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Am I wrong and maybe sort of paranoid, or is there a concentrated and obvious effort in the Western public discourse by Zelensky's foreign supporters to retcon (if that's the correct expression) their own past narrative about the Russian military and Ukraine's prospects? My memory isn't that great and I can't be arsed to start digging up social media rubbish from months ago, but I distinctly remember the narrative of Atlanticist culture warriors, which was practically flooding both legacy media and social media for months, especially after the much-publicised counteroffensives in the Kharkov and Kherson regions. It was basically all the same: the orcs are looting local stores because they have no food, they have no vests and other basic infantry equipment, they have no ammunition nor warm uniforms for the winter, abandoning their vehicles and fleeing en masse, freezing to death, Putler has run out of guided missiles, tanks, artillery shells, aircraft etc., the Moskal never had an effective military antd their shitty state was always a paper tiger etc. To reiterate, I distinctly remember countless Twitter/Facebook/Substack posts, YT videos etc. pushing this.
And then, in the last few months, when, according to this narrative, the glorious great counteroffensive should have already brought about a decisive victory, these same people are stating, as if they were all seasoned military historians, with a straight face that duh, of course it's terribly difficult to break through prepared defensive lines and fortifications (even those put together by the fucking orcs, it seems), of course it'd be vitally important to have air superiority (even agains dumbass orcs, I guess, that are even capable of losing a cruiser against people without a navy), of course combat drones have, like, completely revolutionised modern warfare (as if that weren't clear as day to anyone involvind in planning the counteroffensive), of course it's just all so damn hard!
As a dissident rightist, my view is that all this gaslighting has the obvious purpose of preparing the masses for the next narrative down the line, namely that it all could have actually worked out well, if not for the evil appeasers, wreckers, saboteurs, demagogues, opportunists, deplorables and toxic shitheads who've sadly infiltrated important positions in the political affairs of NATO member nations, and prevented all efforts to give all the resources and equipment necessary for the final and total Ukrainian victory. And this is just a variant of the narrative pushed by the Kiev government to their people, namely that, in a nutshell, "NATO promised to help/intervene, but betrayed us, especially in the end".
So I think I understand why this narrative is being pushed, and how it makes sense, from their own point of view. But still, the brazenness of it all is still a bit surprising. Is my observation correct, or should I not believe my own eyes and ears?
The narrative uniformness and changes might seem like there is a complotist illuminati-like scheme that would dictate covertly what can medias says. This is obviously not a thing actually. I mean some investigative journalists have been killed or jailed either by Ukraine or by the West because they were too contra-narrative (e.g. covering IRL the referendum in occupied ukraine or the ukraine war crimes on dombas civilians). Despite this fact, those are annecdotal in the greater POV) Medias are also mostly controlled by a very limited oligarchy, however there exist outliers to this rule. But the main explanation is that those narrative uniformness and changes, are simply due to the extreme and universal mediocrity of journalists as human beings. They are expert in nothing and haven't even been trained for cognivive debiasing/rationality. Add to this, that very few people on earth (so few we don't see them online, if they exist at all (aside me) understand modern warfare. And no, historians are non-credible. But for the most things you report, e.g. the orc dehumanization or turning russia capabilities in ridicule, were not, I believe mostly reported by "serious" media (wapo, forbes, etc). Of course /r/worldnews is not an accurate representation of the world news and is a cringey echo chamber. The "serious" medias such as forbes have although built a narrative of western superiority and wunderwaffe which stem from many biases but most importantly come from a failure of understanding what matters in modern warfare. Currently Ukraine is inflicting 2 times the equipment losses on russia and still has large amounts of ex-soviet equipment, however the balance will quickly shift as lancet production scales up and it is a fact that ukraine will have lost 100% of its artillery in less than 8 months
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I don't think this retconning is something new. Even before the counteroffensives you had pundits that switched from "of course Ukraine is going to collapse" to "of course Ukraine wasn't going to collapse" without missing a beat. Before that you had "of course masking is useless, we shouldn't shun Asians" and "of course masking is essential, we should shelter in place", "of course Trump will never win" and "of course Trump was going to win" and so on all the way to the beginning of written history.
Richard Hanania and Anatoly Karlin were two prominent people on the dissident right who switched from "of course Ukraine is going to collapse" to "of course Ukraine wasn't going to collapse". As far as I know (I largely stopped following them after that) they still think that Ukraine, NATO, and the GAE have a bright future.
GAE?
Globalist American Empire https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=GAE - pronounced exactly as it looks. Globohomo (for global homogenization) is a related epithet.
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Whenever I read the "20xx predictions: Calibration results" that Scott Alexander publishes, I'm always struck by how hard it would be to fairly compare differing pundits' prediction results, when any two people are naturally interested in two different sets of questions and yet some questions are much harder than others.
Then I remember that the status quo is not "pundits' predictions are published along with epistemic uncertainty levels but their annual calibration records aren't easy to compare", it's "the 'best' pundits express uncertainty qualitatively and clam up when they're proven wrong, the worst pundits make binary predictions and don't always even change their minds when they're proven wrong".
It's a shame that nobody's publishing calibration records for them. I guess that would be a public good in both the "good for the public" and "economically undersupplied" senses of the phrase. We can't even make it into a club good, since facts aren't copyrightable. Maybe this sort of thing could be supplied by harnessing culture-war-hatred? I'm imagining each pundit's supporters/detractors assiduously adding successful/failed predictions to a shared database, incentivized because they don't want that pundit's evil detractors/supporters to bias the score by only adding the opposite.
