Holding onto the truth in a post-truth world: Putin’s Russia

Nobody fears the truth more than a liar. The perpetrators, the abusers, the cheats and the cowardly comfortable. For the rest of us proof and clear-headed testimony arrives as psychological release. When we’re told we live in a post-truth society – we want instant kickback to defy the words we can see clearly as an excuse for dishonesty and further dishonesty. We want to fight the phrase itself.

Famous English novelist George Orwell might agree that we are right to feel afraid of a post-truth world. His most successful novel, 1984, was a testimony to authoritarian regimes which used techniques of mass persuasion to perpetrate lies, embedding them into a whole state. Orwell was undoubtedly inspired by his first hand experiences of the Stalinist purges of the socialist militia in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. His friends and comrades were imprisoned, tortured and sometimes executed as “Trotyskist-fascists”.

For Orwell it was personal. Being tortured until you accepted that 2 plus 2 equals 5 if your president wants you to believe it. That’s not something we want in our lives.

“Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country” (George Orwell)

Britian in 2026 is not subject to a Stalinist regime, instead we are mired in the mass persuasion of funded ideological propaganda and deceptive marketing on a global scale. Like the rest of the world, the British spend all day sucking up lies from hand-held computers. It is frightening. It has undoubtedly warped the mass consensus on reality, spiralled us into a dark ages, we can accurately describe as “post truth” if we accept this means ignorant and delusional.

If post-truth means a new dark ages of technological chaos and confusion then I accept the description as accurate. I believe that social media has proved fertile for fascist-Stalinist style movements partly because the opposition of science, integral fact-based journalism, education, democratic government, social justice and morality has been discredited. The arguments against greed, power and lies have been undermined by popular misconceptions. So, the cultural advances of the European traditions which emerged in the Englitenment are being redacted. Hence, technological chaos and confusion, which must be psychologically damaging to us all. It must make us all feel fear and doubt.

One way to fight it off in our minds is to stay calm and simple with the big facts of reality. No matter how weird it gets on the online free-for-all of populist gossip and hate campaigning. To anchor ourselves in the warm bath of a self-help which is reliant on some notion of being closer to the truth, closer to a philosophy of a measureable, arguable notion of social reality, at least being honest enough to actually try. .

Why not start with some simple indisputable facts about Putin’s Russia.

Russia attempted and failed to take Kyiv, overthrow the regime and take Ukraine in 2022. It happened. It was real. The gangster Putin, head of a gangster state where the political opposition, business rivals and critical journalists are bumped off and die in mysterious circumstances. They fall out of windows, become sick in prisons, get shot, blown up, poisoned. Putin, a former KGB officer, is on record for years talking about a return to the glory of the former Soviet Empire. For him, Ukraine has no right to exist because it is Russia. Even if Russia did sign the Budapest Memorandum on December 5th 1994 and agree to Ukraine’s independence in exchange for its former Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Ukraine is a democracy not a neo Nazi regime. In a second-round run off of the Ukraine elections Zelensky got around 73% of the vote and has this been verified internationally. Yes it has.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – through its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE coordinated one of the largest international Election Observation Missions, monitoring the campaign, voting and vote counting, and later issued an official statement that the elections were competitive and free overall.

OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and NATO Parliamentary Assembly – both sent observers as part of an International Election Observation Mission that reported on the conduct of the election.

European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations (ENEMO) – an international network of civil-society election monitoring groups which deployed long- and short-term observers across Ukraine to evaluate the electoral process.

I had to write this. I had to say it. Again and again and again. It’s head-mashing. We live in a post-truth world where I have, say, a musician friend telling me NATO is not a defensive treaty but a pepetrator of war crimes and colonial advancement and Ukraine is a neo Nazi dictatorship installed by the CIA. It’s Russian propaganda. Lies and exaggeration, anti European and anti democracy. Simply not true.

If you’re interested there’s a film on Netflix which is fact-based and gives a great insight into the world of Vladimir Putin and the gangster state he presides over. It stars Maxine Peake, an actress from my home town of Bolton in Lancashire, England (makes you proud) playing the late journalist journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of Putin. It covers events and reporting from the Chechan War as well as life in Moscow. Apart from being hard hitting it’s a really entertaining drama.

https://www.netflix.com/title/70021644

Then there’s a book called “Killer in the Kremlin” by John Sweeney, a British investigative journalist and writer who worked for The Observer newspaper, and the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight series. His accounts are first-hand or involve eye witnesses. They’re not comments below a social media post based on the logic of “cos I said so” or the ramblings of a YouTube influencer.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Killer-Kremlin-bestseller-gripping-explosive/dp/1804991201

For me the main thing about a post-truth world which truly matters is supporting those journalists and polticians who seek the truth anyway, in spite of social media. Seek it and find it and share it.

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed” – Nietzsche.