Author: Marian Voicu
The massive disinformation campaign carried by Moscow in the West, in the former satellites of the Soviet Empire and also on its own territory, has its Achille’s heel: it is limited to a number of themes or narratives. It’s impossible to combat and debunk all fake news, for the simple reason that writing one takes much less than debunking it; after all, lies can go as far as one’s imagination, while debunking requires the observance of journalistic rigour. It’s not impossible, however, to recognize fake news, because it is built around a few narratives created to serve Russia’s goals. Here are some of them.
Europe, a land of perdition
1. The European Union is disintegrating, nation-states are revolting against Brussels’ plans to turn them into colonies, street movements are on the rise, as are national self-determination movements.
The narrative has been adapted specifically for each nation. The fake pro-Brexit campaign was built around immigration, starting with the danger posed by Romanians and Bulgarians and ending with Turks. In Catalonia, the campaign was built around national self-determination, in order to legitimize the one in Crimea. The strong words of the fake idiolect were “Franco” and “Francoism”, drawing a parallel between the former fascist state and today’s Spain. Also, the tensions between northern and southern Italy, between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, between far-right anti-Brussels parties and groups and pro-Europe center have been speculated.
The Romanian narrative says that Romania risks turning into a European colony, that the country was sold in order to join the EU and NATO, foreigners are buying the land, traditional values are perverted, the international “Occult” decides the future of the country. The protests of 2017 – 2018 in Romania, the Kremlin tells us, were not against corruption, they were staged against those who sold the country to the EU, forcing Romanians to live worse than they used to during the Ceausescu regime.
2. The EU is Gayropa, run by a gay lobby that snatches children from their families and entrusts them to gay couples, and where pedophilia will be legalized.
In the Russian press, same-sex marriages are mentioned alongside zoophilia, necrophilia or pedophilia, all illustrating the civilizational and demographic decline of the West, defeated by Islam.
Blue Europe, Gayropa, is lost, and the center of civilization is now Moscow, Third Rome.
The West wants to perversely infiltrate the world of Orthodoxy through gay propaganda, in the name of human rights, which Patriarch Kirill described as “global heresy.”
The pro-Kremlin press used homonymy – Gayromaidan-Euromaidan – to refer to the same narrative.
The accusation of being in the service of a “gay lobby” has become a powerful political weapon against the Russian opposition, especially against Alexei Navalny, and was also used by Igor Dodon against Maia Sandu in the 2016 campaign.
Russia, a shield against fascists and imperialists
3. Fascism is showing its teeth again in Europe, especially in Ukraine, so it takes an iron fist in the Kremlin, as Stalin was, to save the Russians and Europe again.
Ukraine is led by a fascist junta that has started the mass extermination of Russians in Donbas. The narrative uses a special idiolect: Banderites, junta, fascists, karateli, Russophobia, provocation, the Fifth Column, Gayromaidan, uke. During the Minsk negotiations, these words disappeared from the press. When the negotiations reached a deadlock, they reappeared, with indications coming directly from the Kremlin.
Fake news was delivered from all levels. Lavrov said that ethnic Russians were being killed by karateli battalions and thrown into mass graves and that Russia couldn’t carelessly witness such a genocide. Also, Alexandr Dughin, who became the ideologue of the Russian neo-imperial regime, writing his doctrine – The Basics of Geopolitics (1997), was the author of the fake news about the six-year-old boy who was crucified on a notice board and shot in front of his father in Sloviansk, a story subsequently dramatized by Channel 1.
The war in Ukraine, propagandistically covered by means of fake accounts, has become the most popular reality show. Putin proposes that Russia relive the Great War for the Defense of the Fatherland on a daily basis, in order to render itself legitime again through bloodshed, as it has done in Chechnya and Georgia.
4. The Americans want a war with Russia, so they started a war in Ukraine, as they did in Syria, Afghanistan or Libya; they stand behind the Arab Spring and the “color revolutions”, and it’s them who set up and armed ISIS and Al Qaeda.
