PUTIN'S FACTORY OF LIES: A media offensive against common sense

"If when the Providence of Heaven makes me worthy of a society to compose and write, I will write against nonsense and malice. Nothing tame can be sown in a field and a ley, if the land is not prepared for that and not cleared." This is what Dositej Obradović wrote in "Councils of Common Sense" almost 240 years ago. The Serbian educator praised the goodness and mercy of the Heavenly Father because "he adorned us with a literal spirit and a reasonable mind, and gave us the means and the way that, if we want, we can become more reasonable, enlightened, better, more perfect and happier day by day." ”.

If he miraculously rose from the dead and looked around a little, Dositej would be shocked by the amount of nonsense and malice with which we are daily bombarded from all sides, from the media, from social networks, from everything that makes up so-called public opinion, although in that nonsense there is least amount of opinions. The literal spirit and common sense can be found only in traces, on the margins, pushed into a corner by mass production of various lie factories that work at least in three or four shifts, without rest and relaxation. "If you hate and hide the world of truth, and extinguish and darken the enlightenment of reason, you are a bad man", wrote Dositej, and today the prevailing impression is that these villains have taken over all the levers of power, that they have ruled over human souls, that have no more desire to become more reasonable and enlightened.

Truth under weapon 

Most of the content that can be read in the local media about the war in Ukraine, Russia, Vladimir Putin and similar topics could be characterized as a frontal attack on common sense. Continuous and systematic abuse of elementary logic, bare facts, obvious phenomena, the ability to connect different elements into a meaningful whole - after a while they give the desired effect, so the image of the world in the head of a media consumer most resembles a chaotic mazary of an untalented painter. Superhuman caution is necessary for reading the news, as well as the analysis of various experts and intellectuals, the process of informing turns into a constant exercise of logical thinking and exposing the so-called informative content. 

For example, Kusturica's portal Iskra informs us that the President of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, believes that "if Russia waged a comprehensive war in Ukraine, it would have ended long ago, and that what is happening there is a special military operation where Russian soldiers and officers are saving civilians, sacrificing their lives ”. So, for two months now, Ukrainians have been living in the delusion that Russia has carried out aggression against their country and is waging war against them. Putin did not plan to conquer Ukraine in three days, but all this is actually part of a cunning plan, and Russian soldiers and officers liberate civilians by bombing, shelling, shooting, torturing, raping and looting.

The same portal publishes the text of the writer and politician Herman Sadulayev, who first says that he is a "war specialty of a writer - agitator-propagandist" and that this is normal, and then predicts that the truth will win. The truth of the agitator-propagandist? However, the truth cannot win on its own, it needs help. Fortunately, "the truth is there is no army other than the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation." So, the truth is armed to the teeth and that is why it will win. And isn't the truth reached through hard work, learning, thinking? Did Socrates, Plato, Erasmus, Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire come to the truth with the help of swords and spears, or did they use some other means? Sadulayev actually preaches the death of the mind, culture and spirit, and instead of these obsolete concepts, he offers a simple replacement in the form of a mace: the truth is what the one who is the strongest says. The only truths are the Kalashnikov, the tank and the atomic bomb, everything else is a waste of naive poetic souls.

That wonderful, free Russia 

In the weekly "Pečat", writer and professor Slobodan Vladušić says that Orwell's novel "1984" is probably the most famous critique of totalitarian societies and one of those European values - feels safer and freer in Moscow, where it is read without any prohibitions, but, say, at the University of Northampton, students are advised to avoid it, because it can expose them to potential trauma.” Not long after this celebration of free Russia, in Ivanovo, activist Dmitry Silin got arrested for distributing copies of Orwell's "1984" on the street, which the authorities interpreted as discrediting the Russian Armed Forces.

These days, Russia has started expelling Ukraine and Kiev from school textbooks, these are forbidden concepts for students, rewriting history is an old tradition from the time of Stalinism, and anyone who opposes Big Brother from the Kremlin is arrested, harassed and punished. To cite a silly example of excessive political correctness as proof of the totalitarianism of democracies, and to overlook thousands of political prisoners in Russia, the ban on freedom of speech, the destruction of free media, state censorship, persecution of dissidents, killing journalists, poisoning political opponents - not only malicious and corrupt, it can only be done by someone who understands the truth in the way of German Sadulayev and similar supporters of Putin's power and horde.

