Most Russians Want War, Always Have and Always Will, Nevzorov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 15 – Just as pornography can produce an erection but cannot do anything about the size of a penis, so too Russian state propaganda about the hostility of the surrounding world and the need to fight it can intensify those feelings but in no way create them, Aleksandr Nevzorov says, arguing that Russians indeed are predisposed to want war.

            In an interview with Radio Poland’s Artem Filatov, the former host of the Russian television program “600 Seconds” says that it would have been impossible to “zombify” 86 percent of Russians into supporting Vladimir Putin and his aggressive policies if they weren’t predisposed to those positions in advance (radiopolsha.pl/6/248/Artykul/224943).

                “People belief only that which they insanely want to believe,” Nevzorov says, pointing out that “a pornographic magazine can lead to an erection, but it is not capable of making a penis larger.” Thus, such journals “erect that penis which always was, is, and I suspect, will be” the case.

            Kremlin propaganda intensifies the feelings Russians have about enemies and war, he continues, but its impact should not be “overrated. Russians wanted to believe that there are fascists in Ukraine. Did Russians want war? Yes, they do. They need an enemy; they need someone to hate.”

            The reason is simple: “hatred is the only thing that allows the unification and experience of an all-national orgasm in Russia given the absence of science and culture. Anger alone unifies the academician and the policeman, the apple polisher and the geneticist,” the Russian commentator argues.

            There is a small group of people in Russia, some two to three percent, who are not so programmed and redisposed, but the overwhelming majority goes along as the regime plays to its feelings.  That majority, Nevzorov says, can reverse itself on many things “in the course of twelve hours,” but propaganda cannot change its fundamental predispositions.

            Nonetheless, he argues, foreign broadcasting of the kind Estonia and Poland have promoted “for the same reason that it made sense to sell jeans even when the obkoms of the party said that wearing jeans is practically state treason. Ultimately, jeans win,” and “Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic and all EU countries” offer Russia an alternative. 

            The Kremlin has acted quite wisely in the way it has dealt with the minority of Russians who want that alternative now and continue to exist in “reservations like Snob or Ekho Moskvy, he says. There such people are given the chance to occupy themselves with what they want” because they do not have any effect “on the 86 percent black hundreds patriotic society.”