Special Edition: "The First Debate Did Not Take Place" - Info Wars, Narrative Control and Modern Washington - feat. Malcom Kyeyune

Multipolarity

In the halls of modern government the info-wizard is king. Media consultants, political strategists, whatever title they assume they always promise the same thing: magic worked through information control; spells cast by incantation.

In the first week of March 2022, only a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a slew of articles came out in Western publications announcing the advent of the anti-Russian infowar.

To say that this infowar was launched with much fanfare would be an understatement - within days of the Russo-Ukraine war beginning various Western publications were already suggesting that victory was on the horizon.

The effect was eerie, with multiple outlets running the exact same headline. "Ukraine is winning the information war against Russia", proclaimed different writers at CNBC, Slate, and The Financial Times.

No doubt this proclamation of victory was itself part of the infowar that the various authors purported to analyse - a self-licking ice cream cone if there ever was one.

Yet as time went on it became clear that the anti-Russian infowar was not targeted at the Russian people, much less the Russian military - rather it was targeted at a Western domestic audience.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once declared that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place - it was merely broadcast as a sort of simulation on television screens across the world. If only Baudrillard had lived to see the anti-Russian infowar launched in early-2022.

Partisan politics in the United States had long been drowned in a bathtub of propaganda by the time the anti-Russian infowar came along.

As the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal raged in 1998, the American public asked themselves whether the President did or did not have sexual relations with that woman. The question was a factual one: did he or didn't he. Today such a reference to reality seems quaint.

The factuality of various political attacks barely matters anymore as everything is treated as being part of some partisan "narrative" or "talking point".

And so, when some people raised the possibility that President Joe Biden might be completely incapable of doing his job due to severe cognitive impairment, the factuality of this claim was never really addressed - it was simply dismissed as an obvious partisan attack, a "right-wing talking point".

Last week we saw reality climb back in through the window: the President tried to debate his opponent on television and the world saw that America is being led by a man who is clearly not in command of his faculties.

In this week's episode of Multipolarity, we are joined by Malcolm Kyeyune to discuss the saturation of the information space with propaganda of various forms.

Are these really the savvy tricks that consultants and strategists claim them to be? Or are they a symptom of a political system experiencing deep decline - a system that can no longer deal with reality and finds itself instead retreating into fantasy?

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