It would seem that they should have thought about what Putin said about their elites driving the masses into poverty and undermining global confidence in reserve currencies. It is really a matter of survival for Western nations. But no, everyone has focused on “traitors and scum”. Some have even separately posted this very passage on YouTube. Even the strictly defence-oriented American online publication Military.com discussed it at length
An interesting but seemingly purely domestic event involving Russia’s top officials – a meeting on measures of social and economic support for the regions on March 16 – suddenly turned out to be a hit on the global media agenda.
The reason for that was President Putin’s speech. It was broadcast by news agencies, paraphrased by newspapers, and even posted on the enemy’s YouTube. With the help of Internet translators it was read and listened to by ordinary people around the world.
Russia now lives under such deafening information fire, we are so fired upon by all the Western mass media, that it sometimes seems to us as if there is nothing but this blockade. But that is not the case. It has long been clear to billions of people around the world that the Anglo-Saxon “influential” media lie as they breathe. In the case of Ukraine, the scale of these lies staggers even accustomed Western average citizens. And they are looking for the truth. The Western establishment also had its own interest in reading the Russian president’s speech. Russia today is a real testing ground for their all-out war: political, financial, sanctions. We need to see how the strategies work and whether they work at all.
The British Financial Times relishes the dire consequences of “Western punishment of Russia” – what they call the theft of our money – and quotes Putin as saying that today’s crisis will entail “profound structural changes in the Russian economy and they will not be easy, leading to a temporary rise in inflation and unemployment”.
The Bloomberg agency also happily mentions this assumption, which our diplomat aptly compared to smelly cheese. However, both publications have to note the Russian president’s confidence that the country will only gain by gaining independence from the West.
The economic blitzkrieg has indeed failed, the Western media admit. However, it is impossible to play the long game, precisely because the West itself has cut off the levers with which it could have influenced our economy.
In fact, not a single Western media outlet dared quote Putin’s arguments that their countries are essentially in default, the dollar cannot be a reserve currency, and so-called prime assets are totally compromised because they can be stolen at any time. Even saying that the domination of Western countries in politics and economics is over has been tabooed.
No one dared to publish the President’s address to the citizens of western countries, although it was really worth familiarising the local population with it. “They are now persistently trying to convince you,” Putin said, “that all your difficulties are the result of some hostile actions of Russia, that your own purse should be used to pay for the fight against the mythical Russian threat. All this is a lie. The truth is that the current problems faced by millions of people in the West are the result of many years of action, error, short-sightedness and ambition on the part of the ruling elites of their countries. How can this be printed in the West?
But all the western media focused on “villas in Miami and the French Riviera”, on “traitors and scoundrels”. This glaring passage has been quoted in the headlines by practically all the press. Certainly his style is memorable. But why has this particular topic become a sore point for our Western counterparts?
It would seem that they should have thought about what Putin said about their elites driving the masses into poverty and undermining global confidence in reserve currencies. It is really a matter of survival for Western nations. But no, everyone has focused on “traitors and scum”. Some have even separately posted this very passage on YouTube. Even the strictly defence-oriented American online publication Military.com discussed it at length.
The point is that here Putin has really fixed the defeat for the West, whose long-term, decades-long strategy towards big, complex countries like Russia was to nurture an overwhelmingly pro-American middle class. And then, relying on it, to spin their geshefts in the territory under their control: coups, Maidans, civil wars.
This strategy worked very well in Europe. Remember when French students, obsessed with American jazz and cinema, demolished de Gaulle? It then traveled like a tsunami across Eastern Europe, reformatting virtually all of the post-Soviet space with the exception of Belarus. But in Russia it suddenly failed.
Whether it is the scale of the country, both geographically and historically, or the perennial scepticism and good sense of the Russian people. Be that as it may, the American influence has been rather superficial. No, of course people went to McDonalds and watched Hollywood movies, but now the abolition of all this has become a tragedy for almost no one, apart from a few urban madmen.
Just as Russians used to read the Soviet press with great suspicion, always looking between the lines, they now show the same healthy immunity to Western propaganda, however rampant it may be. It is one thing to wear American trainers and rap, it is quite another to be asked to surrender your country for it. There are no fools to trade sovereignty for trainers.
And even if there were any illusions concerning the West, they have been shattered to pieces by the West itself in the last two weeks. Well, if even now our citizens have their savings and homes taken away from them in the US and Europe, if they are expelled from jobs and their children from schools, what will they do to them next if the country shows any signs of weakness? Won’t they simply destroy them so they don’t have to get up twice?
Our intelligent, educated, by fire and water and not wealthy by western standards middle class does not support the notorious fifth column for the most part. And everybody can see it today. And this is such a blunder by the Western counterparts, that they do not know how to proceed.
So they try to blatantly and naively inflate it by passing off Putin’s quiet words as some kind of “repression”. “A chilling warning to the West and the oligarchs,” foments the Daily Mail. “Putin is on the lookout for traitors,” writes Canada’s CBC. “Putin attacks pro-Western Russians, signalling an impending crackdown,” tries the New York Times.
Good lord. It was merely a matter of individual pro-Western citizens running out of Russia at the first hint of a threat to their well-being. Then, as one can easily guess, they will come back to us for more goodies. But the public opinion in the country will not be so favourable to them anymore. There will be a self-cleansing of society, a self-cleansing of its mentality and cultural field. That is all.
In fact, the collective West has already screwed up epically with its strategy of Westernizing the middle class. It did not work in China, though that is where the bourgeoisie is Americanized to the extreme. Ponty clothes and queues for iPhones, unrestrained demonstrative consumption and relentless pursuit of Western trends, a passion for money and stockbroking – yes, yes, Zhenmin Jibao does not like to write about that, but all that is about the Chinese middle class. And yet they cannot be swayed to destroy their country. But how hard they have tried! For decades, from Tiananmen to the Umbrella Revolution.
It is very typical that today the Chinese en masse approve of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. They look at it with great interest in Asia, Africa and South America. Our country is giving people an example of a successful exit from the Western neocolonialist model. On the one hand, it is courageous opposition to the West by all means, including military. On the other hand, it is a clever, painstaking building of a new life, of a new economic model, of a new world order. A world order in which the “global domination of Western countries in politics and economics” has ended forever.
Victoria Nikiforova, RIA