Russia and HAMAS are winning

The title sounds both defeatist and wrong. It’s the former because the Ukrainians have stopped the Russian invasion in its tracks. It’s the latter because Israel is pounding HAMAS into the ground.

True, neither evil gang is winning the war fought with shells and bullets. But they are doing much better in the war fought with words and keyboards.

Gen. Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, is unlikely to go down in history as a major military strategist. However, he is credited with conceiving the concept of ‘hybrid warfare’: combining military, propaganda, diplomatic, economic, cultural and other tactics to achieve strategic goals.

The idea isn’t new, but it has had to be thoroughly rehashed to accommodate modern information technology. That the Russians have done, adding a massive electronic effort to the traditional stratagems of creating spy networks and recruiting ‘useful idiots’. And in a display of characteristic Russian generosity, they have shared their knowhow with HAMAS and other similar setups.

The underlying intent is to exploit the inchoate sentiments already existing at Western grassroots. Russian propagandists realise that about two thirds of all Westerners occupy an inert and malleable middle ground, with the remaining third evenly divided between the right and left fringes.

Both are ideologically programmed to respond in a Pavlovian manner to any messages catering to their ideologies. Both, therefore, are gullible and recruitable. The recruitment may be carried out the old-fashioned way involving documents signed in blood or more subtly, with expert brainwashing.

The right fringe is made up of malcontents usually (and incorrectly) called conservatives, but who are in fact Right-wing radicals. They are dissatisfied with where their countries are going, and with good reason.

To take Britain as an example, her indigenous population is being diluted in an influx of alien immigration, her traditional values are being mocked, her whole history is being derided, her education doesn’t educate, her children are encouraged to change sex and so forth – the litany can go on for ever.

People inhabiting the Right fringe have a certain ideal society in their minds, and they increasingly realise their own governments don’t share those ideals and will do nothing to realise them. Hence they are desperate to find someone, anyone, who speaks the same language they do, whose every word tickles their nerve endings.

Putin’s government, made up almost entirely of KGB officers, knows all that. Those KGB operatives still remember the glorious days of the Soviet Union, when millions of Western Lefties were successfully fed the canard of a peace-loving, democratic Soviet Union where everyone is equal, no one is rich, and everything is free.

That pumped endorphins into millions of Western bloodstreams, creating a sense of well-being impervious to facts. Later the Lefties would say they didn’t know about mass executions, concentration camps, torture, murderous artificial famines and other hard Soviet realities. That’s a lie: of course, they knew. But what they knew couldn’t make inroads on what they felt: the ideal might have only existed in their minds, but it was none the less tangible for it, more real than reality.

Some, such as the American playwright Lillian Hellman, kept their Stalinist faith long after the Soviets themselves had described Stalin’s crimes in harrowing detail. However, the hard Stalinist Left later transformed into what’s mislabelled as liberalism, the softer version of the same thing.

Hence, starting from the 1970s and steadily accelerating over the next generation, Soviet propaganda began to express itself in the language of Western campus liberals. The stress was on racial equality, distributionism, Third World virtues, peace, love and respect all around. That set up the outburst of enthusiasm in the West greeting the transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, known as ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’ and even – especially idiotic – as ‘the end of history’.

It took about 10 years for the KGB to progress from being the power behind the scenes to becoming the power, tout court. Russia, already thoroughly criminalised under Yeltsyn, became fascistic under Putin and his ruling KGB gang.

The intention was from the beginning to recreate the Soviet Union, by force if necessary. Since that aim was unlikely to find many allies on the Western Left, both the thrust and the target of propaganda had to change. Putin’s trolls started peddling ‘traditional values’ to Western malcontents on the Right.

Those people were fed the very verbal sustenance their own governments starved them of: traditional sexual morality, strong decisive government with a muscular leader at the helm, religiosity, a strong line on immigration and Islam – again, you can continue this litany on your own. Facts pointing at the bogus nature of all such claims and the real fascistic nature of Putin’s Russia have always been in the readily available public domain, but virtual reality has again trumped the actual kind.

