Ukraine: Are We the Prisoners of Our Own Narrative?
Controlling the narrative— that is what “keeps the world running,” one may cynically say. When we want to convince others of something that they wont believe on face value, or by facing the brute facts on the ground, or by listening to all sides, then we create a narrative to get them on our side. We can go even further, namely to punish anyone who dares to listen to the other side, or to another perspective, for to us it’s a matter of life and death… And please make no mistake, it’s happens everywhere, from our frantic efforts to hide personal shame to navigating a messy marriage breakdown; from church conflicts and corporate scandals to brutal political revolutions. The Bible calls it all lies and deceit. And that’s what it is. And there is ultimately only one species on earth not involved in doing it—the poor in spirit, the meek, or those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, as Jesus called them. They know that all these narratives will come down like a house of cards, yes like a house built on sand, when the storm of God’s judgment arrives. They find it not only shameful, but utterly useless, to live in an unreal world, one created by lies and deceit.
So how do we make sure that we control the narrative on a national or international scale? Well first of all by owning the mass media, and then by controlling the “airwaves, ” and also by making sure we shut down any possible dissent. Isn’t that why the Soviet Union was so upset when Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was smuggled out of the country and first printed in Paris in 1973? They were no longer able to tell their lies, and that is not so nice. That is why controlling the narrative ultimately means purging libraries, getting rid of opposing academics, shutting down voices we don’t want to hear, i.e., anyone who dares to question our narrative.
That is also why, from the moment the Russian invasion of Ukraine started in early 2022, our media and governments made absolutely sure that we do not ever get the perspective from the other side. Everything “they” had to say was in any case only 100 per cent propaganda. How dare we even entertain the thought that they may also have something to say? Aren’t they the evil and we the good guys?
So we had the monopoly on the truth, which we disseminated into the entire world. It was therefore nothing strange to see the very same headline all over the news, on the same day, from Washington to Delhi, from Johannesburg to Warsaw, and from Jakarta to Sao Paulo: Putin’s Unprovoked War!
A famous archbishop—whose theology I could unfortunately not entirely endorse—once said: “If you want peace, speak to your enemy, not to your friends.” Now there is a whole lot of truth in these words of Desmond Tutu, even if such an approach may never lead you to sell out your own principles and people for the sake of peace. Yet sadly, though the war has entered its third year, we still refuse to listen to the other side… We are not even interested in dialogue— something I have never seen, even when East and West were locked in the Cold War.
Retired NATO Colonel Jacques Baud
Our Western narrative about the Ukrainian conflict has, however, now become a massive snare and deadly trap, from which we urgently need an escape, if we are concerned about the future of this globe. That much a former member of Swiss strategic intelligence, who used to work as a specialist on Eastern Europe for NATO, alluded to in an interview. Colonel Jacques Baud said on Max Milo: “The problem is that now, the West is a prisoner of its own narrative.” And that narrative is stopping us from facing reality and gaining the wisdom and courage to seek an offramp from a war that could engulf the entire world in a nuclear catastrophe. Let me explain…
It began long before February 2022 of course. As tensions were building up east of the Dnieper, I followed things on the alternative media, since our mainstream news was not paying much attention, apart from blaming the Russians for almost anything that went wrong in the world. During 2021 only one theme dominated our news, mainline or otherwise: Covid, and the draconian measures invented to combat it. By the end of that year the ruling class of the West had spent their capital and lost the plot. Three of the top WEF favourites, Justin Trudeau of Canada, Mark Rutte of The Netherlands and Jacinda Adern of New Zealand, were looking like withered flowers in the scorching sun.
Meanwhile I was watching things developing in Eastern Europe, amazed that so few were paying much attention. I tried to warn my friends on social media that there was something coming far worse than Covid. And then suddenly, as with the blink of an eye—when the trucker protest in Canada was finally gaining support from around the globe—all the news camera’s switched to Ukraine. Almost overnight, the disgraced leaders of the West became our heroes, facing up against prime evil far away in the Kremlin. The narrative all around the globe was plain and simple: It was an unprovoked war. Russia was the aggressor and Putin a crazy dictator, bent on reclaiming the former Soviet territories in Eastern Europe and even beyond. Ukraine was entirely innocent, and a sovereign independent democracy, just seeking to live in peace. We need not to worry though, the war (helped by our monstrous sanctions campaign) will bring Moscow to its knees in a few months. Ukrainian troops far outnumbered the Russians, and the Russian economy was not much bigger than that of Spain or Italy’s, we were told.
