Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: I fascisti immaginari di Kiev

Peter Pomerantsev è un produttore della tv britannica. E' nato in 
Ucraina. Una trad. it. dell'articolo che presento si legge (con il 
titolo del subject) sull'ultimo numero di "Internazionale".
 
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n12/peter-pomerantsev/diary
 
 
Vol. 36 No. 12 · 19 June 2014
pages 42-43
 
Diary
 
Peter Pomerantsev
 
When Putin’s holy war began Alexey checked himself into a psychiatric 
ward. He had come back to Russia in 2012 after working as a journalist 
in London, where we met (I had just moved to London after a decade in 
Moscow). The protests against Putin were cresting, and change seemed 
imminent. ‘London is boring, everything has already happened here,’ 
Alexey said. ‘Russia is extreme but exciting. Real history is being made 
now.’ He got a job at RIA Novosti, the state-owned news agency and 
beacon of Medvedev’s media ‘reforms’, designed to prove that the Kremlin 
could be objective and transparent when it wanted to be. RIA’s reporting 
was fair, its live streams of crooked trials against dissidents were a 
must-see. Alexey edited Ino.Smi, an online site that translates the best 
writing on Russia from around the world, including the most critical 
things about Putin you could find. But with Putin’s return to the 
presidency the Kremlin’s approach to information changed.
 
RIA Novosti was killed off and merged into Russia Today. Alexey’s new 
boss was Dmitry Kiselev, one-time mouthpiece of perestroika who is now 
the mouthpiece of Holy Russia, using his primetime shows to call for the 
burning of homosexuals’ body parts (so they don’t infect potential organ 
recipients with gay DNA). ‘My approach is somewhat theatrical,’ he told 
Alexey and other staff on his first day, ‘but I stand by every word.’ 
RIA began to change. The live streams of trials stopped. Hope for a 
rebellion against the new masters faded when a poll inside the 
organisation showed that some two-thirds of employees didn’t care what 
ideology prevailed: it was just a job. ‘At Moscow State Journalism 
School they have people like Deputy Minister of Communications Volin 
telling students that journalism is basically a propaganda tool,’ Alexey 
says. ‘So many young hacks just shrug and accept it.’ (In a speech in 
2013 Volin had said that students should be given ‘a clear understanding 
that they are going to work for the Boss, and the Boss will tell them 
what to write, what not to write and how this or that thing should be 
written, and the Boss has the right to do it, because he pays them.’)
 
Kiselev would wear orange trousers and bright green socks to work. His 
shows warned that paedophiles were taking over the EU; that it’s normal 
in Sweden for nine-year-olds to have sex but by 12 they are impotent. 
Alexey began to have trouble sleeping. He drank more. The people who 
worked for him wanted to know what the future held but he had no answer. 
He started having panic attacks on his way to the office. He drank to 
get over them, which didn’t help. Then he added antidepressants. One 
night he went on a booze-pill binge and woke up blue and mumbling in 
hospital. He booked himself into a psychiatric treatment-and-research 
department in the north of Moscow.
 
I realised Alexey was in a hospital ward when I saw the photos he was 
posting on Facebook: ‘Welcome to my new home,’ he joked. It seemed 
fitting that my Facebook feed was filling up with posts from a mental 
institution. As the conflict over Ukraine intensified my social media 
feeds became more and more unsettling. Acquaintances from Moscow, the 
‘creatives’ who make up the semi-mythical Russian middle class – that 
normally apolitical but vaguely anti-Putin iPhone crowd who’d joined the 
protests in 2011 and 2012 – were suddenly frothing with patriotic 
passion. I imagined myself in some downmarket horror movie where you 
wake to find your neighbours are vampires, with little ultra-patriotic 
bite marks on their necks.
 
The early symptoms often took the form of harmless scepticism about the 
protests in Ukraine and whether they were genuine. ‘Who is behind the 
Maidan?’ people would write, or they’d say: ‘Those poor Ukrainians are 
being taken for a ride.’ Soon the conspiracy-mongering got worse. ‘It’s 
clear the West is behind all these events,’ Eduard Boyakov, the bohemian 
head of Russia’s most avant-garde theatre festival, wrote. ‘Absolutely 
obvious.’ I didn’t pay much attention at first. A conspiratorial 
mind-set is the default of Putinism, inherited from the late Soviet 
period: ‘Perestroika came much too late,’ Alexander Yakovlev, one of 
Gorbachev’s mentors, remembered. ‘The years of social stagnation almost 
killed social idealism … sowing cynicism, disbelief and social 
lassitude.’ In the 1990s this attitude was strengthened by reforms that 
weren’t reforms, and kept going by the creation of puppet political 
parties and fake civil society bodies which no one takes at face value.
 