The Soviet narrative of the “Fight for Peace” is being reinterpreted by post-Soviet neo-imperialist Russia. Today, Moscow is “fighting for peace” against NATO, the Ukrainian fascists, the Romanian revisionists, the American imperialists, ISIS, which is “financed by the USA”. Ranking first among Russia’s enemies, according to popular perception, are the USA, Ukraine, the European Union and Germany.
One of the news items that had an impact on the US presidential election was that according to which Hillary Clinton had funded ISIS. Russian hackers affiliated with Russian intelligence services hacked Hillary Clinton’s servers, mixed real information (in small doses) with fake information and spread the content on social media. Headlines such as “WikiLeaks confirms that Hillary sold weapons to ISIS”[i], had more than 1 million views.The 20 most read fake news had more shares, comments and likes than the 20 most read “real” news in the traditional press. On average, the fake news headlines were believed by 58% of Clinton’s supporters and 86% of Trump’s. The main trolling source was St. Petersburg’s “Troll Factory” run by “Putin’s Chef” Prigozhin.
The scarecrows of the post-truth era: Soros, refugees and the parallel state
5. The US has created a refugee crisis, as Europe has become an economic competitor. Refugees have been accepted in Germany because only they can stop the demographic decline, but immigrants rape their women, destroy their national culture and turn Islam into a weapon.
In January 2016, Lisa, a 13-year-old girl from the Russian-German community in Berlin, disappears for 30 hours, then tells her parents that she was abducted and raped by three foreigners from the Middle East. Russian-language social networks get activated, then Channel 1, and thousands of Russian-Germans take to the streets to protest against the government and immigrants, accusing the police of cover-up. The protests are attended by far-right organizations. Although Lisa later admits to the police that she invented the whole story, the Russian press continues to cover the first version.Sergei Lavrov states that the girl “obviously did not voluntarily decide to disappear for 30 hours” and voices hope that “this issue of migration will not lead to a distortion of reality due to political correctness.” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, warns Russia that it is politicizing the case. Hans-Georg Maassen, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, says that “Russia is using the KGB’s old methods of disinformation and detribalization”[ii] and that if Merkel, the EU’s strongest leader, falls, then the EU will fall too.The “Lisa case” happened at a very difficult time for Germany. The sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve (2016/2017) in Cologne came as a shock to Germans. More than 1.4 million refugees had sought asylum in Germany from 2014 to 2016. The story fit perfectly into Moscow’s narrative of a “soft” and “weak” West that “fell into the hands of immigrants.” [iii]For NATO, the “Lisa Case” has become a text-book case on the instrumentalization of tensions between two states, starting from fake news.
6. The world oligarchy (whose main exponent is Soros) finances color revolutions to seize power through coups; popular democracy is attacked by the “parallel state”.
Since January 2017, this narrative has been amplified in the Romanian space through Sputnik. Iulian Capsali, a militant neo-Orthodox publicist, writes that the danger for Romania is not corruption, but the “parallel state”, with Soros and the Norwegian state allegedly behind it. The narrative has been taken over by various publications and social networks, demanding an end to NGO funding from abroad, recalling the Russian and Hungarian experience.In November 2017, the Social Democratic Party adopted a resolution against the so-called “Parallel and Illegitimate State” and decreed general mobilization.Romania was going through a unique period, with 3 governments in 12 months, a situation that had only been reported back in 1944, during the war. But the governments were not changed by the “parallel state”, they were changed by the Social Democratic Party – Alliance of Liberals and Democrats coalition, during party meetings and even through a no confidence motion against their own government. The ruling party manufactures and spreads fake news, disinformation and paranoid narratives, just like in Russia, Turkey, Belarus or Hungary. The same politicians who spoke of the “parallel state” and “foreign interests” also warned of the danger of Romania being transformed into a “colony of the European Union”.
Putin’s (and his great predecessors’) wonderful Russia
7. The Western model of liberal democracy is dysfunctional and outdated; life is better in Russia, despite the sanctions imposed by the Russophobic West, which demonizes the efficient, iron-handed leader Vladimir Putin.
