Russia-Ukraine: Who controls public opinion wins the war

In a totalitarian society, information is manipulated, to such extremes that citizens have trouble identifying what is true and what is a lie in the public narrative.

by Maibort Petit

George Orwell expressed it very well within his novel "1984" in his famous phrase: "Whoever controls the present controls the past and who controls the past will control the future.".

In a totalitarian society, information is manipulated, to such extremes that citizens have trouble identifying what is true and what is a lie in the public narrative.

Power creates a reality based on the control of narratives and strengthens it through mass surveillance of what is spoken, read and written in the media and social networks. Obviously, the action of handling the collective narrative at will is also accompanied by political and social repression.

On Friday, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a measure that could jail journalists for up to 15 years for reporting "fake" news about the military and invasion that conflicts with statements from Russian officials.

In Venezuela, a country that has lost its democratic system and freedoms since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, the current dictator, Nicolás Maduro, who recently reaffirmed his military, energy and strategic relations with Vladimir Putin's Russia, has ordered the "journalists" who work in the regime's disinformation media to manipulate the messages they emit to distort what NATO says and strengthen the Russian narrative.

Below we share with you the Instructions given by the Ministry of Popular Communication of the regime of Nicolás Maduro to the communicators in the official media for the treatment "that they must give to the information related to the war in Ukraine".

1) On the situation of conflict between Russia and Ukraine, in accordance with the position of the Venezuelan State, our information line must dismantle the anti-Russian matrices. 2) There is a silent advance of NATO against this allied nation, which intensified after the coup d'état in Ukraine. 3) Venezuela is not impartial, given that we have been under attack for 20 years by the same NATO actors (the US and the European Union). 4) Attentive to the official Let's Pray for the People of Ukraine and for us all.