Reddit reviews Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
We found 12 Reddit comments about Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Obviously (I hope at least) they use the Russian words for those terms [Blue is a Russian nickname that roughly translates as 'faggot']. It's easy to not notice these things because they try extremely hard to make it look normal. But if you've ever watched a Russian political debat you'll notice that all the people fit a stereotype. The communists are all puffy red faced and fat, spouting ideology of marx, the liberals are thin and effemenate, the far right are stupid and lack rhetoric. This is done so the Russian people watch it and go "Who else but Putin can controll this mess?". All of it gets orchestrated by Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov. If you're really interested in how the Russian mis-information machine behind the media works then this book I can highly recommend.
> Also actually Russia supports far-right parties and Russia is almost total opposite of what Syriza stands for so it would be rather bizarre for me if the support would be somehow ideological because Russia is far from left ideologically since fall of Soviet Union.
Russia is a place where ideology dies. It is a place of absolute, overarching, post-modern cynicism, of institutionalized sociopathy.
Anyone having problem with comprehending this should read Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, it encapsulates the dystopia of present day Russia.
Russia supports extremist, anti-systemic parties in its ever-more-overt pursuit of subverting and ultimately destroying "the West", regardless of said parties particular political sensibilities. Cold War never ended for the siloviki.
Peter Pomerantsev, makes the argument Russia is ruled through that style of authoritarianism in his book. The short version can be found in Adam Curtis' nonlinear warfare.. The book's great and I highly recommend it.
>In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.
excerpt from this 2011 article by Peter Pomerantsev about Vladislav Surkov.
>Or the noise-to-signal ratio will be so high that people won't know what to believe anymore. If most people are overwhemled by the sheer amount of bullshit that they are subjected to, they might as well shut down and become totally passive to the system. That would be in the interest of powers-that-be.
What kind of hellworld do you want? A mutating kleptocracy? A totalitarian panopticon? Spin That Wheel!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610394550/ref=nodl_
> In the office of the Soldiers’ Mothers the walls are lined with photographs of dead soldiers. I’ve come to interview four eighteen-year-olds who have recently fled from a nearby base called Kamenka. I’m late, but they’re all waiting quietly and jump to attention when I walk in. They wear hoodies and the football scarves of Zenit, the St Petersburg football team, and are desperate to prove they didn’t just run away because of common initiation, that they’re loyal, tough. They seem embarrassed by having to take shelter with fifty-year-old women. They never call the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers by its name, just ‘the Organisation’.
> ‘You get beaten up, that’s fine. I pissed blood but that didn’t scare me,’ says one, the skinniest.
>‘Stools broken over your head. It’s good for you,’ echoes another. ‘They put a gasmask over your face, then force you to smoke cigarettes while you do press-ups. If you get through that you’re a real man.’
>‘I’m not red …’ they all repeat. ‘Red’ means ‘traitor’. It’s a prison word: in the 1940s Stalin started to fill up the ranks of the army with prisoners, infecting the system with prison code and hierarchies.
>‘You need discipline. But what happens at Kamenka has nothing to do with discipline.’ ‘The “grandfathers” beat you to extort money, not because they want to make a soldier out of you.’
>The conscripts spend most of their time repairing and repainting military vehicles, which are then sold on the sly by Kamenka’s command. The ‘spirits’ are essentially used as free labour.
>The boys had run away after a night of non-stop beatings. The ‘grandfathers’ had been drinking all day, and then at night they began to whack the boys with truncheons. The commanding officer came by but did nothing; commanding officers need the help of the ‘grandfathers’ in their larger corruption schemes and let them have their fun.
They go to great lengths to cover up for the ‘grandfathers’. In one week, the Soldiers’ Mothers told me, five ‘spirits’ at Kamenka had their spleens beaten to a pulp. The commanders couldn’t take the ‘spirits’ to a normal hospital; too many questions would be asked. So they had to take them privately, paying 40,000 roubles (over £ 650) for each operation.
>At 6 a.m. the ‘grandfathers’ told the ‘spirits’ they needed to each bring 2,000 roubles (£ 35) by lunchtime or they would kill them. One of the conscripts, Volodya, decided to make a run for it. He slipped through the fence and made it to the road. His father had picked him up and brought him to the Organisation.
>Volodya mutters as he tells his tale. I have to keep on asking him to speak up. ‘Of course it’s because the commanding officer in the army is a darkie from the Caucasus. The darkies control the camp, it’s all their fault,’ he tells me. The women from the Organisation tut-tut and shake their heads. They hear this every day, especially in St Petersburg, the skinhead capital, and especially among the supporters of Zenit, Volodya’s team.
Here's the author's book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
Russia - Where everything is possible
I am going to disagree that there is not "unbiased" info on the conflict. That line of thinking plays into Russian PR tactic exactly as they want. Russia's whole thing is that "there is no truth" so there is no way to judge a situation that Russia is involved with. This book and many other essays go into detail and examples.
I think the conflict is clear as day when future generations look back. Nobody can dispute:
The rest of the details about the conflict are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. There is lots of biased opinions on whether some individual shells were fired by the Russians or the Ukrainians, etc etc. Those events should be discussed with an understanding that we don't know exactly what transpired.
But as for a basic overview for people who never heard of Ukraine there is plenty of unbiased info because the basics are not disputable.
I'm sure you can infer something about the legitimacy of Assad victory in 14. Does Syria have a history of legitimate and transparent democratic transitions of power? No.... oh boy....
Theres a fog of war in Syria, sure. Find good sources and sift through them to get a good picture. But the idea that theres no way of knowing what's happening in Syria is a huuuge stretch.
U find it curious that suddenly theres a media campaign claiming knowledge of Aleppo or anywhere in Syria is impossible when Russia is facing criticism over its bombings.
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610394550
Which is exactly the effect Russian propaganda tries to achieve in Russia. There's a book called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.
If you like this clip, you should read "Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible". Also, that author with a piece on Surkov.
Looks worse is a morality question. But if you are trying to create an amoral society you wouldn't care about how you look. They always try to distract from the things that are codified in law as wrong or unethical.
No, you don't. You just need a media ecosystem which spreads the message. It's about destroying the public discourse.
https://www.amazon.de/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610394550