From The Blind Spot (also on blogroll at right):
There’s a lot going on today. More than any one brain can process quite frankly. We are all going to be stunned with too much information flow and I don’t want to add to the noise.
But I think there are a few important points that need stressing to do with hybrid information war and who we can trust.
It’s become abundantly clear that Putin’s long-term strategy has been to confuse everyone, and use disinfo to turn major demographies into useful idiots doing his work.
As a Pole, one thing I have always been clear about, however, is that you can’t and never should trust Putin. The reason I have always stressed this is because I’ve seen too many voices appear apologetic to his cause. This is especially true of the crypto and alternative/independent news space.
It’s a problem. And it comes about because of a needlessly binary attitude. The assumption that if you are against a technocratic globalist state you only have Putin and RT to turn to to fight your corner is terribly naive. There is, of course, a middle ground where you can resist the bureaucratic technocracy that is turning everything into a centralised surveillance capitalist state on a globalised level and still remain hugely suspicious of Putin, Russia and autocracy. There is a middle ground where you can defend the right to your own culture, sovereignty and identity but not default to thinking that the only alternative to globalism is a strong-man system. Poland is one country that has tried to achieve this middle ground, even as it has stood accused of a similar tendency for strong-man autocracy (I think somewhat unfairly). There is no country in Europe that better understands the negatives of both fascistic and communist technocratic forces.
We still don’t know what Putin’s long-term objectives are. Some people say it’s about establishing Russia as a respected power on the international stage. Others say he never gave up on communism. Some others say he has gone totally delusional and wants to burn the whole thing down. On the middles point, this clip of Condi Rice is worth a gander (h/t Pippa Malmgren).
Whatever the case, it’s become increasingly clear that what Putin has done very effectively is identify that it is the West’s libertarian backbone that represents the trojan horse/zero-day exploit of the whole democratic system overall.
Why libertarianism may be the furin cleavage of the democratic system.
If you can convince libertarians to work against the West’s own interests, you can in theory cause the free-loving open system they love to self-destruct. This, sadly, is the fundamental naivity of the libertarian mindset. While the mindset is a hugely important component of the Western way of life, it fails to appreciate how exploitable it is to malevolent forces. They say your enemy’s enemy is your friend. But when your enemy by default is the state, you introduce the risk that a foreign enemy can use you for their own gain.
This exploitation I think is evident in the way in which Russian propaganda channels like RT (and independent conspiracy channels) have wooed the liberatarian mindset to convince them that their own Western elites are working against their interests....
....MUCH MORE