The philosophy of the atomic bomb

In the same weekly commanded by Milorad Vučelić, former head of Milošević's propaganda machinery, philosopher and university professor Časlav Koprivica answers a journalist's question about the atomic bomb, stating: "Russia is the one that is existentially endangered and must defend itself." Logically, Nazi Germany was also existentially endangered, so it invaded half of Poland in order to defend itself, and Stalin's USSR was also threatened by the other half of Poland, so they also defended themselves by occupation. Like all endangered conquerors throughout history. Predrag Čudić wrote beautifully, mocking such excuses of various murderers and their intellectual lackeys: "The stronger has the right to fight, because he is endangered."

The philosopher continues, saying that Russia "almost does not care whether the world will be left without it or there will be no world at all", which is actually a paraphrase of the famous Kremlin KGB thinker Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin who once asked himself, longing for the red button: Who needs a world without Russia? ” However, if there is a nuclear war, it will not be the fault of the one who threatens the world with the atomic bomb, apocalypse and extinction of humanity, the one who thinks that it is better that the world does not exist than that Russia changes, but "Anglo-Americans". Luckily for the reader, Dr. Koprivica doesn't write crime stories, everyone would be guilty except the killer, which would be an original contribution to the genre, but I'm afraid it would go badly with the audience and the critics. Unlike equally indigestible political dreams, which have an excellent pass for those who have succumbed to the collective psychology of the victim, because the ruling propaganda has been delivering it for decades.

The philosopher interprets that the Russians must defend themselves "for the sake of justice for all mankind", and concludes: "Let us therefore hope for the victory of justice, which will not be paid for by the extermination of life on our planet." This is again a paraphrase of various Kremlin propagandists who say that Russia must not be defeated, otherwise it will launch atomic bombs around the world. And Putin himself has threatened to use nuclear weapons if the democratic world helps Ukraine. If you don't allow me to slaughter and destroy whatever I want, I have to turn you all to dust and ashes, and Russia along the way, says the Kremlin brigand, tapping on a chair at that twenty-meter table that speaks volumes about his state of consciousness. The achievements of Serbian atomic philosophers are reaching to the foot of that chair.

Christ with a nuclear mushroom

There seem to be so many different fans of the strong hand, massacres, tyranny, Putin, nuclear missiles and the apocalypse, each and every crazier than the other. On the Novi Standard portal, political scientist Ljubiša Malenica praised the wisdom of the Russian Orthodox Church, which "preserved and promoted the Russian nuclear forces at a time when it was very unpopular." It seems that some of God's commandments have been reformed in the meantime, so now one reads: Love your neighbor and kill him with an atomic bomb. And Christ should be painted on icons with an atomic mushroom instead of a halo. He might look more like Abaddon, an angel of destruction than himself, but he would visually align himself with Russian-Serbian nuclear Orthodoxy.

On the same portal, Dr. Nebojša Vuković, an associate of the Institute for International Politics and Economy, shows the first signs of a critical attitude towards his beloved leader Putin, Volodya, dissatisfied with the speed of the conquest of Ukraine. Dr. Vuković is guided by the maximalist motto - either all or nothing. "Without the overthrow of the government in Kiev, substantial denazification, and political-geographical recomposition of Ukraine, the entire Russian military action could be described by the popular saying of 'slaughtering an ox for a kilo of meat,' Vuković said, using subtle metaphors. It is immediately obvious that this is an educated man, who would otherwise think of using the folk saying about slaughtering oxen and kilograms of meat for the massacre in Ukraine, where the Russian army butchers women and children. An ordinary person could never reach such a dose of criminal refinement in expression, Dr. Vuković was not educated for nothing.

Destruction of reasonable power

Such comments are multiplied, so-called analyzes, opinions, columns, attitudes, false explanations of every divine day, and then tabloids and TV chat rooms distribute them in small intestines and deliver them to the broadest strata of the population. And so, in people's heads, they additionally cement the long-petrified image of the world, which has nothing to do with reality. And even less with Dositej's literal spirit and reasonable mind, and efforts to become more reasonable, enlightened, better, more perfect and happier.

It may sound paradoxical, but the best comment on today's Russian and Serbian media propaganda, which is two eyes in the head, was given by Hannah Arendt back in 1974 in a conversation with the French writer Roger Errer. Here is what the great philosopher says: “If everyone is constantly lying to you, the consequence is not that you believe lies, but that in fact no one believes anything anymore. This is because lies in their essence must change, and the government that lies must constantly rewrite its history. So you get not just one lie - which you will live with for the rest of your life - but you get a huge number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And the people who can no longer believe in anything can not decide. He is not only deprived of the capacity for any action, but also the capacity to think and judge. And with such people, then you can do whatever you want." And indeed, with such people, the rulers and their intellectual retinue do whatever they want, both in Russia and in Serbia.

(zurnal.info)