Chicago University Press
The Kremlin has, however, become adept at turning Russian scepticism 
towards their rulers to its own advantage, actively promoting a 
conspiracy-driven view of everything that happens in the world. Once you 
stop trusting your own institutions you’re easily convinced that 
everything, everywhere is a sham and that events are directed by a 
hidden hand. Russian TV is full of chat shows about Scientologists in 
cahoots with Greek-Catholics and Masons to take over the Russian 
near-abroad, or Swedes who want to avenge their defeat at the hands of 
Peter the Great (that pearl came from Kiselev). It’s hard to find anyone 
who takes this stuff literally, but it helps to create a climate in 
which conspiracy becomes the norm. The Ukrainian crisis has also 
triggered other, far less savoury associations. At one point my wife 
clicked on a series of Facebook posts by an old (Russian) schoolmate 
showing pictures of a blood-splattered American eagle with the tag: ‘The 
Americans first killed the Red Indians – now they’re interested in 
Ukraine.’ This was fairly standard, but a little later Mr Burns from The 
Simpsons morphed into Lord Rothschild. The line read: ‘You know who is 
behind it all.’
 
The Kremlin celebrated the annexation of Crimea with fireworks – and the 
fervour on my Facebook feed grew. Eduard Limonov, a great writer who in 
the 1970s wrote frankly of his homosexual experiences and went on to 
become a hard-core anti-Putin revolutionary, was now encouraging Putin 
to expand the invasion and ‘harden the metal while it is still hot’. Now 
was the moment for Moscow’s Pounds and Marinettis to emerge as 
cheerleaders of the new imperialism. Former cultural heroes – mine 
anyhow – signed a public letter of support for Crimean ‘reunification’. 
‘This guy came from the Culture Ministry and said if I didn’t sign I’d 
lose my band,’ one musician explained. ‘What could I do?’
 
Post-annexation, as the ground was being laid for a potential military 
push into east Ukraine, the emphasis shifted away from conspiracy and 
fervour towards the humiliation of the enemy. ‘Ukrainians don’t really 
exist, they’re not a real nation,’ people wrote. It was easy for the 
Kremlin to tap the rich tradition of Russian chauvinism where Ukraine – 
‘Little Russia’ – is concerned. It can take patronising forms, as in 
Ivan Bunin’s ‘Little Russia has no history … it has only songs, legends, 
it is somehow outside of time’; or it can be more insulting, as in 
Joseph Brodsky’s (unpublished but publicly performed) poem about foolish 
‘hohli’ – the pejorative term for Ukrainians – and their ‘gibberish’ 
national poetry. But the language and imagery were more sombre in 
internet gifs and jokes. Ukrainians were portrayed as prostitutes, 
whoring themselves to the Kremlin or the EU. This seemed a deliberate 
flip on the cliché of Kiev as ‘the mother of Russian cities’: in order 
to break the deep emotional bond with Kiev, the mother had to be 
debased. When I looked for the social-media roots of this mother/whore 
configuration I found it was regularly reinforced by Kremlin spin 
doctors such as Konstantin Rykov. Rykov also liked to refer to 
Ukrainians who had been on the Maidan as Mai-Downs (as in Down’s 
syndrome), hammering home the idea of Ukrainians as Untermenschen. 
Rykov, who once produced the Russian version of Pop Idol, is one of the 
many political technologists working the internet. A common myth about 
social media is that it’s a priori a tool of liberation, taking 
publishing out of the hands of power. But Facebook and Twitter are a 
perfect vehicle for postmodern authoritarian regimes that focus on 
opposition narratives instead of simply suppressing them. You can switch 
off the TV, but you can’t stop a political technologist getting inside 
social media and generating memes from within.
 
