Why does Russia always lie?

Anyone interested in the ongoing conflict is right to conclude that Russia is lying. And he doesn’t lie as much as one would expect from a country at war, or as much as tyrants usually do, but all the time. Have we heard a single clear and simple truth from the Kremlin in nine months? Never. Moscow sends out an endless stream of fraud, disinformation and lies that fail to realize that two plus two equals four. And so it is. An almost supernatural phenomenon whose historical causes must be determined.

Tsarist Russia was lying

The famous “Potemkin villages” became textbook cases of state illusion. This was just the beginning.

In XX^e In the 19th century, Russia went through seventy years of pure and harsh communism. The intensity of totalitarianism has varied over time with more or less terror, mass deportations, and summary executions, but there is one element of the system that has never changed one iota: jargon. From Lenin’s seizure of power until the collapse of the system under Gorbachev, the only official political language, the only authoritative and binding language, has been the icy, blind, mechanical, steel-solid language from which all humanity is excluded from all emotions, all ironies. Countless innocent people ended up in the Gulag or were shot because they refused to talk about it.

The language of the tree is the language of ideology. As Orwell clearly saw 1984, he is the spirit of totalitarianism, the demon that possesses you and turns you into a mutant, a zombie. Alain Besançon has such a decisive formula: “The language of wood does not want to believe, it wants to speak.” It doesn’t matter if you are sincere, loyal to the regime or a secret opponent: from the moment it comes out of your mouth, you belong to it, you participate in and lend a hand to the fiction that seeks to replace reality. destruction of the world. Russians have been living under the yoke of this language dictatorship for seventy years. Their minds are deeply polluted with nothingness.

In Lenin’s metaphysical vision, truth as we imagine it does not exist: it is only the reflection of matter, it is pure action. What is true one day may be false the next day and true again the next day. World History leads to revolution, but the paths that can lead to the final and redemptive conflagration are endless. In such a philosophical context, the lie of participation in evil in the Christian sense does not exist either: the Bolshevik who lies to the capitalist participates in the truth (note the strange pleasure in the eyes of Jean-Luc Melenchon). he hits something big: this is the fruit of this Leninist metaphysics. He considers himself absolutely right, secretly sanctifies himself with his canardo).

The language of the tree thus never tries to come into contact with truth and through it reality. It is an autonomous, abstract space, where both what is and what is not are perfectly interchangeable. Fascinatingly illustrated by Orwell’s wars between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eurasia, the combination of these is ever-changing, each to be accepted as the only possible, immutable one by Big Brother’s minions. But let’s go back to Putin, who sings surprisingly 1984 on the territory of Russia.

(Here I refuse to recall an anecdote. I live in an isolated French village. The majority of the population is peasants: very few armed, no ideologues. Shortly after the war in Ukraine, on the terrace I heard this sentence from a fifty-year-old man in a cafe in a small village : “All Ukrainians are Nazis anyway!” I couldn’t help myself: “Good move, Vladimir.” An escaped Moscow lie had found its way from the Kremlin office to the brain of a French peasant like a virus from the P4 laboratory in Wuhan.)

(remove parentheses?)

Putin lies all the time

He lies for three main reasons.

First, because he, like Lenin, did not believe for a moment in the existence of truth.

He believes that the taste of truth is the fashion of the weak, fools and suckers. Brezhnev grew up in the language of wood, which is his mother tongue. Then, as a diligent student of the KGB school, he learned all the Soviet methods of the art of political disinformation. More than a mere vector of lies, he learned to embody the lie: it was etched into his flesh, into his very being. False identities led to its formation modus vivendi. Finally, it wraps around spin doctors who took the same courses as him and combined the discoveries of Western psychology and marketing with lectures and practical work at the KGB. The result is an extremely effective lie factory.

The French, who are most outspoken about Putinism, consider our Russian compatriots ordinary idiots or licensed traitors. For many, this makes them too quick to judge. Because Putin has built a continent-wide political communication campaign during his twenty-two years in power, which is extraordinarily effective. In advertising, we value a tree by its fruits, and the facts are there: millions of Europeans look to Vladimir the Great as a wise man, a thinker, a glorious conqueror. To judge the strength of his intellectual hold over our country, it is enough to look at the misty-eyed laurel wreaths thrown at him by traditional Catholic circles. Yes, some people call him “our savior”. They no longer see that they have sunk into the idolatry that their Lord has vomited. As Alain Besançon said, “they think they know, they don’t know what they believe.” By unconsciously deifying Putin, they leave the orbit of Christianity: the Russian lie is capable of this. But these poor people are not mentally insane, but Moscow can make them momentarily insane, as it did with the French workers in the 1940s and 1970s.

It is the power of Russia addicted tell a lie.

Without him, the deception of the “Eurasian power that will save civilization” would have been obvious to the naked eye, and the crowd – not only in Russia – would have bared its teeth. If it were not for systematic and systematic lies, Putin could be perceived as what he is: XXL mobster, honorary member of the most brutal secret services of the 20th century^e century and an insatiable predator of his own people. The exact opposite of the patriotic and orderly man before whom so many European laws kneel. He probably wouldn’t survive his mask falling off. He is the one who can no longer be himself.

And then, the final reason, perhaps the most crucial, is that Putin lies all the time because he doesn’t know what universe he lives in.

As Galia Ackerman and Françoise Thom point out, he doesn’t read a newspaper, doesn’t know how to use a computer or a smartphone: he accesses local and global information only through Russian television, he repeats what he thinks and the reports given to him on Loop. by FSB officers who are too afraid to face the facts. He will never tell the truth because he has never seen it, heard it, or come into contact with it in any way. If he happened to hear him, he would punish him because he has this megalomaniac, paranoid old, incompetent multi-billionaire in his bunker, at the center of an absurd war that he should never have started. the pariah can no longer detect the ever-increasing chasm between admiration and the verb to be.

We need to get rid of Russian lies more than Vladimir Putin. It will be long and difficult: the painful mission of at least an entire generation.