I often wonder at the level of stupidity of UK and EU leaders. Do they really believe that Putin just woke up one day and decided to bring back the Russian Empire by “invading” Ukraine in an “unprovoked war of aggression”? Do they really not see how putting Ukraine into NATO is a “red-flag” for Russia? (Strangely William Burns, head of the CIA under Biden when an Ambassador in Moscow sent a message back to Washington explaining that everyone in Russian policy circles regarded this as the “brightest of red lines”). Can they really not grasp the evidence in front of their eyes – that millions of people in eastern Ukraine are, loosely speaking, “pro-Russian” (either due to being ethnic Russians or due to cultural and historical ties) and had every reason to resist a Ukrainianization programme imposed on them by a coup government in Kiev who had (violently) ousted ‘their man’ – the legitimate President Yanukovych? Can the liberals really not accept that some peoples and cultures are “at a different stage of development” and simply aren’t at at stage where they are ready to embrace all kinds of permissive liberal values and ideologies – that some cultures are simply a bit different?
None of this is hard to grasp if you read a little history and pay attention to current affairs with an open and rational mind. What is the problem? I should say I agree the the view that most Western leaders really believe this stuff – they are not just pretending to believe it. It isn’t just the leaders. The “intelligence” agencies also produce the nonsense. (I have read recently that both Danish and Estonian intelligence have been producing reports that Russia is getting ready to attack a NATO country in the next few years).
There is some kind of collective fog. What is happening? The obvious answer is the ‘echo chamber’. This is a process whereby the criteria for what is “true” is if it logically fits into the existing narrative. There is no connection to ’empirical’ reality. For example; if our first principle is that Putin is trying to recreate the Russian Empire then it doesn’t sound crazy to say that after Ukraine he is going to invade Sweden. In the same way that once someone has convinced himself that he is really Napolean it doesn’t feel crazy to him to go about in a bicorne hat. Careerist intelligence officers and politicians believe that to climb the ladder they have to produce and reproduce the existing narrative, and even add to it. People who have good skills at reproducing existing narratives and performing according to scripts become successful at politics. The system encourages conformity to and performance of the already accepted narrative. A lie grows and grows and they all forget that they are lying. An initial lazy and propagandist narrative line ends up mushrooming and taking over. The narrative becomes self-reinforcing through circularity. In just the same way that a foolish person may one day toy with the idea that he is perhaps Napolean and end up letting the notion overtake him completely.
Even so. It remains surprising. Don’t these leaders read books? Consider theories of International Relations? Expose themselves to different points of view? Think critically about their own beliefs? It seems not. Their intelligence, (and most have degrees or even MAs so they can’t be intellectually disabled in the medical sense), is wholly devoted to the task of narrative reproduction, of saying what they are expected to say. by power, by the media, by the intelligence agencies. They are like performing seals; doing what is expected of them.
