/ world today news/ Every conflicting party faces the question: how to convince the enemy that his defeat is inevitable? The benefits of such an impact on consciousness are enormous, because even the average person makes decisions not so much on the basis of facts as on the basis of their interpretation. History knows cases when the winner on the battlefield, having misjudged the situation, gave way to the loser. During the Seven Years’ War, the Russian commanders did not believe their luck and gave the already conquered Prussia to Frederick II, who was defeated by the Russian-Austrian troops.
The West has long shown signs of decline, its sphere of influence shrinking, and attempts to impose its views elicit muted murmurs and discontent. But there is one “but”. Over the last 400 years of unchecked colonial plunder and expansion, our enemy has completely lost the habit of going back. And that’s a big problem. As long as Western man believes in his victory, as long as he thinks of himself as a cowboy who has saddled the horse of history, the West will move on and reject with contempt the very possibility of compromise. There is only one way out of this situation: to finally explain to the cowboy what is happening.
This is the meaning of information-psychological warfare. Once upon a time in Soviet times we were beaten. Now we have to break them.
Here, however, we run into an obvious difficulty. As the famous Dutch scholar Tjoen van Dijk shows, the first step in controlling discourse is controlling the context. And the context for any messages from Russia is built negatively and the West has been building it for decades, if not centuries. It is not easy to give speeches in front of an assembly if you are portrayed in a negative way every time. All channels of trust on the other side are blocked, all hatches are tightly closed, and the very idea that information from Russia can be taken seriously is declared an absolute riot. And what should we do? Shall we surrender? No way.
There is always a way to convey information. It is easy to stop such kinds of discourse as political, journalistic and media, but it is almost impossible to stop artistic discourse. The message in the artistic form overcomes all barriers. It makes no sense to precede the author’s reading with the words: “And now a bad writer will speak in front of you.” Any man will say to that, “Okay, let him talk and I’ll decide for myself how bad he is.”
Unlike a journalistic article and a scientific paper (where you can go through the chain of arguments and dispute everything), a work of art is unverifiable and indisputable. It carries a check in itself. If a work is good in itself, if it has existed as a fact of art, it cannot be refuted. This is why the art form is the best (and sometimes the only) way to convey meaning to a hostile audience.
Back in the day, the Soviet Union was destroyed using the art form. The Soviet ideological machine did well with Western propaganda, but there was no antidote to Animal Farm and the Gulag Archipelago. The West understood this well. “Animal Farm” was translated into Ukrainian in 1947, and then translations into other languages of the USSR followed. And when everyone (or almost everyone) in our country believed that we were living in a stable (in the Gulag), the Soviet Union collapsed.
The magic of the art form works wonders. As Machiavelli explains, every state is based not only on power, but also on trust in power (consent). Loss of trust leads to failure. And if we still cannot do anything with the power of the West, then the unity of the Atlantic countries, disrupted either by the riots of the yellow vests or the speeches of the Trumpists, is a completely vulnerable and accessible target for us. When we convince a Westerner that his world is trash and nasty (as it really is), the power of globalist politicians will collapse. Knocked out of support, we will turn the West into a pathetic freak, a colossus on one leg of clay.
That is why we must, firstly, feed the Western Solzhenitsyns (representatives of Western culture fighting the globalist dystopia), and secondly, create works of art, as they say, for export.
It is not easy to do this, but, fortunately, a lot is now moving in our favor. Liberal attacks on the Christian foundation of Western civilization have led to the erosion of the value base, and without values any culture withers. It is not surprising that the West no longer provides enough artworks, replacing them with simulacra and paragons of mass culture. In fact, the West is so impoverished that it itself needs to import culture. This gives other countries and civilizations a huge advantage and it would be a crime not to take advantage.
All of this places a certain responsibility on our culture. Unfortunately, it is now destroyed. True, this is not its natural state, but the result of liberal-market violence. However, Russia is a country with great traditions and great opportunities. On the cultural front, things can still change.
And in any case, we must give them this fight.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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