The Theater of the Big Lie

Read newspapers long enough and you learn to decipher the truth by noting patterns in propaganda. It's like mirror writing, crude, but most big-lie propaganda is crude.

The strong tell that the coordinated expulsion of Russian diplomats throughout Europe and in the United States was an ostentatious display meant to cloak Western perfidy is the repeated morning-after invocation of a previous big lie.

Andrew Higgins in "A New Cold War With Russia? No, It’s Worse Than That" reminds readers that

While denying any part in the March 4 poisoning of Sergei V. Skripal, a former spy, and his daughter, Yulia, both still critically ill in the hospital, Russia in recent years has built up a long record of flouting international norms, notably with its 2014 annexation of Crimea, the first time since 1945 that European borders have been redrawn by force.

Steven Erlanger in "How an Outraged Europe Agreed to a Hard Line on Putin" uses almost the exact wording:

“This is an intelligence operation carried out with intelligence capacity with weaponized, weapons-grade chemical agents,” one senior European official said. “It has taken matters to an entirely different level.”

Alluding to Russia’s earlier aggressions in Ukraine, the senior official added, “Russia keeps violating international law in Crimea and Ukraine and unwritten rules on nonintervention, and now there is the use of nerve agents in Britain.”

To claim that Crimea's vote to join the Russian Federation in 2014 is proof of Russian aggression is absurd. It was purely a defensive move coming close on the heels of the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev.

Russian leaders would have been criminal in their neglect if they hadn't engineered a plebiscite to protect the Russian-speaking population of the Crimea, not to mention its major port of Sevastopol.

To defend yesterday's diplomatic expulsions by citing Russia aggression in Crimea immediately casts doubt on assertions of Russian guilt. Furthermore, Higgins says that Russia's annexation of Crimea is "the first time since 1945 that European borders have been redrawn by force." What about Kosovo?

So, as Erlanger makes plain in his story, yesterday's expulsions were merely big-lie theater planned last week over a dinner in Brussels attended by Merkel, May and Macron.