Pro-Kremlin media reports that Jews are leaving Europe, ethnic Russians settled in Germany are being raped, stock exchanges in London, Frankfurt and Warsaw are being cyber-attacked, European men are no longer men and their women need immigrants to procreate, and the anti-German sentiments in Poland and the Czech Republic, the anti-Polish sentiments in Lithuania and the anti-Romanian ones in the Republic of Moldova are getting stronger. “Things may seem bad in Russia, but they are much worse in Europe,” they say. “You may be poor, but you are poor in a great country.” [iv]iBy emasculating the others, Russia’s remasculinization takes place. It’s not by chance that the Russian Bear is increasingly promoted as a national symbol and it is also no coincidence that Putin presents himself as an alpha male: when he does not fly MIGs and does not take a submarine dive, he fights Siberian tigers and ice-bathes (with the orthodox cross visible around his neck).
8. Russia has a great past, which the revisionist West denies through fake news. It was not the Soviet Union that started World War II, it was Poland; the USSR did not invade the Baltic countries, Finland and Romania. The Americans simply do not observe the Yalta and Malta agreements and NATO invades former fraternal peoples.
In this narrative, monuments are evidence of the great tsarist and Soviet past and are intangible, part of the Russian neo-imperial cult. Because of its decision, in 2007, to move the statue of the Soviet Hero to a military cemetery, the Estonian Parliament was accused of fascism by Moscow. Ethnic Russians are taken to the streets by the fake news that the monument has already been destroyed. Street clashes follow – 156 people are injured and one is killed. The Russian press reports that he was assassinated by the police, who were torturing Russian detainees. That was fake news. The stakes were high: a third of the citizens were ethnic Russians, their numbers had increased 20 times between 1945 and 1991.The next day saw the first cyber-attack on an entire country. Banks stopped working, the online press and televisions were blocked. The attacks, coming from Russian IP addresses and with instructions in Russian, were being launched by the assistant of Sergei Markov, a member of the United Russia party, as a “reaction against the Estonian fascists”.
In Moldova, the Minister of Defense, Anatol Salaru, ordered in 2015 the dismantling of the Soviet tank in Balti and its transfer to the Museum of Soviet Occupation. In Cornești, Ungheni, the monument is defended by socialist sympathizers: “This is history and should not be ruined; it’s where my grandfather, my father, fought for this liberation. .” [v]
Today, the Fascist West is preparing to strike again, and again, the tanks will do their job. In 2016, Russian tanks crossed the Dniester through water and simulated an attack on the “enemy on the right bank of the river.” The Transnistrian press reported that many civilian spectators greeted the Russian military on the shore with flowers, “like they do with victors”. [vi]After the exercise, Dmitry Kiselyov announced on Russia 1 that the armies of the Republic of Moldova and Romania would attack the Russian forces in Transnistria, with the support of the West. The reason was the threat posed by the Russian military contingent in Transnistria to the Ukrainian army. A year later, Vadim Krasnoselski announced that tens of thousands of Transnistrians were ready to defend their country from a Moldovan invasion and Russia mobilized significant resources in Belarus for the largest war exercise since the annexation of Crimea – Zapad.
The Moldovan people and the cruel Romanian gendarme: Russian narratives in Bessarabia
9. Moldovans are a separate nation from Romania, with their own language and history, and are part of the so-called “Russian World” – in which peoples live in harmony, as they did in the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, protected against the calamities coming from the West.
