Ukraine War – Part 3, Cold War propaganda

Resurrection of Cold War propaganda

(De - April/May 2022) Already some time before Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, I had a bad feeling when I heard or read news about Russia and Ukraine.

Warnings were heard almost daily, especially from the US president. Russia’s attack was imminent! The secret services reported that Russia was about to create an occasion for its war of aggression artificially! The German media speculated that Putin was either evil, crazy, deathly ill, insulted, could no longer stand democracy in Ukraine, or even feared it.

The one-sided view of Putin’s propaganda

To me, this sounded like warmongering, pre-war Western propaganda to get into the mood for war. The warning signals in my head started flashing frantically.

The press in the West, including the German, had a different view.

Propaganda of the West?! Impossible! Russia was the aggressor! It was Russia who was spreading propaganda to justify its aggression!

Once the war had begun, the German media head shakingly reported on the absurd Russian propaganda lies. After all, no rational person could take Putin’s statements seriously.

(a) It was clearly propaganda if “intimidated” Russian politicians and citizens and the synchronised media were forced under penalty of law to call the war not a war but a “special military operation”.

Here in the free West, Putin’s “criminal, brutal war of aggression” could be described by politicians and society as it was, namely “criminal”, “brutal”, and “illegal under international law”. – Yet, no politician, journalist, presenter or panellist on a talk show would dare to call the war something else.

(b) Putin’s and the Russian media’s claim that Russia must prevent the threatening genocide by Ukraine in the breakaway People’s Republics in the Donbas region could also only be propaganda.

Why? That was not explained!

(c) Putin’s repeated claim that a Nazi regime under President Selensky was in power in Kyiv was absurd because Selensky was of Jewish descent. Until then, no one cared, but now this fact was used as a counter-argument to Russian propaganda. So in what way were Selensky’s party, politics and government not fascist but democratic through and through?

Nobody wanted to argue. Why not?

(d) According to the German media and politicians, the pinnacle of Russian propaganda is the claim that Nato is threatening Russia. Instead, it was the other way round. One should be ashamed not to have listened to the Eastern Europeans. For a long time, they had demanded a more substantial NATO presence in the East on Russia’s border to protect against Russian aggression. Yet, a threatening gesture on the part of Nato had never taken place!

Putin’s point of view is ridiculous and owed to his affinity for lies and the distortion of the truth.

True, the Russian government undoubtedly circulates propagandistic claims, lies and incomprehensible arguments.

But does the West really renounce manipulation, the creation of sentiment and opinion through propaganda, as they say?

What is still opinion-forming, and what is already propaganda?

As a German contemporary, I naturally look first and foremost at the formation of public opinion in Germany.

In doing so, I noticed that some of what is considered part of free opinion-forming in our country seems to be propaganda.

These days, the labels “propagandist” and “Putin-understander” are quickly applied to contemporaries who do not want to justify the war but only examine Russian propaganda for its accurate content.

I am reminded of the one-sidedness in my childhood and youth, the rigorous view that Western governments were good and the Eastern regimes were evil – also known as the propaganda of the Cold War, if not that of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era.

For example, why is it necessary to add the adjectives “criminal and brutal” to a war of aggression? Are there also legitimate and humane wars of aggression? Do these routinely used specifications reach back to the attitudes of the collective German subconscious of the 19th century?

Russia and Ukraine are at war, but Russia and the USA/EU are in a propaganda battle. Germany is in the middle of it!

The governing coalition and most of the Bundestag have the declared will to commit to Ukraine, to turn away from Russia with a shudder, no ifs or buts.

It would be unthinkable if Germany, which in the eyes of most Europeans carries historical guilt, were to refuse help and moral support for a country formerly subjugated by Germany.

The international pressure to argue vehemently for Ukraine is enormous, as is the internalised pressure.

A neutral Germany like Switzerland or Israel?! Also unthinkable in terms of foreign policy!

So Germany stands firmly by Ukraine’s side, and politics and the media do their utmost to ensure that the people support it despite all the difficulties and disadvantages.

A war alone is not reason enough, as the half-hearted or complete lack of commitment in other armed conflicts has shown and continues to show. Only prolonged propaganda ensures approval among the population when the initial horror images and reports fade and adverse effects on everyday life become noticeable.

In August 2022, the first appeals by Ukrainian politicians to Germans and other Europeans appeared, urging them not to become “war-weary”. So, German media are still keeping up the interest through war reports, features, interviews with Ukrainians in Ukraine or as refugees in Germany, etc.

According to politicians and the media, the energy shortage and cost increases have their cause solely in “Putin’s war”. “Putin is turning off the gas tap” can be heard and read everywhere.