Then came the fire in Odessa, where more than forty pro-Russian 
separatists were killed after being attacked by a crowd of 
pro-Ukrainians. Everyone was sharing photos of charred bodies, limbs 
suspended in mid-motion, hands trying to cover burned-off faces. A woman 
who looked pregnant lay asphyxiated on a desk, her belly hanging loose 
(‘her child will never be born,’ someone wrote, but it turned out that 
she was merely overweight). Among the colour shots of charred bodies in 
Odessa there were black and white photos of naked, murdered and wounded 
women and children, slaughtered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943 
in Volhyn, as if the massacre constituted an eternal judgment on the 
Ukrainian character. From Volhyn to Odessa. The term ‘Euro-Auschwitz’ 
began to gain currency. ‘As the building burned, fascists beat the 
survivors … There will be a terrible rise in anti-Semitism … Let’s not 
pretend hundreds of angry people carrying bats are anything but 
fascists,’ the film director Alexey German Junior said. German, like 
many others, failed to mention the many Ukrainians who also helped 
separatists get away from the fire, or that the separatists had shot and 
killed people taking part in a pro-Ukrainian march. The point isn’t so 
much the truth of what happened (the inquiry into the fire is ongoing: I 
have no evidence and nor does anyone else online) as the eagerness with 
which the event was woven into the Kremlin narrative, as if it came as a 
relief to throw up one’s hands and agree that the Ukrainians were 
archetypally evil, and it was fine to invade their country.
 
Conversation between Muscovites and friends in Kiev became difficult.
 
‘Are you safe from the fascists?’ the Russians would ask.
 
‘What fascists?’ the Kiev residents asked.
 
‘Those fascists,’ their friends replied.
 
‘What fascists?’
 
In 1996, when Yeltsin’s spin doctors helped him win re-election by 
conjuring fears of a fascist menace, the propaganda was vague, playing 
on fuzzy fears. Now it was alleging specific facts. What will happen 
when people begin to realise it isn’t true? When they visit relatives in 
Kiev and see that Russian speakers aren’t at risk, that everyone is 
speaking Russian; that, yes, there are some alarming right-wingers 
(polling currently at around 2 per cent), but the country hasn’t been 
taken over by a fascist junta?
 
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In a more open political system when the general public is forced to 
swallow a lie in order to justify a war, one can grope towards recovery 
by electing a new president, one who opposed the lie, but even then it 
takes time. What do you do when you can’t get rid of the liars? Will the 
anger quietly fade away? Ever since the Kremlin recognised the Ukrainian 
elections the rants on social media have been dwindling: it’s as if 
someone somewhere had turned off a tap. My Moscow friends are posting 
cats and culture again. The default mode – cynical, worldly-wise – is 
back: ‘Ha, the Ukrainians got rid of one oligarch in order to elect 
another!’ Or: ‘Yanukovych and Poroshenko even look the same!’ The snide 
tone came as a relief – until I received a message from my cousin in New 
Jersey.
 
‘Oh my God’, she wrote, ‘fascists have taken over Kiev!’
 
This was new. My cousin never mentions politics. Like me, she is from a 
Russian-speaking Jewish family who left the Ukrainian SSR in the late 
1970s, but I’ve never known her give a thought to the old country until 
now. I told her she was misinformed. A few days later she wrote again, 
this time about attacks on synagogues in Ukraine. I told her local 
rabbis denied it. I was troubled: my cousin, or someone near her, seemed 
to be trawling for information which proved that Ukrainians were Nazis. 
I asked where she was getting her information. She said it came through 
the Russian émigré grapevine on the East Coast, where they have their 
own radio and TV stations. Not long afterwards, another friend whose 
family is in Eastern Europe posted the assertion that ‘33 per cent of 
the Maidan are Nazis.’
 
Could all this, I wondered, have something to do with a Jewish émigré 
memory of Ukraine? For those of us who grew up hearing stories of 
pogroms, Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Semitism are almost 
indissociable. My grandmother used to tell stories her mother had told 
her about how, during the Civil War, Jewish children would run through 
Ukrainian towns shouting: ‘Er Kommt! Er Kommt!’ ‘Er’ referred to the 
image of Jesus on the crosses carried by the pogrom gangs. In today’s 
Ukraine, Jews and Ukrainians have pretty much made peace (even Jews and 
right-wing nationalists pay lip-service to getting along). But in the 
diaspora old fears still resonate.
 
