The war in Ukraine is making history, not just on the battlefield, but in the annals of propaganda. It is the first global news event in which audiences have been told outright that narrative must be preserved as a strategic imperative — in this case, “Ukraine Will Win” — no matter what contrasting truths pop up. This process is documented above in Racket video wizard Matt Orfalea’s brutal “Ukraine Will Win” compilation, which shows how audiences have been told, ordered almost, to accept ideas they learned over time to be untrue.
A prime example is Andrea Kendall-Taylor, former senior intelligence official (and co-author of the Trump-Russia Intelligence Community Assessment written about here last week, drawing on a 2020 RealClearInvestigations story by Paul Sperry). Kendall-Taylor told PBS recently that although it’s true battle lines haven’t “meaningfully changed” in Ukraine in months, the “narrative of a stalemate is wrong and unproductive.” True but wrong, or true but unhelpful, is the definition of malinformation, previously confined to things like social media posts about vaccine injuries. With Ukraine, the entire direction of a war, including the public’s attitude toward supporting it, is being suppressed in favor of a political mantra.
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In a country where public opinion mattered, it would be counterintuitive for White House and Pentagon officials to go out of their way to advertise plans to increase the likelihood of wider war before aid is passed, but this is what’s been happening lately. Like wrinkles in a dress shirt, intrusions of reality can and have been ironed out of public view. Orfalea shows how the White House/Pentagon dictates continually reassert themselves each time reality tries to inch its way into the mainstream. Just the broad-strokes chronology is incredible:
Take the new NBC headline this week: “Biden administration is leaning toward supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles.” Though the Senate last Tuesday passed a $95 billion military aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the bill is not likely to pass the House. No matter: Joe Biden’s White House was cheered enough for “two U.S. officials” to leak plans for stepped-up attacks, assuming enough GOP House members can be bullied into yes votes. We want to send so-called ATACMS missiles:
The Biden administration has resisted sending the long-range missiles… because officials worried Ukraine would use them to strike inside Crimea or Russia and cause Russian President Vladimir Putin to escalate… Pentagon officials have expressed similar concerns about other weapons systems but have now decided to provide them to Ukraine.
Since October, when attacks in Israel and Gaza seized global attention, American attitudes toward the “other” war moved toward exhaustion. The public long ago began to tire of being lied to about topics related to Russia and Ukraine, from the Nord Stream pipeline blasts to overenthusiastic reports about last year’s counteroffensive to promises that each new entry in a succession of “savior weapons” will turn the tide (the ATACMS story belongs to this genre). This exhaustion was expressed late last year when Republican voters told House reps not to approve new aid, and surveys showed a distinct public preference for a negotiated resolution (see recent Harris/Quincy poll), coupled with reluctance to send blank checks into an arena with heightened risk levels (see a Pew Center survey).
Initially, after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, mass weapons shipments had the strong support of the American public. When Ukraine didn’t fall in days as some predicted, millions around the world rallied behind the tale of its “stiff resistance,” and as February turned to March a flood of stories came out suggesting catastrophic surprise losses for Russians said to be stunned by the “scale and ferocity” of Ukraine’s fighting spirit. Just as quickly, those stories faded, as viral events began to be retold with more ambiguous footnotes. The “Go Eff Yourself” Ukrainian border guards who stared down death to send the Russian warship Moskva off “on three letters,” as Slavs say, were commemorated and then un-commemorated in two postage stamp editions within the space of a month. Even before that, media consensus told us that by the end of one month of combat, the Russia-Ukraine military battle was locked in a “stalemate.”
As Matt documents, “stalemate” was then replaced with, “Ukraine will win.” Military victory was so certain, we began to be told, that the only important question was when. The date was coming soon, in “weeks,” or a “very short period,” and reporters did standups against whipping winds, telling us everyone agreed.
It wasn’t everyone. Commentators on RT of course disagreed but were banned. Tucker Carlson got pushed out of Fox, Russell Brand and the Grayzone ran into distribution issues, and “Pentagon leaker” Jack Teixeira, who exposed the public to gloomy classified assessments showing our own government predicting a “protracted war beyond 2023,” was arrested with the help of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Bellingcat.
With all these naysayers out of the way, “Ukraine Will Win” was once again a near-unanimous chorus. Even actor Sean Penn, in an extraordinary life-imitates-art callback to the “Film Actors Guild” (make your own acronym there) scenes from Team America World Police, declared “Ukraine will win… There’s no question in my mind.”
This situation could have gone on forever, as voices in virtually all major media by late summer last year spoke as if in one voice. The only interruptions came through synapse-misfires by the likes of Joe Biden, who noted Vladimir Putin is “clearly losing in Iraq,” a hint that in Beltway minds, one interventionist quagmire is very like another.
History of the Idea of...
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Despite the media’s near-blackout, the American public somehow began to conclude before it was told that Ukraine was not, in fact, winning. It turns out that if you ban alternate points of view, and have official after official use the same phrases while reading from a government script, the public will be able to read between the lines if you make even a slight shift. For instance, if “Ukraine will win… in weeks” is suddenly replaced by less cheerful headlines about how we’re in a “war of incremental gains” or that Ukrainian troops have made “limited progress,” people will notice that you’ve been lying, that “limited progress” means “losing,” and the truth is worse than what’s admitted.
The public seeing through “Ukraine will win” led to calls to the House GOP caucus to stop blank-checking military aid, which in turn led to a stalled vote and an unprecedented propaganda tantrum about the unwisdom of the livestock-like general public in its failure to follow dictates demanding support of an open-ended war. I wrote in December about a remarkable Washington Post story blaming Teixeira for this public disobedience. Teixeira wasn’t villain enough for the propaganda job, however, so we’ve since been treated to a variety of features showing how a string of traitorous serpents tempted the public to bite from the forbidden fruit of inquiry on Ukraine.
