In these terrible days in which everyone feels the urgent need to prove themselves very savvy, people of the world, people who do not let themselves be enchanted, who do not fall for it and who do not buy it, the latest very hard attack by the Russian government on the Italian government instead it suggests to me the most naïve of questions: why do they lie?
If it weren’t tragic, it would even make you smile to hear the Kremlin spokesmen say yesterday, without getting upset, phrases such as “Italy is at the forefront of an attack on our country”, and the day before yesterday that the sending of weapons to the Ukrainians from part of the Western countries “does not help peace”, as if we were really attacking Russia right now, and the columns of tanks that invaded Ukraine and every day do their best to clear the cities were there to bring peace. Not to mention the attempt to overthrow the responsibility of civilian victims on the besieged, arguing that Ukrainian nationalists are not letting them escape from the cities under attack, as spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN a few weeks ago.
In that same interview, however, Christiane Amanpour recalled that until the day before the invasion the Russians had denied all the reconstructions of American intelligence on their plans and flatly denied any intention to attack, and had therefore asked Peskov how Moscow could think of being believed and taken seriously in the international forum, in the future, in any kind of negotiation. Peskov’s response was that they had said they had no intention of invading because it was true, but unfortunately in the last two days – when bad luck is said – they had realized that Ukraine was preparing to launch a major offensive in the Donbass. , and therefore they had been forced to intervene.
It does not surprise me, of course, that Putin and his spokespersons are not telling the truth. But I am struck by the way, the level, I would say the quality of the lies. Russian propaganda had a better reputation.
Compared to the long and tragic history of lies and nonsense of all totalitarianisms, it seems to me today there is something more of disorientation, awkwardness, discomfort. I am thinking, for example, of that Russian ambassador betrayed by the slip that made him say: «The corpses lying in the streets never existed before the Russian troops arrived… er… sorry, before they left». Even in the embarrassed pauses and in Peskov’s slurred replies to CNN there was something absurd and at the same time tragically comic.
I felt the same sensation in front of the images of Russian soldiers who went to pack and send home computers and televisions, the result of the raids carried out in the occupied cities. Especially in front of that incredible dialogue between husband and wife, with him saying to her on the phone: «There are women’s sneakers. Well, I’m New Balance, I’m branded, everything here is. Size 38. They are absolutely fantastic… if I can I will take a laptop ». And she replies: «Well, think about it, Sofia is going to school, she will need a computer too».
Even the military engaged in the destruction and looting of Ukraine want the branded shoes, televisions and computers produced by that capitalism, that Western society, that way of life that are also there to annihilate. Patriarch Kirill, convinced that war is above all a war against our values, from consumerism to “gay parades”, would not be at all proud of them.
At the moment when I was about to close this article, I see an inscription on a wall in 1968 Czechoslovakia appear on Twitter, at the time of the Soviet intervention: «Beware of Russian killers. They steal watches and radios ». It may be that in the end there is nothing new in all of this. Yet it seems to me that today there is something more, a deeper contradiction between the words and deeds of the Russian leadership and the world in which we live, and in which they also live willy-nilly.
Perhaps it is precisely this cognitive dissonance that affects the entire establishment, but evidently also a not small part of the Russian population, which makes the Kremlin spokesmen, official and unofficial, so clumsy and awkward, and often even grotesque. And perhaps this is also where our best hope lies.
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