The West is Finally Breaking Up With Russia — And It’s Long Overdue
Why The West is Better Off Without Putin’s Russia
The slaughter unfolding in Ukraine awoke the West — and in retaliation, the West is dropping a new Iron Curtain on Russia. Business after business has pulled out. Amex, Mastercard, Visa, Ikea, Nike, Disney, Apple, Airbnb, Boeing, BP,
the list goes on. Luxury brand stores in Moscow
have been closed and sit empty.
This is the single largest transformation in sociopolitical order in a lifetime. Certainly the largest since the end of the World War II.
The truth that’s already beginning to emerge, though, looks like this. The West will be better off without Russia. Socially, culturally, politically, and even, in the end, economically. Putin
awoke the sleeping giant of the West — and he probably shouldn’t have. He has set in motion a chain reaction, whose consequences are now spreading. The Iron Curtain now dividing the West and Russia will be good for the West — and bad for Russians.
It’s not often in the murky waters of global politics you often find unalloyed truths, but this is one. Let me explain how the West will be be better off, in the end, in each of these ways — and so the Iron Curtain now beginning to divide it from Russia is one worth keeping closed, at least until such a time as Russia isn’t a malicious global actor under a figure like Putin.
It was the day after the war started that someone said to me: “Twitter feels completely different. It’s….not so bad anymore.” Startled, I checked for myself. My Twitter stream? It’s normally a hellscape. Angry trolls, seemingly radicalised by disinformation, attacking me over everything from Covid to the economy. And they were
gone. It was like a breath of fresh air.
What had happened, I wondered? It was my kid sis who told me. Russia had
begun to block Twitter. Its troll farms weren’t there stirring up the dark waters of rage and hate anymore. They weren’t there anymore. At least, not in the numbers they were before. And suddenly, for the first time in years, my Twitter feed was a gentler, smarter place. I’m not the only one to have noticed this, by the way —
many have noticed that the bots aren’t swarming the way they used to.
But of course this is hardly just about my Twitter feed.
It’s about the way that Russia has poisoned the public spheres of Western nations. It has managed to shut down the mind of society after society, which should be made of intelligent debate and thoughtful conversation — and replace it with rage and hate, ignited by disinformation and misinformation. Trolls farms attack public figures. Other public figures are open advocates of Putin’s Russia — once respected journalists.
Our societies stopped being able to think for quite a while. And that was Putin’s goal, of course. It’s now well documented that what was aimed at us was an attack. Russia’s “
firehose” model of propaganda was levelled at us, like a giant howitzer turning reality on its head. The election was stolen. Your living standards were falling, and you were struggling in life? It was the fault of Mexicans, Jews, Black people — not your own, for electing poor leaders. The enemy was the other side political side — and instead of debating them, you should attack them, like soccer moms in America, who ended up threatening to shoot up their kids schools.
For the last decade or more, Russia’s “firehose” of disinformation has corroded our societies almost completely. Think of how many Americans
support Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen. How many Brits
fell for the Big Lie that Europeans were their enemies. How even in nations like Germany and France, all kinds of Big Lies spread — vaccines were dangerous, minorities were hated subhumans, it was all a worldwide conspiracy run by Jews or shadowy “global liberal elites” to get you.
This had all the hallmarks of the “firehose” model — disinformation was bombarded at people a thousand times a day. It was microtargeted at them personally, on Facebook and Twitter. They were gaslit, reality turned inside out. Just as Putin is a believer in
Christian Fascism — his favourite philosophers are Christian Fascists, who believe in an apocalyptic confrontation between the pure and impure, the human and subhuman, of blood, over soil — so too all this propaganda was designed to essentially turn our societies in reflections of Putin’s newly aspiring
Christian Fascist Russia.
In places like America, this campaign of disinformation worked incredibly well — probably even surprising Putin. His strategy was to use our democratic mechanisms of information sharing against themselves — to buy ads on Facebook to spread Big Lies, to populate Twitter with bots and trolls, who’d attack public figures, and sow doubt in the mind of the average person. What if vaccines really did contain microchips? What if the election really was stolen? What if Jews and Mexicans and Europeans really were the cause of our woes in the West? The average person, bombarded by all this a thousand times a day or more, believe it. And enough of them began to believe in it fanatically that America became a land where ultraconservatives like Tucker Carlson became open Putin supporters — and so did, curiously, a certain cadre of once respectable “liberal” journalists.
