The Ministry of Truth: The dystopian post-modern hell of Russian propaganda
Anthony Burgess once called 1984 “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears” Newspeak, Thought Police, the Ministry of Truth, and that 2+2=5. Even the word Orwellian became a synonym of everything Orwell loathed. When the hosts of InfoWars a website that puts out absurd conspiracy theories cite Orwell, we realise that Doublethink is real.
“1984” was the most popular fiction download in Russia this year on the Russian online bookseller LitRes. Which shows it has lost none of its relevance. Russian propaganda has declared truth as its mortal enemy, as a fascist state cannot allow that people tell the truth.
Jon Kimche described Orwell as a “gut socialist, very decent but not attuned, I would say, to complicated political and military situations who believed that nothing else can save us from the misery of the present and the nightmare of the future” should socialism fail to persuade ordinary Britons, then this discontent would be surely exploited by someone like Hitler.
“It smells of crankishness, machine worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.” (see Ministry of Truth, Lynskey, page 8-9)
The truth is the enemy of every authoritarian regime.
Orwell let us know that he must warn us of his biases. “But I have tried to tell the truth, as I believe no lie no matter how beautiful and convenient it is can have any true value.”
“If you pretend that fascism is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon” George Orwell on fascism 1936
Russian propaganda plays with a fundamental truth about human nature: Nearly all human beings have an extremely intermittent grasp of reality.
Only those things that illustrate their own interests and ideas are real to them; other things which are, in fact, equally real, appear to most humans as abstractions. This is very horrifying when we think about it in more detail.
However, the truth matters especially when it is an inconvenient truth. Of course, one cannot always get the objective truth, but at least one needs to acknowledge that it exists. Lies will eventually backfire, but sadly, the lie has made it 3 times around the world long before the truth has its pants on. Our current political discourse in the US and other democracies show this theory put into practice on a daily basis sadly.
Giuseppe Mazzini, a famous Italian revolutionary, described Marx as
"a destructive spirit whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind" and declared that "despite the communist egalitarianism which [Marx] preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party, admittedly he does everything himself but he is also the only one to give orders and he tolerates no opposition.”
Orwell came into contact with communism up close during the Spanish Civil War.The appeal of communism is much more treacherous as it sets out with much nobler aims.
Both ideologies head towards the same totalitarian destination, but communism starts with the more noble idea to not elevate ones own nation above all else as fascism does, but to elevate the worker class above all else.
“Communism is a form of Socialism that makes mental honesty impossible.” George Orwell
The NKVD has perfected telling lies into a profession. A trait that remarkably stays with the current successor of this organisation which is the FSB.
The literature of communism is nothing more than a mechanism for Orwell to explain away mistakes.
Orwell said that this kind of ideology has a massive appeal for any writer under the age of 40, he found many that would be willing to defend the atrocities of the Soviet Union and tolerate them without second thoughts.
In general communism is another failed Utopia of the 20th century, as perfection can never be achieved.
Whoever strives for perfection reveals his own emptiness. The individual in this ideology is nothing, and the party/state is everything.
Now, let us connect this introduction to the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union and the propaganda machine of the Russian Federation.
The Soviet Union propagated a so-called “Alternate reality propaganda”
Soviet Propaganda would tell you one thousand times that the sky is green, not blue, until you finally believed them. If you didn’t believe them at some point, you would either be beaten into submission or taken care of in another way. A good portion of the population couldn’t be aligned with these ideas.
They were then subjected to forced labor, deported or killed by the millions during Stalin’s “Great Purge” in the 1930s
The Russia Federation has perfected this propaganda machine, creating something called: “Manipulation of reality propaganda”
This works sort of like this: You say you really despise Tesla, but you really love Audi. Instead of telling you that Audi is a horrible brand, I will agree with you that Audi is not a good car.
Then, I bombard you subtly with images of a Tesla and constantly show them in news programs and fake articles. I will tell you how good Teslas are, until you start to believe they aren’t that bad and quite start to like them over time.
This propaganda follows a simple but highly effective playbook:
1) It is questioning truth itself. It says that such a thing doesn’t exist. Everything has two sides. Nothing is real, and there is no right or wrong.
2) It gets rid of consistency and sends out mixed messages until its consumers get lost in the sheer complexity of information that is thrown at them.
3) It has a priority on volume and quantity. The goal is to flood the information space with as many things as possible. It tries to find out what sticks by the sheer volume of the ideas that are floated.
4) It takes what is already interesting for you, and then it expands from there to get you interested in the topics the makers of the propaganda want you to be interested in.
5) It works with the concept of: “Learned helplessness. Here are some examples for this: “The sanctions do not work” “Russia won already” “It is useless to protest, it won’t work the state is too strong” “Don’t help Ukraine it will collapse” “Don’t send more aid the winner is already decided” “Russia cannot be defeated it is too strong and powerful” “vaccines don’t work”
The goal behind all that is to take divisions that are already there and make them even stronger.
Then, they aim to amplify these divides and make them much bigger than they are. In the US, this kind of propaganda is used to create a disconnect between how corrupt some people of the GOP are. Instead, the info campaign is targeted at how inflation has risen due to whatever Biden has potentially done. This must not even be true. All it needs to have been just some flicker of truth in it.
That is already more than enough to play with how the human mind operates and how you can weaponize humans for your own goals.
The rest of the entire thing can be literally made up. Scary, isn’t it?
A good example is to take the quote by Reznikov “Ukraine is de-facto in NATO” and then you create the ludicrous idea that Russia is fighting NATO on the ground.
There is some truth to all of this. The rest can be whatever you want it to be, and it will work easily on 20 percent or more of the entire world population no matter how well educated they may be.
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” George Orwell 1984
Russia is flooding the information space for their upcoming mobilisation
The Russian Federation currently spreads the following information: “All smartphones on the territory of the Russian Federation can hypothetically be turned off by Apple and Google.”
Russia is flooding the information space. This is done to make Russian people believe that this cellular network failure is an attack from the outside . Which is technically possible and “holds some truth”, but the rest is made up to create confusion.
Russia will close the border and wants to prevent the population from sending more embarrassing videos to the world in the next round of mobilization.
The digital iron curtain will fall over Russia, and the population will be digitally coded by the Russian government. (Welcome to 1984)
Red: Confined to home
Yellow: Confined to region
Green: Confined to country.
Red will then turn to yellow during work hours.
Conclusion
Russian propaganda has actively supported dehumanization for centuries. Communism, Stalin, the Gulag, was an application of Marxism. Leninism. It was also an extension of Russian political culture.
For all Russian governments, past, present, and very probably future; individuals do not exist. The population is a pawn.
They are allowed to exist to serve the cartel in power, and that cartel has a right to be the judge of life and death in this system.
Churchill once called Russia “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”
Churchill was well aware of what the future with the Stalinist Soviets will hold in store. We have the historical task to finally make an end with this system of propaganda, lies, and atrocities. The main responsibility is on Russians themselves to make Putinism fall they need to wake up and fight back.
The Stalins and Putins will come and go, but the Russian people will always be there, and this may be their last chance to escape from a bleak future under Russian Z-fascism. I have the fear that they will not take that chance just as they let all those chances in the past just pass them by.
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth” Albert Einstein
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Russiae Imperium delendum est. Chris Snow
Further reading:
Sources
Dorian Lynskey: The ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (hard copy)
Links to the digital Iron Curtain and the pronounced mobile phone failures.
