https://t.me/dagetal/1833
bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@kravietz @bonifartius
This is entirely the Soviet understanding of "truth" - contingent on daily interpretation by the authorities, and it's incredibly hard for Westerners to get their heads round it. I imagine the last thirty years of a "globalisation of truth" has also made us grow unaccustomed to the fact that this way of distorting reality is even possible.
@andiias @kravietz @bonifartius
Perhaps, but there are other ways of distorting the truth that work depressingly well in countries with press freedoms. Rupert Murdoch's empire comes to mind.
@cpay
just look at what any public broadcasting service in the free & democratic west chose to report or not report on. and like you wrote: same goes for most private media, they are all owned by a handful of conglomerates which will happily oblige with the government if the money flow isn't interrupted.
@andiias @kravietz
@bonifartius @cpay @kravietz
I think it goes beyond just selective reporting. It is lying to you in the face of you seeing that very reality and insisting that you agree with the lie. Theodore Dalrymple describes it this way: "When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity..."
... "To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself."
Are you saying most Russians say opposite to what they think? But then, what's the difference? Putin doesn't care what they think inside their minds or say in their kitchens as long as they comply and don't cause problems.
@cpay @andiias @bonifartius
I wasn't thinking of trust so much, and you're right: Russia is a famously low-trust society. I was thinking of a willingness to be deceived and then parrot that deception. That's enough for this kind of manipulation to succeed and that's what's difficult for Westerners to understand, who are trained to see the quest for truth as the ultimate goal of all thought.
I give you a small example: a Ukrainian friend of mine was working in Moscow last February. On the morning of the 24th, his Russian colleagues came up to him and apologised. But one week later they came back to him and said that Russia was right to invade. They knew the truth, but they chose to parrot the official line. What they believed "in their hearts" is irrelevant from that point.
This system which you describe, and it’s a true picture as of 2022, was not created overnight. Putin was building it every day since 1999, gradually limiting basic freedoms and turning the state into an authoritarian one — but this happened with permission of most Russians. Your last chance was 2012 and even thought there were thousands people protesting in Bolotna, millions didn’t give a shit or even supported Putin as the wiped his ass with Constitution 🤷
But I don’t only mean people speaking in public — most of the people who repeated the Rossiya 1 bullshit I know for years, if not decades. Yet, they were telling me straight into my face that EU is rotting and going to collapse soon, while Russia is going to rule everyone around. That was not something they were saying for compliance with the line of the party, they honestly wanted it.
@iron_bug @bonifartius @kravietz @andiias
Iron Bug, you're correct that I don't understand Russian life. Living under the Putin regime sounds horrific. Torture, imprisonment, and death seem to be real possibilities for protesting.
@iron_bug @bonifartius @kravietz @andiias
Still, America has major problems, too. Some politicians, including Trump, want us to be more like Russia. Some people think we should simply accept the end of the world instead of facing climate change. Trump's lawyer asserted that "truth isn't truth." One of his top advisors made a case for "alternative facts." Violence and threats against politicians have increased tremendously since Trump came on the scene.
@iron_bug @bonifartius @kravietz @andiias
Trump’s "big lie" about the "fraudulent" election was an essential element of his attempted coup, and he came uncomfortably close to succeeding.
Words matter here, too.
As someone born in communist Poland at the very bottom of its economic crisis I can only concur 👍
@cpay @andiias @bonifartius
US indeed has major structural problems, which can be objectively seen in the socioeconomic indicators such as life expectancy or economic inequality data.
These problems are in my opinion rooted in the cultural values of US society, where personal profit is the primary measure of social success, and the cult of private property above all leads to a significant ideological bias at the state level.
US however has something that is entirely absent in Russia — the culture of a debate and evidence-based decision making. What Trump tried to do was specifically to eradicate both and I agree this is an existential threat to the US society, because where the debate and factual arguments end, the only option left is violence.
Yet, Trump has been removed from power democratically, even if he tried to prevent his removal with violence in the Senate, so the system still works. But I agree it cannot be taken for granted.
@iron_bug @bonifartius @andiias
Kravietz,
That is exactly right. The only thing I would add is that "trumpism" is still an existential threat, as seen by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives working to delegitimize the Biden presidency.
@andiias @kravietz @bonifartius I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint. But haven't we seen, analogously, exactly this with the outrageous chronic recasting of events before our very eyes by the likes of Donald Trump and Co.? I mean, we even have a recent word-of-the-year contender for it, don't we, with 'gaslighting.' In other words, half of the West is doing this now, too. It's Alice in Wonderland and The Red Queen.
Trump was pushing very similar concept of “truth” as Russians, but freedom of speech and freedom of speech never ceased to exist under Trump. Ultimately, he was removed from power using democratic means. The difference in Russia is that all media are now state controlled and there’s no democratic means to remove Putin from power any more.
@kravietz @bonifartius once more for the people in the back
@elizabethveldon @kravietz so the west adopted these methods, interesting!
@bonifartius @kravietz what are you blabbering on about?
@elizabethveldon
well, if you ask this nicely: it is in part about the stockholm syndrome you seem to have regarding western governments - they have given you so much, how could they possibly be evil.
@kravietz
@bonifartius
It’s not “can of worms”. #Russia state media and politicians openly say it’s hitting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine in hope of civilians freezing to death and generally getting rid of Ukrainian population from Ukraine in any way that works. At the same time they try to prevent foreign media or institutions from essentially stating the same thing through arrests of journalists, #censorship etc.
This contradiction is nothing surprising in Russia, where such bipolar attitude was always state policy - for example, people got arrested and sent to prison for merely reading Russian Constitution (!) or quoting Putin (!) which would be hard to imagine anywhere else.
The point of these policies is not to establish a single “truth” — the point is to reject the concept of truth at all and establish state monopoly on deciding what is considered truth in Russia at any given moment. As a Russian citizen you are expected to only follow Russian state media and their today’s description of current and past events, which can literally change from day to day, as it was with the very start of the invasion^1, with the mobilization in Russia or dozens of other events.
For example, if Russian state tomorrow declares that #Bandera was a Soviet hero and his monuments should be placed in Russian towns, you are expected to erase all previous narratives about “fascist Bandera”^2 from your memory and re-learn the new one as if it was from scratch.
There’s also another purely practical reason - Russian state media frequently manipulate statements of external parties, especially respected ones, such as UN. For example, from the 2022 Amnesty International report that talked about Russian mass-scale killing of civilians in #Ukraine and a few cases of Ukrainian army negligence in protection of their civilians, Russian media made a huge story about “Ukrainian army killing its civilians”, which was of course a total distortion. Having the original source (Amnesty or UN) on hand allows people to actually go and check what the organisation actually said, while placing it on the list of banned websites immediately gives you a signal that such checks will be prosecuted.