It must have been a massive coincidence that a wave of far right poison spread through the West like a pandemic. Which demonised everything from science to tolerance to reason to democracy itself. And lionised Christian Fascism — Putin’s chosen ideology. What a mysterious coincidence, that this wave spread across the West at exactly the same time, in exactly the same ways — digitally, online, with bots and trolls and fake personas. What a further coincidence that it didn’t just push Putin’s favoured ideology, but also used Russia’s firehose propaganda model to essentially brainwash a working class in the West which, like in America and Britain, was losing faith in its institutions and leaders. And what a final coincidence that all that neatly called for the West to lose unity and purpose, and turn on each other — just as Britain turned on Europe, or Trump called for the US to leave NATO, or the far right in Germany and France openly admired strongmen and dictators leading authoritarian states like Putin’s Russia.
What a coincidence.
Of course, none of this was a coincidence at all. The West was being poisoned by Russia. The wave of far right hate and rage that was overwhelming it, people being radicalised by an increasingly baffling array of Big Lies on Facebook and Twitter and so forth — had a source. It was part of a strategy and plan, we know now. The point of it was to destabilise the West.
That era is now, thankfully, coming to an end.
Twitter’s just one example, but it’s a meaningful one. It’s a place where diplomacy is conducted and where the world goes for news and even facts. For it to be suddenly this much emptier of disinformation and propaganda and rage and hate now that Russia’s suddenly gone also tells us who was behind it in the first place. It is an “existence proof” — living evidence — that the rage and hate poisoning our public spheres were not really Western in values or tendencies or attitudes at all. They were a Russian creation.
We will be far, far better off without Putin’s Russia socioculturally for this reason. Russia is a country which has incalculable contributions to what we consider Western culture, from Dostoevsky to the Bolshoi. But Putin’s Russia? It hasn’t just not contributed anything to our societies. It has actively poisoned them.
Do you remember when Putin poisoned a former spy on English soil with a toxic nerve agent? That’s what Russia and the Kremlin did to our societies. They novichocked our public spheres and democracies. They left them writhing in pain and screaming in agony. The toxin is now leaving our system — Russia is not part of our public spheres anymore. And suddenly, incredibly, we are healing. We may be regaining some semblance of health and strength as they once were.
Now that the spreading of Big Lies has slowed drastically — Big Lies like the election was stolen or the vaccines are out to get you or Christian Fascism is the way forward for our societies (just like it is for Russia) — you can already sense how much better off our societies are. People are thinking more clearly. People are finally recognising the pull these lies have had on them for the last decade. And by finally acknowledging that, the lies lose their power. People can again talk without mountains of trolls trying to sow doubt. Hate is spreading far, far less effectively — and unity seems like it could finally be the sentiment of the day. All that is already happening — if you take a close look.
That is because the toxin is leaving the system. The troll farms and bots and Russian operatives disguised as Aunt Judy from Texas or Grandmere from Bordeaux aren’t there anymore. At least not at the concentration they were before. It is a sea change that is already hugely positive for us. If you doubt me, take a second to reflect on how much saner life online already seems — after a decade in which venturing into the murky waters of Facebook or Twitter or what have you was a recipe for your mind to stop working.
Because our societies are able to think much, much more clearly without Russian disinformation and propaganda being “firehosed” at us, our democracies can already be that much stronger. You can see that Biden’s approval ratings have risen sharply. That isn’t just because he gave a great speech, or because Putin made the mistake of invading Ukraine. It’s also because there is less disinformation and propaganda leading people to make poor political choices, like backing Trump, who was installed in a Kremlin military operation. You can feel the sense of unity in the West from Paris to Berlin to Washington — and that again, too, is partly because there is that much less poison sowing disunity and division now that Russian propaganda and disinformation is beginning to recede.
I’m not saying that everything will be perfect, by the way. I am just saying that it will be better without Russia for us in the West, socially, culturally, politically — and that perhaps it already is beginning to be, if you look closely, after just a few days with that much less of it. I’m also saying that it’s even more evident than ever that Russia really was behind the poisons spreading through our societies and cultures, because they have begun to recede the instant that it is no longer part of our public spheres.
We got novichocked by disinformation and propaganda — systemically poisoned by it, to the point that the organs of our democracies were beginning to shudder and fail — and it’s remarkable to a keen observer how much healthier we already seem to be without it in the West. The hope is that regaining of health continues its upwards climb.
