<nettime> Guido Caldiron: The age-old roots of the 'plot against Russia'

Aloha,

Since voices from Italy are rarely heard outside Italy, here another Q&D translation. Cheerio, p+7D!

(...)

"What seems to emerge (after Lavrov's eggregiious anti-semitic statements' -PR) is the shadow of the cultural humus that looks like having sedimented in the Kremlin during past twenty years. Meaning a magmatic ideological construct, ridden with contradictions, but with obvious outputs: in order to legitimize the absence of democracy and of social and political rights in the country itself, we have a new aggressive and war-mongering calling towards foreign parts - mote than twenty years have passed since the first war in Chechenia and the invasion of Ukraine, yet both are directly linked through an almost uninterrupted streak of conflicts, all based on the idea that 'outside powers', international potentates or the Occident itself, all afflicted both by moral decay and undefined identity struggles ('cosmopolitism'? A strange accusation from a country with thousand faces) are always out to deny Russia and its people their innate greatness. A cleptocratic system which has not used the riches coming from the export of oil and gas to better the living conditions of the population at large, but only to fatten a metropolitan elite just large enough to guarantee a broad enough consensus to show for if the need arises. It has made its own population believe in an extensive and ramified anti-Russian conspiracy in order to justify their difficult living conditions - It were family men the soldiers who stole household goods from Ukrainian homes in order to ship them home. Maybe it is not even necessary to recall Dugin's anti-semitism, the fascism of [can't make out: 'Il' ], the over-the-top rhetorics of the 'new chronology', the evocation of Stalin, or that of a new Tsar, and the alliance with the orthodox church to understand that Lavrov's pronouncements, far from being a freaky anomalism, are rather its contrary. In a recent op-ed in the Guardian, historian Jason Stanley has suggested to interpret (Putin's) 'de-nazification appeal in the following light: "Russian Christians are targets of a conspiracy by a global elite, who, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights, attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation." (*) From there it is easy to appreciate where the (true) ant-semitism comes from.

(*) from the original at:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/vladimir-putin-ukraine-attack-antisemitism-denazify

Q&D translated by yrs truly

Fiesole May 3,

original (& whole op-ed) at:

https://ilmanifesto.it/lavrov-e-il-cuore-antico-del-complotto-contro-la-russia

(pay-walled)

PS Since Lavrov made these statements in an interview (rather a monologue without any interjections) on Italian Rete4 TV (Mediaset, Berlusconi-owned), a full-blown scandal has erupted in the national media about the limits of freedom of _expression_ in the context of the war in Ukraine ...