Putin's propaganda losers
The USSR knew how to promote itself. Putin's Russia is shockingly terrible at it.
In The Spectator, Michael Warren Davis asks a good question: “Why are Putin’s propagandists so bad at their jobs?”
This is one aspect of the Putin regime that isn’t talked about nearly enough: its unbelievably bad propaganda machine. For a major world power, Russia is uniquely bad at managing its self-image.
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Take Graham Phillips, the British civil servant-turned-Kremlin flak. He’s currently touring Ukraine as an honored guest of the Russian army. Members of the British government have accused him of war crimes for “interviewing” (interrogating) an Anglo-Ukrainian prisoner of war. Mr. Phillips is a small, strange-looking, and unpleasant — just about the worst possible profile given that he calls himself “the most honest journalist in the world,” though even his mother can’t possibly believe that.
And what about Gonzalo Lira? The Dartmouth alum got his start as a minor celebrity in the manosphere, marketing himself as a pickup artist. He was already living in Ukraine when Russia invaded and gained a wider audience by offering pro-Russia commentary on his YouTube channel “Coach Red Pill.” A spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry recently referred to Mr. Lira as a “famous film director,” though everyone who isn’t on the Kremlin’s payroll would probably prefer “obscure, Very Online weirdo.”
Or take Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector who became a fixture of the anti-war movement. Mr. Ritter’s career bottomed out in 2011, when he was caught exposing himself to a police officer posing as a fifteen-year-old girl online. Mr. Ritter had never been an A-lister, but after going to jail for trying to sext a child, his career was basically over. So, of course, that made him a prime recruit for Russia Today, the Kremlin’s mouthpiece in Western media. Mr. Ritter also uses his platform to parrot Kremlin talking points about Ukrainian Nazis.
My favorite, though, is Russell Bonner Bentley III, a.k.a. Comrade Texas. A former pot dealer from the Lone Star State, Mr. Bentley moved to Donetsk in 2014, and has been working to make the Donbas part of Russia ever since. A video of Comrade Texas (which is still surprisingly obscure) shows him standing in front of a line of Russian tanks dressed in a leather jacket and Mao cap.
“It’s Texas on the front line with the de-Nazifiers and liberators of Ukraine,” he announces, before promising, “These guys are going to save and liberate all the good people of Ukraine. And the bad people? Boom! Kick their ass.”
David notes that the USSR was much more effective at propagandizing to Westerners. I wonder if that might have been because the country was governed in accordance with an ideology that applied to all the Workers of the Worldᵀᴹ instead of Russian nationalists.
Agree or disagree with Communism, I can at least understand why someone in Western Europe might have been intrigued by it. But why would someone who lives thousands of miles away from Russia, who no Russian ancestry nor any other connection to the country except for the gas that until recently heated his home, form any kind of emotional attachment to Putin’s project restoring the glories of the Russian Empire?
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