The dark image of Russia in the West: myth or reality?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

MIA "Russia Today" for the first time answered two questions: does the collective West really do not love us - or is it a myth of our propaganda? And if this is not a myth, why don't they love us?

The publications of the leading mass media of all G7 countries for six months, dedicated to our country, were studied - a total of 82 thousand. They were then categorized as positive, neutral and negative.

Any praise got into the “positive”, including “comfortable trains run in Russia”, “Russian ballet performed beautifully in Paris”, “Maslenitsa was cheerfully greeted at the Japanese embassy in Moscow” and “a Russian network of pizzerias was opened in Germany, it’s delicious”. Messages without any evaluations got into "neutrality" - like "Putin met with Abe", "Russia proposes a new format of negotiations on the denuclearization of Korea" and "a business forum has started its work in Russia." The stories about the atrocities of Russia in the outside world, the crimes of the state against citizens in Russia itself and the crimes of the citizens themselves have gone into the "negative".

Bottom line: on average for the G7, 50% of articles are sharply negative. The positive is two percent.

The rest of the messages are neutral - they are either informational texts like "I went and met", or "on the one hand, Russia is doing badly, but on the other hand, it is good."

Record-breaking countries:

- Most of all the British media wrote about Russia (25 thousand publications);

- Least of all - Canadian (less than four thousand. However, Canada itself is small in population);

- the most positive of all are the Italian media (as much as 13% of positive publications, that is, only half as many as negative ones);

- the most neutral of all - France (70% of articles).

And now to the point.

What's good about Russia? In principle, this could not be taken into account at all: well, what is two percent of publications? Moreover, without the Italian media, the positive would not have accumulated even a percentage.

But nevertheless: the good about us are individual athletes, ballet - theater and historical sights. In other words, "good Russia", as perceived by the media of advanced countries, is stuck in about 120-year-old vintage. Somewhere where Chekhov is, Russian seasons, golden poppies and folk crafts for tourists. By the way, Russia was also good in the same way in the 90s.

Everything else in us is bad.

But here's what is significant: most of this "bad" for us, in general, sounds like a compliment. For this is "bad" - a description of the many dark arts in which you and I are ahead of the world.

First of all, we, of course, interfere in the life of other powers - and we do it with monstrous efficiency. We elected Trump in America, we did Brexit in the UK. We have pushed the right-wing and populists to power in Italy, Germany and Austria. In Canada, however, we didn’t do anything - but this is not an obstacle: the top “Russian” topic of the six months in the local media was the possibility of Russia's interference in their elections this October.

Collectives of Russian trolls roam social networks, turning everyone against each other (especially American blacks against whites and Trumpists against Democrats), forcing the owners to introduce censorship. Poisonous Russian propaganda RT and Sputnik sows fakes or at least biasedly presents events, "promoting pro-Russian views." Russian spies hound the Skripals and accidental victims, red-haired Russian spies get into the credibility of influential people. Secret GRU units are planning coups throughout Eastern Europe.

Typical headline: "Elections in Europe: Special Services Will Watch for Russian Intervention" (Zeit).

Secondly, we are building up our aggressive military power. This is consistently theme number two. We threaten Scandinavia, we threaten Great Britain and the United States. We are supplying weapons to non-democracies around the globe. We forced America to withdraw from the INF Treaty, and the Balts and Poles to build up their NATO contingents near our borders. We are conquering Ukraine in a hybrid way, but in Venezuela, Syria and even in Africa we do not allow democracy to win.

Typical headlines: "Putin's Hypersonic Nuclear Missile Could Destroy London in Seconds", "Russian Nuclear Weapons in Venezuela?" (Daily Express).

In the third place, the Russian government stifles freedom in Russia itself, brutally persecuting protesters, cultural figures and sexual minorities, as well as assigning the title of foreign agents to foreign agents. Typical headlines: Journalist Criticizing Putin Dies in Mysterious Traffic Accident (Mail Online), I Survived Putin's Gulag (Bild), Police Rampant at a Rally in the Capital (Les Echos).

And only in the fourth place do we become destitute, corrupt, get drunk and kill ("Russia: the father kept his ten-year-old son in chains for months").

The Japanese mass media are presenting a separate program. There our main villainy is non-transfer of the Kuriles (“Russia, stop behaving stubbornly!”, “It is inadmissible to refute the fact of illegal occupation”).

… What is worth noting here.

First. If we remove the horror of Russian evil power, then Russia-2019 in the Western media will be no different from Russia-1999 (despite the giant changes for the better that have happened in the real life of the country).

That is, you can, of course, make sure that little is written about us - as little is written today, for example, about Bangladesh or the Philippines comparable to Russia in terms of population. To do this, you just need to get closer to Bangladesh in economic, social, scientific and military development. This republic has no threatening military power, no global media network, no ubiquitous foreign intelligence.

But here's the whole thing: there is no positive image of Bangladesh in the Western media, oddly enough, anyway. The topics with which this country breaks into the pages of the world's leading publications are poverty, corruption, prostitution and protests. That is, about the same thing that was written about us twenty years ago, when we were on a historic day.

Second. It is easy to see that the image of Russia-2019 is mainly based not on any of our obvious actions, but on analytical reports (on possible interference), expert forecasts (on future threats) and artful leaks (on secret sabotage). In other words, although Russia-2019 has embraced the world with intrigues, they are invisible. And in order to bring them to light - in Western countries there is a whole class of media fighters who bring these Russian intrigues into the light.

Yes, it didn't seem to you. Russia in the Western media has finally taken shape as the good old devil. And he is exactly what he was in the previous millennia: at the same time he is in hell and is trying to drag all the good inhabitants of the planet into hell. It seems that there, in the Russian underworld, everything is bad and scary (which means that, by definition, it cannot be effective, because the market is not free and there is no liberalism). But at the same time, the Russian underworld invisibly and secretly stands behind all strife, and behind the aggravated problems, and behind the victories of the wrong politicians in the free world itself. If anyone has forgotten, then we organized the invasion of migrants to Europe.

And this is an interesting symptom. We have already written that the tsunami named after Greta Thunberg, which washed away the advanced countries, has all the features of an archaic hysterical cult: here is the threat of an imminent ragnarek, and the division of all people into conscious lambs and irresponsible goats according to the simplest criterion of "attitude to Greta", and even a virgin (in the old, literal sense) at the center of the phenomenon.

Now let's add to this cult the equally irrational image of Dark Russia, penetrating everywhere with its temptations and infecting good people with populism, intolerance and homophobia. When the other day in Minneapolis protesters against the US president carried a poster "Trump is Russian!", They only meant that Trump is pure, unalloyed evil.

It turns out that in the midst of the information age, the advanced information societies of our planet are driven by a far from rational analysis of real facts. No, instead of him, simple archetypal images are successfully operating: some innocent virgins, some Gandalfs and Dumbledore who unravel the secret designs of the Enemy, and, in fact, the Enemy himself (this is us).

If we call a spade a spade, this says only one thing. The "picture of the world" in the countries that we habitually consider to be advanced, is now being written according to the canons of a thousand years ago. And if these canons do not really fit into reality, then this is not a problem. The reality, almost identical to the natural one, today can be simply constructed from one and a half expert opinions and four reports.

In practice, this means one of two things. Or the elites of the advanced Western countries themselves live in reality, and their peoples are fed the good old myth with the orcs and elves. In this case, they are building a rather gloomy dystopia for their peoples.

Or the elites of the advanced Western countries themselves live in the myth they relayed. Then they did not have long to continue to consider themselves advanced - because reality always beats myth.