Russian censorship extremism is on the launchpad

The NYT writes:

Russia clamped down harder Friday on news and free speech than at any time in President Vladimir V. Putin’s 22 years in power, blocking access to Facebook and major foreign news outlets, and enacting a law to punish anyone spreading “false information” about its Ukraine invasion with up to 15 years in prison.

The crackdown comes as the Kremlin scrambles to contain discontent over the war and to control the narrative as Russia faces its most severe economic crisis in decades as a result of this week’s crushing Western sanctions.

Putin signed a law that effectively criminalizes any public opposition to or independent news reporting about the war against Ukraine. Taking effect as soon as Saturday, the law could make it a crime to simply call the war a “war” — the Kremlin says it is a “special military operation” — on social media or in a news article or broadcast.

Facebook, Russia’s internet regulator claimed, had engaged in “discrimination against Russian news media” by limiting access to pro-Kremlin accounts, including that of the Defense Ministry’s television channel. The decision was a blow to internet freedom in Russia, where Western social networks have remained accessible despite Mr. Putin’s creeping authoritarianism.  

The text of the new law offered few details about what constituted an offense, but Russian journalists and Kremlin opponents take it to mean that any contradiction of the government’s statements on the invasion could be treated as a crime. Besides criminalizing the sharing of “false information,” it makes “discrediting” Russia’s use of its military in Ukraine, calling on other countries to impose sanctions on Russia or protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine punishable by fines and years of imprisonment. (emphasis added)

Woof, that's a good one. 

What's interesting here is Putin's tactic of shutting down information sources that do not allow his propaganda machine access to spread lies, slanders, irrationality and crackpottery. Implicit in Putin's tactic is that his lies and deceit are truth, while sources that try to stop lies and deceit are attacked and blocked. That is true, in-your-face lying and deceit from a pure demagogue-despot. There's not one shred of shamelessness or moral qualm in any of Putin's elimination of sources of inconvenient but actual facts and truths.

Also noteworthy is ambiguity in Russia's new anti-truth law. That leaves it up to Putin to tell the judge who is guilty and who just made an innocent boo-boo. Dictators love ambiguity in their laws. Makes it easy for the rule of dictator to look exactly like the rule of law (because it is). 

Meanwhile back in the grumpy US of A, Republican snowflakes in America whine about being canceled for their lies and deceit, which they falsely call truth. They really should go visit their friend Russia and see what real cancellation of real facts and truths looks like. No doubt, they will be inspired to do the same here. That assumes they don't get caught up in Putin's 'keep your mouth shut' law and sent to a Russian slammer to experience some of the kind of government service they want to emulate here. Or, is that criticism over the top?

Also, it seems reasonable to think that Putin has graduated from creeping authoritarianism to a brutal, full-blown kleptocratic despotism. Or, is it premature to draw that conclusion?

Former Attorney General William Barr explains how Trump fired him

Starting at 4:35 of this 6:11 video, Barr describes the Ex-president's infuriated reaction when he was told there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump had no concern whatsoever for truth. Not one iota. That is the mindset of the current leader of the morally rotted Republican Party.

The Russian public comments on war, or not

This 2:32 video says a lot about police state tyranny, the power of propaganda and lies, and the frailty of facts and truth in the face of aggressive demagoguery.

Thanks to Freeze Peach 🍑 for posting this in a comment here. The video merits its own post.

Russia invasion update

Washington Post: 

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin called Friday for the “normalization” of relations with other states, saying Moscow has “absolutely no ill intentions with regard to our neighbors.” .... He said Russia saw no need to aggravate tensions with other countries, claiming that Moscow’s actions in Ukraine came only “in response to unfriendly actions toward Russia.”

That might make sense only for Russian people who are now cut off from real news and information sources. What they are going to get from here on out is mostly lies, slanders and crackpottery. real news sources in Russia are being shut down.

Washington Post opinion piece:

NEAR THE UKRAINE BORDER — Javelin antitank missiles, the American-made weapons that can destroy Russian tanks, are stacked in steel racks awaiting quick shipment into Ukraine. A giant C-17 transport is parked on a nearby runway.

