Russia Denies Shooting down Santa's Sleigh, Blames
Western Propaganda
This isn't satire and I'm not making
this up. When an obscure American satirical blog, The Daily Currant,
posted a funny spoof titled, "Russia Shoots Down Santa's Sleigh Near North Pole", the story quickly became viral on the Russian
Internet thanks to the Russian-language version of the RT website,
which translated several excerpts and posted them with some editorial comments.
This is where the "life
imitates satire" part begins. While everyone realized this was a joke,
many Russian readers, swept by the current wave of militant nationalism, turned
the comment sections of blogs and news websites into an anti-American
hate-fest, gloating over Santa's death, praising Russia's military, disparaging
Western consumerism, and wishing that Western leaders attending Santa's funeral
on the North Pole would drown along with St. Nick's dead body. Some even
expressed concern that certain nitwits out there may think the story is real
and will draw incorrect conclusions about Russia's peaceful policies. All of
them unwittingly proved the point of the Daily Currant's satire:
Several ultra-nationalist
politicians in Moscow have praised the downing, which targeted a popular
Western celebrity. “Santa Claus is a symbol of Western decadence and
consumerism,” said Alexei Onnatopp, leader of the far-right Golden Bear party.
“Whoever killed this fat, corrupt man is a patriot and a hero.”
But it gets curioser. Some serious
publications, such as the Moscow-based business daily Vzglyad
(Viewpoint) and the National Defense magazine, added to the controversy
by describing this satire as vicious imperialist propaganda, unleashed by the
U.S. government against Russia and its glorious president, Vladimir Putin.
Below is my somewhat shortened
translation of the article from Vzglyad,
which is chillingly reminiscent of the Pravda editorials of the Cold War
era.
Foreign jokesters reported the
sensational news: Russian military has allegedly destroyed the sleigh of Santa
Claus over the Arctic Ocean, on his way to deliver gifts. Jokes aside, experts
believe that this story draws an analogy with the real tragedy of the downed
Boeing over Ukraine and the world's reaction to it. They see this
"news" as yet another wave of attacks in the information campaign
organized by the West against Russia.
American satirical blog The Daily
Currant reported that Russia's Air Defense shot down Santa's sleigh over the
Arctic Ocean, with a missile launched from the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.
According to the source, fragments
of the sled were allegedly found in Arctic waters by a "Norwegian
fisherman." He said that Santa and most of his reindeer have died, except
for the famous Rudolph, who was quickly identified by the red nose, reports RT.
"Although Russia has officially
denied involvement in the incident, U.S. intelligence forces say they have
proof the missile was fired from a Russian military installation on the
island," the joke goes on. "Several ultra-nationalist politicians in
Moscow have praised the downing, which targeted a popular Western celebrity."
Washington, meanwhile, vowed an
"appropriate response to the tragedy," the article says. President
Barack Obama, in particular, promised the tightening of sanctions against
Moscow. "Vladimir Putin has threatened the hopes and dreams of children
around the world. He will be brought to justice," the website quotes the
American president.
Yet another provocation
According to the editor-in-chief of
the National Defense magazine, Igor Korotchenko, we can laugh at this
"news," but we can also draw some disturbing conclusions.
"This is just more of the same
information war that is being waged against our country," he said.
"Santa's flight is of an entirely virtual nature, it is modeled on NORAD
computers, and no one ever actually observes any flying objects. This is to
some extent a tribute to the Western New Year's culture."
"As for the sensationalist news
that the Russians have shot someone down over the North Pole -- and not just
anyone, but Santa Claus's sleigh... This is another attempt to continue with the
devious smear campaign, to reinforce in the heads of the narrow-minded
Westerners the previously disseminated lie that it was Russia's fault that the
Malaysian Boeing had been shot down over Ukraine. What they're telling us is
this: look, Russians are now so brutal, they're even shooting down Santa
Claus," added Korochenko.
According to him, not everyone will
see this as a joke. "For some people in the West who are ignorant of
certain technical subtleties, for those children who believe in Santa Claus, this
news undermines their New Year expectations (the speaker once again confuses
the New Year with Christmas -- O.A.). That is, there is an ongoing effort to
demonize Russia by means of such vulgar and repugnant injections of
manufactured information," said the head of the National Defense magazine.
He also commented in jest that
Russia's Aerospace Defense would surely "provide Santa Claus and his
escort the necessary corridor and would not only shoot it down, but would give
it the green light all the way."
The military expert also advised
that the (American) authors of the jocular provocation should see a
psychiatrist and "check themselves for certain phobias that make them look
bad."
