Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
(Dymer, Ukraine) Dmitry, computer programmer, recounts the brutal passage of the Russian army in early March in his village.
He remembers the dogs being shot, the bombardments, the troops passing in front of his house on their way to the front, shrapnel on the outside walls of the house, the ground shaking. In the evening, he, his wife and his two children made sure that no lights were turned on for fear of arousing the suspicions of the soldiers who lurked. His story is scary. I don’t know him, but I believe him right away and I am full of compassion.
Dmitry’s stepfather lives in Russia. And during the fighting, his wife calls her father. She explains to him, in despair, that the village has just been invaded by the Russian army, that it is raining shells, that she is terrified. Her father berates her and refuses to believe her. She insists. He gets angry, tells him that Ukraine deserves its fate: after all, it’s the fault of this country run by neo-Nazis, who didn’t want to know anything about the Kremlin. And Dmitry himself has relatives in Russia who are fully engaged in propaganda. Telephone communications were never cut between the two countries, but if at first Dmitry called his family to tell everything, he soon realized that it was no longer useful.
A young Crimean woman hasn’t spoken to her parents for months. “They are like zombies, they are all walking in the same direction, that of Putin. And these testimonies have been repeated to me constantly since my arrival in Ukraine.
Imagine the strength of this propaganda if even a father does not believe his beleaguered daughter. Imagine what the soldiers sent to the front, the population in general, believe.
Dmitry, Ukrainian whose village was partly destroyed by Russian forces
Since my arrival, I have been scrutinizing the Russian media. The same narrative always. The first channel tells about the war 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is always the Russians who are on the defensive, defending Russia. In fact, in this parallel world, Ukraine is not a nation, this is an invention of the Soviets. The dislocation of the USSR is a historical error to be corrected. The Ukrainian language, a dialect. We must save Luhansk and the Donbass from the hands of these fascists. There are TV shows, celebrities, print media and radio that repeat the same stories. The sober Tass, the eternal news agency, speaks of denazification, of a dangerous fascist state in the service of NATO.
After my visit to Boutcha, where I saw sectors completely gutted, I reread a dispatch from the Russian agency which described this suburb of Kyiv as “a masterfully orchestrated staging”. It is written that the whole affair is “a lie” concocted by NATO and the Ukrainian government. This reading is surreal, delirious.
And yet, by dint of hearing it, we believe in it and it works.
The media is a formidable weapon of war, even in 2022, and even if Russia’s huge population has access to the internet. Vladimir Putin’s government has no scruples. He and his men invest immense sums to create this parallel world. The news texts appear to have been written by Ministry of Defense scribes.
This discourse, this way of identifying a group, of qualifying it as fascist or Nazi on all the platforms so that in the end everyone believes it, it’s dangerous, it’s reminiscent of the prelude to the Rwandan genocide and the “free radio of the Thousand Hills”. Which makes my colleagues from the non-governmental organization International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR), who invited me here, say that the thesis of genocide cannot be ruled out.
And this feeling, that of being considered a country of plague victims, feeds a deep anger. And this anger manifests itself towards not only the Russian army and Vladimir Putin, but also the Russian population. No leniency.
Since 2014, since the advent of a nationalist government, since Russia annexed Crimea and waged war in the Donbass, they consider the Russians generally complicit because they let it happen.
I call Sergei Parkhomenko, an old dissident Russian friend exiled in Greece, to try to understand this hatred that is rising on both sides of the border, fed by a propaganda poutine.
Yes, he says, a majority of Russians revel in this parallel world because accepting these horrors, perpetrated by their own government, is too painful. The official discourse is so made that one doubts everything. “Rising prices, McDonald’s leaving, the ruble falling? It’s the fault of the Americans, NATO and those damn fascist Ukrainians. We are victims, responsible for nothing. And suddenly, nothing is really true anymore and everything becomes possible. »