In the space of five days the tectonic plates of world politics – which ordinarily seem to move at glacial pace – have shifted so dramatically that the landscape facing us seems almost unrecognisable.
War in Europe on a scale not seen since the Second World War. The most serious confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cuban missile crisis. Cities being surrounded and shelled indiscriminately. The completely unexpected galvanisation of usually divided countries and disparate civil society groups, beginning with a trickle, and quickly turning into an avalanche, offering their support to Ukraine in ways large and small.
Strangely, it’s the unexpected participants and moments in all this that make it so striking for me. Switzerland dropping it’s historical neutral status and agreeing to adopt sanctions against Russia. Sweden deciding to export arms to another country for the first time in over eighty years. Kenya’s powerful speech at the UN opposing Russia’s actions. Elon Musk positioning his broadband satellites over Ukraine to maintain their internet connections. (Imagine if the images and footage coming out of Ukraine of civilians peacefully blocking tanks and armoured columns where not available.) The hacker group Anonymous declaring war on Putin, and doing everything from leaking Russian Government data to renaming Putin’s yacht on the international shipping database.
Within Russia, brave protesters have been taking to the streets, despite the certainty of arrest, despite the challenges of organising. Despite the fact that dissenting voices, like opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and investigative journalist Anna Polytkovskya have been murdered in their hundreds.
Images like this, of an elderly Russian lady on the Moscow underground have stayed with me for days for it’s quiet dignity and courage.
Or this article behind the scenes of one of Russia’s last remaining independent TV stations, which was finally closed down yesterday.
How can we make sense of the speed with which this has all happened?
Perhaps the most revelatory post I read over the last few days was a thread on twitter by Carole Cadwalladr, one of the journalists responsible for unearthing the Cambridge Analytica scandal. She had a profound epiphany about the nature of this conflict which helps explain why this conflict has become so serious, so global, so quickly, and why this is not simply a question of Ukraine being invaded by Russia.
Because Carol suggests that we have actually been under a sustained attack for over eight years.
I think we may look back on this as the first Great Information War. Except we’re already 8 years in.
The first Great Information War began in 2014. The invasion of Ukraine is the latest front. And the idea it doesn’t already involve us is fiction, a lie.
It was Putin’s fury at the removal of President Yankovych in Feb 2014 that kicked everything off. Information operations were first crucial step in invasion of Crimea & Donbass. A deliberate attempt to warp reality to confuse both Ukrainians & the world.
This was not new. The Soviets had practiced “dezinformatsiya” for years. But what was new in 2014 was technology. Social media. It was a transformative moment. “Hybrid warfare” on steroids: a golden Willy Wonka ticket to manipulate hearts & minds. Almost completely invisibly.
But it wasn’t just Ukraine. We now know Russia began another offensive in Feb 2014. Against the West. Specifically, but not exclusively, America. How do we know this? Because the FBI conducted a forensic, multi-year investigation. That almost no-one paid any attention to.
The Mueller Report. You’ve heard of it. But probably as a headline about how it didn’t “prove” collusion between the Kremlin & Trump campaign. We can come back to that. What it did prove – BEYOND ANY DOUBT – was that Russia attacked 2016 US election through multiple routes.
And just *one* of the ways Russia attacked 2016 US election was via the tech platforms. Especially: Facebook. This was a military technique, it pioneered in Ukraine in 2014. By 2016, it refined, iterated & supersized these. Most brilliantly of all, they were entirely invisible
And it wasn’t just Russia. Companies such as Cambridge Analytica. Political operatives such as Manafort. Amoral opportunists such as Cummings. They learned how to exploit a platform that was totally open – anyone could do so. And totally closed – no-one could see how.
But also it *was* Russia. That’s what the Mueller Report proves. And, again, Ukraine is at centre of it all.
In 2016, we knew none of this. Russia & other bad actors acted with impunity &, in some cases alignment. But now, through the sheer bloody hard work of academics, journalists & FBI, we do know.
But it was complex, messy, difficult. So..We brushed it all under the carpet
We failed to acknowledge Russia had staged a military attack on the West. We called it “meddling”. We used words like “interference”. It wasn’t. It was warfare. We’ve been under military attack for eight years now.
This failure is at the heart of what is happening now in Ukraine. Because the first offensive in the Great Information War was from 2014-2022. And Putin won.
