Excuse me for my tone, but might you actually be gish galloping here?
> "Russian propaganda does not strike me at all as using Gish Gallop tactics. They repeat fairly simple points in multiple venues without trying to overwhelm the opponent using rhetorical superiority."
First, the point isn't rhetorical superiority per se, but to "overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments." Straw-man arguments, equivocations, outright lies, etc.
This is precisely what Russian propaganda does. It sponsors and promotes all sorts of contradictory theories, statements, and so on, without necessarily countering opposing statements. This works in part because of Brandolini's law, as this thread initially stated. So, the original truth or argument against which they are opposed becomes "just another theory" and there's no time to actually counter all of the bad arguments, even if they are ridiculous.
> "I do think that the Western hawks like Sikorski and McFaul are far closer to using Gish Gallop in debates."
I can't find any way that this makes sense, except that both Sikorski (a Polish politician) and McFaul (former US ambassador to Russia) might be seen as anti-Russian.
> I also think that the extent of Russian propaganda is overstated. When it is there, it is always obvious.
It's far from obvious, since Russian propaganda often simply supports a variety of opposing views in order to muddy the waters, again the point.
> Western style consent manufacturing is way more pervasive and stealthy.
"Manufacturing consent" wasn't the issue; this is also a way of fracturing the focus, equivocation.
An example of Russian gish galloping from The Road to Unfreedom:
At 1:20 p.m., Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was struck by hundreds of high-energy metal projectiles released from the explosion of a 9N314M warhead carried by a missile fired from that Russian Buk launcher at Snizhne. The projectiles ripped through the cockpit and instantly killed the pilots, from whose corpses some of the metal was later extracted. The aircraft flew apart ten kilometers above the earth’s surface, its passengers and their possessions scattered over a radius of fifty kilometers. Girkin boasted that his people had shot down another plane over “our sky,” and other commanders made similar remarks. Alexander Khodakovskii told the press that a Russian Buk was active in the theater at the time. The Buk was hastily withdrawn from Ukraine back to Russia, and photographed along the way with an empty missile silo. What had happened was quite clear, and has since been confirmed by the official Dutch-led investigation.
The law of gravity seemed to challenge, at least for a few hours on the afternoon of July 17, 2014, the laws of eternity. Surely the passengers who died were the victims, not the Russian soldiers who fired the missile? Even the Russian ambassador to the United Nations was thrown for a moment, using the excuse of “confusion” to explain how a Russian weapon had brought down a civilian airliner. Yet Surkov’s apparatus acted quickly to restore the Russian sense of innocence. In a typical mark of tactical brilliance, Russian television never denied the actual course of events: that a Malaysian airliner had been brought down by a Russian weapon fired by Russian soldiers taking part in an invasion of Ukraine. Denying the obvious only suggests it; defeating the obvious means engaging it from the flanks. Even under stress, Russian media managers had the presence of mind to try to change the subject by inventing fictional versions of what had happened.
On the very day the plane was shot down, all of the major Russian channels blamed a “Ukrainian missile,” or perhaps a “Ukrainian aircraft,” for the downing of MH17, and claimed that the “real target” had been “the president of Russia.” The Ukrainian government, according to the Russian media, had planned to assassinate Putin, but by accident had shot down the wrong aircraft. None of this was vaguely plausible. The two planes were not in the same place. The failed assassination story was so ludicrous that RT, after trying it on foreign audiences, did not pursue it. But within Russia itself, the moral calculus was indeed reversed: by the end of a day on which Russian soldiers had killed 298 foreign civilians during a Russian invasion of Ukraine, it had been established that Russia was the victim.
The following day, July 18, 2014, Russian television scattered new versions of the event. Myriad inventions were added to the multiple fictions, not to make any of them coherent, but to introduce further doubts about simpler and more plausible accounts. Thus three Russian television channels claimed that Ukrainian air traffic controllers had asked the pilots of MH17 to reduce their altitude. This was a lie. One of the networks then claimed that Ihor Kolomois’kyi, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch who was governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, was personally responsible for issuing the (fictional) order to the air traffic controllers. In an echo of Nazi racial profiling, another network later provided an “expert” on “physiognomy” who claimed that Kolomois’kyi’s face demonstrated his guilt.
Meanwhile, five Russian television networks, including some that had peddled the air traffic control story, claimed that Ukrainian fighter aircraft had been on the scene. They could not get straight just which kind of aircraft this might have been, providing pictures of various jets (taken at various places and times), and proposing altitudes that were impossible for the aircraft in question. The claim about the presence of fighter planes was untrue. A week after the disaster, Russian television generated a third version of the story of the downing of MH17: Ukrainian forces had shot it down during training exercises. This too had no basis in fact. Girkin then added a fourth version, claiming that Russia had indeed shot down MH17—but that no crime had been committed, since the CIA had filled the plane with corpses and sent it over Ukraine to provoke Russia.
These fictions were raised to the rank of Russian foreign policy. When asked about MH17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated the inventions of Russian media about air traffic controllers and nearby Ukrainian fighters. Neither of his claims was backed by evidence and both were untrue.
Russian media accounts were impossible not only as journalism but also as literature. If one tried to accept, one by one, the claims of Russian television, the fictional world thus constructed would be impossible, since its various elements could not coexist. It could not have been the case that the plane was shot down both from the ground and from the air. If it had been shot down from the air, it could not have been shot down by both a MiG and an Su-25. If it had been shot down from the ground, this could not have been the result of both a training accident and an assassination attempt. Indeed, the Putin assassination story contradicted everything else that the Russian media claimed. It made no sense to say that Ukrainian air traffic controllers had communicated with the Malaysian pilots of MH17 as part of a plot to shoot down the Russian presidential aircraft.
But even if all of these lies could not make a coherent story, they could at least break a story—one that happened to be true. Although there were certainly individual Russians who grasped what had happened and apologized, the Russian population as a whole was denied the possibility to reflect on its responsibility for a war and its crimes. According to the surveys of the one reliable sociological institute in Russia, in September 2014 86% of Russians blamed Ukraine for shooting down MH17, and 85% continued to do so in July 2015, by which point the actual course of events had been investigated and was clear. Russian media urged Russians to be outraged that they were blamed.
Ignorance begat innocence, and the politics of eternity went on.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom (pp. 179-182). Crown. Kindle Edition.
-- Edit: Book excerpt formatting