There was Chechnya. Syria. Crimea. The world let it happen. There were the poisoned dissidents. Journalists murdered. The lead, more and more crushing, on Russia. Always, the world let it happen.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Here it is now in full light. Unavoidable. Unquestionable. The total and totalitarian drift of Vladimir Putin. This time, it was impossible to look away.
For six weeks, Russian tanks have been rolling over a sovereign nation in the heart of Europe. Putin’s troops execute men, rape women, sow chaos, drive millions of Ukrainians into exile.
And then there is this turning point. Mass graves. The bodies lying in the streets of Boutcha. Ultimate proof of Putin’s murderous madness.
Of course, the Kremlin denies the obvious. It cries hoax and serves us propaganda worthy of the Cold War era. But in fact, Russian disinformation has never ceased.
Once again, Moscow offers us a parallel reality, where the invader becomes the liberator and the Ukrainians are Nazis. It’s Putin’s upside down world, where the Syrian opposition is bombing itself and where the White Helmets, those Syrian rescuers who search the rubble for survivors, are al-Qaeda terrorists…
The worst thing is that after all these years, there are still people who believe it – and not only in Russia. There are still people who deny the reality of the massacres. In the face of the obvious, in the face of the unnameable, there is something to temporize, to relativize, to sow doubt.
During the Cold War era, the Soviets had a term for left-wing Westerners who naively defended the USSR: useful idiots.
These idiots are still with us. But by one of these strange reversals of which history has the secret, we now find them especially on the right.
For several years now, they have been the spokespersons of the Kremlin, captivated by the strong man of Moscow. With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, it must be said, most of them are still a little embarrassed. Too small.
There is Donald Trump, of course, for whom the invasion of Ukraine is “genius”. There is Steve Bannon, his former strategist, who is delighted that Putin is an “anti-woke”.
There’s Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who wondered why, on the eve of the invasion, he should have hated the ruler of the Kremlin. “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Does he make fentanyl? Does he eat dogs? »
Putin does none of that, it’s true: he just assassinates his opponents and leads bloody wars. Tucker Carlson knows this very well. He’s playing dumb. And in this role, he surpasses himself.
On the air, the host-star wonders about the presence of biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. He denounces the sanctions against the oligarchs.
Ah, sure, he’ll tell you he’s just asking questions…
The Kremlin, on the other hand, finds it does its job so well that, in a memo dated March 3, it urged Russian media to “use as much as possible of broadcast segments from the popular Fox News host, Tucker-Carlson”.
In the ranks of Russia’s propaganda war, seldom has there been more usefulness. Or dumber, depending.
Quebec has no shortage of admirers of Putin’s Russia. Heard on Radio X last week: “The Russians are rough. […] They are not woke. Are zero wokes. They’re not memounes like the rest of us. It’s real real tough! »
This was before the discovery of the Boutcha mass graves, but after five weeks of war in Ukraine. As if the words had no meaning, no consequences.
There are also all those apologists who make excuses for Putin. It’s the West’s fault! He had better not humiliate him… It’s NATO’s fault! She had better not try to annex Ukraine! As if the truth no longer mattered.
And then there are those who seem more quick to resent the vodka boycotters than the war itself. They are alarmed by rampant Russophobia. As if denouncing Putin was racism.
In talker, a far-right French magazine, Jérôme Blanchet-Gravel expressed concern on March 21 about “warmongers ready to trigger a new world conflict”.
The Quebec essayist left his post as a columnist for the Russian agency Sputnik on the first day of the war in Ukraine. But he always seems to believe himself on the payroll of this media entirely financed by the Russian state.
In talker, he mocks people who display yellow and blue as a sign of solidarity on their social networks, this “new outpouring of virtue in the colors of a Ukraine that did not interest anyone before the Russian invasion”.
Then, this: “With this new wave of ostentatious virtue comes all the tools of censorship and thought framing that have sprung up in the woke universe. »
And There you go. The bad wokes. We come back to it again.
It’s all into the Kremlin’s game. It is the fruit of a long-standing strategy. In the culture wars that are tearing the West apart, Russia has chosen its side. It spares no effort to seduce a certain right, by displaying itself as the anti-woke refuge of the planet.
In 2021, the editor of RT, another Kremlin propaganda outlet, bragged about helping American families move to Russia. These families were supposedly fleeing the United States…because of the woke theories that were taught to their children in class!
Vladimir Putin himself recently compared the fate of Russia, criticized by the West, to that of JK Rowling, “canceled” because of her views on transgender people.
Think about it for a moment: a bloodthirsty tyrant likened himself to the author of Harry Potter as his troops pounded cities and attempted to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government.
We swim in full absurdistan.
On the left too, we relativize. After my column on the Boutcha massacre on Monday, someone wrote to me: yes, but the Palestinians? Yes, but Syria?
Hey, it’s not a contest.
First, we covered these conflicts extensively, The Press as elsewhere. But above all: not all the corpses have yet been picked up from the streets of Boutcha. Right now, people are starving in Mariupol. Mothers write numbers to call on the skin of their babies, in case they die in their flight.
It’s happening now. It is necessary to talk about it. Without relativizing. Without finding excuses. Without denying.