And he won by convincing us it wasn’t even a war.
We fell for it. We said it was “just ads” that “don’t work anyhow”. And “a bot didn’t tell me to vote”. Facebook is still an open threat surface. Exploited by authoritarians from Philippines to India to Brazil to Hungary. It’s maybe not a world war. But the world is at war.
Meanwhile, in Britain, we’re a captured state. In America, the institutions of govt worked. Even in spite of Trump. The authorities investigated. Individuals were indicted, charged, jailed. The hostile actions of a foreign state examined & unpicked.
(Not that it mattered.) The US media & therefore public failed to understand the real lessons of Mueller Report. And in the UK? We didn’t even bother trying. We allowed Johnson’s govt to sweep 2016 under the carpet. Nigel Farage. Arron Banks. Facebook. Russia. The lot.
But it wasn’t ‘just ads’. It was war. And it’s absolutely crucial that we now understand that Putin’s attack on Ukraine & the West was a JOINT attack on both.
That began at the exact same time.
Across the exact same platforms.
And this new front, the invasion of Ukraine, is not just about Ukraine. We are part of the plan. We have always been part of the plan. And Ukraine is not just fighting for Ukraine but for the rest of us too.
And maybe that could be why we’ve failed to understand Putin’s strategy in Ukraine? Because it’s not just a strategy in Ukraine. It’s directed at us too. And that’s what makes this such a uniquely perilous moment. Not least, because we still don’t understand we’re at war.
I hope you get goosebumps reading this, because you should.
How could we have been under attack like this without recognising it? How could our Governments ignore it? I think the reasons for this are fairly simple. Firstly, the west has been thoroughly intimidated by Putin, who has shown himself to be a ruthless operator, with complete dominance and control in his country, and a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. We may have been willing, in recent memory, to attack smaller dictators, like Saddam Hussein, but we did that precisely because he was no real threat to to the west, despite the famous manufactured “45 minutes” claims.
Secondly, collaboration with Russia brought a flood of illicit money into our country, particularly London, that was very attractive to both our Government and members of the elite. Law firms, high end real estate agencies and concierge services like Quintessentially have grown fat on facilitating the integration of wealthy oligarchs and their families into our society, and introducing them to our political elites. The UK became the epicentre for the laundering of dirty money generated by the robber-baron, wild-west capitalism that flourished after the fall and break-up of the Soviet Union.
The Conservative party has been the beneficiary of large scale donations from Russian sources with links to Putin for years, running into millions of pounds.
And it’s not just about money. It’s inappropriate relationships. Boris Johnson may be strutting the stage in Eastern-Europe, arguing that we were the first country to help send arms to Ukraine. But he’d probably rather we forgot about his how in 2018 as foreign secretary he was caught hungover and barely able to walk in a straight line after attending a party at Evgeny Lebedev’s Italian castle, the very next day after attending meetings in Brussels to discuss Russia and the Salisbury nerve agent poisonings.
Strangely, none of this has been hidden, just ignored. Like a low grade and persistent infection, or a managed drug addiction, we just didn’t recognise the danger of this level of penetration into our society and our body politic.
Journalists like Carole Cadwalladr have tried to shake us out of our torpor, but a jaded and cynical public, betrayed by Blair and Labour’s wars, betrayed by politicians in the expenses scandal, distrustful of journalists and the media after the phone hacking scandal, worn out by Covid, and overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of both information and misinformation on social media, no longer know who to trust, what is real, and what is false. We have become divided and alienated from our neighbours, and from countries that have been traditional allies. It is no wonder that Putin thought the liberal world would be incapable of any kind of unified response to his invasion.
Indeed, it appears that division and confusion has been actively and deliberately sown by Russia, and is the result of seeds that have been sown long ago. We know that Russia interfered in the US Presidential Election and in the Brexit Referendum, with the clear aim of weakening the western liberal alliance. There is also evidence that Russia has been responsible for large scale dissemination of Covid related propaganda and misinformation, with tangible results.
