When voters lose faith

If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on the road to unfreedom, as Timothy Snyder, the well-known historian of Russia, argues in his new book. He sees threats to democracy in Europe and America as following the Russian model of oligarchic takeover: ‘The stabilisation of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.’

Snyder focuses on the Ukrainian crisis, noting how this conflict became a theatre of cultural memory: during the Russian invasion it was once again 1941, the enemies were Nazis, and tanks were even painted with slogans such as ‘For Stalin’. Leftists in the West particularly fell for Russia’s version of events. Snyder shows John Pilger and Seumas Milne parroting information from Russian propaganda sites arguing that the protests in Ukraine were led by fascists, and points out how western coverage bought into the divisive narrative of ‘ethnic Russians’ and ‘ethnic Ukrainians’, based on language use.