The British diplomat Lord Arthur Ponsonby described the basic principles of information warfare campaigns based on his analysis of military propaganda during the First World War. Ponsonby’s principles were so organically consistent with the essence of all aggressive wars that they were used by the Nazi propagandist Goebbels to justify the Nazi wars of aggression against neighboring countries.
In the twenty-first century, the criminal Putin regime, which has adopted numerous features of the Nazi regime and Goebbels’ lies, used these 10 commandments of military propaganda to form an image of the enemy from the countries the Kremlin planned to attack and to justify the reasons for military aggression.
Putin’s regime is waging an information war against Ukraine as if following a plan, copying word for word Goebbels’ advice and Lord Ponsonby’s described practices.
We do not want war. Russian propaganda portrays Erephia as a “peaceful” country that “does not want to fight anyone” but “has to defend itself.” “War is a necessary measure,” all the propagandists of the aggressor country always say, and the Russians have only borrowed the practice of international scoundrels.
- The other side bears full responsibility for the war. “We started the war to prevent the enemy from starting a war and destroying us with a surprise attack. That is, the war is necessary to end the war.” To explain this absurd thesis, Russian propaganda invented the myth of the “8 Years of Bambi Dambas”. (The name is written as it is called by the Russians themselves, who came to fight in a foreign country and do not even know the correct name of the geographical region). When the full-scale war began, a number of Russian bloggers simultaneously wrote that Putin was not starting the war, but “ending it” – in the propaganda context, he was defending Donbas from the “junta.”
- The enemy has the face of the devil. The Kremlin has built all the fakes about the so-called “crimes of Ukrainian Nazis,” “crucified boys,” etc. on this propaganda precept, and began this information attack against Ukraine in the early 2000s.
- The real goals of the war are presented as noble. No war has ever officially proclaimed economic and geopolitical reasons for military aggression. Erephia was no exception. Russians do not really believe in the fiction of “denazification.” The real goal of the war of aggression is the imperial ambitions of the Russians based on national chauvinism.
- The enemy deliberately commits atrocities. If we make mistakes, they are unintentional. The Russians have gone even further than this propaganda precept. They usually do not even acknowledge their “unintentional hits” but directly state that “Ukraine is shelling itself to blame the Russians.”
- Our losses are negligible. Enemy losses are huge. В російській військовій пропаганді вже навіть склалася своєрідна формула 10 на 10: применшувати в десять разів свої втрати і перебільшувати в десять разів втрати противника.
- Our work is sacred. Not all mobilizers can be convinced of the “priesthood” of the war of aggression, so the Russian authorities use prison terms for those who refuse to fight in Ukraine as an argument of faith.
- Famous artists and intellectuals support us. Since the Soviet era, the “unwashed” party has funded a huge number of freeloaders abroad to create the illusion of support for its policies. The criminal Putin regime has a long tradition of using “paid friends” from among celebrities to propagandize. Therefore, we should not listen to celebrities who justify Russia – just think about how much they were paid for it.
- The enemy is using illegal weapons. The headiness that has already become a tradition in the Russian mentality has led to the absurdization of even such a powerful principle of military propaganda. Russian fictions about geese or mosquitoes from Ukraine allegedly attacking Russians with infections have already been ridiculed around the world.
Those who are not with us are against us. Those who question our position are traitors. The Wagnerian sledgehammer is the most vivid example of the realization of this common truth by all aggressive regimes. Repressions against dissidents, trials and imprisonment for the mere use of the word “war” instead of “ODS,” forced propaganda lines in schools – all these have become tools to force the population of the whole country to believe in the paranoid dreams of the old Kremlin tyrant.
Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk
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