A Russian reporter
wandered about talking to fellow Russians about the thingy. About half of them did not want to talk. The ones that did, though, it will hurt your head to read about it. The country seems to be full of befuddled MRGAts who refer to their czar as "Uncle Vova".
I’d heard that word already, from my mother. On the third day of the war, I went over to her house and she suddenly started talking about targeted strikes and “where were we looking for the past eight years.” I started telling her about the bombings, about a girl I knew in Kharkiv who’d called me, terrified, during a break in the shelling. I explained that there was a real war going on and that I didn’t understand how people refused to see this monstrous thing. My mother sat there stupefied, staring down at the floor.
“People are tired of negativity,” she sighed.
That phrase explained something. In the past 20 years, every time I’ve happened to overhear what’s being said on television, they were frightening people with something: migrants, “Gayropa,” Banderites — the main thing is that these people are just “others.” I suppose that the audience itself had wanted this. Having something specific to fear was more manageable than the free-floating terror of the unknown that people were forced to live with during the 1990s.
This bit got my attention. Pound the people with relentless ugly, wear them down with it, and you can get (most of) them into a space where they can be easily manipulated. I cannot imagine anywhere else where this might have been tried …
www.aljazeera.com
