The lies are the point

The Ukraine war has never been entirely military, or even territorial. It is epistemic.

Photo by Paul Hermann on Unsplash

The lying isn't a byproduct. It isn't some accidental detail and it's not a character flaw. It is fundamental to the project. It is the core explanatory quality which sheds light on everything else around it. They're trying to drown you in lies because it will eradicate your ability to challenge power.

They come thick and fast now. You can barely check your phone or listen to a news report without coming across two or three really big lies. This week's lie was so vast it felt like it would overshadow everything, as if you could feel it cover the sun.

"You should have never started it," Donald Trump told Ukraine. "You could have made a deal."

I'm not going to bother fact-checking it, obviously. There's no point. We all saw what we saw. We are not going insane. We witnessed the unprompted Russian invasion. We watched the tanks, the air strikes, the troop movements. There's nothing complicated about it. There's no other valid interpretation of it.

The war has never been entirely military, or even territorial. It is epistemic. Since its very inception, the battle for Ukraine has been a battle for the concept of objective reality.

It began with a lie. Back in 2013, Ukraine had the choice between two futures. One with Europe, through an initial association agreement on regulatory harmonisation with the EU, and another with Russia, through a customs deal. President Viktor Yanukovych went with Russia, the people gathered in Independence Square to demand he go with Europe, and eventually the regime crumbled.

This was when Putin initiated a military attack. Unlike previous military attacks, it took place as a post-truth operation. On the morning of February 27th 2014, the so-called little green men appeared. They emerged seemingly out of nowhere, outside the regional parliament in Simferopol, the capital of the Crimean peninsula. They were masked commandos, wearing green uniforms of the sort the Russian military had, but with no insignia, no identifying marks, no indication of who they were or where they came from. Then they took the airport.

At this point Ukraine was already at war and yet not at war. It had entered a liminal space outside of truth and fiction.

The identity of these men was never confirmed. Even as the Crimea was invaded by Russia, no war was declared. No hostilities were announced, there was no confirmed statement from Russia that these men had anything to do with them. "There are no troops whatsoever, no Russian troops at least," Russia's ambassador to the EU insisted.

Behind this physical invasion came two supplementary waves of coordinated disinformation. They were as much a part of the assault as the physical operation had been. The first used television, with Kremlin propaganda beamed out to people in eastern Ukraine on channels like Channel One Russia, RTR Planeta and Russia 24. They pumped out a sequence of lies: Ukraine was being run by fascists, it was under American control, it was sending armies to terrorise the east, it would ban the Russian language.

The second used social media. Troll factories in places like St Petersburg churned out lies. If Ukraine took control of an area, it would put out blogs saying it hadn't. It would put together memes dealing in cynical stoner humour making a false equivalence between Islamic terrorism and Ukrainian fighters. It would write-up fake below-the-line comments pretending to be by Americans about Obama, or by eastern Ukranians about food supplies.

When this disinformation tactic proved effective in Ukraine, Putin used it in the West. From the end of 2014, the proportion of English language tweets from Kremlin fake accounts started to increase dramatically. By 2016, when Trump first ran for election, English and Russian tweets were in roughly equal number.

They went to town on the US information system: on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. This report, based on data provided by social media firms to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, details what happened next. Many of the messages were seemingly innocuous. One of the most popular on Instagram was a celebration of diversity. But they had one overriding structure. The Kremlin messages aimed at progressive voters were intended to induce apathy - they discouraged voting. The messages aimed at conservative voters were intended to induce action - they encouraged voting.

Now, all these years later, Putin's preferred candidate is trying to stitch up the Ukrainian war in the Kremlin's favour. Let's not pretend he has another desired outcome. We must believe that people are who they show us to be. He echos the Kremlin talking points one after another, almost in order, as if he was reading them off a script. He sounds like an ally of the Kremlin because he is an ally of the Kremlin. It's no more complex than that.

As he speaks, he begins to degrade reality around the world. It happens among honourable people and dishonourable ones, clever strategists and foolish disciples alike. The British government is so keen to not offend Trump that it occasionally went mute this week. Asked about Trump's claims on Wednesday, defense secretary John Healey said: "Three years ago, one country illegally invaded another, and since then, the Ukrainians have been fighting for their freedom." Perhaps this was meant to be poetic. In context, it sounded opaque.

In the Spectator yesterday, the magazine's deputy editor, Freddy Gray, tried to cast Trump's words in the most favourable possible light. He referenced Trump's statement that Volodymyr Zelenskyy started the war. It had been "widely interpreted as him saying that Ukraine started the war". But only lower mortals would come to such superficial conclusions. Then, slowly, Gray's cynical, mendacious mind unfurled itself to the world. "While his choice of words was poor, in context he is clearly referring to the thwarted efforts to achieve peace in the conflict's early days in 2022". Ludicrous Quisling garbage. The kind of sentence which shames someone’s reputation indefinitely. The kind of stain which you can never rub off.