There are now early signs of a direct correlation between those who turned away from reputable media sources, medical professionals and scientific advice during the Covid pandemic, and instead believed conspiracy theories spread on social media networks, and those who are most sceptical about whether Putin is the bad actor in this conflict. This can be seen quite clearly and prominently in Neil Oliver’s recent monologue on GB News, where he apparently argued that there is no meaningful difference at all to be seen in terms of honesty or freedom between Putin’s Russia, and the UK and other western democracies. Try watching this clip of elderly activist Yelena Osipova being arrested by 8 police in St Petersburg tonight for asking for an end to the war, and then tell me that.
On a personal level, just a few days ago I was getting quite obvious propaganda justifying the invasion from a fellow parent at my kids school. They even went so far as to describe the Russian leader as “Plucky Putin” on their Facebook page. What do you say to that? Where do you start when someone is that far down the rabbit hole? How do you bridge the gap?
Again, this blurring of truth, reducing anyone’s ability to trust a baseline of reality with which to make decision or form judgements, is neither new, nor accidental. I first watched the documentary “Hypernormalisation” by Adam Curtis some years ago, but I still remember the profound impact it had upon me – firstly that something as a radical and polemic would be broadcast on the BBC, and secondly from the revelations that it included about both the underlying forces that were shaping our world – the backstory of Trump’s rise to power, the emergence of terror tactics, and above all, the astonishingly brilliant misinformation tactics developed by Vladislav Surkov a former Theatre director who worked for Putin for many years.
To return to Cadwalladr’s analysis, if we have been under attack for at least eight years, it has been a new form of warfare that we have been poorly equipped to either identify or combat. Like laundered dirty money, once a post with misinformation has been passed on from one person to another, people will believe it because it comes from someone they know and trust personally. It’s origins are obscured and lost.
To use an analogy, it’s like the 2013 horse meat scandal – except that as long as people like the taste, they don’t really want to know where it came from. They certainly don’t want to know they’ve been chowing down on that shit for years without knowing it. They’d much rather believe that you lot are the ones eating shitty mainstream horse-shit burgers.
Unlike a country like Russia, which maintains the strength of it’s Government by controlling and restricting information, we consider in the west that our messy, open and turbulent battle for ideas and free speech is our greatest strength. Indeed, I think that remains that case. But the massive shift that social media has created is that ideas and arguments no longer need to be tested, filtered, or true to influence public opinion and rise to prominence – they need only chime with the beliefs of the reader.
With people in large numbers starting to reflexively distrust everything that established media puts out as being false, rather than the far more energy intensive act of learning to filter, question, or fact check, then our body politic is very vulnerable to malign influence, and will continue to be so. And we may, like climate change, be approaching some tipping point moments in the loss of effective and trustworthy, truth seeking journalism. If the BBC is defunded, for example it won’t just be the UK that loses a bench-mark for truth-seeking journalism, but the whole world. The BBC World Service has already seen it’s funding shrinking in recent years, yet it produces brilliant journalism and promotes global voices to a massive audience. Will it really survive as a paid for service?
The invasion of Ukraine has ripped back the curtain on some of this new digital brand of psychological warfare, but whether it will ever be properly understood by the general public and combatted by our leaders and civil society remains to be seen. We may be unusually attentive to these issues right now, but we live an age of distraction and information overload, where the important information and issues gets buried in a mountain of dross and entertainment. Many within Government right now have a vested interest in a not examining the mistakes and donations and favours received so far. Others, such as the Conservative Bob Seely, MP for the Isle of Wight, seem willing to shine a light on this. Suddenly an intense spotlight is being shone on every aspect of Russian penetration into our political life, and stories like the 2020 intelligence and security committee’s report into Russian interference in the Brexit referendum are being re-shared widely on social media.
There is a surprising, even astonishing level of unity right now in relation to this crisis, but that is because Putin has finally acted in a way that makes him a clear and present danger on a physical level, rather than a hidden psychological and political one. But even if the Russian invasion of Ukraine fails, we have tough questions to ask about the way in which our technological innovation and the very freedom of our discourse has made us vulnerable.
Meanwhile, that same technology is allowing us to watch and share, minute by minute, almost unbearable acts of bravery as ordinary Ukrainians as they try to slow and stop the occupation of their country. It lets us see the growing protests in Russia, and the courage of it’s people show there too. It has allowed us to act and organise and show our support in myriad ways. It has helped force our government to act.
If only it felt like it was enough to make the invasion stop now.
The Nose... 
Posted on 02/03/2022 by Tom Allan
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