Crisis of democracies, of “public space” and of the “critical capacity of public opinion”. “CallRussia”, a project to explain the truth about the war to the Russians could be used for ..
How to fight fake news? By bypassing the mainstream media, whatever the mainstream. In this case that is the mainstream Russian Kremlinthe propaganda of Vladimir Putin.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Putin has blocked access to Western social media, which in some cases even made it legitimate to incite his death, but he has also tightened Russian independent newspapers and various foreign media outlets. forced to stop activities after the Duma (the Russian parliament) has passed a rule that imposes one imprisonment of up to 15 years for anyone who is found to intentionally spread information deemed false. But what is fake? What is it?
Thus was born the #CallRussia project
A group of Lithuanian, British and Dutch volunteers has invented a way to restore a simulacrum of public life that no longer exists in our time, in Russia but in fact also in the West, as it is absorbed by the fictitious dynamics of media and social networks.
The Russians only learn about the war in Ukraine from the national press and the government. And then people, especially of an older age group, read Russian not Western languages.
But Russian telephone numbers are public and visible. The government cannot block or obscure an established condition. Thus the #CallRussia project invites anyone who knows the language to call Russian citizens, telling them what is happening in Ukraine, or more correctly, one would say “their own version of events”, thus trying to stop the war.
Under the motto of “a phone call cannot end the war. But millions of phone calls can “approximately 145,000 calls have been made to date from 135 different countries.
It starts from the data, the #CallRussia volunteers explain that “the independent media are closed, the journalists are silent. There is no one else who can tell the truth to the Russians, show photos of destroyed hospitals, murdered children and bombed houses ”. And they write: “Vladimir Putin can order entire cities to be razed, but we will continue to talk to respectable Russians because the first day they oppose Putin will be the last day of the war ”.
From the reconstruction of the volunteers it is understood that the effect of the telephone calls is not always the one hoped for, indeed paradoxical situations are often created. There are telephone volunteers who tell like almost everyone called Russians refuse to speak at length.
But when the phone call finds an interested interlocutor on the other end of the phone, the exchange evolves more or less in this way. At first, the Russian gets angry, refuses the telephone operator’s reconstruction, then claims that the Western media offer a partial version of the story, hiding the responsibilities of the US and NATO, as has already happened in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or elsewhere. But when the discussion begins, the first doubts arrive. Eventually the Russian gets depressed and feels in danger. The end result is that even thinking differently, the Russian agrees with the Western telephone operator that the war in Ukraine must be stopped.
A phrase attributed to Aeschylus says that “the first victim of the war is the truth”. It is easy to understand. How fragile the truth can be if each of the contenders in the field (in this war Russia, Ukraine and in fact the USA) wants at any cost to make their version of events prevail !?
The history of the world, on the other hand, is full of lies to justify terrifying military interventions. See among the last the war in Iraq, for weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Thousands of people, even unarmed, have died, a regime has changed, ISIS has in fact been created and no one has ever paid.
But now propaganda is a dynamic of the modern world, which goes far beyond wars, when almost every area of human knowledge is produced only to be sold. We have been able to appreciate it, perhaps better than in the past, during the handling of the pandemic from Covid over the past two years. All exalted by the mainstream media that amplify its capabilities.
We actually live in a society where truth and reality have less and less value, replaced by propaganda and disinformation that play a more useful role, to sell goods and solutions. At the same time, leaders and political decision-makers are also elected for their ability to arouse emotions, not for skills, concreteness, merits, ideas.
Those categories that the German philosopher have ceased to exist Jurgen Habermas he considered the thermometer of ours Western democracy: “public space”, “the critical capacity of public opinion”.
But initiatives like #CallRussia go against the trend, trying to restore a more complex debate on an event, in this case the war in Ukraine however you think it is.
It comes to mind but if, as the volunteers called in Russia, the same thing was organized in Italy and in Europe, to tell the other side of the Covid management of governments, western propaganda to narrate the war in Ukraine, speculation on energy and power of finance and banks that standday after day, destroying our economies, what would be the reactions of the European peoples and the Italians !?
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