Since February 24 – to take this now historic date, but we could go back many years before – Russian war propaganda has used the old recipes of tyranny, denial, lies and the substitution of the reality of the scene of crime of a narratively reconstituted invention, in order to force the truth, to transfigure it by “fictioning”. These language operations, sometimes coarse, sometimes sophisticated, would like to make the real disappear and replace it with its counterfeits.
In the words of Putin, Lavrov, Peskov, Prigogine and still others, which should be quoted at length, we can easily take some samples of this “counterfeiting” of reality. Ukraine would be governed by Nazis, in power since Maidan, who would oppress and persecute, like their predecessors, the brave defenseless Russian-speaking minorities.
There would be no war by Russia against Ukraine but a special operation to maintain order, as in the colonial era of the “events” in Algeria, against bandits who would threaten the safety of the brave and peaceful citizens. Russia would never have attacked anyone, it would be a power of peace harassed, threatened and finally attacked by NATO, that is to say by the Americans assisted by their regional, Baltic and Polish vassals. Finally, the West would be moved by an immemorial, almost racist hatred of Russia, and wants purely and simply to exterminate it, to wipe it off the map.
Counterfeit Art
The purpose and the function of the referendums organized in the four regions of eastern Ukraine constitute a summit of this art of counterfeiting: since Ukraine does not attack Russia, but Russia Ukraine (the real), it enough to turn part of Ukraine into Russia (fiction).
Obviously, reality does not fail to come back, including in official propagandist discourse, until it takes on comical forms. Counterfeiting sometimes goes beyond itself to the point of delirium, thus reaching a point where, by itself, it denounces itself as such. When it is pointed out to him that Zelensky can hardly be a “Nazi” and a “Jew” at the same time, Lavrov explains that after all Hitler himself was a Jew, before going back on his statement as it contravenes reality, if one can say.
To counter Putin’s propagandist discourse, it is necessary and sufficient to tirelessly repeat a simple, obvious, absolutely inescapable datum – which its Russian negation tends continuously to erase or to cover with a more or less opaque veil of oblivion: it is Russia that is occupying Ukraine in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter. There is not a single Ukrainian soldier in Russia, but an occupying army that is waging war on Ukraine on its soil, against its people.
A fertile ground
Historical Holocaust denial has always existed, it reached its final form with the denial of the Holocaust, the second death of dead Jews. Unfailingly associated with conspiracy of which it is the most acute “critical” form, it is perpetuated before our eyes with regard to the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the Tutsis, the persecution of the Uyghurs.
Russia was often the fertile ground and effective activator. Almost all contemporary conspiracies feed on it. It’s because there has never been in Russia an authentic and profound reflexive and memorial return to the crimes of Stalinism, the Gulag, the Holodomor, which the Memorial association tried to open, prohibited by Putin, and as Germany did in an exemplary way for its own historical past.
Production of a pseudo-reality
The Russian case, and even more today, in times of war, is a very good object of observation of negationism. Falsehood, denial and (self-)fiction are its integrated elements. They comfort each other and contribute together to the production of a pseudo-reality, a setting covering and masking the desolation of the real, in the manner of the Potemkin villages, of a theatricalization or a nihilistic staging Of the history. The total of a mobilization is only “partial”, the military defeat a victory, the corpses of the actors.
This Holocaust denial also consists of a retrojection of the facts, from the culprits to the victims. It reconstructs events, it remakes reality – what Russia shamelessly practices around everything that has happened since 2014 at least. Retrojective Holocaust denial projects its own vices onto the enemy (the Ukraine as an aggressive, invading, occupying power), themselves previously transfigured into virtues (the eternal good mother Russia, victim of the Western plot). This is what is happening with the case of the sabotage of NordStream 1 and 2: while it is, probably, a deliberate action by Russia, it immediately imputes responsibility criminal to Americans.
Recipe worn down but which, in the eyes of Putin and his clan, can always be used – that ofArturo Ui of Brecht, the one clinically described by Freud as “cauldron logic” : ” What are you talking about ! you never lent me a cauldron! besides, he was pierced! »