Bells
Staff member
The narrative of the Aggressive Victim is the perfect distillation of 1990s post-imperial melancholia and post-Yeltsin jingoism: once brought to its knees, Russia is rising up against all the forces that would push it back down. Including the very forces that feel threatened by it.
Here the crusade against LGBT rights fits perfectly with Russia's expansionism into the territory of a neighbor it never quite believed was sovereign: no competing claims of victimhood can be tolerated. To the contrary, the enemy (whether internal, like predatory gays "recruiting" innocent children and liberal "fifth columnists" who dare complain about the new order, or external, like exhausted Ukraininans who dare to throw out the latest in a long line of elected kleptocrats and reject stronger ties with the RF) must always be transformed into a terrifying, and strangely familiar bogeyman (again like the Ukrainians, who, in a move straight out of the Milosevic playbook, have mysteriously waited six decades to reveal their true nature as Hitler-loving fascists). The sins of the Banderovtsy are visited unto the seventh generation.
The recent revival of a Stalinist opera as a patriotic crowd pleaser about the "liberation" of Crimea shares a logic with Channel One's report of an obvious urban legend as fact (the crucifixion of a three-year-old ethnic Russian boy by Ukrainian "fascists"). Even the downing of Flight MH-17 is part of a plot to discredit Russia: witness the assertion of one of the separatist leaders that the airplane was full of defrosted corpses rather than living, breathing human beings. Any evidence offered against the official narrative is simply a "provocation," and any allegation of Russia's wrongdoing is part of a plot against the motherland.
A healthy government can be relied on to reject conspiracy theories. An unhealthy government helps disseminate them. This is not to suggest that conspiratorial narrative is top-down -- far from it, the paranoid rhetoric of today's Russian media can be traced to the popular fiction of the past two decades. One of the leaders of the Eastern Ukrainian separatists is an author of an entire series of science-fiction novels about Russia's impending war first with Ukraine, then with NATO.
In the past, it was easy to dismiss this sort of thing as inconsequential (and I have spent years wrestling with my own doubts as to how much significance to attribute to them in my research). But now we are watching national fantasy being written before our very eyes, and it's a national fantasy that wants desperately to be a new national epic.
The competing truth claims about all the recent events in Ukraine, but about the Malaysian jetliner in particular, show one of the great epistemological dangers in the postmodern condition: no document, no footage, and no testimony can retain the status of unequivocal evidence. But the national epic fantasy at issue here is about more than simple propaganda. It is about reinforcing a narrative of victimization designed to appeal to an unhappy citizenry (and what Russian citizen lacks the justification to feel aggrieved?).
Grow up and open your eyes sheeple.
