Moscow’s war on reality

When Russian bombs began to fall on Ukraine, Julia Tymoshenko called her aunt in Moscow.

She told her about spending a night in the basement as explosions thundered overhead. Her aunt was unimpressed. “Well, you don’t know who did that,” she said. “We’re seeing one thing on the news, you’re seeing another thing on the news.”

Tymoshenko, who is 22, sent her aunt photos: the bomb shelter, the refugee train packed with fleeing people. “It’s not the news for me,” she told her aunt. “It’s my reality, and it’s what I see with my own eyes.”

In response, her aunt blocked her.

That story, told last week on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” suggests that, for as much as this is a war against buildings, bodies and a legitimately elected government, it is also a war against objective truth. Richard Pryor, channeling Chico Marx, once put it like this: “Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Well, this is a war against your lying eyes.

Evidence abounds. It includes Russia’s attack on TV towers in Ukraine, its crackdown on social media and other independent information sources, its detention and intimidation of journalists and its new law mandating up to a 15-year prison sentence for reporting so-called “fake news,” i.e., news that contradicts the Kremlin. Some Russian TV journalists have quit rather than parrot Moscow’s lies about the “special military operation” they are forbidden to call a war.

More ominously: At this writing, four reporters have been killed by Russian forces. War being what it is, it’s impossible to say definitively whether Brent Renaud, Pierre Zakrzewski, Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova and Yevhenii Sakun were specifically targeted. But Russia being what it is, it sure seems likely.

Yes, every nation at war seeks to control the flow of information, to shape the narrative to its advantage. That’s why television and radio stations are prize targets for invading armies. But this feels like an Orwellian step beyond that, an extension of something with which we’ve become sadly familiar in this era of preposterous social-media conspiracies and multiple-choice truth. Meaning, an attempt not just to lie, but to overwrite reality.

America, unfortunately, has extensive recent experience with that. So it’s hard to watch this with any sense of detachment, to observe as though through some intervening window, as the very idea of knowable things is mauled. No, this is frightening stuff.

Julia Tymoshenko’s aunt is what you’d expect her to be under a regime that weaponizes lies and interdicts truth. And Lord knows, truth has trouble enough even without that. “You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson famously snarls in “A Few Good Men,” but the thing left unsaid is that many of us don’t really want it anyway — all protests to the contrary notwithstanding — because it challenges what they choose or need to believe.

In other words, truth is hard, but QAnon is easy. And defending truth grows harder still, not only in Ukraine, but also in Lafayette Square, where journalists were gassed, in Ferguson, where they were arrested, in Minneapolis, where police shot one in the eye. This, as some of us wait for John F. Kennedy to return from the dead and Donald Trump to be restored to the White House. All of which makes it difficult to have any sense of remove from Moscow’s war on reality.

You’d like that war to be just some scary thing far away, glimpsed safely through a window. But it’s actually a mirror reflection of us.

Distorted, yes. But not nearly as much as you’d like to believe.