Russia's War
Russia's War
Is this how you thought the internet would react?
Tonight, as Russia invades the Ukraine, and missiles land in major cities, I feel sick. I have been cursed with a great gut instinct, and it's a curse because it's usually right. So when events make me feel sick, it's because something is rotting. There’s something about illegal war that should be uniting us as people. The fact that it’s not is very disarming. Don't you think? We've been imagining with dread what it will be like when war breaks out and Twitter is our way of processing it. Tonight I was confused by the usual suspects reasonably focusing their attention on it, but it did not feel like a universal concern. Russia’s war on Ukraine perhaps is not the “right” war.
How exactly did we get there?
On December 19th, 2021 – two months ago – I wrote a note in my iPhone and shared it as an Instagram post, and the second Putin invaded tonight, I pulled it up.
It reads:
I wrote this down. Maybe it’s too much. I lie awake at night because I’m disturbed by the primal fear I sense around me. The pandemic fatigue is overwhelming people and industries. It is hard to keep searching for new depths of strength to face that unknown. And while all this has happened, the isolation has produced a dependency on Big Tech – from online shopping to social media, FaceTime to Zoom – that has fundamentally diminished our emotional intelligence, attention spans and critical thinking. The worldview is less shared, even though the impression is that we’re more connected than ever. The truth is intolerance runs riot, and access to minds has never been easier to manipulate, particularly while so many of those minds are vulnerable, bored and sequestered. To me, the only thing that will keep us alive is love, but I worry that love is also compromised by the digitization of our life experiences. We are more accustomed to leaving impressions of the moments, rather than being inside them, facing them, feeling them out, cherishing them. We rely on our phones to meet each other, to keep connected, and it’s got nothing on wrapping your arms around someone. I want to resist this online world where the rules of time and logic defy those of our physical world and where complex beings become AI clones. But I need to be here to speak the truth. I think I do. Maybe I’m wrong.
Social media has changed our capacity to digest information. It has compromised the chemicals in our brains, the fight-or-flight responses, the gut instincts we were imbued with pre-internet. It has made us susceptible to subtle, unconscious, invisible manipulation. This might sound like conspiracy and conjecture, and maybe it is. Or maybe it's just what I've observed after almost two decades on social media. I’ve been in the weeds of this strange anomaly world online in disparate places for ages. I’ve been screaming into the void of my various action alert style Signal groups that we should care about the various issues online that are being overridden by bots and misinformation, because there are tangential lessons to be learned, and we are experiencing the same phenomena; an erasure of truth, of common sense, of reality. The more we come together in our separate silos, the greater the chances of exposing this digital warfare we're enduring.
In Jewish advocacy, many of us experience incessant attacks from Iranian bots, particularly when tensions are mounting in the Middle East. I defend Amber Heard online; who has been attacked by Russian bots acquired by her ex husband Johnny Depp's lawyer, with the intention of destroying her career and reputation, and creating a mass smear campaign around the truth of her experience. My hate name – Eve Fartlow – blew up because it completed the horseshoe theory. It was born in a men's rights, right-wing adjacent, fan army of Depp who fight for “justice” against anyone who upholds that he's an abuser. It was quickly claimed by the far leftist hammer-and-sickle emoji brigade during the conflict between Israel and Hamas last May. Suddenly the entire fucking internet was using the name, because of two opposing online factions who should and perhaps one day will cancel each other out, and the bots that boost them. “Eve Fartlow” became the #2 trend in America for an entire afternoon and evening. Distracting. Damaging. And so completely unimportant. But the point is: the power of these factions to generate conversations born out of conspiracy and fuelled by hatred in a manner that drowns out everything that actually warrants our attention is untenable.
Why am I talking about this tonight? Well, I'm wondering why the professionally angry do not care about Ukraine? Even with real time footage of the atrocious attacks on the city of Kyiv, it doesn't feel like an earth-moving event in the vein of hot issues that are suddenly weaponized by the humanitarian masses. I find that alarming. Where are the people marching in the streets of America protesting this war? How did the world let this happen? According to international lawyer and human rights activist Hillel Neuer, “The UNHRC has no time, money, staff or resources to deal with the victims of Russia's war on Ukraine. They are instead all being used up on the UNHRC's Navi Pillay commission of inquiry into how the Middle East's only democracy is an evil apartheid state.” The irony of UNHRC’s antisemitic obsession with Israel; the lesson of antisemitism is that it will get people killed, Jews or otherwise. Again, Ukraine isn't on the agenda. Why not? Why isn't reality on the agenda?
The evil forces of the world have rewired brains through websites such as Twitter to their own advantage. Things are about to get real interesting. And by that I mean worse. Terrifyingly worse. See, most of you who are passively using the internet and don't have a motive beyond passing time, perusing and browsing, have been poisoned and distracted from real time issues, instead loaded with false outrage intended to keep you busy and occupied. In the Korean war, the enemy brainwashed captured soldiers, programming them with audiovisual manipulation. They needed to do it in person. In Nazi Germany, children were manipulated through a new school curriculum. It required a classroom. Now all the enemy forces need is a Twitter account and some bot power.
So it’s not a surprise to me that the world appeased Russia. This has been by design. Biden is weak. The West is consumed by social justice issues, many of which are non-starters. A dark age is looming. And as the world is burning this evening, all I can think about is how the people I love are doing, and where we are all headed.
I saw what was going to happen in The Ukraine though I still can't quite bring myself to believe that it is actually occurring, even as I watch the Russian onslaught. I would add that this will not end with The Ukraine. Putin learned well in 2008 in Georgia and 2014 in the Crimea that a feckless West would do nothing of substance to protect its allies. Once he has ended Ukrainian independence, he will turn his attention to the other former Soviet/Russian satellites. I'd be very, very nervous right now if I lived in the Baltic countries or the old Warsaw Pact nations.
Oh, and to make matters worse (if that's somehow possible), don't think that the Chinese aren't watching very closely how the U.S. in particular and the West in general responds to the Russian invasion. Lessons will be learned by them as well, and I'd also be terrified if I lived in Taiwan.