February 24, 2022
When the “Special Military Operation” (as Moscow called it) began on February 24, 2022, I was both shocked and deeply saddened. Having followed things for years I thought Putin’s patience and restraint would hold. It obviously did not. And so, from day one the war was fought on three “fronts,” with the collective West pouring in everything. On the military front things looked pretty good for Ukraine for a while; on the economic front everyone expected the Rouble to be turned into rubble with the Russian economy collapsing under the weight of all the sanctions; and on the information front the West enjoyed complete “full spectrum dominance,” mopping the floor with its adversary. And if anyone still doubted what Western intentions were all about, then President Biden’s wild off-script remarks in Poland spilled the beans— it was to get rid of the evil man in Moscow. We made one massive mistake though, not only at the beginning, but for the first eighteen months at least: We based our calculations and predictions not on reality, says Jacques Baud, but on what we wished to believe reality was. We believed our own propaganda! A lethal mistake.
Let’s listen to some of the top “experts” in the West as they voiced their opinions in our media. They almost sound like a church choir. The famed US political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote for the Huffington Post that “Russia is heading for a total defeat.” He said that Russia’s military planning was incompetent and he ruled out any possibility for a diplomatic solution. Russia is facing “outright defeat” and “sudden collapse” which would also spell the end of Putin. Seven months later Fukuyama could state on Radio Free Europe that “the ground for a massive Russian failure has already been laid…”
Noah Yuval Harari wrote for South Africa’s News24 that it was “Putin’s War” in which he tried to revive the Russian Empire, but that it would spell the end of Russia. Under the heading “Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war” the Israeli historian wrote for the British Guardian that the Russian dictator is heading towards an historic defeat for “[t]he Russian despot has told his lie so many times that he apparently believes it himself.”
Conservative Harvard historian Niall Ferguson weighed in too. He alleged that Russian aggression was not prompted by NATO’s eastward push at all, but by the desire to eradicate an Eastern European democracy and that Putin’s intentions are much larger than Ukraine. In March of 2022 Ferguson wrote for Nikkei Asia that “Czar Vladimir Putin is not mad, but rather corrupted by power and divorced from reality.”
Divorced from reality
But then as time went on, it became clear who was really divorced from reality. Russia’s economy, due to its vast natural resources and little national debt not only survived all the sanctions, but even bounced back. On the warfront the Ukrainian summer offensive failed spectacularly. And slowly but surely, the West was also beginning to lose the information war. Concerns were being raised in Western news media about Putin’s rise in popularity across the world, and that fewer and fewer Westerners believed our own narrative. When Canada’s popular liberal Global News posted a short video where Putin was jokingly calling the speaker of the Canadian parliament either “a bigot or an idiot” for inviting an unvetted Nazi war-criminal into the house, praise for the Russian president in the comment section was virtually 99 per cent.
A shift was taking place across the board. Major voices changed their tunes or came out bolder. Many influencers on the left also changed their minds, so that left and right began to see and say the same things, with one common concern driving them all: to find the truth and to seek an end to the senseless slaughter that to date had already claimed up to 600 000 Ukrainian lives (even though Pres. Zelenski claimed recently that only 33 000 of his men had died so far). Our popular Western narrative was showing serious signs of collapse in more ways than I can show here. It did not help either when three former European leaders, Poroshenko, Hollande and Merkel, came out openly in the press, admitting that they did not sign the 2014 Minsk peace accords in good faith. Like those Western leaders promising Michael Gorbachev in the early 90s that NATO would not move an inch east of Germany, these leaders also blatantly broke trust. They were fooling the Russians by signing, while they were only buying time for Ukraine to arm itself. The Russians on the other hand, never changed their story: They wanted a pan-European security architecture, peace in the Donbass and no Neo-Nazi commandos on the other side of their border.
