Putin, like others before him, is losing this important part of the war.
Putin, like others before him, is losing this important part of the war.
P ropaganda is a major front in any modern war. Spin, narrative, framing — call it what you will, if “propaganda” carries too negative a connotation. The word itself originally derived from the Vatican office for propagation of the faith, but has been applied to political information since the First World War.
Even when deployed in the most just and pure causes, wartime propaganda is inevitably emotionally manipulative, oversimplified, and frequently misleading. It is also essential to the success of a just cause — not only in rallying a nation to fight but also when the combatants are appealing to outsiders for help.
Ukraine has, thus far, conducted a master class in propaganda, and as a wholehearted supporter of the Ukrainian cause in this war, I applaud it. That said, as Charlie Cooke notes, and other examples seem to show, we should recognize that some of what we are being fed is propaganda, and we should consume it accordingly, knowing that many of the stories we are hearing of plucky Ukrainian resistance and Russian brutality and ineptness are, in at least some of their details, false or exaggerated.
I have been impressed not only by how Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has risen to the occasion of his moment in history, but also with how he has used his background as a TV entertainer to grasp his country’s propaganda needs both for internal and external audiences. The cause needs a leader who acts like Bill Pullman in Independence Day? Zelensky can become one. He is playing a role — but he is also living the role, at great personal risk.
It helps that Zelensky is up against a regime led by a man, Vladimir Putin, who has basically spent two decades building his own personal brand as a James Bond villain, and who has invaded his neighbors before. Much of the world has been primed to accept Putin as the bad guy, and his repressive state has barely even tried to compete in the information war, preferring brute force and bluster while Putin publicly dresses down his own advisers in a show of dominance that only underscores the closed information loop around the Russian dictator. Zelensky is in his early 40s, with a young family; Putin is almost 70 and has been in power for decades.
As Farhad Manjoo wrote in the New York Times:
During the Trump presidency, Putin became an all-purpose boogeyman for some on the American left — everywhere you looked, people were turning up supposedly scary evidence of a hidden Russian hand in media and politics. In the Ukraine invasion, though, we are seeing that Russian influence has significant limits — and perhaps the unraveling of the myth of Putin’s mastery over global discourse . . . it’s already clear that Russia has suffered a public-relations catastrophe. . . . There are many theories for why Russian propaganda about Ukraine has fallen so flat. Perhaps the most obvious is that the invasion is just too ugly a pig to pretty up — an act so baldly unjustified that no amount of propaganda could set it right. But we’re seeing something else, too: that our fear of Russian domination over digital discourse may have always been a little overblown.
This is also the first war of the social-media age. There have, of course, been other wars fought in that era, but this is the first in which the smaller combatant is a Westernized country that has English speakers, a relatively free media, and an understanding of how to appeal to the mass sensitivities of Western audiences. Some examples of the cultural overlap: Zelensky once won the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars and was the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian-dubbed versions of the Paddington films. Ukrainians have deep ties to many Catholic and evangelical Christian churches in the United States. Ukrainians have twice won the Eurovision songwriting contest popular in Europe. Most Americans and Europeans will more easily see a reflection of their own community and culture in Ukraine than in videos of masked jihadists preaching the destruction of the West.
One measure of the success of Ukrainian propaganda is the shift in messages coming from outlets on the political right. Prior to the invasion, there were segments of right-wing media that were inclined to take Putin’s side in his showdown with Ukraine. These typically fell into two categories. On the one hand, you had a small number of people who saw European authoritarians as not only allies in a culture war but superior in willpower to the liberal order. This strain has always existed in the American political Right, but it has always been confined to a fairly crabbed quarter of right-wing elites rather than any sort of mass movement with popular support.