It filters down. Don't think that we're immune from it in this country because we're not. I was sat in a GP waiting room on Wednesday when I heard an elderly couple mention Ukraine. The wife looked up from her paper and said something along the lines of: "I suppose Trump's point is that the Ukrainians should have tried for a deal earlier." The man murmured in agreement. My partner glanced at me nervously. I had to restrain myself from jumping out of my seat and shouting: 'Yes and exactly how much of their territory should they have handed to a foreign aggressor for you to be satisfied they'd done their part? How many of their citizens should they have sacrificed so that your empty echoing brain, dictated in all qualities by whichever opinion you heard last, could be satisfied that they'd done their bit?' I felt the skin on my face flush red with anger, then talked myself down. I decided I should avoid standing above an elderly couple and shouting directly at their faces about imperialism in a doctor's surgery.

All of this feels terrifyingly new but the basic ideological function is old. The assault on truth is a core component of all assaults on liberal democracy. Nazism was born with the stab-in-the-back-myth. It promulgated itself with a lie about Jewish culpability for Germany's ills. Those lies were not even internally consistent. Jews were framed as communists stoking insurgency and as financial speculators stoking instability. Sometimes they were framed as both, engaged in an elaborate plan to split Germany down the middle. The central conceits of Nazism were a lie, including the concept of race leadership and the fascist New Man. Even its communication strategy was a lie. Nazism actively helped create the violence it said it was the only answer to.

They try to destroy truth because truth is the greatest threat to their rule. As long as truth exists, they can be scrutinised and held wanting. Once it is vanquished, they define reality and there is no basis upon which they can be held to account.

They say Zelenskyy is a dictator, that free speech is in danger in Europe, that the EU is turning its back on democracy.

If we maintain our capacity for truth, we realise that they are turning the world on its head. Remember. Don’t forget. Don’t become confused. It is Putin who is the dictator. It is Putin who assassinates journalists. It is Vance's own administration that punishes reporters depending on their style guide, or threatens them with jail when they break critical stories. It is Trump who tried to overthrow a US election result.

In the next few months, you will feel reality start to crumble around you. Figures like Trump will lead the charge. Their little advocates, operating under a degree of reputational cover in respectable conservative magazines, will do their best to help. Otherwise decent-minded politicians will inadvertently assist them by failing to speak the truth with conviction. And on a bad day it will feel like the whole notion of objective truth is fading away. And with it, the ability to scrutinise and challenge power.

It'll be up to each and every one of us to stick to the truth, now more than ever. It was Orwell, obviously, who said it best: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

Two plus two makes four. Russia invaded Ukraine. This is as true today as it was a year ago. They will only win when they can get inside your skull and convince you otherwise.

Ukraine represents truth. Russia represents lies. Every time we speak the truth, we support the war effort. Every time we reject lies, we help defeat the enemy.

Odds and sods

I had an absolute bastard of a week, sick in bed pretty much from the moment I finished the last newsletter to the second I got up to write this one. Just a dreadful snotty aching feverish business of the type I have no intention of ever going through again. I don't care what fucking winter flu jabs I need to get, you can plug them right in me.

Plenty of you will be going through it now. My sympathies. I only survived because of some really-high-quality-but-not-too-challenging entertainment options, which you might also want to dabble in.

Mafia Definitive Edition is a lovely, wistful, autumnal little game which loves all the same films you do. The controls are all over the place, the combat is sub-par and the gameplay is adequate at best . But the voice acting and the score are so much better than they have any right to be. Driving around 1930s prohibition America with a tommy gun and an attitude never got old. Don't you know who I am, wiseguy? I'm with Salieri.

I loved Fresh Meat when it first came out. The Channel 4 university comedy by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain was nostalgic for youth without being sentimental about it, or ever forgetting that it was so much more grotty and disappointing than you remember. It's a delight to revisit now: achingly funny, scathing, confident, and occasionally tender. It managed to coax a laugh from me when I could barely do anything but moan.

DC Comic's Gotham Central - by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Michael Lark and others - is a gem of a comic. It's set in the Gotham police department, where detectives chase after crimes only to find Mister Freeze has absent-mindedly frozen their partner's arm and then broken it off. Batman is rarely involved, but when he is it's as this object of frustration and humiliation. If you liked the TV series Penguin this'll be right up your street. It's the product of people working at the absolute peak of their craft. I was so gripped I occasionally forgot I was ill

See you next week. Which has to be better than this one. It just has to be.