So verlor ich den Glauben an die etablierten Medien

 

Helmut Scheben / 29.06.2023

 

When news later turns out to be false, it is often already burned into the memory as “historical truth”.

 

During and after the 1991 Gulf War, the US media was banned from photographing or filming images of the coffins of dead US soldiers. The measure was only lifted in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded US soldiers was also forbidden, and the ban was enforced extremely harshly, especially during the Iraq War, as cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such recordings in the huge Swiss television archive, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier tried to climb out of a burning tank.

 

Three seconds of thousands of videos shot during this war. Three seconds, which - as is clearly visible - were due to a mistake by an editor who had incorrectly placed an IN or OUT, so that material was visible that should actually have been censored.

 

Scenes of defeat have not been shown since Vietnam. So there are no more defeats, because the TV news compressed into two and a half minutes is what makes history in our heads

 

In his book “Liberty and the News” in 1920, the American journalist and media theorist Walter Lippmann stated:

 

«The newspaper columns are public information carriers. If those who control them take away the right to determine what should be reported and for what purpose, then the democratic process comes to a standstill.”

 

(Lippmann p.24)

A few years ago, I couldn't have imagined that my morning walk to the mailbox to get the newspapers would be accompanied by a quiet counterpoint of reluctance and boredom. I like having paper in my hand with my morning coffee instead of looking at a screen. Reading takes less time each year. On the one hand, this is because many topics no longer interest me, for example the eternal soap opera of British royals, the daily obligatory LGBTQ problems, the me-too attitude of groupies at rock concerts or parliamentary investigations that are supposed to find out why in the financial casino Drive banks against the wall.

 

The real problems of most people, the war in Ukraine, the escalating conflict between the USA and China, i.e. processes that are currently changing the lives of millions of taxpayers and will burden future generations (armament, inflation, energy policy, sanctions policy, asylum, etc.). but presented in our leading media with such a reduced perspective that it stuns me. The denial of reality occurs with a matter-of-factness that borders on rabidity.

 

Out of 100 articles, there are not 5 from the perspective of the other warring party

 

As an example, I took the trouble to check the Zürcher Tages-Anzeiger, which I subscribed to, for bias. From Russia's attack in February 2022 to the end of 2022, I looked at around a hundred articles that directly dealt with the Ukraine war. By the hundredth report I was exhausted by the same thing over and over again. Almost all of them describe the suffering and heroism of western Ukraine in the Russian war of aggression and - in shrill colors - the crimes of Russia.

 

Experts in weapons systems and geostrategy constantly repeat why Russia must be defeated, and investigative investigators know little other than the hunt for some Russian whose assets could be confiscated.

 

Out of a hundred articles, I couldn't find five that provided information about what was happening on the other side of the front. The suffering of the pro-Russian Ukrainians under the rocket attacks and artillery fire of the pro-Western Ukrainians is not worth mentioning. The people behind the front lines don't seem to exist for our major media. Reports are made exclusively from the perspective of NATO, i.e. from the perspective of an armaments lobby that acts worldwide as a crowbar for the USA's regulatory power.

 

The one-sidedness of the reports arises from the one-sidedness of the sources. In addition to the inevitable British secret service (whether 007 is cooperating remains unclear), the daily sources of our "notification" are: President Zelensky and his entourage in Kiev as well as his friends in Brussels, London, Washington and the associated experts and NATO think tanks. The Russians appear mainly as criminals who deny their crimes.

And if a dam breaks that largely floods Russian defense positions and an area occupied by Russia, then all German talk shows, but also the Swiss radio magazine “Echo der Zeit”, immediately find experts who know that it was the Russians who built the dam destroyed. Just like the Russians are the ones who are shooting at themselves in the nuclear power plant they are occupying. “Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind,” says Shakespeare in King Lear.

 

In the years before the Russian attack, OECD observers recorded artillery detonations every day, and in February 2022, hundreds of explosions per day. The fighting in eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 caused well over ten thousand deaths. So this war didn't start in February 2022.

