘great replacement’, anti-refugee and anti-immigration sentiment supported by Tanton Network, with a veritable ‘conga line’ of Anglo conservatives presenting in Hungary, in support. 

If one goes back in history with the Anglosphere, much was and is still shared with Russia’s regime and its former empire, including related to the British (& German) royal families, shared conservatism, religious orthodoxy, far right nativism or nationalism, authoritarianism, class order, fossil fuels and oligarchy.

If one then looks at the values, interests and talking points of major Anglo media outlets, think tanks in Koch Network, unspoken but dog whistled class order and eugenics of Tanton Network, are there similarities that make allegations of Russian influence on Brexit and Trump, seem unsurprising?

Using sociocultural issues to deflect and divide electorates for right wing power, e.g. modern immigration, authoritarianism to negate any dissent, then use Orwellian doublespeak for ageing voters to deny freedoms for younger generations, but how does this relate Russia and the Anglosphere apart from these obvious generic traits?

Climate science denial, anti-EU for Brexit to avoid constraints e.g. financial transparency, anti-money laundering measures, workers’ rights & unions, work health & safety, open society and empowered citizens. Central has been the US fossil fueled ‘libertarian’ Koch Network think tanks in US, UK and Australia, with media architecture helped by Rupert Murdoch while still unresolved, but Russian money and influence in UK politics, especially the Conservative party. 

Finally the use of events or grifters to inversely present pro-Russian narratives by blaming Ukraine, NATO, the EU and the west for provoking Russia through visitors platformed in Hungary.  The highest profile ‘geopolitical experts’ visiting and demanding ‘peace’ included Jeffrey Sachs linked to (originally) fossil fueled Rockefeller Foundation (Standard Oil/Exxon & UN ‘Sustainability’) and John Mearsheimer with the Charles Koch Foundation.

Another important area of shared interests, often presented alongside ‘peace’ and anti-EU platforms, is conservative Christianity, especially the US environment via the Council on National Policy which is described as ‘owned’, like the GOP, by Koch Network donors or investors; over years since Soviet times there have been links whether WCC, WCG or more recently ADF, while energising evangelicals, pro-life, Baptists and Catholics.

Who is manipulating whom?

From Inside Story:

‘Russia’s war with the future

Underlying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are existential fears of democracy, diversity, sustainability and the decline of patriarchy

What links Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutinous March on Moscow, climate denialism, the Nord Stream pipeline and vaccine scepticism with the jailing of Aleksei Navalny, the Russian Orthodox patriarch’s rants against “gay parades,” domestic violence and declining life expectancy in Russia?

In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.

In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna…

….Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.

At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.

“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.…

….Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”

If paleo modernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaia modernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.

Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.

As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.

Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.

In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”….

….Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”

Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.

Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).

Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.

….Etkind coins the term “stop modernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaia modernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaia modern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.

Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe….

….Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaia modern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.

Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleo modernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaia modern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaia modernity.

Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.

Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.

One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.

Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.” 

Russia Against Modernity

By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press’

For more related articles and blogs on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, EU European Union, Evangelical Christianity, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Koch Network, Nationalism, Political Strategy, Russia, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

The Tory donor, Soviet-born Billionaire and Fossil Fuel Interests Bankrolling British Politics – ByLine Times 

Conservative Christian CNP – Council for National Policy in US – Influence in UK, Russia and Europe

Russia Report – Anglo Conservatives Compromised by Russian Interference on EU and Brexit

Chomsky, US, Russian Propaganda and Faux Anti-Imperialist Narratives

Fake Anti-Imperialists of the Anglo Left and Right on Ukraine and Russia

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

Strange Conservative Political Links – The Anglosphere, Hungary and Russia

US or UK Sanctions on Murdoch’s Fox News Support for Putin’s Russia?

Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

World Congress Of Families WCF, Russia, The Kremlin, Christian Conservative Nationalists, Dugin, Conservatives and US Evangelicals

Chomsky, US, Russian Propaganda and Faux Anti-Imperialist Narratives

Following is an article from the Green European Journal discussing issues of faux anti-imperialist narratives and propaganda from the west, US, left wing followers of Chomsky, conspiracy theorists and right wing libertarians.

