The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks”—including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that “to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate’ opponents.”
Many of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own “alternative media” that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them….In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.”
In fact, the historian Victor Sebestyen writes in a biography of Lenin that the Bolshevik leader was “the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call ‘post-truth politics,’ ” and he stands, in many respects, as a “thoroughly modern political phenomenon—the kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies, as well as in dictatorships.” Anyone, Sebestyen adds, “who has lived through recent elections in the supposedly sophisticated political cultures of the West might recognize him.”
Steve Bannon, Trump’s now estranged adviser and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, once described himself to a journalist as “a Leninist.” Writing in The Daily Beast in 2013, Ronald Radosh recounted that Bannon declared, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” The conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, who helped finance Cambridge Analytica, thinks the less government the better. A former high-level employee of Mercer’s hedge fund told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer: “He wants it to all fall down.”
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Not surprisingly, the two countries to master the black arts of propaganda in the twentieth century were the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Their techniques of manipulating the public and promoting their hateful ideologies have trickled down to several generations of autocrats and demagogues around the world. Lenin specialized in promises he would never keep. “He offered simple solutions to complex problems,” Sebestyen wrote in his biography of the Bolshevik leader. “He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people.’ He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything: the ends justified the means.”
Hitler devoted whole chapters of Mein Kampf to the subject of propaganda, and his pronouncements, along with those of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would constitute a kind of playbook for aspiring autocrats: appeal to people’s emotions, not their intellects; use “stereotyped formulas,” repeated over and over again; continuously assail opponents and label them with distinctive phrases or slogans that will elicit visceral reactions from the audience. Described by biographers as a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization, Hitler possessed an instinctive sense of how to capture public attention from the start. “Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” he wrote about his early efforts to make a name for himself. “The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.” Like Lenin, he also underscored the need “to disrupt the existing order of things” and “thus make room for the penetration” of new doctrines.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
“Mass propaganda,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Russia still uses propaganda to achieve these very same ends: to distract and exhaust its own people (and increasingly, citizens of foreign countries), to wear them down through such a profusion of lies that they cease to resist and retreat back into their private lives. A Rand Corporation report called this Putin model of propaganda “the firehose of falsehood”—an unremitting, high-intensity stream of lies, partial truths, and complete fictions spewed forth with tireless aggression to obfuscate the truth and overwhelm and confuse anyone trying to pay attention.
“Russian propaganda makes no commitment to objective reality,” the report observes: manufactured sources are sometimes used, and so is manufactured evidence (faked photographs, faked on-scene news reporting, staged footage with actors playing victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes). “Russian news channels, such as RT and Sputnik News,” the report goes on, “are more like a blend of infotainment and disinformation than fact-checked journalism, though their formats intentionally take the appearance of proper news programs.”
Russian propaganda, which was extensively exported in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election and elections in Europe, is cranked out quickly in response to breaking news, and it’s endlessly recycled, in high volume at high spin rates, through various media channels to feed the perception of multiple sources. Because Russian trolls are unconcerned with veracity or inconsistencies, they can often get their fictional version of events out before legitimate news organizations can post accurate accounts, taking advantage of the psychological tendency of people to accept the first information received on a topic (and, as the Rand report observes, then “favor this information when faced with conflicting messages”).
The sheer volume of dezinformatsiya unleashed by the Russian firehose system—much like the more improvised but equally voluminous stream of lies, scandals, and shocks emitted by Trump, his GOP enablers, and media apparatchiks—tends to overwhelm and numb people while simultaneously defining deviancy down and normalizing the unacceptable. Outrage gives way to outrage fatigue, which gives way to the sort of cynicism and weariness that empowers those disseminating the lies. As the former world chess champion and Russian pro-democracy leader Garry Kasparov tweeted in December 2016, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
Choose your metaphor: muddying the waters, throwing chum to the sharks, cranking up the fog machine, flinging gorilla dust in the public’s eyes: it’s a tactic designed to create adrenal fatigue and news exhaustion, a strategy perfectly designed for our ADD, information-overloaded age, “this twittering world,” in T. S. Eliot’s words, where people can be “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
In the digital era, sowing confusion online through a barrage of misinformation and disinformation is actually becoming the go-to tactic of propagandists around the world, says the scholar Zeynep Tufekci in her insightful book Twitter and Tear Gas.
