Reality transcends satire. Maybe.

There’s an American left-wing vlogger I have fallen into following called Beau of The Fifth Column.

His latest piece is about what is rumoured to be an accidentally released Russian opinion piece which was supposed to be released after Putin’s armies had conquered and pacified Ukraine. It got take back and denied but nothing is lost on the Internet and it’s up both in the original Russian and in English translation. Go and have a read of whichever you’re most competent in. The English version is housed at a Ukraine government site, which may make it a bit suspect in some people’s eyes.

I don’t have enough knowledge of Russian as a language, Russian political theories, nor Russian journalism to be able to say if this is genuine or not. (And Beau you probably ought to put some disclaimers in your coverage of it.) But assuming it is genuine for now what strikes me is the close modelling of this bit of propaganda on the Nazi justification for their agression in the 1930s. We not only have the ‘people like us are being ruled by people not like us’ and the ‘people not like us are resisting the just rule of people like us’ but there’s also the ‘we must pay back those who humiliated us in 1918’ only updated to 1991.

Also striking is the way they tell other people that they are being manipulated against their own interests by the Big Evil of ‘the Anglo-Saxons’. Ah, those Anglo-Saxons! Oppressing people since the Battle of Badon Hill. (c 500 AD). The idea that Germany or Italy or Poland ought to feel perfectly contented with a resurgent Russian Empire and have absolutely nothing to fear… It’s a very tone deaf and Russocentric view of the cosmos.

This could be fake. It feels like parody or satire. But have you seen how the world is tending just at the moment? I reserve judgement on its authenticity.