Part of the ‘realism’ agitprop have been demands for ‘peace’ i.e. Ukraine should surrender while Russia has no responsibility for its invasion of Ukraine.  In fact Noam Chomsky is aligned with Kissinger on demands for UKraine to yield, as have Koch’s Mearsheimer and Rockefeller linked Sachs.

Article excerpts include Chomsky and ‘tankies’ (who ignored USSR invasion of Hungary), Propaganda via the ‘left’, rubbery language including contradictions and weaponising laughter (in which Ukraine is doing far better)

From Green European Journal:

‘Narratives Meet Reality

Richard Robert  22 FEBRUARY 2023

Russian propaganda has long relied on the kind of anti-imperialists always ready to cast doubt on Western narratives. Over the years, public debate has been deeply damaged by a corrosive configuration whereby doubt opened the way to lies and lies reinforced doubt. But with the war in Ukraine the machine started to spin too fast. A bunch of gifted writers helped it reach its point of implosion.

For years it has been difficult to discuss with big and small Chomskites – you know, those who, always suspicious of the imperialist aims of the West, reject mainstream media. Along with the real Noam Chomsky and other public intellectuals, one had to deal with friends and acquaintances or just trolls. They stood on a triply legitimate position: their doubts were deeper and sharper, they would throw a few unknown facts that for this very reason one found difficult to contest, and they would point out troubling similarities between what great powers did. Any discussion with them would prove long, costly and effectively futile. They would fix their opponent just like soldiers fix an enemy.

This intellectual and political trap was particularly viscous when it came to Russia and Ukraine. First of all, old reflexes inherited from the Cold War were at play. Also, social media was flooded with content produced by Russian propaganda and set in motion by troll farms. Besides, the vague knowledge we had of Ukraine, on nationalism and the far right especially, could be confusing.

Chomsky’s moment

What is a tankie? Originally, it was a nickname given to European Stalinists who defended the intervention of Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. This political culture is not completely extinct. Some of the orphans of communism, after having placed their hopes in the Cuban citadel, found in Putin’s Russia a substitute for the USSR; not so much a paradise as a standpoint in their distrust of the corrupt, capitalist West.

Today’s tankies are not just Stalinists or sovereigntists opposed to NATO or the EU. Those targeted by Darth Putin are, whether they know it or not, disciples and followers of Noam Chomsky. This covers a wide political and intellectual spectrum ranging from literate leftists to much less literate conspiracy theorists, convinced that the truth is being hidden by several concentric powers: mass media (whose owners are billionaires!), but also, depending on political proclivities and the corner of the world where one lives, the Jews in general or the Rothschild family in particular, George Soros, the US as whole or the “Swamp,” big business and the corrupt West in its various variants: degenerate, imperialist, or both.

Chomsky himself is mostly after the US, but we owe him the formalisation, in the 1980s and 1990s, of the methodology of leftist doubt that today irrigates Reddit, Twitter and other social media. Denouncing in 1988 the “manufacture of consent“ by mass media, indignant after 2001 about the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq carried out under the aegis of the neo-conservatives, Chomsky came to promote a decentralised and even atomised form of information which, according to him, is a salutary response to the lies and propaganda of the Western mass media. Those who really want to learn the truth should therefore forget this capitalist nonsense and rely on a multiplicity of alternative sources and direct testimonies from ordinary citizens or independent journalists….

Propaganda 2.0

Over the years, resurrected Russian propaganda has found Chomskites quite useful. For one, they were easy to fool and showed unrestricted zeal in spreading the fake news it was manufacturing. More generally, Putinists could rely on the political and intellectual reflexes of those criticising the colonialist and imperialist West. Darth Putin’s How to Tankie is based on this premise: “The book that will teach you how to fight forces of colonialism & imperialism.” Presenting itself as a manual for those who resist the American empire, it reveals – with false naivety – all the tricks of the propaganda trade. Imperialism? American, of course. An illegitimate intervention? What about Iraq?