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I think we should think back to previous military adventures, which have been nearly uniformly disastrous and strewn with lies for at least the last 20 years. Iraq. Afghanistan. Trillions down the drain, a media machine which existed in a parallel universe to reality... Part of it is that they can only call for 'experts' from a captured industry. The interventionist lobby, LMT, Raytheon, BAE have all the money, most of the influence and all the power to offer cushy board seats to retired generals or officials. They have an innate advantage.
However dubious news media is, defence-related should be treated extra-cautiously.
To be clear, you’re talking about American adventurism? Not the Russians, who have actual boots on the ground, and appear to be dreaming of conquest?
Yes!
My claim is that our media lies, misleads and deludes on our military adventures.
At no point did I claim that Russian media is a bastion of truth and reasonableness about Russia's military adventures.
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I don't think that's the most likely explanation. The easier one is more factual: no matter how incompetent a military starts out, after about six months or more of war, certainly a year, even bad militaries get better at war. In terms of the troops doing the actual front line fighting. There's no inherent contradiction of a "Russia has a shit military" type narrative and "it's very hard to retake ground" one. As an aside, I watch the news very carefully and I don't agree at all that the prevailing current narrative is one of "it's NATO's fault Ukraine isn't doing better". There are ammo shortages on both sides of the war, a lot of Western reserves are pretty strained for certain types of ammo and equipment (at least, they want to keep some in reserve for themselves and not totally empty out the shed), and Ukraine has of course found that acting like a petulant child who wants more more more, kinda sorta works? They have always danced a fine line between expressing a desire for more stuff and greater quality stuff, and avoiding acting too ungrateful, and I don't think that's changed very much other than they've finally gotten most of their (realistic) high quality wish list.
In short, I disagree that there is any substantive or coordinated gaslighting going on, in fact (Occam's Razor style) there is a much simpler explanation that requires very little intentional and complex deceit.
There's also, I should add, the element of how surprises are more newsworthy than boring updates. We were almost all certainly surprised that Russia was that awful at a lot of things especially early in the war. Then there was basically a repeat of the original stories but with the Wagner Group as the main character. The need for surprise also twists what kind of news stories are produced especially as the conflict becomes more, might I even say, boring.
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This wouldn’t shock me. We’re almost 2 generations since the last major full scale war (Vietnam) and haven’t had a draft since then. Less than 2% of Americans have served in the armed forces even in peacetime, and most of the opinion makers know very very little about war, how it’s fought and what it takes to win.
Looting stores might well have happened. Sherman’s March did something similar in the American Civil War, in that they lived off of what food was available in their path as a way to demoralize the south. And the Russians might well have planted story of ill-equipped troops or running out of equipment for similar reasons — if your army is losing to “orcs” with no food or equipment, then you are in really bad shape.
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It is a difficult question to settle without any citations to primary evidence than recollections. I have not kept a detailed diary neither, but I thought that looting, poor equipment and logistics were mostly discussed in spring 2022 (when the initial invasion had started showing ever increasing cracks and subsequently Kiev invasion was given up). Russian Kharkov front collapse / retreat, later in the autumn, sounds quite much like poorly trained and equipped soldiers running away ("fleeing in masse"). Retreat from Kherson, muddled picture. Then much debate whether the fight for Bakhmut made sense and was the loss ratio favorable to Ukrainians or Russians. I forget when the Iranian drones entered the picture. Since then there has been much waiting for the grand counter-offensive to yield noticeable results on the map and hand-wringing why is that (all of it keeps reminding me of reading about WW1 trench warfare period after Marne and Race to the Sea, massive battles that result only in small visible changes in the overall picture as civilians reading the news can see); only recently, since August or so, there has been reported changes in lines near Robotyne, which may or may not be a breakthrough (my general feeling is of pro-Ukrainian pundits appearing cautiously optimistic but noncommittal about relevance its success: though that describes the attitude of some pundits already back in May, so no change there).
The world in general and wars in particular are chaotic. I believe pundits often attempt to tell more consistent stories than the reality warrants. Low-quality pundits will reiterate soundbites. It would be quite expected that reported bits of information have changed because the relevant facts on the ground keep changing, may have shifted multiple times, with different information coming from different units with variable experiences. Let's consider the equipment situation of the Russians. It is not uncommon that troops in retreat or soon to start retreating have bad material situation (which necessitates the retreat); this explains reports of very poorly equipped Russians retreating. Yet, one purpose of strategic retreat is to improve the strategical situation, including logistics; who knows, possibly Russians succeeded in improving the situation, explaining there are reports compatible better equipped Russian troops (after the retreat). Likewise, which side has better drone tech and doctrine and relevant parties' perception of their relative strength may have changed several times over.
It is difficult to discuss this kind of question ("am I wrong ... or is there a concentrated and obvious effort ... to retcon") without specific articles and events to discuss. Attempts to litigate is such retcon attempt "obvious"? Even more difficult without such references of who said what and when. Maybe the "Narrative" has switched, or maybe the different voices are more prominent then previously; maybe the overall atmosphere among the audience reading the mostly similar information content has changed, or maybe it is not the overall atmosphere but individual perception.
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