In Edinburgh, where I write this, there is concern that the city’s newly opened branch of the Kremlin-backed news agency Sputnik is intended specifically to destabilise post-Brexit English-Scottish relations. Message to Putin: “Don’t worry, Vladimir baby! We can handle this one ourselves!!”
Nonetheless, let us compare the contrasting media manipulation strategies of Putin’s Russia and, for example, the Labour party, both of them organisations that have, at times, abandoned their leftwing core beliefs in an attempt to adapt to a shifting geopolitical landscape. If last week’s news is to be believed, Russia’s control of media extends as far as hacking staff at the New York Times. As well as the Kremlin getting to see funny cartoons of representational figures holding up signs with writing on them hours ahead of the rest of us, could this hack also mean Russia could plant false stories into American media at source?
Is Donald Trump, for example, whose rise is fuelling fears of forthcoming global nuclear war, actually a fictional creation of Russian propagandists intended to destabilise the west? Oddly, this is a more comforting proposition than the idea that he really exists.
In the autumn of 2015, it was suggested that Putin’s deliberately penis-shaped submarines, designed specifically to subconsciously exaggerate our perceptions of Russian genitalia, are poking around the transatlantic data cables to ensure the maverick anarcho-superpower’s ability to cut continental Europe off from America. Two campaigns working in opposition might then mean American media were full of Russian lies that we in Europe weren’t actually able to view.
On the other hand, this kind of strategy would be typical of Putin’s propaganda guru Vladislav Surkov, a surrealist artist who, despite dressing like a disgraced Top Gear presenter, uses creatively chaotic double-think to sculpt our perceptions of Russia as determinedly as Richard Dreyfuss mushes mashed potato into mountains in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
On the one hand, dope-fiend Russian athletes’ disqualification from the Rio feelgood festival was embarrassing; on the other, it creates the impression of a country of unpredictable law-defying crazies so convincingly Surkov himself may have masterminded it. There’s no way of knowing anymore. Surkov may even have written this. I may actually be him without my even knowing it.
In March 2015, I wrote, for this paper, a silly fantasy about a giant statue of a naked Putin landing in my garden. Reading the below-the-line internet comments later, I realised how thorough Russia’s determination to muddy the waters of opinion was; many of them were clearly generated by almost-literate Kremlin cyber-slaves, rather than by the usual neoliberal trolls taking time off from masturbating over old videos of Toby Young on a rowing reality TV show.
Briefly, I adopted a strategy of writing borderline meaningless gibberish about Russia to try and provoke weird responses from the full-time Kremlin-backed commenters. Indeed, in a column about the Eurovision Song Contest three months later I discreetly included the following irrelevant paragraph: “One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed to their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenetic Russian keyboard wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.”
The problem here was twofold. Firstly, many Observer readers found this nonsense indistinguishable from my usual writing. (As has been pointed out by contributors many times, I am no AA Gill. Now that man can write!)
And, secondly, many of the pro-Putin below-the-line comments the incoherence provoked were, I suspect, actually placed by sassy readers attempting to parody the usual Kremlin posts.
Consider, for example, this convincingly odd submission from General Dreedle. “Russia is very well doing without your Opra Winfrey western pornography and youre decadent music. More lies about Ukraine which was only the size of a biscuit before transsexual won.”
Whether the supposed Observer contributor General Dreedle is real or not, the fact is Putin’s Russia has taken political propaganda to the next level, motherfuckers! Meanwhile, here at home, Jeremy Corbyn is filmed sitting on the floor of a train.
There is a long tradition of essentially dishonest photo opportunities being used by politicians to cement policy in the public mind. Consider Margaret Thatcher in that tank in 1986; or Michael Dukakis in that tank in 1988; or John Major on that tank in 1991.
But politicians’ photo opportunities don’t only use tanks. In 2006, David Cameron, who went on to ruin Britain for ever, was photographed in Norway hugging a husky, as he launched the lie that he was unleashing the “greenest government ever”. But within a few years, Theresa May would close the Department of Energy and Climate Change and Conservative propagandists would have gone to any lengths to avoid David Cameron being photographed embracing an animal. (Indeed, now I find myself wondering, was Vladislav Surkov himself the unnamed source of the bought biographer Isabel Oakeshott’s Cameron pig-sex-face story? Or is Isabel Oakeshott herself a Kremlin creation? What kind of name is “Isabel Oakeshott”? Has anyone ever really been called that, in real life, ever?)
But instead of being photographed in a tank like a normal politician, Jeremy Corbyn last week chose to be filmed sitting on the floor of a train. While clearly intended to highlight the scandal of private rail company ownership, the Labour party’s release of the footage represents an entirely foreseeable own goal.
First, it provides the same two blokes that secretly write all the jokes for the comedians on all those shitty TV comedy panel shows with a picture of Jeremy Corbyn sitting on the floor, thus generating loads of pithy one-liners tying together the idea of the number of seats on a train with the number of seats in parliament, ie, “He should have gone and sat in his own back benches, there’s plenty of room there!”
Secondly, as the Corbyn floor film was taken on a train owned by a private company, that company had access to CCTV detailing the circumstances leading up to its creation and it is clearly in its own commercial interests to use that footage to discredit the images, whether the empty seats Corbyn chose to walk by were actually reserved or not.
The right in British politics, backed by business and media, is consolidating an unassailable hegemony. Our left needs to raise its game. If you ever got to see film of Putin sprawled on public transport, every single possible interpretation of the footage would already have been minutely mapped.
Stewart Lee’s new show, Content Provider, is at Leicester Square theatre from 8 November and then touring. See stewartlee.co.uk for details