“In the networked public sphere,” Tufekci writes, “the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is i
ncreasingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.” This can be done, she notes, in a variety of ways: inundating audiences with information; producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus; delegitimizing media that provides accurate information; deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt; creating or claiming hoaxes; and “generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate.”
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The contemporary Russian master of propaganda Vladislav Surkov, who’s been called “the real genius of the Putin era,” has employed all these techniques and more in helping to engineer Putin’s rise to—and consolidation of—power. In fact, the tradecraft of the Russian agents who carried out a sophisticated campaign of disinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign bears many of the hallmarks of Surkov’s stage management.
The journalist Peter Pomerantsev, the author of the book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, has described Surkov as the impresario who turned Russian politics into a reality show in which “democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms.”
“He helped invent a new strain of authoritarianism based not on crushing opposition from above,” Pomerantsev wrote in 2014, “but on climbing into different interest groups and manipulating them from inside.” For instance: “Nationalist leaders like Vladimir Zhirinovsky would play the right-wing buffoon to make Mr. Putin look moderate by contrast.”
“With one hand,” Pomerantsev went on, “Mr. Surkov supported human rights groups made up of former dissidents; with the other he organized pro-Kremlin youth groups like Nashi, which accused human rights leaders of being tools of the West.” Playing all sides against one another to create chaos was a way to ensure that the Kremlin held all the puppets’ strings while using disinformation to remake reality.
This same sort of Surkovian manipulation informed Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election by impersonating Americans and grassroots political groups on social media. As described in a thirty-seven-page indictment brought by the special counsel Robert Mueller, the scheme was a sophisticated one involving hundreds of operatives working for the Internet Research Agency (the Russian troll farm based in St. Petersburg). These agents—some of whom visited the United States under false pretenses—set up hundreds of fake social media accounts, posing as (and sometimes stealing the identities of) real Americans and using an American server to mask their location in Russia. Using these fictional personas, the Russians posted material on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and built up substantial followings. Their mission: to spread derogatory information about Hillary Clinton (and during the primaries Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) and distrust about the political system in general. In addition to trying to widen schisms among voters over issues like immigration, religion, and race, the Russians spread fake news aimed at boosting Trump’s popularity and hurting Clinton’s. They also helped organize and promote pro-Trump rallies, spread rumors of voter fraud by the Democratic Party, and began “to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote” in the election, or to vote for a third-party candidate.
Some of the Russian operatives’ moves seemed like cynical pieces of Surkovian stagecraft: recruiting a real American to hold a sign depicting Clinton and a phony quotation attributed to her, “I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom”; hiring one American to build a large cage on a flatbed truck and a second American to wear a costume portraying Clinton in a prison uniform.
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Surkov’s goal in Russia was always the same, Pomerantsev argued in Politico: “to keep the great, 140-million-strong population reeling with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan, fascists, the CIA, and far-fetched geopolitical nightmares.” Ensuring that the country was always off balance and a little paranoid was a way to keep people preoccupied while encouraging them “to look to the ‘strong hand’ of the Kremlin for protection.”
In addition to his background in both theater and public relations, Surkov was also a self-styled bohemian who liked to allude to avant-garde artists and postmodernist thinkers. He helped turn Russian television, in Pomerantsev’s words, into “a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine”—not dull and ham-handed like old Soviet TV, but superficially glitzy in a way that weaponized Western entertainment for Russian ends.