Before 2022, Russian propaganda was articulated with a certain logic, mixing facts with fantasy, history with present: to cut a long story short, the “Kiev fascists”, who were bombing their own citizens, were the direct heirs of the Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom were allies of the Nazis in the Second World War. The regime was therefore illegitimate, aggressive, dangerous, and corrupt. Moreover, it was a puppet of NATO. And the Maidan revolution was a CIA-orchestrated putsch. Yes, just like in Chile…..

Rubber language

As striking as the growing absurdity and incessant reversals of Russian propaganda were (not to speak of the echo chamber provided by social media), its efficiency was not altogether annihilated. Indeed, a multidirectional and contradictory propaganda is in tune with the plurality of standpoints, from doubters to true believers. Chomsky himself, against all evidence, seems more concerned by the rise of fascism in the West than the murderous kind of authoritarianism that is taking root in Moscow.

Weaponising laughter

Faced with this new blend of rubber language, with the diffraction of arguments, with the multiple poles of discourse that intervene alongside Russian propaganda, one could feel overwhelmed, or get lost. But this is when Darth Putin rises.

To this information frenzy, Darth Putin opposes on Twitter a mantra which, in the whirlwind of truth and falsity, offers a compass: “Do not believe anything until the Kremlin denies it.” Chomsky against Chomsky: the power of doubt is pushed to its limits, to the point of turning against those who have cultivated it.

Parody offers Darth Putin and his likes an extraordinary resource, for with the excesses of propagandists there is no need to push an argument very far to bring it to the point where it becomes absurd. Examples abound. Take this one, published after the collapse of a Dnipro building hit by a Russian missile, which caused the pro-Russian Twittosphere to go into overdrive:

“Russian missiles are so advanced that western systems, which we have destroyed, cannot shoot them down & that is why a western missile system, that didn’t exist cos it was already destroyed, hit [Russian] missile, that cannot be shot down, & fragments landed on a Dnipro apartment block.”…

Voltaire, Kundera, and Radio Yerevan

Darth Putin’s techniques, tactics and strategies are typical of the Twitter age, right down to the art of the double indentation to suspend sarcasm before it blows….

…Irony and culture against the idiocy of a regime bent on rewriting history: this was one of the issues of dissidence and resistance in the USSR and in Central Europe till 1989. The irony is that this culture of turning propaganda on its head is now coming to the rescue of the Western public sphere, which has been under attack (and severely damaged) by the unlikely alliance of anti-imperialist Chomskites carping imperialist Putinists.’

For related blogs and articles on Koch Network, media and Russia click through:

Libertarian Conservative Propaganda Promoted in US and Anglo Media

Anglosphere News Media – Objectivity – Political Interference – Fair & Balanced

Fake Anti-Imperialists of the Anglo Left and Right on Ukraine and Russia

Geopolitics – Horseshoe Theory – Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Anglosphere European Far Right and Left

US or UK Sanctions on Murdoch’s Fox News Support for Putin’s Russia?

World Congress Of Families WCF, Russia, The Kremlin, Christian Conservative Nationalists, Dugin, Conservatives and US Evangelicals

Fake Anti-Imperialists of the Anglo Left and Right on Ukraine and Russia

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 2014 we have observed many Anglo left and centrists echoing Kremlin talking points that justify the invasion, shared with the far right, but not by the European left nor right?

However, if one observes many of the US along with some British, Australian etc. geopolitical analysts, media types and politicians promoted in Anglo right wing media, not only do they present sketchy analysis, but seem linked to US oligarchs, Putin allies and/or far right, or at best cold war agitprop?

Some posit that many on the left are not just playing out ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, but the Red-Green-Brown Alliance, according to Wiki sources:

‘The term red–green–brown alliance, originating in France in the 2000s, refers to the alliance of leftists (red), Islamists (green), and the far right (brown). The term has also been used to describe alleged alliances of industrial union-focused leftists (red), ecologically-minded agrarians (green), and the far right (brown)’

Further, on social media and at an individual level, many also seem to support the anti-Vaxx movement and Koch ‘Freedom Rallies’, suggesting it’s not organic? In addition to the article below, Byline Time’s Duncan Campbell has a related article here on supposed left media bias towards ‘Russia Who Watches the Watchdog? The CJR’s Russia Problem’

