Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 11 – “No one controls
the world entirely and completely, Alina Vitukhnovskaya says; but many Russians
from the Kremlin on down want to believe that forces behind the scenes in fact
do, a perspective that shifts responsibility away from themselves by suggesting
individuals don’t matter and one that provides a focus for their anger.
And despite expectations,
increasingly widespread access to the Internet has not reduced this proclivity
but intensified it because Russians like others turn to the web to find
confirmation for what they already believe rather than to test their beliefs against
the evidence (newizv.ru/article/general/10-07-2019/krugom-vragi-konspirologiya-stala-osnovoy-rossiyskoy-ideologii).
As a result, the Russian commentator
says, conspiracy thinking has become “the main Russian ideology” of the Putin
era. Recognizing this danger, she
suggests, is the necessary first step to overcoming it or at least to avoid
becoming caught in the trap and lost in a maze of half-truths that others are
only too willing to manipulate.
Archaic conspiracy thinking has
always been characteristic of many Russians, but what is especially troubling
now, Vitukhnovskaya says, is that it has spread to the elite which uses
conspiracy thinking to distract attention and deflect blame from itself by
positing a foreign conspiracy and then comes to view the world through the same
lens and act on this vision.
“One example of the pseudo-state
structures for the production of conspiracy myths is the so-called Izborsky
Club,” the commentator says. The
“hallucinatory constructions” that organization offers, taken “directly” from
the German models of Hitler’s time, have become “the ideological foundation of
the present-day Russian statehood.”
Kseniya Kirillova, a Russian
journalist based in the US, says that no one should be surprised by this. Putin
and his entourage have only “reproduced the model which existed in Soviet
times” which posited a worldwide conspiracy directed at the destruction of the
first “workers and peasants state” (svoboda.org/a/30025319.html).
So widespread and
influential is this conspiracy-based vision of the world that those who want to
influence Putin or other senior leaders cast their arguments in terms of the
existence of a conspiracy, knowing that their views are more likely to be
accepted if they are put in terms of the world conception that the Kremlin
leader and his entourage already have.
“In the
chekist consciousness,” she continues, “any serious activity is viewed as the
result of someone’s special operation, carried out on the basis of someone’s
order and someone’s money,” she writes. And there must always be “a curator” in
charge be it the CIA, the State Department, the Bilderberg Club, or some even
more shadowy organization.
Kirillova’s
comments are in response to a recent article by Mark Galleoti, a Western
specialist on Russian politics, who suggests that Putin himself is the victim
of a conspiracy of conspiracy thinkers in his own regime (theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/20/west-putin-russia-spymaster-spies-ukraine-us).
At one level, of course, Putin is a
victim of such conspiracy thinking; but as Kirillova points out, Putin is a
willing one given that he shares the perspective of those offering up such
ideas – they are his appointees after all -- rather than being a rational actor
who is being misled by others as The Guardian commentary implies.
Presenting Putin as victim of the
conspiracy thinking by others is perhaps the latest Western attempt to suggest
the top man in Moscow is better than those around him, a view that traces its
origins to Gorbachev’s time when the Soviet president was often given credit
for anything positive in the USSR and absolved, via this means, of any
responsibility for everything bad.
Putin in fact is not a victim in
this case: he is a co-conspirator -- or even more a prime believer in and
orchestrator of this conspiratorial worldview.
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