The other tendency is partisan. The controversies of the 2016–20 period — accusations of Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia, the Steele dossier (which was sourced in good part from Ukraine), Hunter Biden’s shady service on the board of a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Trump being impeached for leaning on Zelensky to get dirt on the Bidens — served to polarize American politics with at least the perception of Democrats allying with Ukrainians and Russians allying with Trump. The roots of those events went back to intra-Ukrainian and Ukrainian–Russian controversies in 2014, in which the Obama administration and Biden in particular were heavily involved. Memories of the mid Obama years, when Democrats mocked the Russian threat and Republicans were led by Russia hawks, were swept under the rug by both American parties. The truth was more complicated, and it was a problem Zelensky inherited when he took office, but the reality was that the Ukrainian leadership class took a number of steps that convinced a fair number of Trump partisans in the media to see Putin as a friend in domestic American political squabbles and Ukraine as an adversary.
This, too, was mostly an elite phenomenon all along. Rank-and-file Republican voters were not itching to sympathize with a former KGB officer. But in this age of political tribalism, people will take sides on almost anything if they see it as an outgrowth of America’s partisan divide and if leaders they respect offer them cues to do so. So long as Putin could plausibly be painted as just another shabby foreigner meddling in other people’s affairs, he was excused by some people as being our SOB.
No more. Polls show lopsided support by Republican voters for Ukraine since the invasion began, with voters faulting Biden for too much weakness in standing up to Putin. Even people such as Tucker Carlson have had to moderate their anti-Ukraine stances in the face of popular disgust at Putin and popular sympathy for the beleaguered Ukrainians. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s votes in the House against tough-on-Russia bills have Greg Abbott’s campaign ready to unload on him, with Ukraine as the third leg of a “God, guns and gulags” campaign, as the campaign put it in a call on Wednesday. In Ohio, which has a significant Ukrainian-American community, J. D. Vance has had to retreat from his sneer before the invasion that he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
Propaganda matters. It works. Especially when it advances a just cause.
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Propaganda has always been with us in wartime, especially on the home front. Kings roused their people with patriotic appeals and exaggerated portrayals of the enemy. Even Pericles’ funeral oration, that masterful defense of ancient Athenian democracy, was in some sense propaganda. So were the grievances recited in the Declaration of Independence.
External propaganda to appeal to potential allies or cow potential enemies was slower to develop, in large part because information spread differently in the time before the telegraph and its successors moved news across borders and newspapers and public opinion were in a position to influence governments. But it likewise has a long history.
The Crusades began with papal exhortations to European leaders to rescue Christians in the Holy Land, and the nature of those arguments included a lot of what we would now recognize as propaganda. Walter Raleigh complained that the Spanish spread about their Armada “in sundry languages, in print, great victories in words, which they pleaded to have obtained against this realm; and spread the same in a most false sort over all parts of France, Italy, and elsewhere.” The American Revolution and the French Revolution both sought allies around the world in part based on puffing up both their moral claims and their military viability. The Greek rebels against the Ottoman Empire invoked the classical culture of their ancient forebears, which is how a foreign idealist such as Lord Byron ended up dying of a fever far from home aiding the Greeks.
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The first really modern propaganda war was waged in South America, in a conflict with some interesting parallels to this one, when Argentina and Uruguay fought a long war between 1838 and 1851. Uruguay lacked Ukraine’s centuries of history as its own, distinct people, but like Ukraine today, it owed its independence as a state to the settlement of a long, global struggle and the patronage of the victors. The Napoleonic wars wrecked the Spanish empire, and Uruguay emerged as a state independent from its larger neighbors (Spanish Argentina and Portuguese Brazil) in large part because its sovereignty was guaranteed by the British, who saw the best natural harbor in South America — the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo — as a vital entry point for Britain’s trade with the continent.
Uruguay, like Ukraine, was riven by factions that frequently invoked foreign assistance, making it a plaything for international rivalries. Unlike the current war, the smaller state broke the peace, in ways that made the war morally murky. Argentina was under French blockade in a debt dispute, and with the help of Argentine dissidents and the encouragement of the French, the pro-Argentine government of Uruguay was deposed and replaced by a pro-French government that gave the French access to Uruguayan ports. Argentina backed the deposed Uruguayan leader, Manuel Oribe, and sought to return him to power.
