A year and a half into the pandemic the world is going through the fifth wave of the disease. Among nations suffering from a spike of new infections are poor countries where vaccines are not readily available. But there is also Russia and America’s red states, where safe and effective vaccines have been plentiful enough for a long time so that everyone who wanted to could get vaccinated.
Vladimir Putin’s propaganda at various times during the pandemic hinted that Covid was a mere flu, a hoax invented by Western governments to control their populations or a way to introduce chips into people’s bloodstreams. Early vaccines developed by international pharmaceutical companies were criticized as dangerous and ineffectual.
Donald Trump’s followers similarly heard that it was a flu, a hoax invented by the Democrats to defeat him, a way for the Chinese to crash the US economy or a passing fancy that would disappear in a few weeks. They were also understandably skeptical. After the election, the Trumpist propaganda machine spearheaded by Rupert “America’s Murderer” Murdoch’s Fox News TV, became intent on sabotaging President Joseph Biden’s vaccination campaign — which it successfully did among Republicans.
But now Russia is seeing the highest number of daily infections since the start of 2021, and the highest number of deaths since the start of the pandemic. That is according to official statistics, which many experts believe are way too low — and, accordingly, data accidentally leaked by the government a few days ago suggests that the number of cases across Russia is approaching 30 million — or five times the official tally.
So Russia has started a robust campaign to get its population vaccinated, imposing restrictions on the non-vaccinated and perhaps moving to vaccinate people forcibly, as would have been done in Soviet times.
Hardly surprisingly, America’s right-wingers are now following in Putin’s footsteps. They apparently realized that they are killing their own viewers and constituents. So some Fox propagandists have changed their tune and a number of GOP elected officials have started to encourage folks back home to get a shot.
Unless a more potent or virulent variant emerges among the unvaccinated, Covid will be defeated and will remain an endemic regional problem like cholera or leprosy is in India. But Covid has revealed some important truths about both Russia and America, and about the nature of lying in the public space and from the highest levels of government.
Writing in the New York Times Magazine soon after the Jan. 6 insurrection, American historian Timothy Snyder discussed the post-truth political environment, calling it pre-fascist. Authoritarian leaders always lie, because a lie serves a special purpose of controlling their supporters and identifying potential disloyalty. In the 1930s, Stalin used outrageous lies about “enemies of the people,” declaring them simultaneously spies for the British and Japanese intelligence services, in order to enforce blind obedience. Those who expressed doubts about such grotesque fabrications soon were themselves arrested. The best follower is one who never questions the leader’s statements, no matter how stupid or phantasmagorical.
Before the collapse of communism constant and universal lying was the way of life in the Soviet Union. The government and its propaganda lied about everything — its history, its present, its policies, its economy and so on. Soviet citizens saw through those lies, didn’t believe them but lied that they did. Gorbachev’s glasnost was an attempt to break through those lies, but when the pyramid of lies was tampered with, the entire edifice of the Soviet Union promptly collapsed.
You would have thought that the Russians would be extra sensitive to lies by their government. But Putin, who in the tradition of the Communist Party of which he was once a member lies all the time, appears to be believed by those who still watch Russian television. Notably, it is the older generation who grew up in the USSR. They readily accept Putin’s explanation for the changes they have witnessed in their lifetime — notably, the nonsense about the age-old Western plot to keep Russia down.
As to all other lies blaring from Russian television sets, skilled in the art of Orwellian doublethink they acquiesce to them without much critical thinking. Take flight MH17 brought down by a Russian military rocket launched by a Russian crew from Ukrainian territory on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people aboard.
Official Russian versions of the tragedy have changed weekly, including the story about “dead people” allegedly placed into a passenger airliner to discredit Russia and Donbas “separatists.” Then there were allegations that it had been shot down by a Ukrainian fighter plane. Most recently, Russia has lodged a complaint against Ukraine with the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that Kyiv is responsible for the loss of MH17 because it didn’t close the air space over a war zone.
Putin supporters’ response to all this is to shrug and carry on.
Trump also provided an easy explanation for the deracinated, underpaid, and lumpenized whites without a college degree as to why they are no longer number one not just in the world but in their own country. The culprits were different — not evil foreign powers but evil domestic liberal elites; however the images of the culprits were strikingly similar: overeducated, superior, insidious and cosmopolitan. In both cases these culprits used puppets. In Putin’s case, it was Ukrainians (or Georgians, Lithuanians, Poles or whoever) who had been turned into a staging area of the Anti-Russia project. In Trump’s case, it was the non-white immigrants whom the liberals encouraged to sneak in through an open border.
Once you accept Trump’s fundamental lie, all other lies — all 30,000 of them over four years, many blatantly false or contradicting previous lies — no longer matter.
Snyder points out that truth is singular, whereas there is no limit to how many lies you can come up with. When the flow of lies is uncontrollable, then the truth may be lost in it and then all the lies can become other, equally valid versions of the truth. Or, as Trump’s spokesperson Kellyanne Conway once said, alternative facts.
Moreover, when objective independent media outlets are squashed as they were in Russia, or maligned as “lamestream media” or “fake news” or outright fascistic “enemies of the people,” then the standards by which truth and lies are measured disappear.
You can find plenty of alternative facts about Covid and about vaccines on the Internet. Some are promulgated by morons, others by people who are deliberately trying to destroy our social fabric, by right-wing and left-wing revolutionaries whose motto is Lenin’s “Worse the Better.” And now both Putin and America’s GOP may find that their pro-vaccination message is lost on their own followers, who have already made up their minds about which truth about Covid they are going to believe.
