His intentions have been obvious for a very long time for anyone who wants to see them.
The recent Tucker Carlson interview confirmed that Putin has an uncontrollable obsession with a made up version of history, and he gets visibly upset when his long rants about Ukrainian statehood being an anti-Russian conspiracy by the Austrian General Staff and the Pope get interrupted. Nazis running Ukraine is only a small part of that persecution complex.
Putin's speeches deserve as serious consideration as Hitler's. Until tanks started rolling, his speeches were also dismissed as rhetoric.
A good example of this is how Putin floated a statement that was meant to seem a threat toward nuclear war. He did that to distract everyone from talking about how he was losing the war. It worked perfectly.
It's really just political gaslighting and has been going on since the Soviet era. Frida Ghitis used just that term to describe the ridiculous denials from Russia when presented with evidence of Russian operatives active in Crimea.
What's worrying to me is that it's by no means unique to Russia, even if they have perfected it. The current president of the United States does not consider himself above using the exact same rhetorical strategy.
How is it propaganda that the Nazis invaded Russia? That the jumping-off point was the middle of Poland? That's straight-up fact.
Or are you saying that it's propaganda the Putin is worrying about that? I've never heard them say so, so I don't think it's a common theme of their propaganda.
Yeah but exaggerated rhetoric has existed for millenniums and is an inherent part of how human societies work. Also the rhetoric might be exaggerated but there are always some basis behind it, e.g. job loss and wage stagnation due to globalization etc. Sure we need to counter it in a civilized society, but pinning it all on Russia using such absolutist terms is just laughable.
And the US do much direct and violent interventions in lots of foreign countries. This is bread and butter for international politics. The western mainstream media now pretend to have an outcry now that such tactics are befalling themselves, which is really ironic.
Power of propaganda is truly terrifying. Many, if not majority, of my American and Israeli acquaintances of Russian origin think that Putin is heroically liberating Ukraine from Nazis. They watch Russian TV channels.
"The notion of lie and truth works differently in Russia. Examples: The Terijoki government (Russian attempt to make puppet government to Finland in 1939) had a story that the working population of Finland was tired of the Mannerheim-Tanner (Marshal of the Finnish Defence Forces in the 1939) fascist junta and formed a government to liberate the Finnish people then when the Russians attacked they found out it wasn't quite the same as what the propaganda [had said]."
What is he insinuating here? This is in a section which does a "fifty words for snow in eskimo" attempt to claim that Russians are linguistically programmed to be liars. He has just discussed a picture which shows the "technological backwardness of Russia" in which the saviour is the German steamship coming up the the river in the far distance. Is he suggesting that all Finns were favour of the collaboration with the NAZIs². This is really weird.
Then he goes on to mix in the Russian poisoning of Skripal, some probably true information about Russian forces operating in Donbass and Crimea with some never-before-heard conspiracy theory about all the people on MH17 being dead already and the hotly disputed DNC and Clinton were hacked by the GRU. Basically a hodgepodge of whatever he wants to believe, all cherry picked with the intent of his stated aims of showing that the Russian leadership are genetic Mongols who have linguistically programmed their boyar and working classes to believe lies. This is poisonous, rock-bottom stuff.
Yes, propaganda and political lies is certainly not confined to Russia or backwater dictatorships. In America you also had that president's opponents concocting lies and peddling insane and baseless conspiracy theories for years about him colluding with Putin to hack the election and other such nonsense. That was even more infantile and simple than the propaganda that comes out of Russia.
Every country has its propaganda and lies, but they're generally couched in half-truths. It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. That's been a tradition for decades, as far as I know.
So yes, Putin's Russia is used intentionally to introduce the same feeling as Hitler's Germany. That's the way how Biden's USA works, supported by Ursula von der Layens EU, Stoltenberg's NATO and their minions.
That's part and parcel of Putin's Chekist paradigm of obvious aggression combined with denials and disinformation. The idea is to create enough doubt and lies that people feel like the truth is unknowable. But everyone still gets the message that Putin can and will kill you if he so wishes.
In Russia this concept was widely used a couple of years ago. Somebody published a popular article distorting the idea to the point of becoming a conspiracy theory against our moral values. Along with so-called "Dulles Doctrine" it became part of western conspiracy lore
I think what you're describing is a sort of ensemble. I agree sometimes "conspiratorial" thinking is right, as in the invasion of Ukraine, or Hitler. Then the difficult part becomes how to weight the different world views in this particular time in history. But I agree at the very least you need to be able to simulate the thinking of ideologues in order to understand their thinking and actions. The invasion of Ukraine is a very interesting example where people underestimated how nefarious Putin really was, but if you read his writings on Ukraine, and do a bayesian update after Georgia and Crimea/Donbas the invasion shouldn't have been all that surprising. At least we should have assigned something like 10-15% chance.
There is now another 'form' of propaganda that seems to be being used:
> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”[2]
> Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
> Interestingly, several of these features run directly counter to the conventional wisdom on effective influence and communication from government or defense sources, which traditionally emphasize the importance of truth, credibility, and the avoidance of contradiction.[3] Despite ignoring these traditional principles, Russia seems to have enjoyed some success under its contemporary propaganda model, either through more direct persuasion and influence or by engaging in obfuscation, confusion, and the disruption or diminution of truthful reporting and messaging.
For a history of propaganda, the book Munitions of the Mind by Philip M. Taylor may be of some interest (the third edition was published in 2003, so covers up to 9/11):
His intentions have been obvious for a very long time for anyone who wants to see them.
The recent Tucker Carlson interview confirmed that Putin has an uncontrollable obsession with a made up version of history, and he gets visibly upset when his long rants about Ukrainian statehood being an anti-Russian conspiracy by the Austrian General Staff and the Pope get interrupted. Nazis running Ukraine is only a small part of that persecution complex.
Putin's speeches deserve as serious consideration as Hitler's. Until tanks started rolling, his speeches were also dismissed as rhetoric.
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