Russian ideology: there is no truth

[MBS]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/opinion/russias-ideology-there-is-no-truth.html?

When I went to work as a TV producer in Moscow in the early 2000s, I would ask my peers which of the “selves” they grew up with was the “real” them. How did they locate the difference between truth and lies? “You just end up living in different realities,” they would tell me, “with multiple truths and different ‘yous.' When members of this generation came to power they created a society that was a feast of simulations, with fake elections, a fake free press, a fake free market and fake justice. They are led by religious Russian patriots who curse the decadent West while keeping their children and money in London and informed by television producers who make Putin-worshiping shows during the day, and listen to energetically anti-Putin radio shows the moment they get into their cars after work.
. . .
As the Kremlin plays the West, we see it extend the tactics it uses at home to foreign affairs. The Kremlin courts the West’s financial elites, including the German and American business lobbies that opposed new sanctions; backs anticapitalist shows like Abby Martin’s “Breaking the Set” on the broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today); and encourages the European far right with money and support to parties such as France’s National Front. The Kremlin can’t hope to dominate the West as it does the domestic situation, but its aim is to sow division, to “disorganize” the enemy through an information war.

At the core of this strategy is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. This notion allows the Kremlin to replace facts with disinformation. We saw one example when Russian media spread a multitude of conspiracy theories about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July, from claiming that radar data showed Ukrainian jets had flown near the plane to suggesting that the plane was shot down by Ukrainians aiming at Mr. Putin’s presidential jet. The aim was to distract people from the evidence, which pointed to the separatists, and to muddy the water to a point where the audience simply gave up on the search for truth.

Sadly, this mind-set resonates well in a post-Iraq and post-financial-crisis West increasingly skeptical about its own institutions, where reality-based discourse has already fractured into political partisanship. Conspiracy theories are prevalent on cable networks and radio shows in the United States and among supporters of far-right parties in Europe. President Obama, responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine, pointed out that Russia is not the Soviet Union. “This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into,” he said. “Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology.” But perhaps he was missing the point.

[Igel]

1. Say one thing, think a second, do a third.

Russian Soviet-era saying.

It's what compulsory conformity at the level of morality and political belief with a harsh penalty for non-compliance leads to. If the only things you are allowed are those that are politically correct, and what's politicheski pravil'no, "politically correct" or "according to right policy and politics", keeps changing ...

[reorg]

2. Hm, I wonder where these religious Russian patriots

who curse the decadent West get the "energetically anti-Putin radio shows" which they allegedly listen to while driving home from work?

Is Mr Pomerantsev perhaps talking about "RFE" or the "VOA" where he would fit in very well with this article?

Interesting, though, that he would mention Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

The mature generation grew up with this behavior during the later years of the Soviet Union: reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and listening to clandestine BBC reports in private while pretending to be good Communist Youth League or party members. ...

When members of this generation came to power they created a society that was a feast of simulations, with fake elections, a fake free press, a fake free market and fake justice. They are led by religious Russian patriots who curse the decadent West ...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one of those "religious Russian patriots", well known for his very conservative views. I believe he proposed to restore the monarchy in Russia, but that was apparently good enough in the West as long as he was in opposition to the Kremlin, and perhaps sounds like a wet dream for a Brit like Mr Pomerantsev?

A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. ...

Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for President Vladimir Putin's attempts to restore a sense of national pride in Russia. Putin signed a decree conferring on Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work and personally visited the writer at his home on 12 June 2007 to present him with the award.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

In the last years of his long life, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn finally found a political system he could embrace: Vladimir Putin's Russia. Solzhenitsyn had long signaled in his writing and speeches that the Russia of his dreams was no clone of Western-style democracy. It was instead a place apart from and suspicious of the West, acutely aware of its destiny as a great power and unique culture and steeped in the values of the Russian Orthodox Church and Slavic nationalism.

"Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people," Solzhenitsyn told the German magazine Der Spiegel in a 2007 interview. "And he started to do what was possible, a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard-pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments."

http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/ (LOL)

[newthinking]

3. Just like any group people are different. This "opinion" is rascist.

I know many Slavic people from Russia and other neighboring countries and they all have different personalities just as we do. Some are straight-forward, others are not transparent; just as I find in the US.