Separating wheat from the chaff is no easy task. Even with the best winnowing tools. The expression searching for the kernel of truth acknowledges the obvious. To get to the nub requires considerable effort determination. Faced with the proliferation of information and opinion transfer available via Internet the truth has become a precious commodity, often less important than presentation of a point of view. Political indoctrination is alive and well in many manifestations, from the sound bytes chosen by Western politicians to the outright machinery run by the Kremlin.
Propaganda was mastered by the bolsheviks, for a time improved upon by the Nazis, but still best known as a communist tool for keeping subjects in line and any foreign opposition in the dark. The key to making the system work was not so much the content of the beliefs spun, but the idea of loyalty to one's kind, hostility to the enemy. Never has it been seen as clearly than with the rhetoric expressed ever since the MRP pact brought erstwhile partners in crime into armed opposition.
It is exceedingly naïve today to see propaganda as just good or bad advertising, depending on the product. When that product is disrespectful of truth, reason and the human intellect, becoming an attempt at winning acceptance for a cause, system or state, then it becomes much more. It becomes an outright tool in gaining legitimacy for either the past or present, and as such one of the most divisive yet unifying strategies in politics.
This is not Pogo stating that he has met the enemy, and it is us - it is a system vilifying the known and unknown alternatives.
The concept of "the enemy" is core to successful propaganda. And a vanquished enemy is even better to vilify, by pointing out what may have been, rather than what was. The scepter of a Nazi Europe is what is used as the fearsome bugbear even today, and the reality of the world's bloodiest regime of terror thus shunted to the background. And should one question this approach one becomes branded along with Nazis. A classic propaganda tool, alerting the world to the ever-present danger posed by the enemy - no matter that they been defeated, Phoenix-like the bad guys are always ready to spring out of the ashpit of defeat.
This is the spin that Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have been trying to put on the May 9th events marking the end of WW II in Europe. A spin that has been careening along almost predictably, not quite out of control but picking up speed on the last dangerous hills leading to the finish line. The closer the event, the more inflammatory the rhetoric, the more outrageous the claims. A good thing that there are sensible journalists and historians in the West giving the truth, rather than the spin a good airing. But will it be enough to prove the Russian reductio ad absurdum?
Just consider how Putin began his annual state of the nation address on Monday. He declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the Twentieth Century. Presumably greater than The War To End All Wars, which allowed the bolsheviks to cement their regime. Or WW II, the end of which he wishes to celebrate. Or the end of the Cold War, during which tens of millions were enslaved to a totalitarian regime, hundreds of millions trembled in fear of nuclear war. Rather, Putin chose to lament the end of a system. Indeed, most telling was the fact that Putin bemoaned a lost ideology: "the old ideals were destroyed" when the Soviet empire crumbled.
Not a word about how the Soviet Union was built up and why it eventually crumbled, having become, as the Baltimore Sun wrote in a powerful editorial Tuesday, a "bankrupt system built on coercion, lies and a history of murder." Putin actually had the nerve to suggest that the events after 1991, which unleashed further crime, greed, plunder, separatist warfare and poverty could have been avoided had the old system remained in place. It was only through Putin's strong leadership, he suggests, with "authority" finally reasserted, that Russia halted that slide.
Not a word about how the collapse of the Soviet Union ended illegal occupation of Eastern European and Baltic democracies, of how it resulted in the liberation of tens of millions enslaved as a result of the end of WW II.
On one hand a curious nostalgia, on the other a justification for the present return to authoritarian rule. That nostalgia expressed by a former KGB officer is, as the Washington Post noted in their editorial Wednesday, as telling as any of his promises.
Anne Applebaum went further, writing in the same issue of the Post. It is time to opt for truth over "triumph". The Moscow celebrations ignore the fact that while war ended a half-century of brutal occupation began. They are intended as a triumph of Stalinism, not of owning up to the past. War anniversaries are symbolic events, and to commemorate the triumph of totalitarianism rather than its defeat sends, as Applebaum eloquently argues, the wrong message by approving the falsification of the past.
Janusz Bugajski also noted this propaganda ploy in the Financial Times. He wrote this Wednesday that " official falsification of the record by Kremlin leaders is not merely an academic exercise, but is comparable to Holocaust denial for Jews. Russia's recent closure of investigations into the 1940 Soviet massacre of 15,000 Polish prisoners of war is a vivid example of this revisionist process, which ignores the unresolved grievances of the former dominions."
Fortunately, Putin is not fooling everyone in the West, as these editorials reinforce. A good thing, for the Russian agitprop machinery is still churning out the lies of the past with willful delusion. The viewpoints expressed in many excellent editorials counteract the spin up to a point. However, the propaganda will never end unless Russia is forced to condemn the Nazi-Soviet pact and the illegal annexation of the Baltic States. As H. Con. Res. 128, introduced to Congress states, "the truth is a powerful weapon for … reconciliation… but its absence breeds distrust, fear and hostility".
The U.S. and other nations have faced their historical wrongs, and we should expect no less from the Russian Federation.
Truth is a powerful weapon
Archived Articles | 29 Apr 2005 | EWR
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