 

Did our newspapers report on this? They largely swept it under the rug. They only see what they already know. This means: you always know what you are going to see. So what I read in the newspapers every morning. And therefore what I no longer have to read because I already know what it is before I open the newspaper.

 

“Don’t be fooled by your own”

 

In the fall of 1983, more than a million people demonstrated across the Federal Republic of Germany against the stationing of atomic bombs. Even in several countries that were members of NATO, a majority of people opposed further nuclear armament because it was clear that the much-vaunted “balance of terror” had long been guaranteed by the British and French A-bombs. During the debate in the Bundestag, opposition leader Willy Brandt said that his party, the SPD, was being bombarded with letters of protest:

 

“These are German West and German East, they are Europeans and Americans, they are mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, workers and entrepreneurs, artists and soldiers, housewives, pensioners, and they are natural scientists and engineers of all academic degrees. I ask myself who benefits when the commitment and collective expertise of these fellow citizens is thrown away with all the arrogance of power."

 

The FDP-CDU majority in the German parliament voted for the people's vote and decided to station medium-range nuclear missiles. Although these were abolished as part of a disarmament agreement, US nuclear warheads are still stored at the Büchel air base in the Eifel. German Air Force pilots train their use as part of the so-called “nuclear participation”. It is no military secret that Russia has always been and continues to be the main target.

 

In the same year, 1983, Christa Wolf's book "Kassandra" was published, a text about a seer who, before her death, thinks about the fall of her homeland Troy:

 

«We can know when the war begins, but when does the pre-war begin? If there were rules, they would have to be passed on. Bury in clay in stone, hand it down. What would it say? Among other sentences there would be: Don't be deceived by your own."

 

I was deceived by my own, but it took me a long time to realize it. The “Süddeutsche”, the “Frankfurter Rundschau”, the “Neue Zürcher”, the “Spiegel” and other papers were my leading media when I learned journalism.

 

The big media, both those financed by license fees and those run by private corporations, have failed miserably in all the wars that I have observed. Their job would have been to question the actions of governments, but they have proven in many cases to be loudspeakers of government propaganda and warmongers in unjustified and senseless wars.

 

The Balkan Wars opened Pandora's Box

 

If I remember correctly, my first big professional crisis came during the Balkan Wars. I couldn't sleep at night when I realized that the blue sky was lying. Tuzla was my key experience back then. The city in Bosnia was defined as a protection zone in 1993. Blue helmets were stationed there. The Bosnian Muslim population should be protected from Serb attacks. However, the Serbian artillery still fired on the city. These attacks were a daily feature on the radio news for months. The Western media was overflowing with outrage over the shelling of the “safe area”.

 

I fell out of the clouds when blue helmet soldiers told me in 1995: "The Serbs sometimes shoot in there, but the artillery in Tuzla also shoots out at the surrounding Serbian villages every night.”

Tuzla was supplied with weapons by the USA at night and in fog. There were military restricted areas where UN units were denied access. The same government in Washington that outwardly played the role of “honest broker” to bring about an end to the war secretly organized so-called “black flights” to arm the Bosniak military.

 

When a Norwegian blue helmet officer noticed and made this public in 1995, he was ordered to remain silent and was transferred as a punishment. The British broadcaster ITN/Channel 4 made a report about the matter, which I took over for a magazine on the SRG program Switzerland 4.

 

My attempts to draw the Swiss media's attention to the revelations were met with indifference. In Bosnia and Kosovo, NATO determined what one was allowed to know and what not. Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor in The Hague, later complained that she had hit a wall with her request for insight into NATO's secret operations.

 

It was only much later that I learned that leading US PR agencies were feeding the press with horror stories about Serbian concentration camps and Holocaust plans, which a gigantic media apparatus chased around the world in a matter of seconds. In their study “Operation Balkan: Advertising for War and Death,” the political scientists Jörg Becker and Mira Beham found well over a hundred such PR contracts in US archives. The order was to portray the Serbs as perpetrators and the others as victims. James Harff, head of the PR agency Ruder Finn, described his job as follows:

 

«Our craft consists of disseminating news and getting it into circulation as quickly as possible (…) Speed is crucial. Because we know full well that the first message is important. A denial no longer has any effect.”