This is what American and NATO support for Ukraine looks like. Every day, 14 widebody jets are landing here to deliver Javelins, Stinger antiaircraft missiles and other weapons for the Ukrainians. A half-dozen of these daily arrivals are American planes.

Watching the Javelins move toward the battlefield Friday is the clearest demonstration of the delicate balance that the United States and its allies are trying to strike in the Ukraine war. They are rushing deliveries of weapons to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian attackers. But U.S. and NATO troops are staying safely across the border, determined to avoid a direct military confrontation with Russia that could turn this into a cataclysmic world war.

One can wonder why is it that Russia attacking Ukraine does not start a world war, but if US troops step over the border, it might. There seems to be a major asymmetry here. Ukraine wants help against an invader, but we are limited in what we can do.

New York Times:

On Thursday, the pillars of Russia’s independent broadcast media collapsed under pressure from the state. Echo of Moscow, the freewheeling radio station founded by Soviet dissidents in 1990 and that symbolized Russia’s new freedoms, was “liquidated” by its board. TV Rain, the youthful independent television station that calls itself “the optimistic channel” said it would suspend operations indefinitely.

And Dmitri A. Muratov, the journalist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said that his newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which survived the murders of six of its journalists, could be on the verge of shutting down as well.

“Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated,” Mr. Muratov said. 

Precipitating the outlets’ demise were plans by the Russian Parliament to take up legislation on Friday that would make news considered “fakes” about Russia’s war in Ukraine punishable by yearslong prison terms. The Russian authorities have already made it clear that the very act of calling it a “war” — the Kremlin prefers the term “special military operation” — is considered disinformation.

“We’re going to punish those who spread panic using fakes by up to 15 years,” a senior lawmaker, Sholban Kara-ool, said on Thursday. During World War II, he said, such people “were shot on the spot.” 

Mr. Putin appeared unbowed by the crisis and the Western furor. He told President Emmanuel Macron of France in a phone call that his aim of securing “the demilitarization and neutral status of Ukraine” would be “achieved no matter what,” according to the Kremlin.

Fake news, even when it isn't fake, gets you up to 15 years in a Russian slammer. That's real cancel culture, not the whining and sniveling that snowflake Republicans complain about. Notice that under demagogue despots like Putin and Trump, inconvenient facts and truths are lies and despot lies are official facts and truths and not to be questioned. 

Echo of Moscow staff learning that Putin is 

forcing their radio station to shut down

New York Times on China:

Yet as the world faces one of its most serious geopolitical crises since the end of the Cold War, China let down its digital defenses and allowed Kremlin’s propaganda machine to help shape public perception of the war. No wonder the Chinese internet is overwhelmingly pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.

If China wants to remain officially ambiguous about whether it supports Vladimir V. Putin’s war — refusing to call it an invasion and abstaining from a U.N. vote to condemn the invasion — its state-controlled media nonetheless makes very clear where China stands. 

The China-Russia information alliance is forged over a shared worldview of two leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir V. Putin, who, out of deep distrust of the United States, are determined to challenge the West’s dominance in the competition for public opinion.

In a 2013 speech, Mr. Xi urged the country’s propaganda workers to enhance the country’s “international discourse power” under the notion of “telling China’s story well.” During a visit to RT’s headquarters in the same year, Mr. Putin said the network was created to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams.”  

The message they are trying to drive home: Russia’s military actions are anti-West, anti-NATO expansion and anti-Nazi — thus justified and popular.

In China’s state media, there’s very little about the international condemnation of Russia; Ukraine’s success in the battle for public opinion, led by President Zelensky; or antiwar protests in Russia.

Clearly, Russia and China both want to pollute the entire planet with endless broadsides of lies, slanders and crackpot motivated reasoning. The story they will tell well will have little to do with the actual story when underlying facts and truths are inconvenient for the despots' false narratives. Lies of omission will be at least as abundant as lies of commission. These two countries are bitter enemies of democracy, democracies, inconvenient facts and truths, the rule of law, civil liberties, and, especially, America.