Many of the high profile Anglo influencers include Mearsheimer linked to Charles Koch Foundation and Sachs with Rockefeller Foundation who both met with Hungarian PM ‘mini Putin’ Orban, journalist Vanden Heuval (The Nation), Mate & Blumenthal at Grayzone, Greenwald formerly The Intercept now appears on FoxNews, of the latter Tucker Carlson and many GOP Republican Reps, including the Freedom Caucus, promote Putin and Russia over Ukraine.  In the UK we have John Pilger, Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway and Nigel Farage in a similar universe, being linked to support for Russia in the recent past, but now unclear, although the latter is still on (K)GB News? 

Following is an analysis of this dynamic in an article from Paul Mason in a joint ByLine Times and Kiev Post published through ByLine Times Supplement; well worth subscribing to:

‘Six Ways Ukraine is Winning: How the European Left Marginalised a Transatlantic Red-Brown Coalition

Author and journalist Paul Mason looks at how the European left has rallied around the Ukrainian people while la hardcore of ‘neo-Bolsheviks’ are aligning with the hard right

On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the left swung into action: it condemned the aggression, began agitating for arms to Kyiv, and dispatched activists to the borders, working 24×7 to support the flood of refugees. But that was the Polish left, not their British and American counterparts. 

The far left of the Anglosphere, by contrast, disgraced themselves. In the UK an alliance of self-styled “anti-imperialists” and Putin fans around Stop The War had been making the Kremlin’s case for months: Ukraine’s borders were illegitimate; rising tension was the fault of “NATO aggression”. Even the US warning that Putin was about to invade was written off as CIA propaganda.

Once the war began, an influential part of the European left made it their priority to stop the flow of Western arms to Ukraine. On 23 April a “Peace Conference” in Madrid, fronted by Jeremy Corbyn, saw MPs from Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Greece and Ireland call for practical action to disarm Ukraine. In Greece, the Communist Party delivered it – blockading a railway line being used to ferry ammunition towards Ukraine. In Berlin a prominent MP from the Left Party actually fronted a rally demanding “Security for Russia”.

For anyone who’s been associated with the radical left, as I have, it’s been a sickening experience.

‘Political Maturity’ in the European Left

Over the past year, however, the internationalist left has rallied substantial forces in support of Ukraine’s resistance. In France, thanks to their work, every trade union federation has signed a pledge of solidarity with Ukraine. Finland’s Left Alternative party, which is part of the coalition government, helped swing their country’s decision to join NATO.

Here, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign – founded by, among others, Labour’s John McDonnell – has organised practical help for the Ukrainian left group Sotsialny Rukh (Social Movement), some of whose members are fighting at the front, and provided vehicles and other equipment to combat units staffed by miners from Ukraine’s free trade unions.

Poland’s Razem party, which has six MPs in the Sejm, took a lead both in countering pro-Moscow “left” propaganda and organising solidarity to the Ukrainian left and trade unions. But one of the first things Razem had to do, their spokeswoman Zofia Malisz told me, was to break with the so-called Progressive International, founded by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. 

Varoufakis’ group proved incapable of issuing anything other than an abstract condemnation of war in general. 

“We asked them to stand on two principles: that Ukraine is a sovereign nation and that Russia is an imperialist country,” said Ms Malisz. “They couldn’t give us a straight answer, so we had to part ways with them.” 

By 8 March, Razem had helped create the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU) which coordinates the work of left groups, parties, trade unions and journalists. It has national committees in Belgium, France and Catalonia, and also runs a “Brigade of Editorial Solidarity”, involving newspapers, book publishers and writers, which promotes the translation of left news sources from Ukraine and the Russian democratic opposition.

Claudiu Craicun, who heads Demos, a left political party in Romania, believes the failure of figures like Varoufakis and Jeremy Corbyn to support Ukraine has forced the European left into a moment of political maturity. In East Europe, he says, where you are up against oligarchy and authoritarianism, you are always forced to prioritise fighting for democracy, not simply social justice:

“It would be hard for me now to work with leftists who didn’t support Ukraine, or who indirectly supported Russia. If you can’t see a fascist country; a decaying empire; and its threats to our democracies – then we cannot be fellow travellers. This is a watershed moment. I don’t care about left unity – if we don’t share the same values, it’s better to split”.