The Moldovan language, the statehood that descends directly from Stephen the Great, the ribbon of St. George, the tanks put on pedestals and transformed into monuments, guns facing the fascist West, Victory Day – all these are elements of the Moldovan metanarrative, now instrumentalized through fake news. In 1812, Moldovans naturally returned to the Tsarist Empire, the homeland of the Orthodox, and were rescued from the Romanian fascists and gendarmes twice – in 1940 and 1944.In Soviet Moldova, all peoples lived in peace and abundance, they say. Nostalgia is carefully cultivated: the past can be repeated, the Kremlin voice says. Through federalization, all Moldovans could be together again, in a prosperous, multiethnic state, as the Soviets once were. The war in Transnistria broke out because the “radicals” and “elites” in Chisinau wanted to unite with Romania and only the Russian army (the little green men of the time) prevented the massacre of the civilian population in Transnistria by pro-Romanian fascists. It was the first application of what would become known as the “Karaganov Doctrine”, according to which Russia is entitled and obliged to defend the rights of Russians outside Russia. As in the case of Gagauzia, which voted for self-determination: it was only thanks to the Russian army, Tass reported then, that a bloodbath was prevented.In the Republic of Moldova, the amplification of fake narratives is done mainly through the press – 80% of the radio and TV programs come from the Russian Federation and are in Russian. Propaganda bears fruit: the number of Moldovans opposing federalization through the so-called “Kozak plan” dropped from 70% in 2003 to 50% in 2017.The narrative of self-determination was strongly re-instrumentalized after the annexation of Crimea. In October 2014, the “Bessarabian Republic of Bugeac” was proclaimed in Odessa, with the participation of Gagauzia and several districts of Ukraine. In May 2015, also in Odessa, the second congress of the “Bessarabian People’s Rada” was said to have taken place, enjoying a strong international presence, and chaired by Vera Shevchenko, who allegedly sent to Kiev a bill on the national-cultural autonomy of the “Bessarabian Land”. Subsequent press investigations showed that, in fact, the congress had not taken place, the foreign nationals were not on Ukrainian soil and Vera Shevchenko was in a “recreational place”.
10. The paranoid narrative of the Romanian gendarme beating up Bessarabian peasants.
Strange as it may seem, this fake news is more than 100 years old. In 1919, the Marshal of the Bessarabian nobility, Aleksandr Kroupensky, and the former mayor of Chisinau, Alexander Schmidt, authored a 15-page pamphlet entitled “Summary of Events in Bessarabia”. The two had established their own “Bessarabean delegation to the Paris Peace Conference”, where they carried out an intense campaign against the Union, together with the Russian emigrants.The two sent a telegram to US President Wilson, published in The Morning Post on September 26, 1919, stating, among other things:
“We have recently received, from absolutely reliable sources in Bessarabia, information that the Romanian police use medieval methods of physical torture. We are in possession of evidence that Bessarabian intellectuals who are suspected of Russophile tendencies are being tortured by Romanian persecutors. Methods include denailing and finger crushing in the door frame. Others are beaten with rubber sticks; others had their heads tied together with their feet and their hands tied behind their backs and kept that way all day.” [vii]
The information was confirmed, the article says, by a “British officer recently returned from southern Bessarabia”, whose name is not disclosed, though.
The booklet was 15 pages long. The following volumes got thicker: The case of Bessarabia. Documents on the Romanian occupation has 69 pages, and the Romanian Occupation in Bessarabia – Documents has 211 pages. The British conservative newspaper The Morning Post, the one that would publish the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, took over the information.We know that there were abuses against Bessarabian peasants, and they are documented in the State Archives in Chisinau. However, such cases existed throughout interwar Romania, and they were not programmatically directed against the Bessarabian peasantry. Moreover, no other source mentions “denailing and finger crushing” or “torture chambers”. It is one of the earliest examples of how the press can function as a tool for creating and amplifying a conspiracy theory.
Finally, let’s get back to the initial question- if disinformation is at least 100 years old, what’s new about the fake news phenomenon? For the first time in 100 years, those who are the object of disinformation themselves propagate fake news and conspiracy theories through social networks, along with real armies of trolls and bots. In the post-truth era, it is no longer the facts but the emotions that matter. Fighting is no longer for land but for people’s minds.The stakes are huge for democracy, and it’s not by coincidence that the major Russian interferences took place in the elections in Great Britain, Catalonia, Germany, France, the United States, Ukraine, Moldova or Romania.The less the West believes in democracy, the more victorious Moscow gets. If Russia cannot grow stronger, at least it can try and weaken the West; power, after all, is relative. This is the most important lesson of maskirovka.
Source: https://www.veridica.ro
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