Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year there have been tons of blogs and social media posts on such things as military operations, military strategy, and military analysis. But there’s one front that has been minimized or ignored: The information front.
Right now there are propagandists on the Russian side who are doing everything possible to sway you to their side. They post in English, create snazzy eye-catching videos with flashy graphics, and even use certain famous Western celebrities (such as Russell Brand and Roger Waters) to get you to start questioning what your government is doing and to think that maybe Russia isn’t so bad after all. They will try to convince you that the president of Ukraine is a cocaine-addicted, sex-perverted, Jewish Nazi who deserves to be overthrown. They will try to convince you that Ukraine has become a modern-day Nazi Germany who needed to be invaded so the country can be denazified and World War III can be prevented. They want you to ignore the accounts of numerous atrocities they’ve perpetrated in Ukraine, such as mass rapes of women and children, looting of personal homes, kidnapping of Ukrainian children to take to Russia, castration of male soldiers, beheadings, and much more. They want you to start demanding that your government stop helping Ukraine.
The rise of the internet and social media has made it easier for them to distribute their propaganda than ever before.
I created this Substack to educate everyday people like you so you won’t fall into any Russian propaganda traps and learn the truth about what is really going on in the world today.
Since the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in June, 2016 (where voters narrowly approved of that nation withdrawing from the European Union), it was revealed that there was evidence that Russia may have influenced the outcome through the use of propaganda that was filtered through both their official Kremlin-financed broadcast stations (RT and Sputnik) and various social media accounts (which used bots masquerading as people).
Later that year in the presidential elections in the United States, Donald Trump was elected president even though advanced pre-election polling had shown his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as the expected winner. Again, it was revealed that there was evidence that Russia used the same propaganda tactics as the Brexit vote to influence the outcome of that election.
Why would Russia do this? By all accounts, Russian President Vladimir Putin had long been disappointed in the breakup of the old Soviet Union. His big ambition is to reconstruct that country as a big Russian Empire by taking back those nations that had declared independence in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. It explains why Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, which resulted in the loss of Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Russia, which made them into independent republics (yet still dominated by Russia) that most other nations refused to recognize. It explains the Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and the creation of two other so-called “independent republics” in the Donbas region of Ukraine that are also dominated by Russia and most other nations refuse to recognize.
And it definitely explains the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began last year and is still ongoing.
In Putin’s ambition to reconstruct the old Soviet Union into a modern-day Russian Empire, he knew that he would face massive international opposition, especially from the US and the European Union. If he could weaken them, it would make realizing his ambition so much easier. The Brexit vote was the fist step where the UK officially withdrew. The US election was also important because Donald Trump has had a cozy relationship with Russia going back as far as the 1980s. Having a sympathetic pal occupy the Oval Office would also make it easier for Putin to realize his big Russian Empire dream.
Putin’s plans for the US worked for a while until 2020 when Donald Trump was voted out of office. Despite Trump’s defeat, Putin is still doing everything possible to weaken the United States internally so Putin can do whatever he wants with very little blowback.
Donald Trump is running for president again in an effort to be the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve two non-consecutive terms and Vladimir Putin is doing everything possible to make that happen by having Russian troll farms making English-language posts extolling the virtues of Donald Trump. Putin also managed to attract certain people in Donald Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement who have become enchanted by Putin’s authoritarian stance and his stand on right-wing causes. (Under Putin Russia has decriminalized domestic violence and criminalized the LGBTQ community.) Some of them are currently serving in Congress under the name of the so-called “Freedom Caucus.” Despite the name, this caucus wants an authoritarian government that is hierarchical with only one recognized religion (preferably Christian Nationalism), very limited personal freedoms (especially regulating what goes on in the bedrooms of two consenting adults), and only certain people will be able to prosper while the majority of the population will be condemned to live their lives in poverty.
So now you’re probably wondering about my expertise on this and whether I’m some poseur who’s acting as an armchair analyst who’s really some unemployed young high school dropout who’s living in my mom’s basement and who isn’t really an expert on anything and is just winging it in order to seem more knowledgeable than I am in real life. Here is some information about me.
