The New Cold-War propaganda battlefield came into stark focus this week as two highly personal attacks on leading anti-Putin pundits came out in quick succession. Peter Pomerantsev featured as the main target in tandem with Michael Weiss – both now very prominent, both associated with The Interpreter, the relentless online gadfly against the Kremlin. There was a time when one could use the phrase ‘war of ideas’ but it lacks verisimilitude in the current context. The Soviet Union peddled ideas, universal ones, however thinly patched to justify Moscow’s power urge. These days, Moscow offers no universal ideology. Kremlin apologists are reduced to emitting a stridently one-note sound, that of condemning the West for every ill Moscow visits on the world. So it is with Mark Ames’s article about Pomerantsev in the web publication Pando and equally with an article in The Nation by James Carden entitled “Neo McCarthyism and the US Media”.One must say, up front, that the attacks suffer from egregious factual inaccuracies. For example, Pomerantsev is not nor has ever been a ‘lobbyist’ for anyone. That word has a technical dimension and should be used very fastidiously because it suggests that you take money in order to advocate a particular position, specifically for that purpose, as a PR shill. To say this about Pomerantsev is like saying Orwell was a paid lobbyist against totalitarian systems. I won’t go into a list of detailed factual issues here because far deeper issues of principle take priority. You will see what I mean in short order.