Szymon Martys, another Polish activist organising with ENSU, is scathing about those on the left who’ve labelled Ukraine’s resistance a “proxy war”:

“We are talking about a real colonisation now. Not just in Crimea. Contacts on the ground are saying Russia is now settling people in [occupied] Melitopol. If you want to compare it to Israel-Palestine there’s no better parallel: it’s a real, daily colonisation – not just a typical war.”

‘Neo-Bolshevism’

Many left-wing activists still struggle to comprehend where pro-Putin leftism comes from. Adam Novak, a veteran left-wing journalist based in Bratislava, who helps coordinate ENSU, believes much of the attraction of “tankism” is cultural.

“There is the folklore of a few surviving Stalinists,” he says, “but they’re not significant. At a second level, however, you see Stalinism coming back among a younger generation, who like the images of strength, discipline and dealing ruthlessly with your enemies. People who’ll share statements by Kim Il Sung on Twitter for example.”

Zofia Malisz calls the phenomenon “neo-Bolshevism”: “It radiates from skilled and well-funded communication centres in the Anglo-Saxon world: using provocative narratives on social media, nice graphics – whitewashing Stalin, for example. Disinformation plays on people’s best instincts – like wanting peace, or it plays on guilt, as in Germany, or a saviour complex.”

The democratic left… needs to acknowledge that it has more in common with liberalism, humanism and Christianity than it has with Stalinism.

For me, the source of left sympathy for Putin is clear. Leninism was founded on the idea that working-class people are incapable of achieving socialism themselves, and that the “historical process” has therefore to be aided by an outside force.

For Lenin, by the early 1920s, that force was the peasantry of the global south. For the “tankies” of the Cold War it was the Soviet Union. For the New Left of the 1960s, it was students and ethnic minorities. But when the USSR collapsed, and the liberation movements went mainstream, all that was left were the supposedly “progressive” dictatorships of Syria and Venezuela. 

Then, in 2012, came Xi Jin Ping. The logic of his “Sinicised Marxism” is clear: everything that disrupts the US-dominated global order is good; all “colour revolutions” – ie democratic revolts against totalitarian rule from Syria to Ukraine to Iran – are to be crushed. Xi and Putin even spelled these principles out in their joint communique of 4 February 2022.

So if you look at the assemblage of left organisations pushing Putin’s narratives on Ukraine, we are no longer dealing simply with Leninist nostalgia: there is a new vigour, a magnetic force and, of course, the dirty money and social media manipulation skills coming both from Beijing and Moscow.

Looking at the trajectory of the pro-Putin left in the USA, there is little doubt about where this ends: in a fusion of far-left and far-right ideologies that we saw in the Rage Against The War Machine rally in Washington DC on 19 February 2023. Far-right Republicans and Oath Keeper militia figures took the stage alongside the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and the self-styled left comedian Jimmy Dore. The red-brown politics of the 1930s, incredibly, are back.

The future of the democratic left has to be no less clear: the historian EP Thompson once wrote that there are “two Marxisms” and they are incompatible. The democratic left, he said, needs to acknowledge that it has more in common with liberalism, humanism and Christianity than it has with Stalinism.

That’s what the Ukraine war is teaching a whole new generation of anti-capitalists. You cannot achieve social progress alongside a bunch of apologists for Russian fascism, no matter how good their positions on abortion or trans rights are, or how exciting their memes look.’

For related links on Ageing Democracy, Critical Thinking, EU European Union, Koch Network, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics & Russia:

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

Geopolitics – Horseshoe Theory – Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Anglosphere European Far Right and Left

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

The Anglosphere Faux or Fake Left and Centre Heading to the Populist Right?

Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism

Varn Vlog: Eric Draitser on the complications of Russia, Ukraine, and the contemporary left

Eric Draitser: Challenging the Fake Antiwar Left on Ukraine