Ukraine has won propaganda war but Putin still has conspiracy theorist allies around the world
Vladimir Putin might do well to dwell on the fate of serial rapist, torturer and mass murderer, Lavrentiy Beria, when the Stalin-era Minister of Internal Affairs attempted to ascend to the big comfy chair in the Kremlin. Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Zhukov replaced by Medvedev, Zolotov, and Gerasimov.
If Russian history teaches us anything, the end of the invasion in Ukraine may yet come with Putin’s swift departure from the land of the living.
Perhaps that’s why Putin sits at the end of the longest table in recorded history. I have no idea how he communicates with those huddled down the other end. Semaphore?
Ukraine has won the propaganda war, but Putin still has allies around the world and none more so than in the murk of conspiracy theories. The information war continues and its bastard son, misinformation is doing the rounds.
At a protest in Canberra last weekend, protest influencer and leader of the unregistered One Australia Party, Riccardo Bosi, offered an explanation for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The Ukraine doesn’t have recognised international borders which means it’s still part of Russia so it’s Russia invading Russia. But that’s not what it’s about.”
“The Ukrainian people just like the Australian people are blissfully unaware that the people up there (motioning to the federal parliament) are treasonous scum who need to be taken care of,” he said.
Later, Bosi told an earnest fellow traveller, “What’s going on globally in the Ukraine for example, that’s the head of the snake. Once that comes off there is no globalist empire anymore. It’s done.”
What Bosi was hinting at is part of what we might call the Q-aligned conspiracy that Vladimir Putin is not a murderous autocrat currently directing air strikes at civilian populations on foreign soil but a white hat who is liberating the world from NATO-sponsored deep state globalists who are either a) trafficking children in tunnels in Ukraine ten kilometres below the surface of the Earth or b) running US constructed bio-labs in Ukraine out of which will come the pandemic sequel to Covid-19. Take your pick.
It is a narrative that runs through the so-called Freedom movement in Australia.
Never mind that children can’t be trafficked in tunnels ten kilometres below the Earth’s surface in Ukraine or anywhere on Earth else for that matter. The temperature at those depths is a balmy 200 degrees Celsius or more but let’s not let facts get in the way of a damned good conspiracy.
But wait, there’s more (there always is with conspiracy theorists).
Sean Ambrose was a UAP senate candidate in NSW but ended his candidacy and resigned from the party with this tweet:
I have withdrawn my nomination as a senate candidate with the @UnitedAusParty. I do not support the acts of aggression by @NATO against the people of #Ukraine and it’s creation of a pariah state and I commend Putin (@KremlinRussia_E) for his fight against the New World Order.
— Sean Ambrose (@Anmchadh44) March 3, 2022
Last week, UAP disendorsed its candidate for the Melbourne seat of Macnamara, Jefferson Earl after Earl said he supported Putin and claimed the West was targeting Russia to distract from the “failed” plan to combat Covid-19.
“As soon as the pandemic narrative begins to lose power we see a ramp up of the rhetoric against Russia. Why? Because it is the beat (sic) way to hide what is happening on the ground worldwide medically,” Earl tweeted, four days before Russian troops moved into Ukraine.
Besides the narrative where statistics were so badly skewed during Covid, the current frenzy on Russia smacks of Wag The Dog type theatre. The people of the world must not allow these foolish leaders to draw us into WWIII. USA I â¤ï¸ u but you have missiles in Poland. #Befair
— Jefferson Earl (@JeffersonEarl1) February 19, 2022
UAP leader, Craig Kelly deserves some credit for not allowing this sort of nonsense to fester in his party, but I suspect those two candidate withdrawals won’t be the last before the election.
Almost predictably Simeon ‘The Aussie Cossack’ Boikov has filmed himself driving in his car (hands on the wheel, please Simeon) singing patriotic Soviet songs. In his latest video Boikov gives a stirring rendition of March of the Artillerymen (1943), a song that in its original form references orders given by Stalin who Boikov helpfully replaces with Putin. Stalin and Putin are seamlessly interchangeable syllabically and just possibly in a lot of other different ways, too.
QAnon is cheering on Putin’s invasion with many senior influencers babbling about a cleansing of deep state assets in Ukraine. Ukraine, has become a rich vein of conspiracies. On January 27 – Holocaust Remembrance Day -- QAnon John (his real name is John Sabal) babbled about Jewish elements within the ‘cabal’ – a deep state entity supported by the movie industry and big tech was a hashtag Synagogue of Satan.
QAnon has always been deeply mired in anti-Semitism.
Four weeks later, Sabal posted online that the invasion of Ukraine was desirable as it would bring about “a cleaning out of a very corrupt centre of operations for the Cabal.” It was “not a war”, and “not an attack on civilians” but a sweep of deep state illicit military operations in the country.
Thus, conspiracists can traverse the political spectrum; one moment ranting about Jewish cabals while supporting an invasion whose rationale according to the engineer, Vladimir Putin, is designed to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine. This is made stranger still with the knowledge the popularly elected President of Ukraine (elected in 2019 with 74 per cent of the vote) is a Jew whose great-grandfather and three great-uncles were murdered in the Holocaust.
Both sides engage in propaganda. Ukraine has triumphed in the battle of the world’s hearts and minds. We can even glean truth in the midst of myth making. When Putin’s de-Nazification justification fell apart, it was left to Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov to create another, this time a wild story that Ukraine was “seeking nuclear weapons” and retained a present nuclear capability.
Truth might be the first casualty of war, but misinformation is the metaphorical boots on the ground. Many have fallen to it.
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