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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Drugged Ukraine

16 November, 1999 - 00:00

To an American or a West European, who has gone native in the civilized jungles of their consumer societies, Ukraine first seemed an exotic country. Tourists would derive certain pleasure from novel tactile and hearing sensations on the public transport, while business sharks and Wall Street naively believed in the universal rules of the game, no matter what kind of a label — capitalist, reform, or postcommunist — a society sticks to certain rules of the game. As summit talks went on, accompanied with the clinking of presidential glasses, while premiers and ministers were exchanging their freshly-signed documents, there was no disappointment. There was surprise. Disappointments came later, when their sharks encountered our enigmatic Slav soul. Gnashing their teeth in bewilderment, most of them very soon made a 180 degree turn.

The essence of our people’s soul and the theater in which it operates, molded over centuries, is a fact to be reckoned with by not only foreigners. Top politicians in power also need to know the human material they have to work with. But our authorities have proven incapable of studying mass psychology in order to find the levers required to influence it.

As always with us, one who embodies authority assumes not only official status but also the function of an omniscient and omnipotent oracle. Unfortunately, contradictions between one’s status and intellectual abilities occur in history much more often than we would like. What the authorities always did in such cases was try to preserve themselves by all means possible: a drowning man will grasp at straws. And what the people got was a nonexistent prettily packaged social product. In other words, self- preservation of the authorities always has a reverse side in the manipulation of public awareness and behavior.

Ukraine’s authorities have been waging a massive psychological war against their own populace for many years. Such military-medical terms as shock, surgery, and therapy have gained wide currency, while the patient, in the person of the whole people, fails to keep pace and expose not only the usual parts of the anatomy for new injections and veins for blood tests but everything else for numerous vaccinations against illusion. Meanwhile, the doctors’ consultations conclude joyfully after lengthy debate, like in Pinocchio, “The patient is more dead than alive.”

The ingeniousness of our masters of state-building has reached such peaks that no foreign image-makers have yet dared to climb. I think our ruling elite is wasting huge money on Russian, American, and other “consultants.” Perhaps, these same consultants, sitting in a Shovkovychna Street courtyard and sipping a cup of coffee with a cigarette, wrestling with their problems with our language and mentality, are also doing something else here: they are studying the Ukrainian media’s wealth of experience in fooling the people and distorting the real situation, social priorities, and problems (and at our expense).

In the just-published book Five Years of the Ukrainian Tragedy Yevhen Marchuk has described briefly but clearly the techniques employed by the current regime to fool public opinion. This boils down to a massively distorting reality along with cynically ignoring the cultural achievements, spiritual, and moral values, which until recently helped people withstand our lengthy and often unbearable historical marathon. This means fostering simplistic stereotypes of our life as total and blatant propaganda. This is, finally, the unprecedented repetition of lies and concoctions, the irrational perception caused by foisting myths about the President, the brown-red threat, war, inevitable purges of society, abrupt social turnabouts, stable reform and a stable Ukrainian “currency” (stabilized only at the expense of pensions and wage arrears), and so on.

The information theater in Ukraine has become unipolar, primitive, and hence dangerous. It has become public enemy No. 1 and paradoxically made it impossible for the people to get along without it. This psychological war has encouraged a mass disease which may be called societal AIDS: the loss of immunity to lies, platitudes, primitivism, colorlessness, lowering the threshold of reacting to human meanness and downright stupidity, of forgetting oneself and incomprehension of those around you, fear of the future, and the loss of prospects. All this eventually calls forth aggression and demand for a leader equal to the situation.

This psychological war, which requires, like any war, a great deal of money, encompasses everything: from incentives to mass media agents, political allies, and show business stars, to administrative pressure on voters and intimidation (or even liquidation) of political adversaries. Moreover, all this unfolds unscrupulously, encountering no resistance from the people, whose numerous representatives say every now and then only about flipping them the finger hidden in their pocket.

Thus we are being turned into zombies (also by our colleagues: journalists, political scientists, and sociologists) and manipulated, but we (by old habit) do not resist.

We Ukrainians are self-sufficient, which the Wall Street sharks have immediately appreciated, leaving us eyeball-to-eyeball with our own sharks: the struggle of the fittest within a single species is always the cruelest and most brutal, and it seem better to keep clear for some time — we will later deal with the winner. They watch, while we, high on our own inexpressible stability, surrender to dark desperation. Oh, you sensitive nations! Listen to your sensitive heart and climb on the wagon.

Our citizen today has no social protection, and he is afraid to look at himself with his clear conscience or even his own opinion. And this can be explained. Elections are democratic not only when people have the possibility to vote freely. Elections can only be democratic within the context of civil society, i.e., in the conditions of a widespread network of horizontal structures — various organizations that protect human rights and interests and which the authorities reckon with and fear. In our situation, elections cannot be considered democratic. This is an ontological test of our people’s wisdom, compassion for others, and sensitivity toward human dignity. If the test results are positive, this will be the beginning of a new life and building a democratic order. If not, the victors will be above judgment.

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