This simple explanation is catchy! It’s helpful, but it is also propaganda!

The effort to keep the interest in the Ukraine war alive is quite apparent.

However, occasionally critical voices are now slowly finding their way into the public arena, explaining how the German energy market works and how this is connected to the blatant price increases.

Of course, it’s not that simple! But it is not propaganda!

Atrocities and propaganda

The atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine were instrumentalised to argue for weapons demands and deliveries. From the Ukrainian leadership’s point of view, this is understandable, no question!

But for German politicians and media to also identify the Russian army, and even President Putin, as the perpetrators of these atrocities even before the official international investigations into who was responsible were completed was simply unprofessional, except for propaganda purposes.

The desire to supply heavy weapons to Ukraine was too strong. The horror of the war could serve as a moral justification for arms deliveries and sanctions, which the population must, after all, support through blatant cost increases.

Even the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), the renowned medium of neutral Switzerland, was carried away by the torrent of propaganda.

In the NZZ of 28 April 2022, the Ukrainian writer Oksana Sabuschko (b. 1961) writes an incredibly polemical article in which she even goes so far as to equate Russia with evil and to identify signs of Russian mental maldevelopment already in the literature of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The essay reads like an excess of hatred, leading from Russian literature to the Red Army’s orgies of rape and robbery after World War II and directly to the horrors of Bucha in Ukraine in 2022.

More information: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/lektionen-aus-einem-bluff-russische-literatur-nach-butscha-ld.1681267?mktcval=fbpost_2022-04-28&fbclid=IwAR2rmX-QYbsgTk4shOHIKc3JRkGLaCGwnNk3ehtL5F0G_tA0zCCd7uYIMzE&mktcid=smch

The fact that the NZZ, to my knowledge, printed this hate tirade without comment is appalling. Does this mean that the editors share this opinion, indeed this emotion?

It reminds me of Cold War propaganda, when, through documentaries, non-fiction and accounts by contemporary witnesses on radio and television, post-1945 rape by the Red Army was reported, but never by representatives of other Allies.

Cold War propaganda was built on the image of the brutal, ugly Russian Bolshevik that had already shaped the view of “the Russians” on the election posters of the Weimar Republic.

The aim was to keep the memory of the enemy in the East alive among the population. There were also numerous rapes committed by military personnel of the other Allies in the occupation zones. However, their publication was unsuitable in the West integration and America euphoria phase and was swept under the table.

Hardly anything is known about that. The victims and their illegitimate children remain silent or are not heard.

In 2015, historian Miriam Gebhardt attempted to give a voice to victims of Allied rape in an extensive study on sexual violence at the end of World War 2. With this research, she intends to correct the collective memory. But to this day, no one wants to know about crimes committed by the western Allies. Why? Because there could and must be only one unified image of the enemy.

For more information on Miriam Gebhardt’s study, see the link and bibliography: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/zweiter-weltkrieg-massenhafte-vergewaltigungen-durch-100.html, 4 May 2015. Miriam Gebhardt: “When the soldiers came. The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War”, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2015, 352 pages, 21.99 euros, ISBN 978-3-421-04633-8.

The pressure of opinion up to the level of a criminal offence

In today’s war in Ukraine, there is once again only one enemy image. This time it has a specific face: Vladimir Putin!

And woe betides anyone who deviates from the official, simple image of the enemy and searches for more detailed background information!

-Woe betides anyone who also looks for faults in the “good” West!

-Woe betides anyone who does not want to beat the enemy but wishes to negotiate with him!

-Woe betides anyone who questions opinions disguised as information.

-Woe betides anyone who thinks even a bit different! – Shitstorm!

It is alarming how pressure is currently being exerted in Germany for everyone to go along with the general opinion on the war in Ukraine and on Putin (beyond the indisputable fact that Russia is the aggressor and Putin the aggressor warlord!). Such pressure restricts freedom of expression in a democracy.

Some examples:

-Putin’s rune – criminal offence!

The use of the sign “Z” was recently made a criminal offence in Germany because the Russians use it as a propaganda rune for victory in the Ukraine war. Therefore, whoever paints the sign anywhere presumably condones the war of aggression and is thus liable to prosecution. Furthermore, the perpetrator who uses it to express his pro-Russian sentiments can be punished with up to three years in prison.

Freedom of expression is generally a precious commodity in Germany. Sometimes that freedom is almost unbearable. Yet this law came into force within a very short time frame. Unbelievable for me and others of my generation.

