Why Western Support for Russia Grows Despite Failed Russian Disinformation
There is no political fact. If the two-year-long invasion of Ukraine by Russia is teaching us (or rather re-affirming) anything, it is nothing other than this. Any effort at a sober reproduction of political facts in their naked form, reveals the inherent discrepancy in this conception of a ‘fact’ — it reveals the fact’s für-andere-sein (its ‘being-for-the-other’), or its volatile tendency to constitute itself according to how its is observed, experienced, and interpreted.
The political fact is always, and inconveniently, ‘the fact and…’: the fact and its contextualisation, the fact and its reformulation, the fact and its inverse implications. If we surgically separate the fact from its ideological vessel, we all too often lose the fact itself. Its ‘sterile form’, its pure existence, is at the same time its pure negation, its nothingness. The complex game of targeted disinformation-debunking efforts — efforts which dedicate themselves to revealing ideologically-tainted facts in national propaganda campaigns — are currently facing increasing pressure to recognise this unsettling instability of the ‘neutral’ fact. As will be suggested, these anti-disinformation campaigns will have to learn that ‘revealing the facts’ is never itself enough.
The hyper-commodification and excess socialisation of global information systems have had the effect of progressively dispelling the belief that a traditional game of ‘fact vs fiction’ is tenable. Information is always ‘more than itself’. As philosopher David Chalmers would suggest — information presupposes its affective registration, an experiential dimension (like a physical dimension) is inscribed within the basic ‘bits’ of the information constituting the world, and information thus necessitates a subjective, emotional interpretation.
In the political case, fact can often survive only by its envelopment in fiction and propaganda. The insistence upon dealing with ‘cold facts’ implies that we sometimes are forced to deal with nothing at all. Instead of ‘throwing the information out with the bathwater’ — unfortunately a persistent, underlying threat with anti-disinformation campaigns, which risk prompting a nihilistic reaction that ‘nothing matters’, that everything is perverted, or even a fundamental refusal to engage with politics — such campaigns would do better to recognise the inherent ‘tendency towards becoming propaganda’ which a blank fact possesses.
This interpretational kernel of political facts — their internal volatility — has become clear enough with the Western anti-disinformation efforts deployed against Russian propaganda campaigns. Ultimately, despite persistent efforts at debunking the Russian propaganda machine, Western support for Russia continues to grow.
To understand this, let’s for now take the case of Russian TV-presenter and current unquestioning supporter of Putin, Vladimir Solovyov. In the beginning of his broadcaster-presenter career during the early 2000s, Solovyov was an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. On his TV-6 show (an early Russian commercial television station), he openly stated that the takeover of the NTV (a station which had been criticising Putin) was orchestrated by the Kremlin. He mourned the attack on free-speech when his own TV-6 show was taken off the air in 2002, by which time he was recognised (both publicly and by Boris Berezovsky, an influential exiled critic of the Russian State) as a proponent of free, libertarian debate against the heavy censorship of Russian media.
He was, however, eventually welcomed back into Russian media after a suspicious period of absence, this time as a devoted supporter of the Russian cause. His opinion of Putin had seemingly made a 180-degree turn, and since 2018 he has appeared as host of the likely State-backed Russia-1 show Moscow, Kremlin, Putin, which offers direct support, often by its Kremlin-employed guests, of Putin. In this time, and especially since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (despite his formerly warm attitude towards Zelensky before the latter’s presidency), Solovyov has gained an international reputation as the propaganda-producing puppet of Putin, unquestionably defending Putin’s actions and boasting of his allegiance to his leader in interviews with other Kremlin politicians.
Solovyov’s fidelity to Putin’s justifications (inconsistent and contradictory as they may be [I touch on this contradictory status of Putin’s justifications in another text]) and his impressive recycling of anti-Western disinformation, leading him to enthusiastically suggest that Russia aim their warheads at most European capitals and press the nuclear launch button, has been understandably subject to a series of campaigns debunking his false claims.
Most serious newspapers as well as hoards of independent investigators/organisations have transmitted and falsified the string of false claims peddled by Russian propagandists, exposing nonsense at the same rate at which it is produced. I am of course no romantic idealiser of NATO — its aggressive involvement in global hegemonic projects and its meddling in (often secular) democratic processes in developing, US-independent, nations is well documented and should be condemned. It is clear, however, that the contrived and binary world-view of Putin (drawing on a haphazardly reactionary and simultaneously postmodern historical narrative) is no finer a replacement, and would likely lay the ground for a cruel and vulgar system of impotent State dictatorship unfit for the management of 21st century social and economic plurality.
One of the proofs of this inevitably necessary choice of the West over Russia, is its infantile disinformation apparatus, the same apparatus that has been debunked countless times, and yet, like a fungus-infested insect, carries on reproducing itself without any attention to the negative feedback-loops of its environment. But despite our continuous attempts at dismantling the Russian propaganda structure, and despite consistently representing the facts ‘as they are’ to the Western population, Wester support for Putin appears to be on the rise.
Both in developing European countries and in the older enemies of the Soviets, an unshakeable sympathy for and support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has emerged in the West, fuelled by a conviction of Western narcissism and decadence which can only be remedied by a preemptive strike from an oppressive, militant regime. The Western fraction of the ‘culture wars’ was never enough — Western criticism (both from the left and the right) has now turned towards direct support for Eurasian military action. But why has the exposition of facts by anti-disinformation campaigns had such an underwhelming effect? Why does the political truth of ‘bare facts’ not dispel the illusion of Russian nobility over Western degeneracy?
It is here that psychoanalysis can be of help. Freud recognised in 1905, with his famous Dora case, that uttering the truth as such to a patient is never enough. In fact, the cold, hard truth often produces the inverse of its intended effect: a violent rejection of the entire relationship or discussion in which the truth is produced. Freud indeed recognised this when, after offering a perspicacious interpretation of Dora’s dramatic family situation, she terminated her analysis with him (despite eventually admitting that his interpretation was likely correct). Even though the interpretation was correct, its sobering de-contextualisation conditioned an ideological disavowal. Ultimately, as Freud admitted, he forgot the transference relationship between himself and Dora. In other words, he forgot that analytic information must exist and be presented according to its constitutive dependence upon the ideas and subjective experience which carry and ‘formulate’ this information or fact.
If Althusser, Laclau, the Frankfurt School, or any of the host of political theorists of the last century have taught us anything, it is that the logic of intersubjective, discursive structures is at the same time the logic constitutive of political ensembles. The reason that anti-propaganda campaigns continue to have little effect is because pure fact is inherently self-negating. Not only the fact, but the situation itself in which the fact occurs, can be disavowed — it leaves no emotional mark, it carries no ideological weight. Without its context, the content of the fact itself perishes.
Ultimately, ideological narratives exist beyond the register of material fact, and thus facts by themselves fail to leave a dent on ideological apparatuses. The military confrontation between Ukraine (even NATO) and Russia is substantiated by its ideological double: Western decadence and tolerability vs Russian orthodox moralisms. For psychoanalysis, what is more important than the fact itself (if change is to be effected) is the method in which this fact is uttered. Precisely the same is increasingly becoming the case with today’s political confrontations. Fact will be constitutively self-effacing until it is recognised as always being more than itself, as presupposing its ideological-expressive quality.
