Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13024669
In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions, according to a trove of internal Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.
One of the political strategists, for instance, instructed a troll farm employee working for his firm to write a comment of “no more than 200 characters in the name of a resident of a suburb of a major city.” The strategist suggested that this fictitious American “doesn’t support the military aid that the U.S. is giving Ukraine and considers that the money should be spent defending America’s borders and not Ukraine’s. He sees that Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”
The documents — numbering more than 100 and dating between May 2022 and August 2023 — were provided to The Post to expose Kremlin propaganda operations aimed at undermining support for Ukraine in the United States, as well as their scale and methods. The files are part of a series of leaks that have allowed a rare glimpse into Moscow’s parallel efforts to weaken support for Ukraine in France and Germany, as well as destabilize Ukraine itself.
This is not some war of expansion, like we’re used to initiating/taking part in/co-opting as Americans, this is an honest-to-goodness invasion by a very malicious actor (Putin).
I would also love to see our social programs funded and expanded, but denying money to Ukraine doesn’t re-allocate it to social programs. Our budget is not zero-sum, as Republicans pretend to believe when they crow about cuts, it is entirely made-up based on what level of debt risk we believe we can safely operate under. All that not funding Ukraine’s defense does, is make it easier for Russia to expand its influence and and legitimize its claims of the supposed inevitable reunification of former Soviet bloc states.
Furthermore, the specific narratives that Russia is pushing are right-wing ones like anti-immigrant and isolationist ones. They’re a dual-pronged attack meant to erode support for Ukraine, AND bolster Trump politically, who is in Putin’s pocket. I loathe Biden, but I’m not going to turn a blind eye to Putin’s agitprop just because he’s also anti-Biden.
This enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
We heard very similar arguments for every war we’ve involved ourselves in since WWII. I recall in 1983 when we absolutely had to render assistance to the good guy, Saddam Hussein, and then a few years later he pointed those weapons at us.
Given enough time, historical precedent will indicate that we were lied to to some degree, and it always boils down to making wealthier people even wealthier. (In this case, warmongers.)
It’s not an attack so much as a reminder that, yeah, our government is doing an exceedingly shitty job of taking care of its people, but they do a great job of making money we don’t actually have appear out of thin air for the war of the month.