SZ columnist Heribert Prantl takes up this issue in a commentary in the SZ and warns that German criminal law should not fall into the Russian mistake and punish sentiments, even those we would find abominable.

See link to the commentary: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/meinung/heribert-prantl-kolumne-140-strafgesetzbuch-krieg-in-der-ukraine-angriffskrieg-1.5559003

-Russian musicians under pressure in Germany

The Russian star conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, was dismissed by Munich’s mayor Reiter on 01 March 2022 for not distancing himself from Putin. However, the fact that he had long before been known for his homophobic views and expressed them vociferously was not considered an “outrage”. It had not led to any official consequences.

When pressed, the world-famous Russian star soprano Anna Netrebko hesitantly spoke against the war in Ukraine but demanded that musicians be allowed to be apolitical. Major opera houses subsequently stopped working with her, and the singer cancelled all her concerts. But she is now also considered an enemy of the state in Russia.

You can read more about this under this link: https://www.br-klassik.de/aktuell/news-kritik/anna-netrebko-ukraine-krieg-stellungnahme-putin-100.html

-Ex-Chancellor pilloried

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) was also caught in the crossfire. He is not only a personal friend of the Russian president but also holds leading positions in the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipeline projects. In addition, he is a member of the board of Rosneft and has been nominated for the supervisory board role at the Russian energy giant Gazprom.

Media representatives, parliamentarians and his party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), launched a witch hunt. First, his staff in the ex-chancellor’s office resigned without exception; then, he was asked to distance himself from war and the warlord, and the European Parliament was about to put him on the sanctions list. Finally, they wanted to cut off his ex-chancellor’s salary if he accepted the post at Gazprom.

He resisted for a long time, talked to Putin, condemned the war and finally gave in. He did not accept the supervisory board post at Gazprom. Nevertheless, he continues to be ostracised.

The following link provides an overview of the Schröder case: https://taz.de/Schroeders-Russland-Verbindungen/!5856093/

These examples raise concerns that freedom of expression today, in 2022, is being restricted bit by bit both by the law and by slavering contemporaries.

Rigid linguistic conventions

In turn, propaganda is rampant, particularly evident in language conventions.

No public figure – politicians or presenters, for example – can afford to call the war in Ukraine just war. It is unthinkable that the foreign minister does not explicitly emphasise during a speech that this war of aggression is brutal, contrary to international law, or even criminal.

There is also increasing pressure on those with political responsibility not only to say that Russia must not win the brutal war of aggression. No, the correct version is: Ukraine must win this war! For some time, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was repeatedly reprimanded for refusing to use precisely this formulation.

Anyone who has studied propaganda in history has repeatedly come across such language formulas and determinations as an ideological basis.

What is behind this formula?

This war must be waged until Russia is wholly driven out of Ukraine, including the Donbas and Crimea. That would be the end of Russia, even more drastic than the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And it would mean that there can be no peace negotiations for lack of a bargaining chip.

So there are particular political goals behind this formula, which have not yet been expressed. But it gives a glimpse into the future.

Because of the hardened fronts, the war will probably last for years.

But it is not only the German population that will suffer from economic difficulties such as energy price increases, inflation and supply bottlenecks. The ghost of recession looms over and over again.

Moreover, measures against climate change, a concern for many, will be put on the back burner. Presumably, many people could be motivated to sustain the cold and restrict themselves to the climate, but is that also true for supporting Ukraine in this war?

Propaganda can provide such motivation.

Pigeonholing – a consequence of propaganda

It also strikes me that it is becoming increasingly difficult to have serious, factual and controversial discussions about political events and developments.

There is an increasing tendency to filter out specific keywords from what a conversation partner says and to see them as an indication that this person must belong to a particular group.

Then, based on individual features taken out of context, the other person is quickly labelled as a conspiracy theorist, a lateral thinker, a person who understands Putin, a Putin propagandist, a leftist, a rightist etc.

If you don’t belong to this presumed group, you don’t listen anymore. Put the people in the pigeonholes! Communicate only with like-minded people!

This dangerous development threatens interpersonal relationships, is often complained about in public discussions and encourages propagandists.

Why this resurgence of pathos and hero worship?

Pathos and heroism are wafting through the world, and Germany, which should know better.

For example, there are pathetic declarations of solidarity from politicians to school classes sitting in classrooms dressed in Ukrainian yellow and blue or marching through the streets, as well as the yellow and blue flags hanging from windows everywhere.

Even EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was not above dressing in yellow and blue on the day of the vote to grant Ukraine candidate status for EU membership in June 2022.

