Russia's Hypersonic Propaganda Bombing Campaign Hits All High-Value Targets in Ukraine/West (Not Really)
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been absolutely glued to the Telegram screen, watching the videos of surrendering troops, trophy hauls and the smoking floating carcass of the sunken Moskva.
More than that though, I’ve been watching carefully the propaganda being generated by the Russian side and I’m not sure how I feel about it. But, I guess having some propaganda for your side is better than having none, which was the case in the beginning of the special operation turned full-fledged war.
The Ukrainian side continues its gyno-centric propaganda efforts shilling for Human Rights Freedom Democracy and the honor of their brave wahmens who have been offended by the LITERAL RAPE!!! of Ukraine by the Russians…
… and the Russian side has started releasing footage of captured Ukrainian troops and rockets being launched at the Ukrainian side.
Let’s take a step back and consider what the point of propaganda even is.
First and foremost, it needs a target. Who is the target of the Ukrainian propaganda? Videos of wheat maidens slicing the throats of Russian men do not appear to be geared at the Russian side, even though such videos are supposedly formatted as threats to Russian soldiers. The target appears to be the Reddit demographic in the West and at home with the goal of riling up foreign volunteers and the domestic cunt class to continue spitting bile and venom at Russia.
I would even say that videos like that are a deliberate provocation and an attempt to provoke some kind of reaction.
And the Russian propaganda efforts are broken into two categories - those targeted at the Ukrainian army and those aimed at bolstering morale at home. Again, with the examples I gave above, videos showing up military hardware and things going BOOM are almost certainly for domestic consumption while the ones of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering are no doubt aimed at encouraging surrender.
One of the key points that I’ve learned about the dark art of propaganda is that you can never have too little of it.
Most importantly, good propaganda is not one size fits all. And so, the West appeals to the conservatives with one message, while it appeals to libtards with another, tailor-made message. Liberasts are encouraged to think that the Ukraine is a bastion of LGBTQRcodes (outside Kiev and Lvov, it isn’t) and conservatives are encouraged to think about the bravery of the nationalist forces defending Ukraine.
Propaganda does not have to be consistent - it just has to touch at least some of the right emotional buttons. Besides, Libcucks and Conservatives aren’t likely to compare notes anytime soon and discover that they are both being fed opposite narratives and start scratching their heads.
But Russia does not seem to understand this.
Consider RT: under the regency of that horrid Armenian wench, RT’s non-news content has catered to the “old Left” in the West, playing on old Socialist sympathies for Russia. There is no room on RT for people on the Dissident Right, who absolutely dwarf the demographic of semi-senile Russian-language studies professors at the local liberal arts colleges in America. And yet, Russia’s propaganda spent absolutely no time or effort trying to reach disaffected American and West European patriots. This was almost entirely because of people like Margarita Simonyan’s personal distaste for people harboring even nascent right-wing views.
The only people who even tried to appeal to Western conservatives were volunteers working on their own, using their own resources, like Dugin or the late Zhirinovsky. As an aside, Dugin’s ideas were simply too esoteric and divorced from the realities that people in the West face for him to gain any major traction, but even so, he gained some notoriety and popularity simply because he tried in broken, stuttering English, to reach out to right-wing folks in the West. That’s more than most anyone did in Russia.
So the short of it is that a huge opportunity has been wasted to forge closer ties and make new, sympathetic friends in the West - friends that would be the first to be called up to fight Russia in a hypothetical future war, in fact. And there is no hope of fixing that problem in the foreseeable future because of the debilitating censorship regime. Oh well. Moving on.
All remaining propaganda efforts then, must be directed at mobilizing the home front and on appealing to Ukrainian citizens to a) not fight b) cooperate in the future with Russia.
Do videos of surrendering soldiers fulfill these conditions?
I don’t know and no one does for that matter. You could make a logical argument for either Ukrainians becoming enraged and fighting on harder or them becoming demoralized and surrendering. There are too many context and background factors to consider. Propaganda is like a cluster bomb - it isn’t precise, but you hope that one of the explosions hits the enemy in the area. That’s why its good to drop lots and lots of propaganda of a varied nature to hit the emotional target.
So far, as we have seen, the Russians did not factor in the importance of informational warfare in their campaign. With the recent interview that I shared, I hope that the reasons for this became clearer - incompetence and malice in the higher levels of the government and a 5th column Liberal traitor class in the media. In fact, the few patriotic media projects that receive even some government support and funding are complaining that their budgets haven’t been replenished in recent months. That means they’re doing what they’re doing at a deficit, for free, out of a sense of patriotic duty while the checks are bouncing. Fuckin’ A.
As for the propaganda videos of the surrendering soldiers - these are being filmed and released by Kadyrov’s men, who never followed the social media ban imposed by the MoD, and by the DNR/LNR militias or a handful of embedded journalists, some of whom aren’t even working for Russian state media. The videos of missiles being launched are from the MoD. We should be grateful that we have even that.
SUGGESTION: I humbly suggest filming videos of captured Ukrainian soldiers having a good time while in captivity. Film them kicking a soccer ball around with their captors. Show them tossing a few drinks back and playing cards. Have a group sing-along to a song that all people in Eastern Europe know.
Will this work? I don’t know. But it’s worth a shot, no?
Sharing photos and videos of shell-shocked soldiers staring blankly in the distance and stating their names and ranks to the camera before being shown videos of chainsaw torture videos made by Azov is a bold strategy, for sure. But does it promote the message of “brotherly nations” and “a future together”? Does it scare soldiers into surrendering?
In my humble opinion, it’s really not that crazy of a proposition. Nor is it that hard to do. A teenager with a pirated copy of Adobe could do it in a few minutes:
But I’m sure there’s some convoluted 5D chess reason for why my simple proposition is simply beyond the pale.
Still need to set up a crypto account. I just started reading (began at Unz), and enjoy your ideas/writing.
RT's propaganda game peaked in the Occupy Wall Street era, when they platformed old left economic dissidents, anti-war activists, and 9/11 truthers, all of whom were considered edgy at the time and were in fact systematically silenced by regime media. They really should have pivoted to right wing populist nationalism after 2015, but maybe a strategic decision was made that doing so would have played into the hands of the globohomo narrative that nationalists were all Russian agents? Or maybe it's add simple as you say, the Armenian lady's personal distaste for right wing politics.
Considering that Russia made zero effort to reach out to their natural allies in the West, the fact that there's so much sympathy for the Russian cause is rather remarkable. Then again, the right is used to making its own propaganda with Photoshop and MS Paint. Maybe that's enough. Sclerotic boomer bureaucracies would just get in the way.