Vladimir Putin’s depiction of an American incented Ukrainian genocide, “Nazification” in his words, against Russian-speaking Ukrainians is at the core of his justification for an unprovoked invasion and full-on war against his neighboring country. To Putin, NATO and Europe are mere puppets of the mendacious American regime where there is no fair and balanced reporting, with almost all media outlets towing the Biden line. Except for one American news network, Americans, he states, are being fed a litany of falsehoods by their government. That network is Trump-favorite, Fox.
According to the March 21st Daily Digest, “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has praised the Fox News coverage of the war in Ukraine. Despite the increasing isolation that Putin and his government are facing, the Kremlin still finds a few good friends in this critical time and the conservative news cable channel seems one of them… ‘We understood long ago there's no independent Western news media,’ Lavrov was quoted by The Guardian on March 18. ‘If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view.’
“These praises are unsurprising. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, the host of the most-watched cable news program in the United States, derided that the Ukraine conflict was ‘a mere border dispute’ just before the invasion. Since then, Carlson has tried to recant his previous statements.” Excerpts from several of Carlson’s pro-Russian statements on Fox have been prominently featured on Russian state-control media as evidence of the “lies” being told by the US government to its people, with few daring to contradict that position.
It is illegal in Russia to describe as “war” what Putin insists is merely a “special military operation” to prevent Nazi leadership, under Ukraine’s beloved President Volodymyr Zelensky (himself Jewish whose family endured through the WWII real Nazi Holocaust), where only military targets are being damaged. The global images of decimated residences, schools, hospitals and thousands of slaughtered civilians are fake, according to the Russian government. Even as Russian soldiers in the field are telling their relatives in Russia that the war is very real, civilians targets routine and that they not only not being greeted as liberators by locals, but they are also indeed being killed by them… their relatives all too often reject that reality from the front.
The few civilian casualties, Russia claims, are those unfortunates being used by Ukraine as human shields to legitimate military targets. The 141 out of 193 nation censure of Russia by the United Nations General Assembly is never reported, only the perfidy of the West baiting Russia with threats of NATO expansionism, replete with a non-existent US-supplied biological/chemical warfare laboratory in Ukraine. Sounds like the Bush administration’s touting of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq.
But given the plethora of global opprobrium against Russia, the mass of visual evidence of Russian imposed death and destruction on innocents all over Ukraine, Americans are dumbfounded by the naïve belief of a vast majority of Russians of Putin’s “just cause” in stopping Nazi genocide, echoes of Russia’s historical elevation of their triumph against Nazi’s in WWII – The Great Patriotic War, that every Russian learns about in school. Yet Russia has a fully controlled press; all media is now state media. Getting information from any other source, which seems to have incented some Russians to defy authority and risk long prison sentences in their protects, is flatly illegal.
Mass belief in the absurd is understandable in a totalitarian regime with only state-controlled media. That so many Russians believe in mythology; Americans stare in disbelief. Yet here in the United States, the populist right, still controlled by Putin admirer Donald Trump, is a mass constituency of diehard adherents to equally absurd mythologies.
Like QAnon. “QAnon's core belief is that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping child molesters whom Trump is secretly battling to stop, and that Q, an anonymous entity, reveals details about the battle online. The cabal is thought to cover up its existence by controlling politicians, mainstream media, and Hollywood. Q's revelations imply that the destruction of the cabal is imminent but also that it will only be accomplished with the support of the ‘patriots’ who make up the QAnon community. This will happen at a time known as ‘the Event’ or ‘the Storm’, when thousands of people will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or to face military tribunals.” Wikipedia. As ultra-right-wing Senator Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) attempts to paint Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, as soft on pedophiles (she isn’t based on actual records), it’s abundantly clear which playbook and constituency he is attempting to satisfy.
QAnon has a lot of believers, by the way: “Washington, we have a problem — politically, informationally and societally — when 15 percent of Americans agree with the QAnon statement that the U.S. government, media and financial worlds ‘are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.’… Or when 20 percent agree with this statement: ‘There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.’” NBCNews.com, 5/27/21
To this day, the majority of Republicans still believe, as Donald Trump continues to insist, that Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020. Every red state has passed or has legislation pending intended to purge fraudulent voting from their process – despite no meaningful evidence of voter fraud – which has the secondary intended impact of denying equal voting access to voters likely to tilt Democrat. This belief was so strong that hundreds if not thousands of Americans were willing to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to reverse the election, and to this day, Donald Trump refers to them as “patriots,” whom he may well pardon if he returns to the presidency in 2024.
What’s more, those who opposed COVID vaccines manufactured falsehoods claiming the vaccine planted thought-control chips in their bodies, induced magnetic fields, altered their genes or inflicted damage far worse than the disease itself, that a horse de-wormer and hydroxychloroquine cured COVID. All absolutely medically proven false. Governors and legislators in red states are telling adoring constituents that public school teachers are promulgating Marxism and homosexuality in their classrooms. Without any genuine evidence. These states are passing laws to ban such teachings. They call it an important facet of their battle against a non-existent “culture war.” Seriously. Who are we to call the kettle black?
I’m Peter Dekom, and when we deride the “Nazi genocide” falsehood at the core of Putin’s global message… and the hordes who believe it… perhaps we should take a long hard look at ourselves first.
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