I kid you not. The article further
recalls the crash of the Malaysian Boeing-777 over eastern Ukraine on July 17,
which killed 298 people on board. This is followed by an obligatory recitation
of "alternative" versions of events and conspiracy theories that have
since been disseminated by Russia's state-run news agencies, ending with
blaming the U.S. and other Western governments of immediately "using this
tragedy in their information war against Russia," citing such
"notorious warmongers" as Obama and Biden.
"By the way," writes Vzglyad,
"we would be interested in hearing the comments about the Santa's sled
'downed' over the Russian Arctic from certain representatives of the U.S.
government, such as, the spokesperson for the Department of State, Jen Psaki.
Will she also lay the responsibility on Moscow? And in how many hours after the
'tragedy'?"
It remains unclear if the quoted
Russian journalists seriously believe that Barack Obama's government had
orchestrated the Daily Currant's satire, or they are simply throwing out
clues for inflamed minds to connect the dots. In any event, such simultaneously
parochial and angry articles have lately become more of a rule than an
exception in Russia, inadvertently illustrating the pitiful intellectual and
moral condition to which the official media and about 80% of its audiences have
been reduced to by Putin's "postmodern" dictatorship.
Having grown up in the USSR and
seeing the workings of the Soviet propaganda first-hand, I used to attribute
the success of the centralized, state-sponsored ideological brainwashing to the
lack of competition. The unholy trinity of the Party, the State, and the KGB
had conveniently blocked all outside sources of information, enjoying an
absolute, 70-year-long propaganda monopoly in the media, culture, and
education.
But today's success of Putin's
propaganda machine operating in the open information space has put that idea to
rest.
It's important to realize that to a
Soviet citizen, "propaganda" was not a derogatory term, but rather an
inevitable default setting of the Cold War reality. The so-called
"Propaganda Departments" officially functioned in the open,
disseminating "correct" opinions about various events happening
domestically and internationally, to be repeated by the Soviet media and
internalized by the population. Thus propaganda was generally accepted as an
essential, even vital part of life: our "good" propaganda was
necessary to immunize us from their "evil" propaganda.
My generation grew up believing that
we were surrounded by deadly imperialist enemies, whose capitalist media,
motivated by hatred and money, conducted a planned, centralized,
state-sponsored ideological brainwashing of their own populations, in addition
to manufacturing anti-Soviet propaganda for distribution inside the USSR.
Years later, it took a lot of effort
on my part to dismantle, metaphorically speaking, the intricate system of
curved mirrors and screens that had been installed in our heads by the
"benevolent" propaganda with our own consent. In our defense, we
didn't know better at the time. What's this generation's excuse? And what
causes a sizeable number of people in the West to fall for the propaganda
coming out of the Kremlin today?
A Western reader must also realize
that in modern Russia the term "propaganda" has outlived its
usefulness and has been replaced with a more comprehensive term, "political technologies." "Political technologies" is a science of
massive mind manipulation that has been perfected in Russia to a state of art
-- dark art, to be sure -- involving politics, sociology, psychology, public
relations, marketing, advertising, as well as a great deal of cynicism and
corruption. In comparison, Barack Obama's election campaigns, OFA, Acorn, and
Alinsky's Rules for Radicals are mere child's play.
And, just as erstwhile Propaganda
Departments, modern Russia's "political technologists" operate in the
open, protected by the general acceptance of a planted notion that the rest of
the world also lives by these rules: "everyone is doing it, and if it's
our political technologists against theirs, we'll be better off sticking with
ours."
The 19th century French poet Charles
Baudelaire once said, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was
convincing the world he doesn't exist." That is, indeed, a great trick,
but hardly the greatest. The devil's even greater and, therefore, less known
trick, was to convince the world that God is just as much of an evil, corrupt,
and conniving trickster as he is, if not worse. The acceptance that both sides
are morally equal has allowed the devil to stop living incognito, get out into
the big wide world, start a legitimate business, print out business cards with
his real name and contact information, put his face on a billboard, and make a
good living by consulting for the Russian government.
If truth and justice are nowhere to
be found and every political system is equally evil and corrupt, the only way
to survive it is to stick to your own kind, right or wrong. Hence, the fervent
nationalism and xenophobia that are sweeping Putin's Russia, now officially
endorsed by the president and blessed by the corrupt Russian Orthodox Church.
Perhaps, the most effective and
harmful "curved mirror" that had been planted in the minds of the
Russian public since the times of the previous Cold War was the idea that
nothing happens in the Western world outside the control of the
"capitalist ruling class," and that everything that gets written or
published in the Western media has been carefully orchestrated by the powers to
be. (It shouldn't surprise anyone that Western "ruling classes" in
this picture are indistinguishable from Russia's ruling classes except for the
foreign, harder-to-pronounce names -- and now they even get their suits made by
the same fashion designers.)