That the biggest band of 1,000 musicians came together in Piazza San Carlo to play a particular version of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” as an international show of solidarity at the opening of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin was moving. But the fact that the Ukrainian colours were omnipresent and that Ukraine naturally won the competition strikes me as inappropriate and overbearing.

With shining eyes, many look at President Selensky, who is playing the role of his life. He is the hero who wants to save Ukraine and the whole world from totalitarian, brutal Russia. Entire parliaments listen to him devoutly.

When he lectures the German Parliament, the members of Parliament applaud him compliantly.

When the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, rages against Germany, the Chancellor and the President in a highly undiplomatic manner, no one stops him.

Even when he made his political views known by honouring the Ukrainian national hero, the former nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator Stephan Bandera, who belongs to the ultra-right and the fascists, at his grave in Munich, nothing happened. Noone protested. Simply silence!

More information on the following link: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/bandera-kult-ukraine-100.html

In June 2022, this outrageous undiplomatic diplomat gave Germany a verbal slap in the face by saying that many Ukrainian women would not feel comfortable in Germany and would return to their homeland. He claimed they held Germany responsible for the many deaths because deliveries of heavy weapons had not been made so far. Therefore, he said, his compatriots no longer wanted to stay in the country.

By September 2022, Andrij Melnyk will be recalled as Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany and will probably continue to work in the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior.

The world’s most powerful visited President Selensky in Kyiv despite the war.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres even demonstratively adapted his outfit to the host Selensky, wearing a shirt and jumper in almost Nato-olive like the host’s T-shirts instead of his suit and tie. Everyone, even the UN Secretary-General, wants a bit of the glamour of this “hero” to enhance or support his position.

I find this sudden fondness for pathos and heroism creepy and downright repulsive.

When I talk to people of my generation, many are also suspicious of the current propaganda activity in the public sphere.

They are concerned about the affinity of today’s generation in politics and the media to pathos and uncritical, compulsive unanimity.

Images of friends and enemies in the 1950s

I was born in West Germany in 1953 and consequently grew up with the propaganda of the Cold War in the West.

This propaganda held that the imperialist Soviet Union was hostile to the free West. Its people were poor because of the communist economy of scarcity. The communists oppressed them; they ended up in the Siberian gulag if they expressed their opinions freely; they had to subordinate their individuality to the community and did not know freedom and democracy according to the Western model.

There was talk of communists, a dirty word at the time, who did not tolerate the practice of religion. They wanted to achieve world domination and were only waiting to annex Europe.

This could only be prevented by the military presence of our US friends.

In my home town of Regensburg, the saying went, “You’ll see when the Russian boots start marching down Maxstraße!”

When we went on excursions to the Iron Curtain, i.e. to the border with what was then Czechoslovakia, we were afraid of the Russians who might suddenly come across the border.

The border regions in the Upper Palatinate and other federal states were withering economically. They reflected in our feelings the grey, joyless, depressing life under communism on the other side of the border.

“The Russians are coming!” was the ultimate horror scenario presented to us children.

This horror scenario was haunting the minds of the Western powers, led by the USA, on an even larger scale. One only has to think of the hunt for communists in McCarthy-era America.

In the course of the USA’s containment policy towards the USSR, the Western states thus founded their defence alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, in 1949.

Germany had been planning its rearmament since 1950 and finally became a NATO member on 09 May 1955, when it had retained its sovereignty with certain restrictions.

The West needed Germany, which shared a long border with the Eastern bloc states of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, as an active partner in the mutual assistance pact against the enemy in the East, the Soviet Union.

On 14 May 1955, one week after the admission of the Federal Republic of Germany and six years after the founding of Nato, the Eastern Bloc states signed the so-called “Warsaw Pact”, a “treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance”, on the initiative and under the leadership of the Soviet Union.

The East, for its part, felt threatened by the West.

Perhaps someone will recognise the parallel to the year 2022! At that time, West Germany was a state that bordered directly on the Eastern Bloc and thus had Nato weapons and soldiers threateningly close at hand. Of course, we were told at the time that the threat came from the imperialist Soviet Union and that it was imperative to be able to defend ourselves under the leadership of the USA. In the Eastern bloc countries, by contrast, the USA and its appendage, the British, were the imperialists who wanted to achieve world domination and wipe out the socialism that existed. Soviet-style socialism perished, and Western-style capitalism was not entirely uninvolved. That, however, is another story. But until then, for 35 years, the East-West conflict was described in Western societies as a tension between the humane democratic West and the inhumane communist East.

According to Western reporting, the Eastern bloc consisted of the power centre, the Soviet Union and the so-called satellite states GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Baltic states, m. E. Yugoslavia, Albania…., which were forced into dependence and lack of freedom by the Kremlin.