 

Mira Beham: War Drums. Media, war and politics. 1996. p.172 ff.

PR agencies provide the arguments for war and death

 

Harff showed a certain degree of professional pride to Jacques Merlino, a deputy editor-in-chief of France 2, when he candidly described how his agency "with a magnificent bluff" accomplished its mission by getting three powerful U.S. Jewish lobbying organizations to to warn of an impending holocaust in the Balkans in advertisements in the New York Times.

 

«With one move we were able to simplify the matter and present it as a story of the good guys and the bad guys (…) And we won because we chose the right target, the Jewish audience. Immediately there was a noticeable change in the use of language in the media, accompanied by the use of terms that had a strong emotional charge, such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and so on, all of which evoked comparisons with Nazi Germany, gas chambers and so on Auschwitz. The emotional charge was so powerful that no one dared to contradict it.”

 

The German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer consequently toured Europe with the slogan “Never again Auschwitz” and his Defense Minister Scharping told the people that it was known that the Serbs “play football with the cut off heads of their enemies.” A photo that went around the world as evidence of Serbian atrocities and as an argument for NATO's war of aggression showed a horribly emaciated, bare-chested man behind barbed wire. It was reminiscent of the photos of German extermination camps in 1945. The photo was - as was later proven - a fake. At that time, the Trnopolje refugee center in question was neither cordoned off by a barbed wire fence nor were there any half-starved people there.

Nothing has changed. War generates the same propaganda tools over and over again. A “writer from East Germany” living in Ukraine named Christoph Brumme wrote a regular “diary” in the “NZZ am Sonntag” in 2022 in which, among other things, he predicted that the Russians would set up concentration camps in Ukraine and that Putin was a second Hitler. He is probably seriously ill and will stage his suicide with an atomic bomb. And more like that.

 

The category of “embedded journalists” had already emerged during the Gulf War of 1991, and there is hardly a term that better describes how this profession can degenerate into a kind of prostitution. In his study “Second Front: Censorship and propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War” (in German on dtv “The Battle of Lies”), the US journalist John R. MacArthur showed how the media is kept on a leash and how the public is was deceived.

 

The symbiosis of the major media and their governments became completely normal after the 9/11 attack. This was defined as an attack by a hostile power and in this logic Afghanistan was attacked first, then Iraq. A “war on terror” was started worldwide, and since people were cleaning up, “by the way” oppressed peoples in Libya and Syria were also “liberated”. The results can be viewed in all of these countries.

 

The renowned science journalist and peace activist Norman Cousins had already given the ideological mission of the superpower USA a name in 1987: “The Pathology of Power”.

 

Author Helmut Scheben

Helmut Scheben (*1947 in Koblenz, Germany) studied Romance languages in Mainz, Bonn, Salamanca and Lima. In 1980 he received his doctorate in philology. at the University of Bonn. From 1980 to 1985 he worked as a press agency reporter and correspondent for print media in Mexico and Central America. From 1986 he was editor of the weekly newspaper (WoZ) in Zurich, from 1993 to 2012 he was editor and reporter on Swiss television SRF, including 16 years on the Tagesschau.

 

A made-up rape story in Libya

 

I cannot understand how journalists, who have been lied to so often by governments, continue to propagate the political guidelines from above as if they were the tablets of the Ten Commandments. In June 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told cameras that she now had proof that Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi was using "systematic rape" as a strategy. At this point there was civil war in Libya. The Libyan army tried to put down an uprising that had escalated since February 2011 in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring”. The USA and its NATO allies have been bombing the country since March 2011 in order - according to the official argument - to help the Libyan people oppressed by Gaddafi and to "enforce a no-fly zone".

 

A Libyan woman named Eman-al Obeidi was considered living proof of the rape allegations. The woman gained access to the luxury hotel Rixos Al Nasr in Tripoli on March 26, 2011. Hotel staff and security guards tried to prevent her from contacting the journalists who were having breakfast there. The woman screamed that she had been kidnapped and raped at a checkpoint by Gaddafi's militiamen three days earlier.

