An American tourist in Russia
Today I’m going to talk about the alleged Russian attack on June 27 against a Ukrainian shopping mall that Zelensky claimed was filled with more than 1,000 shoppers and employees. I’ve seen chatter from both sides about the veracity of these claims, but I’m going to specifically analyze the propaganda value and the talking points it illustrates.
Both “right-wing” and “left-wing” enthusiasts have this vision of a handful of billionaires controlling all of the news in the world. While there is some grain of truth to this, in the sense that politicians and rich people have certain narratives they want pushed, we are vastly overestimating how much these narratives are centrally controlled. Here’s why.
The “new” war in Ukraine has been a non-stop toy commercial. It’s not enough for corporate news outlets to simply say Russia is losing and Ukraine is winning, every success story has to be tied to a product. Drones, missiles, starlink satellites, and more. It’s like four months of saying it’s good to give cocaine and cigarettes to babies. Sure, the tobacco industry is willing to lie about the supposed benefits of their products, surely the weapons industry wouldn’t do that, right?
I’m not an expert on geopolitics by any stretch of the imagination, but I know how to do basic fact checking. Apparently, a large percentage of the American population has forgotten how to do that (assuming they knew how to begin with). But seriously, remember all that sanctimonious noise we were subjected to over the past several years about only accepting information from “credible” sources? Well, nowadays, the western world’s largest media outlets will copy/paste “news” from Ukraine’s defense ministry, or even random .ru blogs, without any attempt to verify it. That said, BBC seems to have gone into James Bond territory. They apparently weren’t content with just being stenographers of war propaganda, but actually go out of their way to synthesize fake news. Here is an example.