The West, on the other hand – never actually called the Western Bloc – cherished and cultivated a partnership with the USA.

Germany gladly accommodated Allied soldiers and war equipment, partly because the Allies had secured reservation rights for themselves after the end of the occupation in 1955.

It was not until 1990, at reunification, that Germany became a sovereign state.

In short, my generation in West Germany grew up amid the propaganda that the evil empire existed in the East and that good heroic figures were to be found in the West.

Just think of all the political thrillers, including James Bond films, in which heroic Englishmen or Americans fight against a dishonest, unscrupulous, misanthropic Soviet agent who wants to destroy the world and win.

Those born in the 50s had to expose and shake off the propaganda they grew up with. This sharpened their perceptions and fuelled distrust of authorities, opinion makers and political leaders.

Western Cold War propaganda was exposed as hypocrisy!

It fell to my generation to question this worldview. And we didn’t like the answers we found at all.

Re-armed West Germany joined NATO. This disappointed all those who believed in “Never again war!”.

The Korean and Vietnam wars dwarfed the military suppression of the uprisings in the Eastern Bloc (East Germany in 1953, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s).

We learned of war crimes committed by American Gis, American intelligence operations and old Nazis in the German government and judicial system.

In addition, we explored the unscrupulous dealings of big corporations worldwide.

We experienced first-hand the suppression of freedom of expression in our own country, Germany.

We experienced smear campaigns against dissidents.

We saw the one-sidedness, the profit orientation, and the opportunism of the West when it came to business. Values like human rights and democracy played no role in dealing with friendly dictators. What hypocrisy!

Many dubious domestic and foreign policy agreements, economic cooperation, and laws were justified to the population by the fight against communism.

Communism had to be fought wherever it appeared, whether in Europe, Cuba, Asia or South America! On the other hand, military dictatorships like Chile and Argentina were acceptable because they pretended to be anti-communist and were prepared to cooperate with capitalist-oriented states.

Critical students, intellectuals and critical media such as the “spiegel” and the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” or the magazine “konkret” began to question this communist agitation. As a result, many of the young generations started to consider whether evil was only in the communist East or whether it was not also wreaking havoc in the capitalist West.

However, if you thought this way, in the eyes of society, you were a communist or at least a sympathiser. You were strongly advised to “go over there”. In Germany, this meant East Germany, to which dissenters should disappear.

Those who challenged the common belief that the West was democratic and good and the East was undemocratic and bad had to suffer consequences. They were discredited, insulted and threatened existentially; some were even banned from working in their profession.

My generation, already dismantling convictions set in stone, also questioned other values such as the nuclear family, the distribution of roles between men and women, education to obedience and order, and so on.

The youth liberated themselves from sexual taboos, culminating in the slogan: “Make Love, not War!”

Considering the manipulative behaviour of the media and politics in those days, it was not surprising that left-wing terror groups with an affinity for violence developed, such as the RAF (Red Army Faction).

We fought against propaganda, simplistic black and white views, old and new fascists etc. We fought for human rights for everyone, equality, freedom, peace, and self-determination of the individual and nations.

The enemy image of our childhood and youth, the communist Eastern Bloc with the great power Soviet Union at its head, lost its horror.

The propaganda of the Cold War simply no longer worked.

We learned to distrust!

For many of this generation, questioning political statements, mainstream attitudes, and unsound information became second nature. Being able to form one’s own opinion, without taboos and without pressure to conform, was a high value.

Politicians and business representatives were distrusted in the first place because recent history had shown that declarations of intent and deeds often did not match.

The powerful of this world often showed only verbal interest in the common good. Yet, at the same time, they acted in the interest of the economy of their nations, parties or international corporations.

This is how quite a few representatives of my generation have become what they are today, in 2022:

older people who do not trust politicians, with a strong instinct for recognising propaganda, and with an irrepressible need for understanding before forming their well-founded opinions.

But many of us are no longer involved in the productive process. Most are pensioners and no longer have any influence.

The now active generation that increasingly holds certain political and media positions was born in the 1980s (give or take) and socialised differently.

I think this is reflected in the reactions to the war in Ukraine.

Suppose we, the Cold War generation, see the Ukrainian war as a power play of the great powers, urgently call for de-escalation and peace negotiations, and react allergically to Ukrainian heroism and pathos. In that case, we are met with incomprehension by the next generation.

As they were raised and socialised, they want to help, support the weak, and save freedom and democracy; they want to push back the aggressor, disarm him and bring him to justice.

But they do not consider the possibility that they could be manipulated. (TA)