Speaking the truth in a time of universal deception is a revolutionary act!
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One of the concomitant phenomena of Russian aggression is the brazen lying of Russian officials. It is common for people to lie, just as it is common for politicians to lie. But there is some evidence to convict the liars. For example, when the person is caught on camera, when many witnesses see him commit the act, when he is caught in the act, etc. I know anything can be challenged, but we still live in a world where the truth is assumed to be discoverable.
The Russians are showing us that objectively nothing may be true at all and that there is still a kind of reality to them. When they first invaded Ukraine, they were not Russian soldiers, but some unmarked soldiers on leave. If they are now committing demonstrable crimes, then they are not committing them, but the Ukrainian Nazis are. When we see corpses lying in the streets, they are hired extras. When Ukrainians are being taken to Russia against their will, it is not against their will. When they carry out genocide, it is denazification. When they drop bombs on human dwellings, it is a cleansing of the enemies hiding in those dwellings.
This style of lying reminds me of the Orwellian "the past has been erased, the erasure has been forgotten, the lie has become the truth". At the same time, and for this reason, what Orwell formulated as "telling the truth in a time of universal deception is a revolutionary act" is also true in Russia. Not only a revolutionary act, I might add, but also an extremely brave one.
When someone lies, you try to use evidence to disprove the lie and find the weak point in the liar's claim. But try to imagine that we are standing together in front of a blank piece of paper and I am telling you that there is a picture on the paper... The only objection to that is that I suffer from a perceptual disorder. But what if I stand by that claim? You will probably avoid me next time, but unfortunately Ukraine cannot avoid Russia.
The Russian interpretation of the war in Ukraine works very similarly. What the whole world sees is not actually happening. It is not even a war, but a special operation. There is a picture on the paper, the paper is not white! That's what Novak says, and that's more important than what's on the paper. Period, end of discussion.
In this atmosphere, Putin can drop a nuclear bomb on Europe, saying that it was not Russia that dropped the bomb, but Ukraine. And that Ukraine does not have an atomic bomb? Why bother with facts? The truth is whatever the Kremlin says it is. Maybe within a few weeks, Ukraine made one underground...
As I wrote, the response to a lie is to refute it. A. Alvarova writes in relation to Russian lies and propaganda. „Instead of truth, doubt must be sown. And that is what propaganda is all about. The soil of propaganda is a treacherous quagmire where it is not true that the truth will eventually surface and assert itself. It is a world of half-shadows, of half-truths, where the dark mud sucks in information according to completely different keys than its truth and factuality." (The Lie Industry)
This is the principle on which Russian lying and propaganda operate. To refute the blatant lies we see is to put them back into circulation and thus actually emphasize them.
Russian propaganda is masterfully described by the British journalist P. Pomerantsev, who worked in Russia for many years, in his book "Nothing is True, Everything is Possible". He gives his experience of Russian television:
"They give a weekly news summary. A presenter enters a well-made studio, briefly summarizes the main events of the past week, and everything seems normal. Then suddenly he turns to Camera 2, and before you know it, he's ranting about how the West is mired in a swamp of homosexuality and only Saint Russia can save the world from Gay Europe. The West, he says, is sponsoring anti-Russian "fascists" in Ukraine, and they are all trying to destroy Russia and grab its oil; American-backed fascists are crucifying Russian children in Ukrainian squares because the West is organizing genocide against us Russians; and on-screen weeping women tell how they are threatened by roving gangs of Russia's enemies. And, of course, only the President can sort this out, which is why it is right that Russia has annexed Crimea, and why it is right to arm mercenaries and send them into Ukraine, and this is just the beginning of a new major conflict between Russia and the West. But even if you know that the president's entire justification for the war is made up, the lies are repeated so often that after a while you find yourself nodding because it's hard to accept the idea that they lie so much and so blatantly - on some level you feel that if Ostankino can lie so much and get away with it, doesn't that mean they have the actual power, the power to define what is true and what is not? Wouldn't it be better to nod anyway? And if you change the channel, there are the Night Wolves riding in a great column through Sevastopol in celebration of the annexation, the resurrection of the empire, raising aloft icons of the goddess and quoting Stalin and playing their magnificent anthem: "The Russian language rings like a knight's armor in the ears of foreigners, and the white host rises from the bushes to the stars."
Russian aggression shows us lies and propaganda in its most shameless form. The mistake is that we are only now coming to this realisation and that this realisation is being redeemed by thousands of innocent lives. That is also why we must not allow the past to be erased, to speak with Orwell, and the erasure to be forgotten. For then the lie will very quickly and easily become the truth... And this can happen anywhere in the world, to any of us.
http://david-novak.blogspot.com/2022/04/dugin-rusky-fasismus-jako-ideologicke.html
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