Last week, Russia’s Education Ministry provided schoolteachers with “information for a social studies session.” ‘Disinformation’ would be more accurate. The ‘information’ starts by saying,
“Russia does not like to wage wars, create conflicts and succumb to provocations. This is not at all the style of the Russian leadership, but Russia is always ready to defend its interests and protect its people.”
The sting is in the tail — ‘defend and protect Russian interests and people’ is carte blanche rubric for doing whatever the hell Putin wants. And it leads to a Russian foreign policy that could best be described as “I didn’t want to do it, but they made me.” The ‘they’ can be NATO, the EU, genocidal Ukrainians, or anything a paranoid imagination might think up.
If you think that the Education Ministry is reminiscent of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth (‘Minitrue’) you are on the right track. And if its tactics remind you of the conservative censorship of American schools, you are a quality lateral thinker.
The ministry has provided Russia’s scholastic propagandists with a script to explain Russia’s murderous adventurism in anodyne, self-congratulatory language. If the independent thinking school-child raises questions about the motives of the authorities, the party line is,
“Our policy is freedom, freedom of choice for everyone to independently determine their own future and the future of their children.”
And Black is White.
There is more. If any child asks whether Russia is at war, teachers should answer no. Instead, it is conducting a “special peacekeeping operation” to stop a “nightmare of genocide” against “millions” of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. And the teacher should reiterate that the Russian government,
“Does not like to wage wars, create conflicts and succumb to provocations,”
Has “done everything possible to resolve the situation by peaceful, political means,”
And is “not going to impose anything on anyone by force.”
War is Peace
The United Nations realizes the corrosive effect of fake news (aka propaganda). It maintains education should help teach children to “identify misinformation and other forms of biased or false content.” It should prepare “the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace … and friendship among all peoples.” States are obliged to ensure children’s “access to information and materials from a diversity of national and international sources.”
The Russian authorities, in lockstep with America’s curriculum-bowdlerizing zealots, are not listening to that sort of guff. And, in a censoring book-burner’s wettest dream, the Duma (Russia’s Parliament) has outlined penalties of up to 15 years in prison for speaking the truth. The Duma’s President Vyacheslav Volodin elucidated,
"Literally by tomorrow, this law will force punishment - and very tough punishment - on those who lied and made statements which discredited our armed forces."
The Russian crackdown on information includes banning foreign news sources, including the websites of the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle, and other media outlets. The Russian media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, said in a statement.
"Access has been restricted to a host of information resources owned by foreigners."
And, "The grounds for restricting access to these information resources on the territory of the Russian Federation was their deliberate and systematic circulation of materials containing false information."
It further whined that the media organizations had spread falsehoods about
"The essence of the special military operation in Ukraine, its form, the methods of combat operations (attacks on the population, strikes on civilian infrastructure), the Russian armed forces' losses and civilian victims".
This crackdown on foreign media joins with the Russian crackdown on social media. Facebook and Twitter's reach has been severely curtailed. And independent news sources in Russia have disappeared.
However, we live in a wired world. Information crackdowns are harder to maintain. And in a demographic profile reminiscent of the US, it is only older Russians who rely on traditional news sources. While younger Russians are actively searching for whatever independent information is available wherever.