Those eager to dupe themselves are easy to dupe. Hence the propaganda part of the hybrid went into overdrive with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression against the Ukraine.

While a third of a million Russians were being butchered in human-wave attacks on Ukrainian positions, Russian trolls, agents of influence and useful idiots created a fake picture of the proceedings. The Right-wing malcontents all over the world liked what they saw.

The Ukrainian government was depicted as a corrupt regime with strong Nazi tendencies that came to power as a result of a ‘putsch’. That evocative word was chosen in preference to ‘coup’, ‘overthrow’ or, God forbid, ‘revolution’. The upshot was that the West shouldn’t spend billions trying to prop up that reincarnation of evil.

A thoughtful reader commented on my piece the other day by saying: “Most Republicans do not view aiding Ukraine as stopping facism, but as propping up a corrupt regime.” Exactly. And the prevalence of that view testifies to the success of Putin’s propaganda.

Of course, the Ukraine is corrupt. What do you expect after being ruled for almost 100 years by Soviet communism and Putin fascism? She is, however, nowhere near as corrupt as Russia, whose whole government is a fusion of secret police and organised crime.

The Ukrainian people finally became independent when they overthrew their Russian puppet government in 2014, and they have since made giant strides towards civilisation, with the Russians moving just as fast in the opposite direction. Witness the fact that – at wartime! – there exists widespread criticism of the Zelensky government, with Ukrainian media often openly disapproving of its conduct of the war.

Meanwhile in Russia, the KGB government is doling out draconian prison sentences for every whiff of criticism and even for referring to the war as just that, not by the prescribed term of a “special military operation”. Putin’s opponents are being routinely murdered not only in Russia, but all over the world, and Russian money laundromats continue to operate globally in spite of the sanctions.

All that is widely ignored, with ‘conservative’ Western papers happily lending their space to mendacious propaganda of Russian fascism, accompanied by references to Ukrainian ‘Nazis’. That’s why so many Westerners who consider themselves conservative are questioning the advisability of supporting the Ukraine. Russian propaganda there is boosted by the homespun fringe parties that are in Putin’s pocket ideologically and often financially.

The scale of the Russian propaganda effort far exceeds the 1930s achievements of Willi Munzenberg’s Popular Front machine, complete with its own papers, magazines and film studios. And the Russians’ HAMAS pupils are doing very well too.

The other day The Times featured this headline: “Mummy, are they going to bomb our house?” That’s tear-jerking demagoguery at its very best, and the adman in me can’t fail to identify the guiding hand behind such messages in all the ‘liberal’ media.

The original revulsion following the HAMAS raid was short-lived. At first, even the most ‘liberal’ (meaning anti-Western and pro-Third World) media shuddered at the stories of mass murders and savage rapes. Yet the underlying sense that HAMAS’s cause is just had been so cleverly planted into the ‘liberal’ psyche that, when the Israelis began to retaliate, the Arab savagery was quickly forgotten.

Coming to the fore were endless stories to the effect of “Yes, the Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but…” provided they don’t kill any Muslims. Such stories have been richly illustrated with pictures of destroyed Gaza buildings, killed or maimed ‘civilians’, crying children and so on.

The mindset required for such gross misrepresentations of reality didn’t appear by itself. Western ‘liberals’ may have been inclined in that direction, but that inclination has had to be lovingly cultivated and rewarded. And the Russians didn’t just train HAMAS and other terrorist gangs in the use of arms and explosives. They have also taught Third World radicals how to shill for their cause by pressing the right buttons in the Left psyche.

Neither the Russians nor certainly HAMAS is any good at any creative activity, and they aren’t even so good at war. But their two-prong propaganda effort is scoring notable successes all over the world, right, left and centre. The pen yet again is proving to be mightier than the sword, and the prospects for the triumph of the good appear to be bleak.