Russian president Vladimir Putin speaking to viewers following the March 22, 2023 terrorist attack that killed more than 100 people. Four gunmen believed to be Islamic extremists were arrested, though Putin has hinted at Ukrainian involvement.

Webster’s defines propaganda in the most straightforward of ways: “The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.”

Over the last century, propaganda as seen from the vantage point of the Anglo-American West has been mostly associated with Nazism, Fascism, and later Communism, since all three embraced values inimical to democratic nations. In the battle of value systems, propaganda was always associated with the bad guys.

But the 21^st century has shuffled this old deck, making it increasingly difficult to blithely assign propaganda “blame.”

During the Iraq war, the United States held fast to waves of propagandistic messages asserting that Saddam Hussein possessed and intended to use weapons of mass destruction. This campaign was later discredited, and, worse still, found to be based on known lies. The American white hat was tarnished, but only briefly since there were other bullies to target and blame. Foremost among them was Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin. A friend to the West at the height of Islamic extremism – he waged two bloody wars in largely Muslin Chechnya, the memory of which is still raw, as the vicious March 22 Moscow attack amply demonstrates – Putin began to lose favor when he threatened to invade Georgia, had enemies assassinated in London and elsewhere, and finally entered Ukraine to annex Crimea, whose port was Russia’s lone naval switching station. This gave the West an “official” enemy, opening propaganda doors that turned into a highway when Putin chose to invade the whole of Ukraine.

Putin was identified by the West as the new Hitler, a monster, a killer, a man who would murder friends and enemies with equal zeal.

Putin, who long had his own domestic propaganda machine, was identified by the West as the new Hitler, a monster, a killer, a man who, Stalin-like, would murder friends and enemies with equal zeal. The two decade long truce with Russia was over, each side assuming old school Cold War positions and NATO revived in status and importance.

The result of this is a new wave of propaganda not seen since the Saddam Hussein days.

Take the recent Russian elections.

Western mass media wasted no time in calling them a farce, which to some extent they were and are. Still, it chose to focus only on those staging protests against Putin and his rule. The Russians involved in these protests were noble, but of course stood no chance with an Attila in their midst. These people were portrayed as Russia’s silent majority, the vanguard of a wave of dissenters who, were it not for the evil repression forced upon them, would rise up and slay the horrific Putin.

The problem with this propaganda, peddled as news is that it is false.

Russia has been at war with Ukraine, a war it started, for two years. In that time organized dissent has been modest. Russians expected two years ago to rise up and depose Putin have not materialized as many European states felt sure they would. More to the point, nationalists and ultra-nationalists who to this day rue the collapse of the Soviet Union remain Putin’s staunch supporters. Nor has the military rebelled, as some experts believed it would.

For a country devastated by sanctions and largely cut off from the Western world, Russia has been surprisingly free of grassroots movements against Putin. To which the West says, Resisting a monster is no easy task.

True in part, but also true is the Russian history of revolts, culminating in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

Hamas all but used the Gaza Strip as a staging area so it was time, when provoked, to annihilate the group.

Russians are not lambs. They lost 20 million resisting Nazi Germany in what Moscow still calls the Great Patriotic War. To think some Russians have not come to this same kind of patriotism in studying the Ukraine invasion is foolish. Ukraine was flirting not only with the European Union but with NATO, which if it joined would put Mother Russia in harm’s way. NATO on its doorstep. So it was that Putin, still a KGB agent at heart, and still livid at the ouster of a pro-Russian president in Kiev less than a decade ago, played his tank-rich Soviet hand.

Unjustified? Yes. Inexplicable? Not in the least.

Was such context applied to coverage of Russia’s recent elections-in-name-only? No.

Putin the monster again emerged as the predominant theme, doing the concept of news delivered in a detached manner no good. Once again, news returned to its black-and-white Saddam days. Never mind that specious, gullible coverage led to a needless, decade-long war.

The failure to cover the Ukraine war in a balanced way has been helped by that country’s camera-loving president who has used the war as an ongoing photo op. He has called the invasion genocide, which it is not. He has called Russians butchers, which at times of course they are.

No one dares speak of a negotiated settlement – save Pope Francis. In a recent moment of folly, the ancient fragile pope insisted Ukraine find the “courage” to negotiate, a notion immediately reviled by Ukraine as a gift to monster Putin. Western media (as loyal to Putin-hating as Russian state television is to its opposite) also laced into the appeasing pope. How could he fail to recognize the need to put invader Putin in his place?

Especially galling in the matter of bias and propaganda is that the Israeli prime minister, engaged in a war at least as brutal as that the Russians have wrought, is still not subject to this kind of judgment. Yes, his armies’ rout of Hamas may have displaced and killed a few civilians, but he and his country were provoked. And any country made to endure years of German extermination should be allowed a little leverage when it comes to defending itself. Hamas all but used the Gaza Strip as a staging area so it was time, when provoked, to annihilate the group.

But monsters are not eligible for consideration.

The Israelis did what they had to do, albeit a tad roughly. The Russians, Putin more precisely, tore a page from Stalin’s book. End of story.

If only it did end.

But it doesn’t. The propaganda is buttered on, by the day, by the week, by the month. And over time propaganda does what it is intended to do: pass for news. More’s the pity.