Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg?
Link.
Back in May last year, American historian Timothy Snyder invigorated the discussion around the fascist label in his New York Times op-ed “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.”
A personalized totalitarian regime built around the cult of a leader. Countless pieces of evidence of systematic war crimes against civilians. The cult of the dead as a founding national myth. The conquering of foreign land with the open intent to destroy the nation living there. The weird but ominous symbol with which their war of aggression is branded.
Is a pseudo-historical ideology which supports
fascism in fact birthed from fascism? The Z-bags merely (re-)constructed a cruel, twisted house-of-mirrors less than a decade after official 'Soviet Communism' collapsed. Was
Pamyat really so very different? The RAND Corp. calls it a "Firehose of Falsehood"
here.
Guardian Opinion,
5-8-23 "As the Ukraine war grinds on, Russia is becoming a cultural wasteland"
I recently spoke to Mikhail Shishkin, a renowned Russian novelist and dissident now living in Switzerland. During the late 90s and early 2000s, the Russian Federation worked to support and export its writers, Shishkin said. This was an official project of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media (Роспечать or Rospechat), and an organisation called Institut Perevoda gave financial support to publishers so Russian books could be translated and read outside the country. The purpose was to create a dignified facade; a human face for what was then a crypto-authoritarian regime. “You have to understand that the new hybrid dictatorship pretended to be a free country, and worked with writers in a different way [to the Soviets],” said Shishkin.
Potemkin culture, a facade? It's actually
worse. There are probably more RU writers in jail now than at any other time since Stalin. But let's all try to rationally discuss this perverse "theory" that (Modern) Civilization begins in Russia, therefore justifying war-crimes/genocide.
"Garbage in, garbage out!"