Argentina’s dictatorial leader, General Juan Manuel de Rosas, came to power in 1829 and consolidated his informal, extraconstitutional rule by 1835. Rosas represented the first generation of post-independence leaders, and as much as anyone, he set the template for Latin American caudillo rulers. He personally directed the use of terror and violence against perceived political opponents, in ways extraordinary for his time. He controlled the five newspapers in Buenos Aires, and his regime promoted an early form of the personality cults that would be commonly deployed by later Latin American rulers. Men wore red silk badges to show their loyalty, and women wore red ribbons; red for Rosas became such a ubiquitous identification that the Colorado party of Uruguay — the enemies of Rosas — abandoned its signature red during the war.
Rosas subjected Montevideo to an epic siege from 1843 to 1851 that Alexandre Dumas, in a historical novel on the Great Siege of Montevideo, compared to the siege of Troy. Coming as it did near the end of a long period of European peace before 1848, the war captured the imagination of the European press at the dawn of the age of the telegraph and the steam-powered printing press. Unprecedentedly intensive propaganda campaigns — particularly on behalf of the Uruguayans — were staged in British, French, and American newspapers to sway international support. Uruguay banned slavery in part to win goodwill in Europe.
Britain and France, siding with Uruguay, blockaded Buenos Aires. But, as with Russia today, Argentina could not be attacked directly without complications. The United States, invoking the Monroe Doctrine, warned the Europeans against landing troops. David Farragut led an American naval visit to Rosas in Buenos Aires in 1842, signaling American opposition to the Europeans going any further to support Uruguay. So, the European navies continued their blockade at sea, and the stalemate dragged on.
International attention had an unintended side effect: The greatest popular hero created by the war was an Italian, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi had previously made a name in South America fighting in a rebellion against Brazil, but it was the steady stream of war propaganda from Uruguay that made him famous in Europe. Leaflets in Italy told of his exploits, his daring, and his reputation for incorruptibility. The new printing technologies enabled the reproduction of inexpensive portraits of Garibaldi as well as biographies in Italian, English, French, and German. The Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini promoted Garibaldi’s reputation, recognizing in his heroic image an asset to Italian nationalism in an age of literary heroes.
Iconography was a crucial weapon. Garibaldi built an “Italian Legion,” whose flag in Uruguay was an erupting Vesuvius, against a black background “mourning for the enslaved fatherland,” then partly under Austrian rule. In May 1843, his men donned their iconic red poncho-style shirts, initially purchased on the cheap as surplus from a cattle butchery. In one 1846 battle, he launched a bayonet charge and fought dismounted, singing the republican anthem, rather than retreat or fall back to a last-ditch defense. Accounts of the battle made him famous on two continents. Eventually, Garibaldi’s legendary status made him an important enough figure to be pivotal a decade later in the unification of Italy — an outcome nobody could have expected from the wartime propaganda of Uruguay.
Militarily, the war appeared to end in victory for Rosas and Argentina. Britain wearied of its blockade of Buenos Aires in March 1849, and France followed suit in August 1850. The European powers, busy with concerns elsewhere, had no enthusiasm for extended involvement in Uruguayan politics, so long as Uruguay would survive as an independent state open to British and French trade. Who governed Uruguay mattered little to them; who governed Argentina, still less. Face-saving concessions were wrung from Rosas, who guaranteed the territorial integrity of Uruguay and paid claims to French merchants. While the blockade had been painful for Argentina, this was seen at the time as a clear victory for Rosas. The European powers effectively acknowledged the Rosas-backed regime of Oribe as the government of Uruguay. Rosas and Oribe planned to move on Montevideo at last.
Instead, the seemingly predominant local power of Rosas attracted an opposing coalition that brought about his downfall. Brazil’s emperor, Dom Pedro II, was 24 years old in the fall of 1850, and beginning to assert his authority. He drew Paraguay into an anti-Rosas naval alliance in late 1850, and one of Rosas’s generals, appealing to Argentine weariness with the costs of the long blockades and endless war, led a rebellion. Rosas was driven from power in early 1852, fled to a waiting British ship, and lived out the final 25 years of his life on an estate in Southampton. Things might have been very different had the Uruguayans not been able to use propaganda to bring the powers of Europe to their side. Rosas had many years to reflect on how a dictator’s power to control events and perception can be undermined by media attention far from home.