When she wasn’t repeating news from Brighton Beach my New Jersey cousin 
was sending me links to the Guardian. Comment is Free has become well 
known for its references to the Ukrainian fascist takeover. My Kiev 
friends began to message me, looking for an explanation: ‘Is Seumas 
Milne in the pay of the Kremlin?’ they would ask. Probably not, I said. 
‘It all fits into a larger pattern of English racism towards Eastern 
Europeans,’ Oksana Forostyna, executive editor of the Ukrainian cultural 
magazine Krytyka, told me. She too spoke of the Ukrainians as ‘the new 
Untermenschen who get called whores and fascists. All those English 
jokes and novels about Ukrainian sluts; the weird fixation you had 
during Euro 2012 that Ukraine was full of neo-Nazi hooligans – there was 
even a BBC documentary warning football fans not to come – when in truth 
there are fewer racist attacks in Ukraine than in Britain … Now Putin 
can play on those prejudices.’
 
This strange complicity with the Kremlin’s cause was the theme of a 
lecture I gave to students in Lviv in the midst of the crisis, with 
Russian troops massed on the border and the threat of outright invasion 
very real. ‘Do many believe the English editorials about Ukrainian 
fascists?’ the students asked. I said I thought outright lies were 
eventually disproved but prejudicial memes were tougher. We looked at 
how disillusionment with the EU was used to clobber Ukraine’s European 
aspirations. ‘To avoid facing up to its own inexorable decline, the 
postmodern EU … has plunged ahead with a radically anti-Russian 
geopolitical and ideological agenda based on left-wing fantasies about 
resurgent nationalism in Moscow,’ John Laughland wrote in the Spectator 
(the magazine didn’t mention that Laughland’s think-tank was set up by 
Kremlin-connected officials). We went over texts by former British 
ambassadors such as Tony Brenton who lean towards a vision of the world 
which is forever Yalta, and where London and Moscow divide up Central 
Europe. ‘It is a fond delusion,’ Brenton wrote in the Financial Times, 
‘that big states no longer decide the destinies of small states in this 
way.’ Whichever narrative path we took, it seemed to lead somewhere bad 
for the Ukrainian students.
 
After the lecture I walked through Lviv. It is a beautiful city, still 
just this side of being ruined by tourism, and before I knew it I was 
lost in a labyrinth of cobblestones, arches, alleys and spires. It was 
late – and dark – and I had no idea where my hotel was. Ahead of me were 
some young men. I started to approach them to ask the way in Russian – I 
don’t know Ukrainian. But as I opened my mouth to speak I stopped. 
Wasn’t Lviv, I suddenly thought to myself with alarm, the place where 
some 30 per cent had voted for the right-nationalist Svoboda party in 
the last parliamentary elections? Sure, some might say this was a 
protest vote, or even that Yanukovych was boosting Svoboda to make 
himself look more of a centrist by contrast, but people had still voted 
for them. And hadn’t I seen a photograph somewhere of two of their MPs, 
red-faced and drunk, holding up cloakroom numbers which signified 
Hitler’s birthday? And what about all those stories I’d seen online 
about Russian speakers being abused, even beaten for speaking their 
native language?
 
Chicago University Press
Turning back would have looked odd, so I tried to walk briskly and give 
the young men a wide berth, but as I drew closer, I realised they were 
speaking Russian themselves. I relaxed and asked the way. As I walked 
back to the hotel I noticed most of the people who were still out were 
speaking Russian. I too had fallen prey to Kremlin propaganda. I 
wondered what other propaganda odds and ends I’d internalised – 
propaganda of any kind, on behalf of any cause – without noticing.
 
‘The only thing to do if you want to stay sane in this war is quit 
social media,’ Alexey said when I Skyped him. He was out of the 
psychiatric ward and now felt it was the sanest place in Moscow: ‘I met 
some really interesting people. There was a physics professor. A guy who 
had snorted cocaine for 66 days straight and liked to show off the hole 
in his nose. We just talked about our health. Nothing about politics.’ 
But after three weeks in the ward he’d felt no better. ‘All they can 
treat there is schizophrenia. They kept asking whether I heard voices. 
When I said I didn’t the doctor lost interest and went off to find a 
patient who did.’ He quit his job at RIA/Russia Today and moved out to 
the country, to a small dacha 20 kilometres from Moscow; he cycles, 
barbecues, sunbathes and gardens. ‘I switched Twitter on the other week 
and saw that the dissident journalist Masha Baronova was in Donetsk,’ he 
told me. ‘There was a shower of abuse from Russians calling her a 
traitor. And then the Ukrainians went after her, calling her a 
provocateur. Christ. The Ukrainians are at it too now.’ Alexey is not 
rushing back to broadcasting. He will stay at the dacha until the end of 
summer. Maybe things will be better when the hot months are over. He 
says he doesn’t regret returning to Russia in 2012, though it turned out 
a little more stressful than he’d imagined.
-- 
Namib
---
Cesó todo, y déjeme (Juan de la Cruz)
 