Libyan government spokesman Musa Ibrahim later said Ms. Obeidi was initially thought to be alcoholic and mentally disturbed. It was then determined that their information was credible. The case is in the hands of the judiciary. It is an ordinary crime and not a political crime.

 

Ms. Obeidi has been interviewed by CNN and numerous other media outlets. It served as proof of the wickedness of the Libyan head of state Gaddafi. It seemed hardly worth mentioning to the major media that Libyan doctors had cared for the woman, confirmed the rape and that the Libyan police had arrested suspects shortly afterwards.

 

In 2011, in an Amnesty International office in Zurich, I asked what the allegations were. I was told that Amnesty had been investigating Libya for several months and had found no confirmation of the allegation of mass rape. The spokesman for the Libyan organization “Human Rights Solidarity Libya,” which was close to the insurgents, also told me on the phone: “We have no evidence. The only concrete case is that of Ms. Obeidi.”

 

Meanwhile, the shit had happened and the story experienced rapid proliferation in practically all Western media. My Google search on Sunday, July 20, 2011 showed 21 million results. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Luis Moreno Ocampo, provided an excellent lubricant for the media apparatus by saying that he actually had “information” about mass rapes. When asked by a journalist what he thought about reports that Gaddafi had Viagra imported so that his soldiers could rape, the chief prosecutor did not reply: "Leave me alone with such nonsense." Instead, he said the perfidious sentence that they were still collecting evidence: “Yes, we are still collecting evidence.”

 

The fantasy structure continued to grow for weeks. The Swiss newspaper “Le Matin” took the creative storytelling all the way to a photograph of a king-size bed complete with lamp and bedside table: supposedly a room in an underground bunker where, according to the paper, Gaddafi abused his female victims. During this time, I have not met a journalist who said that they were ashamed that their career choice made them part of this industry.

 

“Atrocity management” is as old as war itself.

 

Demonizing the enemy is a tried and tested instrument that is as old as war itself.

 

In his standard work “Images of War, War of Images,” the historian Gerhard Paul used over 200 illustrations to show how modern visual media burned the war as iconography into the collective memory. According to Gerhard Paul, reality is lost to the same extent that the images are perfected and standardized.

 

Crimes against children always attract media attention. This goes from the Kuwaiti “nurse Najirah,” who told a US Congressional human rights committee that she saw Iraqi soldiers ripping out the tubes of incubator babies, which later turned out to be an invention of the PR agency Hill & Knowlton to Human Rights Commissioner Denisova in Kiev, who lost her job in June 2022 because it became clear that she had spread lies. Including the claim that she had evidence that Russian soldiers were raping small children.

 

The portrayal of the enemy as a bestial monster seems to be an unavoidable stereotype of war propaganda. During the First World War, the story that German soldiers snatched her baby from a Belgian woman, chopped off her hands and then ate her was a long-running favorite in the French and British press.

 

When the enemy is a monster that embodies evil itself, wars are easier to justify. In more than forty years of journalistic work, I have noticed that the major media usually spread such propaganda stories uncritically and are only very late or never prepared to admit their mistakes. The New York Times, which asked its readers for forgiveness for misinformation about the Iraq war, is the only case I know of.

In 19 years of working at Swiss television SRF, I have not come across any case in which a program apologized for false news. With the exception of the Meteo broadcast when the weather forecast was wrong.

 

In 2011, I drew the attention of Amnesty International Switzerland to the fact that there were no television images of the destruction caused by NATO air strikes in Libya. The Libyan government's television studios were reduced to rubble in the first wave of attacks. The NATO command center in Naples was able to prevent emotional images of victims being pulled from the rubble from being shown on Western TV channels. The big media either didn't notice the problem or ignored it.

 

The Amnesty spokesman replied to me at the time that this one-sided presentation also caused them great concern. When I finished the report for the Tagesschau in the evening with the editor at the editing suite, the head of the Tagesschau said that this sentence from the Amnesty spokesman had to be taken out of the report. When I asked about the reasoning, I was told: "Otherwise the audience might think that Gaddafi wasn't that bad and that he was still right in the end."

