This week will go down in history as the time that Western hegemony died; in more than one sense.

Russia’s President Putin delivered a landmark speech this week at the UN General Assembly where he truly humiliated Western foreign policy decisions in Syria. Since then, Russia began to launch airstrikes on all forces destabilising the state of Syria.

This led to an incredibly embarrassing response from Western mainstream media, claiming that ‘moderate’ terrorists, not ISIS (despite there being no real difference), had been bombed and civilians had been killed.

Enter Putin (again), who has now branded those reports ‘information warfare‘. The reason why is that those reports emerged before any Russian combat missions had even started.

Taking no prisoners. (Photo Credit: Russian Presidential Office)

This means that not only has Western state government hegemony suffered a huge set back this week, but so too has the hegemony of mainstream, Western media outlets. Mainstream media has, for too long, held itself as unassailable and untouchable. Putin just changed that by exposing the fact that such outlets are used in information warfare for wholly nefarious purposes, to further the particular agenda of a state.

The entire idea of information warfare, particularly governments using media outlets to disseminate disinformation, will be entirely alien to the vast majority of the general public.

But, perhaps this open attack on such tactics from Russia’s President might be yet another catalyst which serves to wake people up to this tragic reality.