Living in a non-Western totalitarian
country with state-run media, it's easy to believe that American and European
"imperialists" are likewise running a well-oiled, state-run, and
centrally operated propaganda machine that manufactures and distributes cynical
disinformation. Such a perception affects even those Russians who are
sympathetic towards America and Europe, distorting their judgment of events --
let alone those with an aversion to all things Western.
By convincing people that "the
enemy" is engaging in the same kind of propaganda and disinformation as
the domestic state-run media does, Putin's "political technologists"
have as much as cloned the Iron Curtain, placing its small replicas in millions
of individual heads. The individual, portable Iron Curtain works even better
than the former big one that encircled the entire country: it effectively
captures and filters out any "undesirable" information even if the
carrier speaks English, watches Fox News, browses the World-Wide Web, or
travels overseas.
Not only is the Kremlin pulling this
trick domestically -- for the longest time it has been exporting this
thoroughly foreign idea to the Western world, where it already has taken root
and blossomed in perverse imaginations of conspiracy theorists (World Trade
Center, Kennedy assassination, etc.), as well as various leftist intellectuals
in the media, Hollywood, and academia.
Some of my American friends will
argue that the Western media is indeed a well-oiled, centrally operated
propaganda machine -- except that it is controlled, not so much by the
capitalists as by their opponents on the international Left. I'd say those are
apples and oranges. But whatever the case, it is ridiculous to suggest that the
Daily Currant is controlled from the same bunker as The New York Times.
The notion that nothing in the West
happens outside the control of the ruling class is, of course, a forced
projection on the part of "projectionists" -- previously of the
Soviet totalitarianism and now of the so-called "postmodern" or
"soft" totalitarianism as it exists in Russia today.
Such projections are usually
effective in destroying and demoralizing the opponent, but they also have a
weak spot. The projected picture can give us a good preview of what the
"projectionists" are up to themselves. In this case, the plans and
the mindset of Putin's political technologists are clearly visible in the
talking points and the choice of words of the above media and defense "experts":
…Ongoing effort to demonize Russia…
Vulgar and repugnant injections of manufactured information… Devious smear
campaign, to reinforce in the heads of the narrow-minded Westerners the
previously disseminated lie… Information campaign organized by the West against
Russia… Yet another provocation… More of the same information war that is being
waged against our country…
Quite some time ago I have
discovered a rule that is being proven over and over by current events: the
dark image of the "evil and corrupt" Western societies that the
Kremlin rulers have always painted to the world is, in fact, precisely the
dystopia we would all have lived in had the same rulers taken over the world.
The latest example is the eastern
Ukraine. First, the Kremlin uses its subservient media to "zombify"
many Russians, as well as some sympathetic Ukrainians and Westerners, into
believing that the recent Ukrainian revolution was engineered and paid for by
the U.S. government according to a widely publicized but a completely paranoid,
manufactured scenario. Next, the Kremlin itself enacts exactly the same
scenario in the Crimea and the eastern regions of Ukraine, saying that if the
Americans could pull it off, so can the Russians, and be entirely justified in
doing so. Right away, a host of FSB, SVR, and GRU agents infiltrate Ukraine to
stage a "popular" uprising against the Ukrainian "junta" --
an uprising that wouldn't last a day without the Kremlin's money, weapons,
military intelligence, and the non-stop media propaganda.
The result is two self-proclaimed
"people's republics" called DPR and LPR -- or, rather, two
devastated, impoverished, angry, and crime-ridden quasi-socialist dystopias
ruled by rival military gangs, with no hope for the future and no signs of
healing in sight. The Crimea was spared the war due to a quick annexation by
Russia, but the situation there isn't much better.
The previous Cold War was fought not
just on the proxy battlefields of the Third World; a much bigger and a more
important fight was happening on the information battlefield worldwide -- a
battlefield of perceptions that was conceived, designed, and almost entirely
controlled by the Kremlin. That was how America lost Vietnam -- not to the
North Vietnamese Army, but to the Soviet propaganda machine operating in the
West.
Make no mistake, Putin has already
started a new Cold War against the United States, fighting it with the same
methods and using the same networks he inherited from the old KGB, which he
himself used to be a part of. It's time America stopped pretending this isn't
happening and began to fight back.
Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic
artist from the former USSR, is the author of Shakedown Socialism,
of which David Horowitz said, "I hope everyone reads this book." In
1994 he moved to the U.S. with the hope of living in a country ruled by reason
and common sense, appreciative of its freedoms and prosperity. To his dismay,
he discovered a nation deeply infected by the leftist disease of "progressivism"
that was arresting true societal progress. American movies, TV, and news
media reminded him of his former occupation as a visual propaganda artist for
the Communist Party. Oleg is the creator of a satirical website ThePeoplesCube.com,
which Rush Limbaugh described on his show as "a Stalinist version of The
Onion." His graphic work frequently appears in the American Thinker
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