 

A new era of censorship has dawned

 

The corporate media and the fee-financed institutions dominate the news market. They all claim that they are the fourth power that keeps an eye on those in power and that this is what makes democracy possible. My experience is that they are much more believers in a type of religious community that sees itself as an axis of good. Anyone who doesn't want to share their worldview will be hushed up, defamed or simply banned.

 

In this sense, governments and their associated media work efficiently. The 27 countries of the European Union have banned the Russian news channels RT and Sputnik. Anyone who spreads or receives them even pays a fine of up to 50,000 euros in Austria. It's so easy to believe that you can enforce the simplicity of your opinion. Protest or criticism from the major editorial offices of the Fourth Estate? Zero.

 

While Russian social media* is constantly discussing this war with astonishing intensity, Western media are obsessively trying to convince us that anyone who says anything against this war will be imprisoned in Russia. “Ten years in prison for thinking” is the headline in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (June 6, 2023).

 

In Kiev, opposition media is simply banned. Do you have to report it? Obviously not. This is then dealt with casually, almost as a digressive detour, in eight words: “Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian broadcasters have been showing a community program” (Zürcher Tagesanzeiger, July 28, 2022). Community program? It almost sounds like community service.

 

The concealment has a system. Nowhere is this more visible than in the silence that our leading media maintains about the rampant censorship of social media. A few weeks after the EU banned Russian channels, Google announced that it would block all Russian-related media worldwide. As is often the case with Big Tech, the pressure allegedly came from its own employees: “Google employees had urged YouTube to take additional punitive measures against Russian channels.”

 

Millions of posts disappear from the platform. Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was involved in the Edward Snowden revelations, has highlighted this extreme censorship campaign and the billions of dollars involved:

“It is not surprising that the Silicon Valley monopolies exercise their censorship power in full accordance with the foreign policy interests of the US government. Many of the major tech monopolies – such as Google and Amazon – routinely seek and receive highly lucrative contracts with the US security apparatus, including the CIA and NSA. Its top managers maintain close relationships with top Democratic Party officials. And Democrats in Congress have repeatedly summoned tech executives to their various committees to threaten them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not align censorship more closely with the party's political goals and interests.

 

Anyone who reads the Twitter files knows how the system works. A discreet intervention by the FBI can cause leading media outlets to put politically sensitive topics on hold until the “danger,” in this case an election defeat for candidate Joe Biden, has been averted.

 

What shocked me then and still stuns me today is the cavilism that is reflexively set in motion by a media mob when a few dare to swim against the tide and question the published opinion. The political scientist Mira Beham told me that she was banned from writing in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” because she dared to argue that the perpetrator-victim schema could not be used in the Balkan conflicts and that the matter was more complex. Nowadays, a renowned journalist like Patrick Baab loses his teaching position at the University of Kiel if he dares to report from Donbass “from the wrong side of the front”.

 

Orwell's dystopian vision of "Newspeak" and "Ministry of Truth" is well on its way to becoming reality. We are actually experiencing a turning point in this respect, even if the German Chancellor meant something different when he used the term.

 

The word lying press does not apply to the matter

 

The media scientist Uwe Krüger has documented that most of the alphas of the established media are members of NATO and US-affiliated institutions. Of course, there is the factor of coercion and adaptation, such as the well-known fact that at Axel Springer Verlag (“Bild”, “Die Welt”) every employee has to agree to the statutes, which demand support for the transatlantic alliance and solidarity with the USA.

 

Nevertheless, one should be careful with the insulting word “lying press”. The matter is infinitely more complicated. On the one hand, as far as the news vessels are concerned, there is a system that is based on shortening and excessive speeds. The philosopher Paul Virilio spoke of an “industry of forgetting” that continually covers what was just reported with new news. A news apparatus that produces highly fragmented fragments of events cannot provide context and background, even if well-intentioned journalists wanted to.

 

And they want it. In my entire life, I have rarely met media people who wanted to falsify or dishonestly report. People don't lie; they are usually convinced by what they say and write. They are shaped throughout their life history, in their education and in their social contacts and are integrated into the worldview of those around them.

