Propaganda, at least in the old Soviet Union, was not an edited version of reality, but rather a crucial part of the endeavor to create a different reality. When we refute propaganda with facts and arguments, and even when we discuss its social function, we are inhabiting a certain mental world; we accept the constraints of observation and reason at the outset and seek to change our situation on the basis of what we think we can see and understand. But this is not the only possible psychic reality. In the Soviet Union, the assumption among many who believed in the promise of communism was that the future was as real if not more real than the present. Soviet propaganda was not a version of the world in which we live but rather a representation of the world to come. When we see Russia’s current propaganda in this way, we understand why its authors are utterly untroubled by what might appear to be factual errors and contradictions. Reducing the powers of the president, calling presidential elections, and restoring the principles of democracy are the opposite of what fascism would do. Putin and others blur the category of citizenship by speaking of Russian “compatriots,” a category that has no legal status. By compatriots Putin means people the Russian government claims as Russians—or who, according to the Kremlin, self-identify as Russians—and who therefore need its protection. This sort of argument, the need to protect the Volksgenossen, was used to significant effect by Adolf Hitler in 1938 in enunciating German claims to Austria and then to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. The language issue can be confusing. Ukrainian citizens are usually bilingual, in Ukrainian and Russian. Russians, like the targets of their propaganda, are rarely bilingual. So it has been all too easy to equate the capacity to speak Russian with a Russian identity that is in need of protection from Russia. Some citizens of Ukraine of course do see themselves as Russians—about 17 percent of the population—but this does not mean that they are subject to discrimination or indeed that they identify with the Russian state. Putin claimed that the Ukrainian state no longer exists as such, and therefore is not protected by treaties or law. This is quite a radical position, recalling the conclusions that Nazi lawyers drew about Poland after the German invasion of that country in 1939. The position of statelessness would seem to authorize any military action whatsoever without legal restrictions, since Ukraine is in this view a lawless zone.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 12:12:53 +0000
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