The Western narrative was increasingly looking incredulous. Not even the claim that the war was unprovoked was readily believed any more. A 2019 video appeared in which Olexii Arestovych, Zelensky’s chief advisor, stated boldly how they were going to provoke a war in 2021 or 2022. The contents were never denied. Another appeared where Senator Lindsay Graham said basically the same thing to Ukrainian troops around the same time. And so in January 2022, Kiev’s shelling of the Donbas skyrocketed, which a close friend of ours living in Krasnodar confirmed at the time. Refugees poured into Russia… forcing the Duma to call Putin to action. It was early February 2022. Meanwhile Ukraine’s reputation as a democracy was rapidly fading too. And so when Avdiivka fell at the two year anniversary of the start of the war, and even Western intelligence confirmed that Putin’s 87.5 per cent election victory in March was a fair reflection of Russian voter-sentiment, the writing was on the wall for the popular Western narrative. Perhaps worst of all for our withering narrative, was the news everywhere confirmed, that Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK flew to Kiev in April 2022 to tell Pres. Zelenski NOT to make peace with the Russians in Istanbul, when a deal was almost brokered.
Yet the mainstream media and most of the Western ruling class refused to change course. In fact, one part of their narrative was broadcasted only louder: The Kremlin has its eyes on the Baltics, Eastern Europe and beyond. By keeping this line alive, in spite of zero evidence for it, they could keep the war going.
Unfalsifiable propaganda!
So, what do you do when your narrative is showing serious signs of fatigue? You can face the facts and adjust it. Or you can double down. And that is exactly what we are seeing all across Western media in the last little while. We are doubling down. Three examples in the broader context prove this abundantly.
In April 2024 the Financial Times ran an article under the title “Russian Disinformation has grown in scale and in skill, warns Berlin.” A top German diplomat, Ralf Beste, warned that Russian disinformation was “absolutely a threat that we have to take seriously.” Russia is combining greater subtlety and plausibility in its messaging. “[Now] it’s not just a question of information that is verifiably true or false. It’s more than that. It’s about skewing opinions. Trying to tilt the balance of debate,” Beste said. “They are taking elements of reality in these campaigns and then warping them to create a different impression.” The Times continued that “…trying to rebut such campaigns is hard because the basic elements are often unfalsifiable, and engaging can often counterproductively lend credibility to claims” (emphasis mine).
Note carefully how desperate we have become in fear of losing the information war. We claim that “Russian disinformation” goes beyond verifiable truth or falsehood, because it skews opinions and tilts the balance of the debate, because the “basic elements” in these arguments “are often unfalsifiable.” Wow, that is quite something! Incidentally, Jacques Baud, when claiming that we have become “the prisoners of our own narrative,” emphasized that he arrived at his conclusions not from pro-Russian sources, but from Pro-Western and Ukrainian sources.
How desperate have we become! Anyone knowing something about the history of science in the West would know the name of Karl Popper. Popper argued back in the 1930s that the truth of a scientific hypothesis is not established by positively proving it to be true (for how can you ever prove that all swans are black until you have seen the very last one) but by the fact that your theory has not yet been proven false (falsified). Yet, the great danger of contemporary Russian disinformation (according to our German diplomat and the Financial Times) is, that it cannot be proven false, but that it skews opinions and tilts the balance of the debate. What are we in fact saying? And are we now jettisoning scientific methodology?
The moral of the story? We have no morals left
The truth of the matter is, our narrative is not going to save us. The truth alone will set us free.
Both in American and in European corridors of power, the argument is regularly heard that funding the war in Ukraine is “a good investment.” They do the fighting, and we do the spending (borrowing from the next generation). And so another $91 billion was approved for Ukraine in April 2024 in Congress. We know none of this money will reach the ordinary Ukrainian, nor will it change the outcome of the war, but it will find its way back to the Military Industrial Complex in the US, and to the interest groups keeping the politicians in power who voted for it. And that’s why they need their narrative, even though the counter narrative from the ground, much closer to reality, has now become “unfalsifiable!”
Ohio senator JD Vance called the reasoning behind the spending bill “grotesque.” And it is, for it shows that we have lost all sense of morality and sensitivity. And yet we still dare to say: “Losing the war would be a catastrophe…since we are fighting for Western values!” For which values exactly?
A word from the Hebrew prophet Amos 700 BC could bring some sanity perhaps, if we translate it from Amos 6 for today…
“You who are so complacent in Washington and Brussels, who oppress the poor and crush the needy, yes all of you who dine on ivory couches, eat the very best lambs from the flock and drank bowls of wine under the sound of stringed instruments: You will be the first to go into exile… for you couldn’t care less about the ruin of… Ukraine.“