 

There is this “huge chunk of truth” that Israeli historian Shlomo Sand called “implanted memory”:

«We are all born into a universe of discourse fields that have been shaped by the ideological power struggles of previous generations. Even before the historian can acquire the tools for critical questioning, all the history, politics and Bible lessons in school, the national holidays, memorial days, public ceremonies, street names, memorials, television series and other spheres of remembrance shape his imagination. There's a huge chunk of 'truth' in his head that he can't simply avoid."

 

Shlomo Sand: The Invention of the Jewish People. p. 40

The problem of an industry that is supposed to serve the daily truth-finding purpose under the name of journalism is familiar to every magician and conjurer: perception is not determined by actual events, but by expectations. About a huge chunk of “truth”.

 

____________

*There was initially talk of Russian talk shows here. However, for some time now no guests have been invited who fundamentally question the war in Ukraine.

 

____________

This post appeared on GlobalBridge on June 13th.

 

_____________________

Opinions in articles on Infosperber correspond to the personal assessments of the author.

 

https://www.infosperber.ch/medien/medienkritik/so-verlor-ich-den-glauben-an-die-etablierten-medien/

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

READ FROM TOP

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

GUSNOTE: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE WRITTEN BY A “GOOD PERSON” WITH IDEALS IN HIS HEART, MISUNDERSTANDS (OR IGNORES) THE THREATS POSED BY NATO AND THE AMERICANS AGAINST THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE. AS EXPRESSED BY A FEW EXPERTS, INCLUDING JOHN MEARSHEIMER, RUSSIA “DID NOT HAVE A CHOICE” IN REGARD TO UKRAINE. SURE ONE CAN SAY THAT RUSSIA SHOULD HAVE ACCEPTED BEING BUGGERED BY THE USA AND NATO, BUT THIS WOULD BE STUPID… IN FACT THIS ARTICLE STATES A LOT OF FALSEHOOD LIKE “the mass murder of [UKRAINIAN] residents”. 

ONE HAS TO CONSIDER THAT PUTIN HAS BEEN CHASTISED BY HIS OWN PEOPLE FOR DEMANDING THAT THE RUSSIAN MILITARY ONLY TARGETS UKRAINIAN MILITARY. SO FAR AFTER TWO YEARS OF CONFLICT, ABOUT 500,000 UKRAINIAN TROOPS HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED, WHILE LESS THAT 9,000 UKRAINIAN CIVILIANS HAVE LOST THEIR LIVES INCLUDING SOME PEOPLE IN THE DONBASS KILLED BY THE UKRAINIAN MILITARY. 

COMPARE THIS TO “OUR DARLING” BAD BOY NETANYAHU WHOSE ARMIES HAVE KILLED MORE THAN 30,000 CIVILIANS IN LESS THAN THREE MONTHS. 

SO IT IS TO BE SAID THAT WHEN FACING THE THREAT OF NATO, IDEALS ARE WORTH ZILCH. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, PUBLISHED IN FRENCH IN A FRENCH OUTLET, IS WORTH ZILCH, AND ITS AUTHOR IS FACING PRISON FOR BASICALLY BEING A TRAITOR TO THE IDEA OF RUSSIA, BY SHOWING BEING DAZZLED BY THE ROTTEN IDEALS OF THE WEST…

 

BLOG POST NOVEMBER 13, 2022

Russia: “they wanted fascism, they got it”

A month before receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, Oleg Orlov, a Russian dissident from Memorial living in Moscow, paints a portrait of a zombified Russia where, in denial of the very existence of the Ukrainian people and culture, in state propaganda, we read the signs of fascism. First part of a series of texts resulting from a partnership between the Mediapart Club and a network of dissidents in today's Russia.

 

The bloody war unleashed by the Putin regime in Ukraine is not only the mass murder of residents and the destruction of the infrastructure, economy and culture of this wonderful country. It is not just a question of the destruction of the foundations of international law.

It is also a blow for the future of Russia.

