Lies Exist in a Vacuum

At the weekend an acquaintance of mine posited that Vladimir Putin would never have dared undertake the Ukraine invasion if Donald Trump was still in the White House. 

 

My response to this preposterously naïve statement was very simple. 

 

The election of Trump in the US, support for Brexit in the UK, the election of Boris Johnson as UK PM and other ridiculous acts of political self-harm all proved to Putin that ANYTHING – no matter how outrageous or distasteful – can be easily accepted in this day and age. 

 

In essence Putin felt unimpeded due to the West’s decline into post-truth and he saw that he could leverage the very same tools to legitimise his savage actions – Trump, Johnson and Brexit were all proof positive that everything is tolerable with spin.

 

As the whole bloody affair plays out it has become abundantly clear that the Russian population must be totally firewalled from the real world to inure them from reality. This job has been done remarkably efficiently with all dissenting voices swept up into police custody as soon as they appear. Support for the war on the Russian street is solid. 

 

There is no “cause and effect” in the traditional sense of events evolving. Instead, the Russian media audience is fed “effect and cause” from the point of view that actions are justified by post-event, post-truth vindications chosen from a lengthy but predictable playbook. 

 

Interviewed by Piers Morgan on 26 April on the new right-wing TalkTV station, Johnson asserted that, “Given the massive Russian backing for what he is doing, given the apparent obliviousness of the Russian media about what is really happening in Ukraine, the paradox is that Putin has far more political space to back down, to withdraw.” Really?

 

Johnson seems to be wholly detached from the reality that the Russian audience does not see any genuineness whatsoever. What Putin does or does not do is occurring in an information vacuum with convenient propaganda. We can foretell a 2022 version of the 1991 Iraqi “Mother of All Battles” where truth is utterly divorced from reality and we have a new player from the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the personage of Dmitry Peskov as a modern-day Comical Ali. Diverting Dmitry perhaps as a spokesmouth for Vile Vlad? 

 

When push comes to shove, poor outcomes in the military and foreign policy spheres – as in every other sphere – are ignored or airbrushed. There is no paradoxical “political space” to act in as, by necessity, it does not exist. 

 

Putin will dare to do whatever Putin decides to dare to do as he operates outside the rules and beyond the influence of any idiot in the White House or any buffoon in No. 10.