Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on July 15, 2018. (Photo by Yuri KADOBNOV / AFP POOL / AFP) (Photo by YURI KADOBNOV/AFP POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Hungary’s change of government has infused hope for many there and elsewhere in areas far beyond politics. The populist-authoritarian model embodied by Orban came with a cluster of attributes that seemed to render it unbeatable. These include oligarchic economy, media monopoly, institutional corruption, bribery of the electorate and the like. In other countries such as Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Belarus, the aging leaders have endured in power over two decades. What made Hungary different was its presence in the EU whose overarching structure prevented Orban from achieving complete state capture.

That is to say, the EU imposed a reality check. By requiring certain immobile rules for democratically testing a politician’s legitimacy, the EU literally kept a reality test alive. It kept reality measurable and contained within certain boundaries. This is a crucial factor because since the early days of Putinism’s rise, the attack on dependable information has intensified and metastasized across continents to the point of creating widespread uncertainty on any important topic of news. Consider what we do or don’t know about the situation in Hormuz. Or the migrant situation in Europe. Or the state of things in Syria. Or the fundamentals of the stock market.

As this column has noted before repeatedly, Putin’s Russia was the first to launch this particular kind of multi-vectored confusion-inducing attack on news domestically. Before him, the Soviet system had a monolithic party-line approach to information. Soviet citizens looked for the truth by finding ingenious ways to access the West’s free speech-based multi-channel sourced approach. Putin initiated a revolution whereby he allowed multiple channels but had them broadcast a bewildering array of false and contradictory takes. This phenomenon is brilliantly documented in Peter Pomeranstev’s classic 2014 book ‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible’ about Russian disinformation and propaganda.

The new approach deliberately induced confusion and fear among citizens about events in the world and threats to their country so relentlessly that they chose apathy and trust in a strongman leader. This was not just an assault on news but on the nature of reality itself - the ability to arrive at or conceive of stable truth. The confusion has since spread globally on the back of the internet to infect all countries to varied degrees of success, at least those with open access to the world. Here is a story about a Russian disinfo operation dubbed ‘Storm 1516’ that has racked up hundreds of millions of views under different names on social media. The Bloomberg article is titled “The Most Potent Weapon In Russia’s Disinformation War.”

In a country like Japan where trust in the MSM remains high this kind of operation makes few inroads. Ironically, it has achieved greatest destructive effect in free-information societies like the West’s. That effect had become a goal of the FSB when it started exporting populist authoritarian systems in the 2010s - to show that pluralist democracy with free speech systems cannot survive.

This atomizing of information is, of course, a fundamental takedown of a central tenet of western civilization, that of empiricism, the shared common ground of a scientific objective way to determine truth. An absolute reality check on myth and confusion. The irony is that the assault on empirical knowledge began from the political left and its insistence on ‘narratives’ rather than truths. In this as in so much else, we are witnessing the so-called horseshoe effect where the extremes of left and right agree in their assault on the middle. Another irony is that it’s being done in the name of saving western civilization.

The author Yuval Noah Harari has a YouTube lecture partially on this topic titled ‘Why advanced societies fall for mass delusion’ in which he also adds the imminent dangers of AI to the poisoning of information sources - and indeed to the nature of knowledge itself. All of these multiplying threats to the collective consciousness, to the basics of knowledge, to family, community and national identity, were exactly the fears that authoritarian leaders invoked to generate support for their regimes, a promise to stop the runaway changes of modern life only so as to to freeze power in their hands.

Orban succeeded in this enterprise to what seemed like an insuperable level. But not before he created the chaos first. This column quoted a Hungarian intellectual in 2016 who averred that a populist leader creates one inflammatory crisis after another without resolving any of them. Meanwhile he gets rich and consolidates power.

Orban followed the script successfully for years creating a punch drunk electorate uncertain of reality and vulnerable to last-minute election gimmicks. By the time he was ousted, he had also helped create a ‘populist-international’ of regimes that funded each other to keep their protagonists’s parties in power, all using similar techniques, within and across borders. For example, the migrant crisis besieging the West is very deliberately a crisis that the Kremlin policy has helped intensify, thereby giving populist nationalism a boost in Western countries it wants to destabilize. With the help of international funds mutually deployed by such parties and the bot-farms amplifying their psy-ops, they make powerful inroads. To build such funds regimes in power pyramidize the economy creating oligarchic elites that suck all monetary power upwards. That is how Orban impoverished his country.

To do this, several paradigmatic policies were used. The assault on institutions: institutional checks act as potential reality imposers, not least the judiciary, so it needs to be overwhelmed with endless cases and corrupted by ministers appointed to do so. Intelligence services and the military receive the same treatment. The isolation of the country: it’s important to monopolize the economy; to do so variegated international trade is quickly muzzled while borders get hardened to prevent outsiders breaking the manufactured reality within. Internal divisiveness is a common policy for myriad reasons, but above all to reduce the electorate to closely matching halves whereby the loyal half always wins by a narrow margin. Not hard to do once all institutional independence is eroded (including disinfo attacks on electoral counts and institutions).

False-flag operations, provocations, emergency conditions, even wars or fears of wars, proliferate as elections loom. The elections once done, controlled media is then instantly flooded with opposition figures willingly agonizing over reasons for losing. Above all, the goal of divisiveness is to fracture the consensus on reality, in other words to splinter what the populace thinks is happening, what it thinks it is witnessing. Here is a lecture on the science of seeing reality, “what we know as reality is when we all agree on our hallucinations”. When that common ground is consistently shattered, the way stands open for power to dictate what the populace perceives.

Too often these protocols are successful for many years, but they do eventually run out of steam and suddenly reality bites. Partly the public grows aware of the disinformation patterns and rejects them. In Russia, where it all began, citizens drifted in a bubble impervious to the Ukraine war but the recent internet shutdowns and Ukraine’s attacks on oil installations inside Russia are the equivalent of “reality bites”. The gradual erosion of Putin’s power at home due to the war led to the abandoning of Moscow’s allies one by one abroad. No doubt, this weakening of Kremlin throw-weight abroad also acted as sobering realization, a reality check, on Orban’s ambitions. Without that, it’s possible Orban would still be in perpetual power in Hungary.