The darkest forces in my country, those who dreamed of complete revenge following the collapse of the Soviet empire, those who were gradually becoming the masters of the country, who had not had enough of the constant strangulation of freedom of expression, nor the suppression of civil society, nor the virtual elimination of the independent judiciary, have all celebrated their victory in recent months.

What kind of victory can we be talking about, you ask? After all, on the fronts in Ukraine, things are not at all bright for Russian troops. That's true, but they were celebrating their victory, their final victory in Russia.

 

This war put the country entirely in their hands. They have long wanted to get rid of all the constraints that held them back. They did not want the return of the communist system (although there were people among them who called themselves communists). They like the quixotic system that has developed in Russia over the past two decades - half feudalism, half state capitalism, riddled with corruption. But there was still something missing...

What was missing was a sense of completeness to this system. It is now complete. They can now openly, without shame, proclaim this slogan: “One people, one empire, one leader! » All shame is rejected.

In a word, they wanted fascism. They got it.

The country, which moved away from communist totalitarianism thirty years ago, has fallen back into totalitarianism, but now fascist.

‘What fascism are you talking about?’ – a lot of people argue with me. Where is the founding mass party that stands above even the state? Does United Russia, a bunch of bureaucrats, resemble such a party? And where are the mass youth organizations through which all young people must go?

Well, first of all, work on the zombification of young people and the creation of organizations structuring them ideologically is in full swing in Russia. And then fascism is not only Italy under Mussolini or Nazi Germany (today, in Russia, it is common to oppose good fascism to bad Nazism), but also Austria before 'Anschluss, Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar. And everywhere, fascist regimes had their differences and their particularities. From now on, Russia, in the last years of Putin, will be mentioned in this list.

There are many different definitions of the phenomenon of fascism. In 1995, the Russian Academy of Sciences, on the instructions of President Boris Yeltsin, developed the following definition of fascism: "Fascism is an ideology and practice that asserts the superiority and exclusivity of a nation or a particular race and which aim to incite ethnic intolerance, to justify discrimination against members of other peoples, to deny democracy, to establish the cult of the national leader, to use violence and terror to suppress political opponents and any form of dissent, to justify war as a means of resolving inter-state conflicts.

In my opinion, what is happening in Russia fully coincides with this definition. Opposition of Russia in the present, past and future to the surrounding states (mainly European states), assertion of the superiority of Russian culture (not in the proper ethnic sense, but in the imperial sense), denial of very existence of the Ukrainian people, language and culture - all this has become the basis of current state propaganda. As for the denial of democracy, the cult of the leader and the suppression of dissent, there is nothing to demonstrate, it is obvious...

Who is to blame for Russia becoming fascist? The simplest answer would be: Putin. He is undoubtedly fully responsible, but there were also a host of other people, not necessarily consciously going in that direction, but who also paved the way.

The masses aspired to the Empire, to the “strong hand”, to the mythical Stalin. These people were both "at the top" - among the "ruling elite" - civil servants, security officers, MPs, heads of state-owned enterprises and "oligarchs" - and "at the bottom" - among the poorest. Some had Maybachs, mansions and yachts, others did not have heated toilets at home. But all remained without any rights in Putin's autocratic system.

It was not in the interest of the former to fight against arbitrariness - under another system of government, they would never have had the material advantages that they had. But to compensate for this unfortunate deprivation of rights, they needed a feeling of absolute power over their "villains", to be uncontrollable at least in that respect... except by the Boss. They wanted to consider themselves as a class of new nobles, chosen by History and Providence to rule this country. Now this was hampered by the rudimentary remnants of freedom of expression, all kinds of investigative journalists, human rights activists, troublemakers who brought people into the streets from time to time. And also competitors among the "elites" who still wanted to maintain some liberal "rules of decency" in the governance of the country.

While the last, those "at the bottom" of the hierarchy, simply did not believe in the possibility of succeeding in a struggle - all their hard lives and the experience of their parents and grandparents had shown them this.

Those of them who benefited from a brief burst of relative democracy in the 1990s were frightened by this period - everything was changing around them, they had to make choices for themselves, and in difficult circumstances, which was scary and unusual. And they passed this fear on to their children – change is always for the worse. You must rely on authority, on your superiors. The best you can do is write petitions and complaints to the leaders.

