No Russell, NATO Isn't Responsible For Russia's Attack On Ukraine

Russell Brand and Joe Rogan put their tinfoil hats on and pretend to discuss the news without an agenda.

by Ben Cohen

Watching two lazy bullshit artists discussing “mainstream media” conspiracy theories on Youtube is not my idea of a good time. But alas, Joe Rogan and Russell Brand have huge amounts of influence over public opinion, so we have to dedicate time debunking their incessant stream of nonsense.

I couldn’t stomach the full three hour love fest between the two, but this clip in particularly highlights everything wrong with their “just asking questions” schtick:

In the segment, Rogan kicks off a right wing conspiracy that Biden and the Democrats are fomenting a new global war. Calling Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden “utter fools”, Rogan claimed “these are the people running everything, and these are the people getting us on the brink of war with Russia”.

Brand agreed and followed up with a more nuanced but equally fact free conspiracy theory that Russia was “provoked” into invading Ukraine because of “NATO’s infringement of Russian territory”. He said:

Something extraordinary has happened when the people who say that they are the, you know “we’re the peace and love party” are the party that are advocating for war, won’t include some of the complex conditions that have led to this current crisis, which there’s clearly a case for NATO’s infringement of Russian territory, the 2014 coup, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. But it’s extraordinary those conversations don’t happen.

Brand then argued that counter narratives are being suppressed on the left, just as they were with Covid during the pandemic:

It’s like actually the post Trump and post pandemic, everything sort of enters into that template — there are certain things you aren’t allowed to say now, if you sort of say “were Russia in any way provoked, is there any legitimacy to their military actions from their perspective”, that’s the same as saying “I don’t think you should take certain medications, or maybe masks aren’t necessary””…

It doesn’t seem that the culture is learning… as the evidence is evolving, people are saying “oh wow look, the stuff you were being told two years ago now, the things you couldn’t say online two or three years ago, now there’s evidence for that.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this garbled, illogical mess of an argument. Firstly, outside of the right wing media bubble in America, the Biden Administration (including Harris and Buttigieg) is widely regarded as having navigated an extraordinarily complicated geopolitical crisis incredibly well.

Let’s consider the following. Biden successfully rallied the international community against Putin, supplied Ukraine with enough money and weapons to repel the Russians from much of their territory, and has avoided escalation of the conflict beyond Ukraine’s border. These “utter fools” have made Russia irrelevant on the global stage, decimated their ability to attack more countries, unified Europe, and given NATO a much needed boost. We are not, contrary to Rogan’s opinion, on the brink of war with Russia — we are carefully funding Ukraine’s efforts to repel a brutal, illegal invasion by a fascist dictatorship, and thus preventing the crisis from spreading any further.

Secondly, there is no case for “NATO’s infringement on Russian territory”, or any serious evidence for the conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian government is actually an American “Deep State” project.

NATO, it should be noted, is an entirely voluntary military alliance. Individual nations with democratic governments apply for membership and pay their dues in return for protection from the entire alliance. The pro Russian claim that the West provoked the invasion of Ukraine because it wanted to expand NATO is ridiculous. Countries like Ukraine want to join NATO because they fear Russia, not the other way around. As Zofia Stemplowska argues, this is the classic case of blaming the victim:

Some countries that had been dominated or controlled by the Soviet Union have succeeded in joining NATO. The narrative of NATO ‘expansionism’, which presents it as a negligent or even offensive strategy, obscures how difficult it was for those new member states to join. The fact that Russia continued to be feared by those states despite the demise of the Soviet bloc reflected Russia’s insistence that it would not accept their democratic decisions; that there was either going to be a new world order approved by Russia or no order at all.

This unwillingness to grant agency to the new member states is visible in much of the media coverage of the war in Ukraine. Questions such as ‘should NATO fear Putin?’ are sometimes posed and answered in the negative. It is true that Putin does not threaten the sovereignty of the old NATO members through the conventional method of territorial war. But if we see NATO as composed of all its current members, including those that have good reason to fear Putin, then blaming NATO enlargement for Russia’s aggression – and blaming Ukraine for aspiring to be in NATO – means blaming the victims.

Just because so-called “establishment liberals” don’t buy into these Alt Right and Alt Left conspiracy theories doesn’t mean they are “the party that are advocating for war”. If anything, the Biden administration and the “establishment liberals” are trying their best to stop a global war from happening. We saw what happened when a fascist dictator obsessed with expanding his empire into neighboring countries wasn’t confronted early enough. Putin has already invaded multiple neighbors during his rule in Russia and annexed Ukrainian land (Crimea) in 2014. The West failed to stand up to him then, and has finally recognized that allowing Russia to continue invading sovereign, democratic nations in Europe is not a good idea.

By funding Ukrainian efforts to repel Russia, the West is sending a message to Putin that his territorial ambitions will not go unchecked. NATO countries aren’t sending troops or advocating a counter invasion — they are simply supplying material, financial and logistical support to a country that has been brutally attacked for no legitimate reason. Russia is the aggressor here, not Ukraine or NATO.

Thirdly, when Brand claims that “the things you couldn’t say online two or three years ago [about Covid], now there’s evidence for that”, he deliberately omits crucial context. Public health officials and social media companies were desperately trying to counter dangerous medical disinformation being propagated by conspiracy theorists and the Trump White House. The so-called “official narrative” was in fact carefully considered public health advice based on the best available evidence. Twitter and other platforms didn’t necessarily do a great job of figuring out what was and wasn’t legitimate, but they did their best during a time when thousands of people were dying every day from a disease we didn’t understand. Furthermore, conspiracy theorists did have multiple avenues to spread their nonsense — just not on some private platforms that tried to do what was in the best interests of the public.

Perhaps there is enough evidence to now argue that masks aren’t effective at stopping the spread of Covid (this is still highly debatable). But again, the best available evidence at the peak of the crisis was that masks worked. Therefore it was irresponsible at the time to spread what we then believed to be dangerous misinformation. This is how science and public health works, because unlike Rogan and Brand, scientists and public health officials are responsible for people’s lives, not getting clicks on Youtube.

The major issue with online provocateurs like Rogan and Brand is that they can pose as legitimate news sources without being subjected to any editorial oversight whatsoever. Both men have peddled in countless conspiracy theories over the years without any recourse, and now seem to think that because Elon Musk is allowing every conspiracy theory under the sun to go viral on his platform, they have been proven right.

It is important to expose this nonsense for what it is; poorly researched, sloppily argued, sophistry. It gets the clicks, but makes us all far dumber.

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