“We’re living in a post-truth world”. What does that even mean? What it is often taken to mean is that the truth is unknowable and that all you have is a fog of conflicting narratives that serve the interests of those who spin than. You can’t know the truth. In fact, what is truth?
This is not only ironic in the internet age where the sum total of human knowledge sits on a device in your pocket, it is also lazy and complete bullshit. Of course, there is truth. The number of people who went to Trump’s inauguration is a fact, not some invented figure the current bogus POTUS wants to claim on Twitter. Someone shot down Malaysian airliner MH17; it’s not just something that you can approach with a shrug of the shoulders – “maybe we’ll never know”. The truth hasn’t gone away, it’s just been enmired in a bog of untruths. As the Bellingcat investigative process shows, if you are prepared to spend the time and use the wisdom of crowds, rather than the current tendency to spread the pig ignorance of crowds, you can find out the truth behind all sorts of things, notably who shot down MH17.
To get to the truth, you listen to those who are most likely to provide it – experts, academics and investigative journalists. You don’t listen to some bloke your mate’s cousin met down the pub (purportedly) which he told you about on Facebook. Luke Harding, Guardian journalist and Russia expert, is one of those people you can trust and whose writing is extremely informative and important. His latest book, Shadow State – Murder Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, is a sort of sequel to his earlier book, Collusion, which examined the likelihood of Trump’s active efforts to encourage Moscow’s attempt to put him in power.
What this new book does is to shine a light on Putin’s attempts to undermine the West and recreate the USSR. There are those in Russia, no doubt many, who see the breakup of the Soviet Union as a total betrayal and they aren’t going to take it lying down. Hence wars in Chechnya, or Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. Bearing in mind that power in the Kremlin and in Russia generally is firmly in the hands of past and present KGB and GRU officers, this is hardly surprising. Having invested their lives and careers in fighting the West, they didn’t just think, oh well, what the hell, if you can’t beat them, join them. What they thought was, let’s grab that cash with both hands and make a stash and do what we can to torpedo Western democracy while we are about it.
In Asterix and the Roman Agent, according to the blurb, “Julius Caesar resorts to psychological warfare to defeat the little Gaulish village by sending expert troublemaker Tortuous Convolulus to set friend against friend. Jealousy soon spreads as the Gauls become suspicious of each other.” This is exactly the Russian playbook as exposed by Harding. From fake social media accounts to internet trolls, from funding populist far-right movements across the globe (communism is completely old hat, a debunked means of holding on to power), to influencing debate and elections via fair means and foul, Russia seeks to recover its status as a world power (despite its second-rate economy) by destabilising the Western democracies.
So far, it’s a plan that has worked admirably. By intervening in Brexit and tipping the balance against the EU, it has weakened both the EU and created a future basket case out of Britain. Having dealt with Britain, an old Cold War enemy, it is now seeking to dismantle the EU by fuelling disgruntlement in most member countries, from Italy to Poland, Hungary to Austria, favouring regimes that would be right-wing dictatorships if only given the chance. France will be next on the list when Marie Le Pen makes an even closer bid on the presidency next time around. I wonder what influence Russia had on the Yellow Jacket (Gilet Jaunes) protests? I can’t think it was negligible if they have their finger on the pulse and certainly in the US and the UK they do. And of course, in the US they have either managed to get their asset elected President, or at the very least, have managed to get a narcissistic dope installed in the Oval Office, someone they can play like a somewhat discordant musical instrument. And in so doing, they have set half the country against the other half so that civility is a thing of the past and rank ignorance masquerades as informed opinion.
Harding’s work shows how the Russians behave with impunity in the West, turning the freedoms of the West against itself. How come a Russian state propaganda TV channel like Russia Today (RT) is allowed to broadcast in the UK? Because, apparently, our laws of freedom of expression allow it. Can an ex-KGB officer become the owner of an influential newspaper, London’s Evening Standard? Certainly. Just a question of money. It all seems so normal. I wonder what would happen if the BBC wanted to set up a special pro-UK TV station in Moscow? Or perhaps if British businessmen wanted to own Pravda? Not so easy perhaps. One rule for some, a different rule for others.
The situation, baldly, is this: Russian ex-secret service people – KGB, FSB, GRU – got their hands on all state assets of value in the early days of the Russian Federation. They thieved and murdered their way to obscene wealth. How else do you accumulate billions of dollars in a few short years if it isn’t through crime and how do you hang on to it in a dog-eat-dog world if it isn’t through thuggery? But cruising around on the Black Sea in your newly-acquired superyacht isn’t that interesting, so they decided instead to live a jet-setting lifestyle in the West, in London, Monaco, New York, the Caribbean and Dubai. And a small portion of their ill-gotten gains served to make the makers of superyachts, luxury cars, art dealers and estate agents wealthy in turn. Their grubby cash financed smart office blocks and paid elite schools and universities to educate their privileged kids. The West, especially the US and UK, turned a blind eye and sent a message that so long as you had money, you were welcome. It didn’t matter how you got it. Putin’s friends live in London. Putin sends killers to murder his enemies in the UK, by hanging, strangulation, nerve agents or radioactive substances. No one says Boo! The nicest bits of London have become an oligarch’s playground. The only people who can still afford to live there are those who partake in some shape or form of the oligarchs’ cash. To put it another way, the West is for sale, or to use the more innocuous-sounding phrase that UK politicians like to quote: “The UK is open for business”. It just doesn’t matter what that business is.
Shadow State didn’t tell me all that much that I didn’t already know, as I follow the news and Harding’s work in the Guardian. I listen to the Bellingcat podcast. I listen to many podcasts from reputable news sources – The BBC, The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal. But I was unaware of The Wagner Group, the shadowy Russian mercenaries deniably involved in all sorts of wars and armed disputes. And yet what do I read today, coincidentally? That a couple of hundred of them have been detained in Belarus prior to the upcoming “election” whereby the current dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, will be returned to office. It seems that suddenly, Lukashenko isn’t so keen on being part of a greater Russia, so Putin has sent some goons to encourage a more reasonable point of view. Watch this space as Russia annexes Belarus.
The only hope for Western democracy lies in people like Harding. So long as they are prepared to turn on a fog light, we can still naively hope that the powers of greed and corruption will one day be defeated.