Russian civil society has proven incapable of giving these people (who constitute, if not the majority, at least a very significant segment of the population) the opportunity, the knowledge to fight for their rights. Moreover, it seems to me, human rights defenders themselves sometimes reinforced these paternalistic attitudes... Instead of treating the people who came to us as partners in a common struggle, we treated them as “customers” and we tried to help them, but for the most part we do not favor explaining the objectives of this fight.

As a result, the "clients", having received free help, returned to their lives, to vote again in the elections for those whom their superiors had indicated to them. They wanted to compensate for their deprivations and lack of rights with a sense of belonging to something great, to feel that they were a cog in the great machine of a resurgent empire.

Putin's regime met some of these needs, but, at this point, not enough.

And so the war was proclaimed as a great unifying goal. “Everything for the front, everything for victory!”, an old slogan that has been reborn so many years later. With the opposition completely crushed, the remains of freedoms eliminated, the words "liberalism" and "democracy" are dangerous to pronounce in public without adding an expletive. The "tops of the hierarchy" and its "bottoms" have merged in an ecstasy of "patriotism" and... hatred for an independent Ukraine.

Of course, this ecstasy does not even bring together the majority of Russians, but there are still many who celebrate it.

And the majority, until recently, preferred to simply turn a blind eye to what was happening, for the sake of self-preservation. “Protesting is dangerous, nothing can be changed, and useless discussions about the excesses committed by our troops in Ukraine will only lead to insomnia and nervous breakdown.” It is best to pretend to believe what is said on television and even try to convince yourself of it.

In any fascist regime, however, this is probably how most people behave.

And a very small minority is trying to fight. There is an anti-war movement, which has its own political prisoners, its own heroes.

Human rights defenders continue to work almost clandestinely - helping people legally avoid mobilization and conscription, compiling lists of political prisoners, providing them with lawyers, providing legal and humanitarian assistance to refugees from Ukraine and ensuring them a trip to Europe.

However, human rights work inevitably undergoes a radical transformation when the law is no longer in force in the country. Today's Russian human rights defenders find themselves in the position of their dissident predecessors during the Soviet era. The search for ways to make them known to the Russian and foreign public becomes the main content of their work. The favorite motto of the great Russian human rights defender, dissident and former Soviet Gulag camp prisoner for 10 years, Sergei Kovalev, was: “Do what you must, come what may”; this is truer today than ever.

How long will all this last in Russia?

Who knows ?

The future of our country is at stake in the fields of Ukraine.

The victory of Russian troops there will definitely preserve fascism in Russia. And vice versa...

Over the past month, the "ecstasy" I spoke of above has slowly begun to dissolve into general disarray - how is it that our great and invincible army is failing on all fronts?

The hangover the next day hurts. This can be serious.

And in these circumstances, a lot depends on the countries of Central and Western Europe. It is natural for any sane person to want peace rather than war. But peace at all costs? Europe has already tried to establish peace by appeasing an aggressor. The catastrophic result of these attempts is known to all.

Now, too, a fascist and victorious Russia will inevitably become a serious security threat, not only to its neighbors, but also to the whole of Europe*.

Oleg Orlov (Moscow), co-president of the Memorial Human Rights Center, Nobel Peace Prize 2022. The article only reflects the position of the author.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/russie-les-voix-de-la-dissidence-daujourdhui/blog/131122/russie-ils-voulaient-le-fascisme-ils-lont-eu

 

*GUSNOTE: RUSSIA ISN'T A THREAT TO EUROPE. THE REVERSE IS TRUE.... THE WEST HAS BEEN A THREAT TO RUSSIA FOR A LONG TIME... SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

READ FROM TOP

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBR-f0gcXH0

Douglas Macgregor Drops Shocking News: Israel MURDERED 21,000 Women And Children In Gaza

 

*GUSNOTE: RUSSIA ISN'T A THREAT TO EUROPE. THE REVERSE IS TRUE.... THE WEST HAS BEEN A THREAT TO RUSSIA FOR A LONG TIME... SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

READ FROM TOP

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....