--- news://
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On Sunday, June 29, 2014 12:37:21 PM UTC+2, Namib wrote:
 
E' un po' lungo ma interessante. Ero al corrente di come l'ambizioso progetto di Russia Today e' stato trasformato in un megafono del Cremlino. Lo stesso succede in Cina. Il meccansismo di proiezione di massa e' ben noto: al 'nemico' viene attribuito l'odio che si prova per esso.
 
Ancor oggi a Sarajevo i Serbi fanno lo stesso e persino Kusturica! E da noi la gente che ha perso i duci, si aggrega, fiera di poter odiare, proprio nel momento in cui la EU inizia a spiegare le ali.
 
Si noti che l'Incitamento all'odio e' un delitto per il Trattato di Lisbona: perche' l'Italia non lo recepisce separatamente dalla legge Mancino? Bisognera' andare al Tribunale Europeo dei Diritti umani per finalmente vederlo riconosciuto?


Ho visto 5 giornate di Agosto
Gran film ci hanno speso i soldi in bombardamenti elicotteri abbattuti e le solite storielle del giornalista yankke che filma solo e unicamente la verita.
Dall'Irak dove ha fatto l'eroe tra le bestie, bevendo come una bestia.
 
Questi stereotipi dovreste revisionarli fan proprio cagare.
 
Cosi'vedi la storia di Ankazia rovesciata, i Russi che invadono la Georgia, sparano ai civili e il glorioso Presidente Georgiano che salva il mondo ritirandosi, non hanno nemmeno riprodotto la cravatta tra i denti che e' il suo marchio.
 
Penso che qualche bovaro obeso possa anche bersela sta sola.
 
Che ci riescano due interdetti come voi due e' proprio da escludere.

 
Non ultima la responsabilita' di Amaryllide, che sottoscrivendo la maskirova di Mosca ha dato fiato a Crei e altri nazi con nick strani, che fino adesso non si erano mai visti su IPI.
 
La maskirova russa ha fatto altrettanto danno se non di piu' di una di quelle luride unita' mercenarie cecene che erano state pagate da Mosca per fare il rastrellamento antipartigiani.
 
Nell'Est Ucraina stanno facendo lo stesso, e la propaganda di Mosca e' responsabile dell'esodo di famiglie prorusse, allorche' non erano mai state disturbate prima.
 
Ne uccide piu' la parola che la spada. Sia detto di amaryllide, e dei Frontebassa e e dei Pocaluce che ne hanno seguito il corteo di menzogne, diffuso ad arte dagli invasori.

 Che ci riescano due interdetti come voi due e' proprio da escludere.
 
Chissà in italiano che cazzo significa questo demente balbettio? Che sia un'antica formula apotropaica scritta in un ignoto e scomparso idioma barbaro?

 Chissà in italiano che cazzo significa questo demente balbettio? Che sia un'antica formula apotropaica scritta in un ignoto e scomparso idioma barbaro?
 
 
Dai fronte bassa, si e' visto che hai poca pratica coi valori italiani, adesso capiamo che non riesci a leggerlo.
 
Se vuoi ti do lezioni, tipo quelle dei ripetenti.
 
Dillo al tuo principale, non sei proprio tagliato a fare il troll su un NG sgamato come questo.
Tu devi limitarti a qualche pippa su irrenzi e la psicologia marxista.
 
Guardati il film va, ti fara' piacere, almeno e' un tentativo di spin sensato anche se pacchiano.

 qualche pippa
 
Finalmente un argomento su cui puoi avere delle competenze :)
-- 
Namib
---
Ces� todo, y d�jeme (Juan de la Cruz)


 
 
Guarda ti sta tanto bene stampato in fronte che lo uso.
E' vietato?
 
 
Al fine di toglierti da quell' angolo da ignorante in cui ti sei cacciato, posto questo filmato.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kjFJzngWyA#t=366
 
 
Che buon pro ti faccia.