| Putin: Make Russia Grate Again |  |
By John Freivalds
Published-TBD
I really can’t believe the ongoing naiveté of past American leaders dealing with Vladimir Putin who just invaded yet another part of Ukraine. Former President Bush told us he could look into Putin’s eyes and see his soul, Hillary Clinton brought out a red button and said she would reset US -Russian relations, former President Obama lamented being against Russia is just rekindling the cold war while former President Trump called Putin to congratulate him on his last election victory. (Editor note: Putin had jailed his opponents and the controlled Russian media would’ report any negative news about him). And then a Fox news personality chimed in that the US should support Russia and not Ukraine. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu asserted that “Russia can’t afford to lose the information war” against the West. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a major media personality broadcasting propaganda that benefits Moscow directly to millions of Americans.
The Guardian newspaper in London noted” international audiences were mostly impervious to Kremlin disinformation. But said domestic Russian viewers tended to believe fake TV footage, which was “theatrically” created for state propaganda purposes. This was especially true of the older generation,”
And in the same way that former President Trump would be seen hugging the American flag, Putin always invokes the western threats to “Mother Russia.” Nothing new here for during the American revolution Thomas Paine said “nationalism in the last refuge of a scoundrel. “President Biden called out Putin’s “false flag” utterances and predicted what Putin would tray to do. And he grated Putin immensely.
We have a saying in my birthplace and NATO country Latvia, which was once “liberated” by Russia who killed many of my relatives, time changes but the personality stay the same. Really folks nothing has changed in Russia since the time of the Czars, democracy is suspect and there is no use for the Medi. Debora Barbosa in her booklet Putin Power and Propaganda writes “through propaganda anyone can obtain unquestionable power and admiration of the public.” Whereas public relations in US democracy in Washington DC is revered to as “spinning” only until the advent of conspiracy theorists did, we get the concept of fake news.
The Russians have been in the propaganda game longer than the United States and never had a free press or body politic to counter it. The propaganda was part and part of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and Russia ramped it up with RT TV started in 2005.
RT's editor in chief Margarita Simonyan compared the channel to the Russian Ministry of Defense. During the Russo-Georgian War, she stated that it was "waging an information war, and with the entire Western world". In September 2017, RT America was ordered to register as a foreign agent with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act RT has been banned in Ukraine since 2014, and in Latvia and Lithuania since 2020.
For its part, The US started the Voice of America in 1942 to broadcast its message to the world. Ok I’m biased as my father was chief of the Latvian service and had to use an alias to prevent harm to our relatives left behind when we fled “Russian freedom.” He served under noted journalists like Edward R. Murrow and John Chancellor. Only now are we realizing that we will not have nuclear war fears as in the first cold war, but we will have cyber-attacks and misinformation via social media. During the Trump years the only broadcasts that the VOA allowed were to promote Trump and not the United Sates necessarily. The VOA had become nothing but a propaganda tool. But VOA is back to “normal” and the Ukraine and Putin’s actions have been a godsend for the VOA to increase its broadcasting in 47 languages.
And now on personal note when I tell people I am Latvian no one no longer says, “What’s that.”