I sometimes listen to podcasts about the secrets behind the best-known magic tricks (the three-shell game, mentalism, levitation), and after reading recent news from Russia, I saw an analogy to how Russian propaganda has achieved the seemingly impossible. Defying common sense, the Kremlin continues to proclaim with a straight face that its attack on Ukraine was an act of self-defense.
Most magic tricks combine two strategies, one to produce the desired effect and another to distract the audience from what is really going on. Russia is doing the same with recent statements that are clearly designed to raise regional tensions around Ukraine. First, the Russian government approved a list of 47 foreign states and territories whose neoliberal attitudes supposedly threaten people with “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” Those on the list are now officially designated as “enemy states.” Gone is any pretense of supporting a “multipolar” world. If you do not share Russia’s values, you are the enemy.
Among those who apparently share Russia’s values are North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran. The common element across these regimes is that they regard the European Enlightenment as the ultimate evil. The conflict is thus elevated to a metaphysical-religious level, and whenever religion enters directly into politics, the threat of deadly violence is never far behind. Beneath all the talk of a new multipolar world is an eschatological vision of a total war to extinction between two opposites.
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