I haven’t even gotten to how oligarchs and money corroded our societies — so let me spend a brief moment discussing that. The West made a fatal bargain with Russia. Seduced by its money and resources, the West was to welcome its oligarchs. They were to be able to buy entire fine neighbourhoods like Mayfair or Chelsea — while the average Westerner, an actual citizen, was to struggle. What sense did that make? It created a kind of confusion and corrosion. Why was it that war criminals who’d looted their own society were able to parade through ours, dock their super yachts on our shores — while the average person was to live by the rule of honesty and hard work earning a decent living and life?
Especially when that equation was beginning to fade? This double standard made a mockery of us in the West. It made our leaders seem like hypocrites — one rule for the oligarchs, another for the rest of its people. Oligarchs could buy any privilege they liked, no matter how abusive, from citizenship to political influence — while the average person was to fend for themselves. This double standard helped to cause a loss of trust that accelerated through the 2010s.
We are far, far healthier in the West without Russia’s fatal bargain for just this reason. There are fewer double standards. The average person does not have to face the ugly, grotesque spectacle of oligarchs who’ve looted their way to billions docking super yachts on their shores, while fishermen and farmers or even teachers and doctors struggle to make an honest living. It’s hard to believe in a system which seems to look our for foreign oligarchs more than you. Such double standards made a mockery of the West’s fundamental values of equality, justice, truth, and peace — and so the West will be far healthier without them.
In hard political terms, Western democracies will be far more representative, legitimate, and functional again without the dirty, duplicitous job of having to serve a class of Russian elites which contributed precisely nothing but dirty money to it. They will have to work for the West’s people again. Western democracies will therefore have greater incentives to develop social contracts that function for all, not just the double standards of one rule for those with superyachts, and another for you. There will be less corruption politically, and less corrosion culturally and socially. The West is better off in all these ways without Putin’s Russia again.
Let me finally mention economics. The West will have to learn to function without Russian energy. The upsides of this transition should be obvious to all. Now the West has a reason to get serious about green and clean energy — which is imperative, given the speed of climate catastrophe. It is beyond time that our entire world weaned itself off a carbon-intensive consumption-based lifestyle. The West will have to lead this transformation — the greatest one in economic history — even faster now. Its progress had begun to stall recently. Not being able to depend on Russian oil is, in the long term, a very good pressure to have to face. An energy independent West, relying on clean sources of power and manufacturing, is the only prepared to really face the 21st century’s natural resource economics.
Of course that transformation won’t be without short term difficulties. Europeans have already been asked to turn down their heating by a degree, to cut consumption of Russian gas. Hardship lies ahead, and yet there’s hardship, and then there’s hardship. Throwing on an extra sweater, while especially hard for those already living on shoestring budgets, is still relative luxury compared to having to live under the thumb of a tyrant like Putin.
The West is made better by such challenges — having to face a little hardship of this sort can develop people’s virtues of moderation and wisdom and toughness, and it’s hardly too much to ask for the sake of future generations. Still, politicians would be wise to stay honest about the costs of this challenge — weaning ourselves in the West off our addiction to Russian oil and gas and money will be harder than many suspect. And it will take something on the order of a decade to really accomplish it fully.
Yet at the end of this, a West has the chance to emerge which is prepared not just to be independent of Putin, but of the industrial age’s dirty energy, whose price is planetary catastrophe. That is a stronger West in the truest sense of the word — one prepared to face the future with confidence and equanimity and unity.
This has been a long essay — too long. The reason for the length is this. I want you to see how much better off we in the West are without Putin’s Russia. The downsides to us are limited, short-term, and relatively small. The benefits, by comparison, are era-defining. Stronger democracies. Healthier societies. More vibrant, gentle, warm, truly Western cultures, not made of hate and spite and rage, but with respect for truth and goodness and knowledge. Renewed trust. Economies ready for the future. Financial systems and social contracts which are far fairer, more just, more inclusive.
That is a reason to stay unified. We are at a remarkable moment in history — a money of unity. Putin is betting we will break. Precisely by not realising that we are dramatically better off without his aspiring empire. That we begin to hope and long to go back to “normal,” the way things “were,” yesterday. An age of things like cheaper gas prices or easier credit — even if they come with double standards for oligarchs and social poisons like hate and spite and greed and rage and democracies which are slowly being corroded by all that. We shouldn’t and mustn’t hope for that. We must stay unified in this moment — and we do that by understanding that, yes, we are really better off without Putin’s Russia.