I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland at College Park with a minor in Government and Politics (which is what the university called its political science department when I was a student there). One semester I took a Government and Politics class titled Eastern Europe Under Communism, which I found very enlightening. I learned about Russia’s obsession with empire building. I also learned about how the USSR was so traumatized by their one-time ally Adolf Hitler backstabbing them with the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that the Soviets created similar communist nations in Poland and Czechoslovakia as buffers against future invasions by any other nation. I learned about how these Eastern European nations were affected by these communist governments that were imposed on them by the Soviets.
I took this class when the Cold War between the US and the USSR was still going on. There was very little mention about what was then called “the Ukraine” in that class other than the area was known as the Breadbasket of Europe due to its fertile soil. At the time I took that class, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union so it probably made little sense for the instructor to spend much time discussing it since he was already discussing the USSR as a nation.
After graduation I ended up not using my degree much other than doing some volunteer work on behalf of my Unitarian Universalist congregation (such as helping out with editing the church newsletter for a few years in the 1990s when the church was trying to make do without an administrative assistant due to budget constraints) and a few other nonprofit organizations (such as my current work with the Poor People’s Campaign). I’ve taken jobs that had nothing to do with what I’ve learned in school. But now, thanks to current times, I can at least use what I’ve learned to educate others about watching out for propaganda that could cause you to turn against your own country.
I have one Eastern European ancestor. My great-great grandfather was an ethnic Czech named Anton Znamenacek. He grew up in Bohemia which, along with the neighboring state of Moravia, were known as the Czech lands due to the ethnic group that resided there. Today Bohemia and Moravia are part of the Czech Republic. In Anton Znamenacek’s lifetime Bohemia and Moravia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (along with the western part of Ukraine). When he was called up to serve in the army, he refused. I can imagine that, as an ethnic Czech, he wasn’t into risking his life on behalf of either the Austrians or the Hungarians. In his day anyone who refused to serve in the military had two options: jail or leaving the country for good with no chance of ever returning again. Anton Znamenacek chose the latter option and he departed from Prague leaving his family, community, and life as he knew it behind. He immigrated initially to New York City before traveling south, where he settled in Baltimore. According to family lore he met and married a woman who also immigrated from Bohemia and they started a family. Anton found work in a shoe factory. The pay wasn’t good and his family lived in poverty but it was better for him than the alternative.
When I saw news footage last year of young Russian men who fled to Georgia and Kazakstan in an effort to evade the draft and get sent to fight in Ukraine, I was reminded of the fact that they did the same thing that Anton Znamenacek did over 150 years earlier. Whether they will ever return to Russia in the future or not remains to be seen as of this writing.
Here’s another Eastern European fact about me: I was once married to the grandson of the Hungarian-born diabetes researcher Michael Somogyi. But that marriage ended pretty badly for me so I’m not going to elaborate on that any further.
I hope that as you read future posts you’ll get a sense of how pervasive this Russian propaganda has become. One example of this is what has happened to the social media site formerly known as Twitter since Elon Musk has taken over ownership of that platform last year. He renamed it X and has ordered the reconfiguration the site so that you end up seeing posts from people whom you aren’t even following. Musk claims that he’s doing it so that visitors can get all viewpoints but the reality is that much of what is being amplified on Twitter/X are right-wing pro-Russian posts. That amplification has driven away many advertisers because, understandably, someone like Coca-Cola or Marriott is leery about having one of their ads placed under a post written by someone advocating anti-semitism or the Ku Klux Klan. The only silver lining is that I’ve learned who is siding with Putin and I hope to expose them here so you can avoid them at all costs.
I hope that I can make you smart enough so you can resist the propaganda and have a positive effect on the many nations who are holding election in 2024 (including the United States).
My blog is free to subscribe but if you want to make a comment, you’ll need to take out a paid subscription, which only costs $8 per month. I know it costs as much as a subscription to Twitter/X Blue but at least I have no contacts with anyone even remotely connected to Vladimir Putin’s government. ;-)