Last April, Vladimir Putin visited the campus of Bauman Moscow state technical university, set on the banks of the Yauza River in the east of the city and home to some of the country’s brightest scientific minds.
He toured the campus, met undergraduates and boasted about Moscow’s ambitious plans for space missions to the moon and Mars. “You have everything it takes to be competitive,” Putin told the students.
What the Kremlin readout of Putin’s visit did not mention was a secret faculty inside the university, known simply as Department 4, or “Special Training”.
Commie here with a point of view that Most such .ml comrades will agree with:
Of course Russia engages in propaganda, election manipulation, etc. The point we want to make is not that this does not happen or that this is somehow moral. The point we want to make is that, by constantly talking about Russia’s election meddling, hacking etc. and constantly forgetting about the US’s and Europe’s much more intense meddling, we are framing the issue as an “anti-Russia” problem instead of an anticapitalist problem and giving leeway to the west to engage in such behaviors.
If we were true to reality, we WOULD discuss Russian propaganda and election meddling, but we would discuss TENFOLD more the western propaganda and election meddling, firslty because it’s the one most pervasive where we live (most of us are westerners), and secondly because it’s much, much stronger, by virtue of the EU and US having a lot more resources to put into this than Russia, a comparatively smaller and poorer country does.
This is the real reason why it is imperative for leftists to engage in so-called “whataboutism”: because the media environment in which we move makes excessive focus on propaganda by declared enemy states and completely glosses over propaganda and meddling by our own or friendly states. By engaging in this “whataboutism”, we force the perspective closer to reality, with a bit more equal representation of the sins of both sides.