Peter Pomerantsev, a former Russian TV producer, recently wrote a book about Vladimir Putin’s war on truth. Aptly entitled Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, the book depicts a regime that has blurred the line between fact and fiction so successfully that its hapless citizens are lost in “a fog of unknowability…In that fog, norms and rational debate disappear, and all that matters is whoever is faster, harder, and more daring” in shaping the dominant narrative.
Sound familiar? Witness the Trumpists’ frenetic efforts to fog up the truth about the impeachable president’s confessed quest for foreign dirt on Joe Biden. If you spend any time fogging your brain with their lies, you’ll probably suspect that they were translated from the original Russian. Because what we’re hearing now is another chilling example of how our tinpot autocrat has imported – consciously or inadvertently – the worst of the east.
In the words of Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess champion who’s now living in America, the Trump defenders “want to distract, not refute. To make it seem like the truth isn’t knowable.”
The Russian-style evidence is sadly abundant, and, frankly, I hesitate listing any of it, because that leaves us less time to focus on the truth of Trump’s impeachable offense. As Kasparov warns us in a tweet, “they don’t care about being caught in obvious lies. Calling bullshit still means you’re talking about the bullshit, not the facts.”
But let’s do this in one paragraph, just to get a flavor of their foggy fiction. Trump’s team is saying in tweets and on national TV that Biden sought to fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to protect his son Hunter. (A blatant lie. Hunter was not under investigation. And Biden, as vice president, made the request on behalf of the Obama administration, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund – all of which wanted a tougher prosecutor.) Trump’s team is also saying that the real “favor” Trump sought from the Ukraine president was an investigation that would prove that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered with the ’16 election. (That characterization of the favor is a blatant lie, and the notion that Russia didn’t interfere in ’16 is a blatant lie.) Trump’s team is also saying that the whistleblower’s complaint is worthless because it’s “hearsay,” and that the whistleblower rules were recently changed to allow the use of hearsay (Two blatant lies. It’s not hearsay, because Trump’s phone summary quotes Trump himself asking for dirt, thus confirming what the whistleblower also learned from White House sources. And the intelligence community’s Inspector General says the whistleblower rules were not changed.)
Indeed, says former George W. Bush national security advisor Kori Schake, “the whistleblower’s account seems convincing, that the president was using our country’s foreign policy (withholding congressionally-mandated military aid) to blackmail a foreign country.”
So what we’re hearing is Russian-style propaganda – the kind perfected by Putin’s chief spinmeister, Vladislav Surkov. He has written that there is no such thing as “so-called reality,” that life is a competition of narratives and that the strongest and most persistent shall win. A government’s goal, Surkov has written, is to flood the mind with constant disinformation – to use “conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.”
Indeed, the Rand Corporation did a report on Surkov propaganda and called it “a fire hose of falsehood.” And Clint Watts, a foreign policy expert wh has long studied Russian propaganda, said back in the early days of the Trump regime that the impeachable president’s disinformation fog mirrored the Putin strategy. In Watt’s words, the purpose is to “create chaos in the system, such that you don’t know what is the truth and what is not the truth.” If citizens “don’t know what is real information anymore…no one can hold (the regime) accountable.”
If the “fog of unknowability” successfully sows the impression that everyone is bad, then Trump can’t be singled out as bad. Even though he has been caught red-handed, breaching his oath of office and covering it up by burying the evidence in a classified digital file, perhaps a flood of weaponized disinformation will help him swim to safety. His liars are counting on that. And Biden appears to have been slimed by the lies. A new Monmouth poll asked Americans whether Biden probably did or did not push for the prosecutor’s firing in order to protect his son; the results: 43 said yes, 37 percent said no.
Thankfully, however, new polls suggest that the Russian-style spinners will ultimately fail; with each day of new scandal revelations, the public has become far more receptive to impeachment. But this historic battle is not merely about ousting Trump; it’s about rebuking Russian-style propaganda and reaffirming that factual truth is a core western value at fundamental odds with the totalitarian mindset. May the truth set us free.