A hopeful story in Bloomberg News November 20 proclaimed that “Kremlin Insiders [are] Alarmed Over [the] Growing Toll of Putin’s War in Ukraine.”
The subtitle revealed that “Some in the [Russian] elite fear the invasion was a catastrophic mistake.”
All of this was just what we wanted to hear—that Putin’s ghastly war is failing and that Putin himself is in danger of losing power. In fact, other publications reported on the Bloomberg story and headlined their stories with exactly that twist—that Putin is in danger of being kicked out of the Kremlin.
But this is not true. Outlets like Fox News and Britain’s the Daily Mail overlooked the last phrase in the headline: “the Russian president won’t relent and is in no danger of losing power.” Let me repeat that. Putin, said Bloomberg, is in no danger of losing power. And he’s not going to stop his war in the Ukraine.
In fact, the Austrian Chancellor, Charles Nehammer, met with Putin the weekend of April 16th and revealed something astounding: Putin “believes he is winning the war.”
Why is Vladimir Putin in no danger of being shoved out of power? Because, according to political consultant Tatiana Stanovaya, he cultivates public opinion and uses the support of the masses to control his political elite.
Putin has a very simple way to cultivate public opinion. He has total control over Russia’s media. And that media will tell any story Putin wants, even if Putin’s take on events is astonishingly untrue. What’s more, Putin’s gob smacking lies are repeated as fact so many times that the Russian public believes them. Putin’s lies are Russia’s realities.
To guarantee this, Putin passed a law at the beginning of the Ukraine war. Anyone who openly disagrees with Putin’s fantastical claims can be punished with up to fifteen years in prison.
Putin’s perception control is working. April 18th, a poll of Russians revealed that 80% support the military. But that’s not all.
When the Russian military is committing war crimes, when it is torturing, raping, and killing civilians, when it is turning cities into rubble, why would Putin’s military have such high support? Because the average Russian knows absolutely nothing about those atrocities.
Russians are told that that their troops have gone into the Ukraine to give Ukraine’s citizens peace. They are told that their troops do not touch civilians. They are told that their troops hand out humanitarian aid. They are told that their troops went to the Ukraine to stop a genocide against Russian speaking people.
They are told that they are liberating the Ukrainians from evil. Says US News and World Report, a “poll… that [Russian] state news released on Monday [April 18th] suggested 88% of respondents believed a Nazi ideology permeated the Ukrainian government and 76% of them believed it posed a direct threat to Russia and its citizens.”
None of this is true. It’s Putin fantasy. The core belief of Nazism was that Jews should be killed. And, as you know, Volodymyr Zelensky, President of the Ukraine, is Jewish.
But there’s more. To complete their perceptual enslavement, Russians are fed the thoughts of the man known as Putin’s Brain, Alexander Dugin. On April 11th, a week ago, Dugin told a Turkish newspaper that NATO countries had chosen Ukraine as the launch pad for an attack against the Russian homeland. Russia invaded just in time to stop this attack.
And, says Dugin, there is a Russian plan for the next phase in the war. First the Russian army will “completely clear” the Donbas—the eastern area of the Ukraine. Then Russia will return to attacking other Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kiev.
Dugin explains that there is no legitimate government in Ukraine. There are only western puppets. And it’s the Westerners who want this war to drag on.
To repeat, the puppets of the West are evil. The Russian news agency Tass explains that “the ringleaders of the Kiev regime and their minions…call for torture of Russian soldiers.” This is another Putin fiction. But, remember, if you openly disagree, you can be jailed for fifteen years.
Meanwhile, Putin has given himself a fallback position. He needs to produce a victory of some kind by May 9th, the day the Russians celebrate their victory in World War II over Nazi Germany.
Putin told a 12 year old girl from a pro-Russian family in the Ukraine May 20th, “The purpose of this operation is to help people living in the Donbas.” In other words, Putin could take the Donbas, declare victory, and go home.
That should be easy. Russia has controlled most of the Donbas’ territory for eight years. Putin invaded the Donbas in 2014 and set up two puppet governments, the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Luhansk. So if Putin can produce the appearance of a victory in the Donbas, he can parade that as a major triumph and, if he wants, he can end the war.
But wrapping up the war is unlikely to be Putin’s endgame. Why? Says Putin’s Brain, Alexander Dugin, this is not just your ordinary war. It is a new World War. It is all of NATO versus all of Russia. It is a clash of civilizations—the materialist West versus the spiritual Russkiy Mir, the Russian world.
And the results of this war, says Dugin, will produce a whole new world order.
References:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-20/putin-s-war-in-ukraine-has-russian-elites-fearing-global-isolation
https://www.turkiyegazetesi.com.tr/dunya/846849.aspx
https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2022-04-20/putin-claims-he-will-bring-peace-to-ukraine
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Howard Bloom has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am et every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.