What should the commissars of their own security do when they run out of enemies
Andrey Norkin became sad: for two weeks now the list of foreign agents has not been replenished with new names. The situation is almost critical. Without a fresh influx of enemies, life on TV loses its burning meaning. Of course, the country has so many external opponents that it is possible to stomp on them for days. But to complete the picture, a lukewarm inner enemy is also needed. At his mention, even the sluggish Norkin's eye lights up. And so it doesn't light up. He fiddles with some papers, bewilderedly repeating the hackneyed maxim: «Maxim left, and to hell with him.»
Indeed, a problem of problems. What to do when the enemies run out? Here the Russian Foreign Ministry, this inexhaustible source of wisdom, will become sad — the usual course of things has been violated. Usually, after all, as it happens: a source will come out with a statement like: the blame for everything falls on the United States, Europe, the collective West, further down the list — and the soul becomes somehow calmer. The mechanism for the distribution of guilt in our country is one of the most reliable.
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Of course, we will not be left without enemies. They weren't attacked. At worst, there is a story that is already indistinguishable from the current collection of compromising evidence. In the arena — the master of the «Great Game» Vyacheslav Nikonov, the sudden star of Channel One. We carefully follow the hand. Celebrating the anniversary of the periodic table in the political program, the star asks questions:
why did Dmitry Ivanovich not become a Nobel Prize winner? And he answers it himself: because Mendeleev was a real patriot of Russia.
Nikonov even blushed from the depth of personal insight.
While his interlocutors froze in admiration, it is worth telling the well-known. Mendeleev was a patriot, no doubt about it. However, it was the Nobel Committee that really wanted to award the outstanding scientist a prize (he was nominated three times by foreign academicians), but the native Russian Academy of Sciences interfered.
She did not like Mendeleev so much that she did not even deign to accept Dmitry Ivanovich into her ranks. However, now, when there is a big game, who cares about the truth?
At the beginning of March, one cannot do without the leader of the peoples. The day of his death passed to the accompaniment of collective lamentation on the theme: «70 years without Stalin.» There was a sensation on the horizon. The main television channel of the country materialized Bortko, who said in a tragic voice: Stalin was killed.
Love for Bulgakov is wonderfully combined with love for Stalin in the director's body. But Bulgakov is now in the shade, and Iosif Vissarionovich is always alive.
Propaganda in the format of a big game has one goal — mind control. The end, as the Jesuits believed, justifies the means. One expert tells particularly impressionable minds that Britain is near starvation — protein is eaten in London restaurants. The other one will start talking about the President of Moldova, «the incompetent lesbian Sandu» with skill. The third, or rather the third, Dana Borisova, will tell how she personally saw Zelensky sitting in front of a whole bucket of cocaine at a party. Everything is possible, nothing to be ashamed of.
Whenever I try to analyze the TV and its surroundings, I feel like an impostor. Today, this should not be done by journalists, but by psychiatrists.
At the beginning of the last century, after enormous social and political upheavals, the term «psychic epidemic» arose. It was in them, in turmoil, that the Russian psychiatrist Bekhterev looked for the origins of mass pathologies fraught with overcrowded hospitals and a record number of suicides. It is possible that in another hundred years a new Bekhterev will describe our time in approximately the same terms. I would like to believe that at least someone will someday be able to explain the inexplicable:
how is a society that, for the most part, claims that they haven’t watched TV for a long time, is controlled by the TV?
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In the meantime, we can only state a sad reality. An attempt to extract even a semblance of truthful information from the media space leads to zero results. The cult of success and the shame of defeat, planted over the years, turns information into a psychological tool like fairy tale therapy. The possibilities of using fairy tale therapy for propaganda purposes, and today there are no others, are endless. And yet, if you rake up the mountains of verbal husk for a long time, you can stumble upon an exception, and in the most unexpected places, that is, on the Solovyov Canal.
The thought of Mikhail Leontiev, a well-deserved hawk of the state, is worthy of bringing it in full:
“We want to turn this (…) into a domestic one, and this is a civilian (…). Our grief is that the Russians are at war with the Russians.”
This angle of view dramatically changes the context. In a civil war, other rules and vocabulary are different. The first thing that comes to mind is the term launched into circulation a century ago by Viktor Shklovsky — «commissars of their own security.» This, it seems to me, is the key to understanding the frenzy that has befallen the first persons of television today. Shepherds from among professional patriots have previously been prone to mutating at the speed of the covid virus, and now especially.
There is a lot of evidence that the shoulder masters (as the executioners were called in the old days), destroying the victim, often experienced animal fear themselves. Ferocity is the only shaky guarantee of the executioner's well-being. The community of commissars for their own security was not born in the fatherland yesterday or today, but they have something in common.
The more correct words (from the point of view of the current moment) the commissars say, the more frightening they are.
We also have to save ourselves with ferocity. But running in a vicious circle does not save. If you carefully look at the faces from the TV, fear is felt more and more clearly. After all, the unbearable ease of repression in most Russians is stored in the subcortex at the level of the genetic code.
Today's main figure, Solovyov, adores power so much that he even calls Vysotsky Vladimir Vladimirovich. He has long outgrown the scope of a TV presenter. Solovyov is a person on a national scale, with his own media resource, an army of comrades-in-arms and followers. He does not get tired of repeating that his main life is there, at the front, where he visits weekly. Vladimir Rudolfovich is doing well. His performance still knows no bounds, as does his popularity. But he was somehow blown away, greatly reduced in size, and fear lurked in the corners of his eyes.
He surrounds himself and his ether with illustrious generals. He willingly poses in an embrace with Yevgeny Prigozhin, who does not get tired of repeating (so far only on the Solovyov channel): guys, join the PMC, and you will adequately meet the third world war. He smashes the enemies of the people, each time finding fresh colors. He likes to speculate on the topic of future victories, when, they say, will we take Berlin or London? And in the eyes — fear. Clever Solovyov knows the unspoken rules of the big game.
Even the most zealous admirers of power are not guaranteed that the next in any list — from a foreign agent to a traitor — will be you, admirer.
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In general, something is invisible on TV, if not at the climate level, then at the weather level, it changes a little. The notorious burnout? Yes, of course, but not only. Take at least the same hardened as steel, Skabeev. Before, she rushed around the studio like a Valkyrie, but now she somehow cooled down. Displaying the adviser to the head of the DPR, Jan Gagin, he can hardly restrain his emotions: once again we begin our conversation with the fact that Bakhmut is almost taken, there is just a little left, now … What is happening now? Needless to say, the advisor did not answer the questions as well as all the previous speakers in this studio.
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Fortunately, there are still eternal values.
Yuri Loza came to visit Boris Korchevnikov, and a session of sophisticated television psychoanalysis began. Korchevnikov with a tear in his voice (now he always has a tear in his voice) promised: everything will be fine when there is no America on earth. Vine supported his colleague with a regal nod of his head. Encouraged, Korchevnikov asked the guest: do you still think the earth is flat? Vine condescended to another regal nod. But Yuri Gagarin, the presenter dared to object to an enlightened interlocutor, saw a round earth from space. Vine only smiled indulgently in response.