Surkov’s orchestration of Kremlin propaganda has been described as having a performance-art quality to it—stage-managed spectacle meant less to convey an old-school Soviet message than to create multiple, often conflicting story lines that promote confusion and blur reality and fiction. There is no Communist ideology in Putin and Surkov’s Russia, just what Pomerantsev called “power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.”
In the service of this nihilistic vision, Surkov has invoked arguments repudiating the existence of objective truth. He has written that “hypocrisy in the rationalistic paradigm of Western civilization is inevitable” because “speech is too linear, too formal to fully reflect the so-called reality,” and because “pretending to be what you are not, to hide your intentions is the most important technology of biological survival.” In Homer’s classics, he notes, the earnest Achilles is less compelling than the “cunning” Odysseus—a kind of trickster hero, adept at lies and deceit—who is the one who survives. All narratives are contingent, Surkov suggests, and all politicians are liars; therefore, the alternative facts put out by the Kremlin (and by Donald Trump) are just as valid as anyone else’s.
In November 2017, the Russian site RT published an essay by Surkov that invoked Derrida-inspired arguments about the unreliability of language—and the gap between words and meaning—to suggest that Western notions of truthfulness and transparency are naive and unsophisticated. At once arch and convoluted, the piece embodied Surkov’s transactional view of the world, privileging irony over sincerity, trickery over earnestness, while name-dropping pop allusions—like the heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch (Surkov approvingly quoted the lyrics to “Wash It All Away”).
Surkov’s essay ends with a portentous account about how the Roman Empire replaced the Roman Republic, suggesting that the republic failed because it became entangled in its “sophisticated system of checks and balances” and needed “the help of a simple imperial vertical.” He ominously suggests that America, too, is waiting to be pulled from growing chaos by “a strong hand.” An argument that echoes the thinking of a right-wing, antidemocratic philosophy known as “neoreaction” or “NRx,” which is gathering followers in the United States and envisions the elevation of a leader who would run the country as a kind of unshackled CEO.
“The king of the West,” Surkov wrote in his RT essay, “the founder of the digital dictatorship, the leader with semi-artificial intelligence has already been predicted by comic books. Why do not these comic books come true?”
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THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS
Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos.
—THE JOKER IN THE DARK KNIGHT
While Surkov seems intent on exporting Russian nihilism to the West, along with antidemocratic principles and a disdain for truth, America has been grappling with a growing cynicism of its own. And fueled by mistrust and some goading from the Far Right, that cynicism was beginning to calcify, in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, into a kind of homegrown nihilism. It was partly a by-product of disillusion with a grossly dysfunctional political system that runs on partisan warfare; partly a sense of dislocation in a world reeling from technological change, globalization, and data overload; and partly a reflection of dwindling hopes among the middle class that the basic promises of the American dream—an affordable house, a decent education, and a brighter future for their kids—were achievable i
n a post-2008-crash United States. While the too-big-to-fail banks paid little price for the crash of 2008, many working people were still trying to make up lost ground. Income inequality was rising, the cost of a college education had exploded, and affordable housing was slipping out of reach.
It’s a mind-set that made a lot of voters susceptible to Trump’s attacks on the status quo and that made some try to churlishly rationalize his transactional politics and shamelessness: Why get upset by his lies, when all politicians lie? Why get upset by his venality, when the law of the jungle rules? In this respect, Donald Trump is as much a symptom of the times as he is a dangerous catalyst. That he broke most of his promises with astonishing alacrity only served to increase many people’s cynicism: a mood that is not conducive to civic engagement and that, ironically, fuels Trump’s attacks on our ideals and our institutions.
As his own books make clear, Trump is completely lacking in empathy and has always had a dog-eat-dog view of the world: kill or be killed, and always get even. It’s a relentlessly dark view, shaped by his domineering father, Fred, who gave him a zero-sum perspective, and by his early mentor Roy Cohn, who gave him the advice, when in trouble, “Attack, attack, attack.”
The Death of Truth Page 9