Zelensky, Theatre and Propaganda

In Conversation with Dr. Colin Alexander

On Sunday April 30th, I was joined on my podcast by Dr. Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications at Nottingham Trend University. We discussed the choreographic propaganda that Volodomyr Zelensky uses to get his message across. Dr. Alexander wrote an article to the Scottish Herald where he pointed out that Volodomyr Zelensky is making use of his career in acting to spread his political message.

The first aspect for discussion is the extent to which Zelensky and his team are choreographing his media performances and how and why this matters. His moments in front of the camera are carefully staged, written in advance, the backdrops positioned for their symbolic value, rehearsed, evaluated, tweaked and then delivered again.

This doesn’t necessarily invalidate everything that he is saying but the element of performance does give an important selectivity to the utterance. Then there is a danger that he is encouraging his audience to think more emotionally than rationally. He wants your heart, not your mind.

Popular culture blending with politics is nothing new. Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump all had significant experience in media before they entered into politics. With this background they could get a feel for the dominating narrative, current news cycle and be comfortable in selling their message in a language that speaks to their audiences - how you say something is still more important than what you say.

In fact I would argue that a modern politician has to be a star of sorts, he has to take acting classes, be comfortable in front of the cameras, have an authentic facebook page and be able to engage with people on twitter. These skills will help him navigate world where raw propaganda dominates the daily news cycle, just as the journalist John Pilger argued in the months before the Ukrainian-Russian war started.

Marshall McLuhan's prophecy that "the successor to politics will be propaganda" has happened.  Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain.

On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, "The medium is the message."

The lie is the message now.

Zelensky is suppose to be your buddy that you want to have a beer with. Women want to scream his name during sex and as Bill Maher joked, him standing up to Russia -revived masculinity.

These arguments are funny, ridiculous and absurd, but that is unfortunate the nature of the message that we are being fed, it’s all punchlines with no specifics and depth to the situation.

As Dr. Alexander argued we are getting an actor that talks a lot and doesn’t say much. Zelensky is surrounded by a members of his own production company.

Zelenskyy is contemporary mediated politics on steroids. Indeed, when Zelensky moved from actor to politician, many of the production staff at Kvartal 95 Studio – the entertainment company that he founded and who produced Servant of the People (the political satire that he directed and starred in) moved with him as advisors and assistants. Herein, the line between real politics with real consequences and the fantasy world of entertainment production have been blurred. Life is imitating art perhaps to a degree that we haven’t seen before in politics.

We got into this question and I hope that you enjoy the conversation, if you did, please subscribe to my channel.

Kind Regards

Hügo Krüger