Everyone Lies

[David Morris]

I think it’s interesting that there are people on this list who think *they
know more about the REALITY of Russian and Ukrainian history* during the
period described by in this account *than the author herself*, who
experienced  it first hand, and is still now in the heart of it.

On Sun, Jul 17, 2022 at 11:14 AM Darah Kehnemuyi <darahk1 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Thanks, David.  Good read.  I  assumed Russians who were smart enough were
> just keeping their heads down and saying what safe even if they did not
> believe it themselves... maybe not so much ...     D.
>
> On Sunday, July 17, 2022 at 10:17:18 AM EDT, David Morris <
> fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> https://twitter.com/john_sipher/status/1548626774703181824?s=21&t=rr0FG3ce-lE3T9WkVYlXwg
>
> “Even the Russians who do have access to outside information still dismiss
> reports of Russian aggression. “Everyone lies,” they say. It’s one of the
> most effective thought-stopping ideas…”
>
>
> https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/15/i-once-supported-putin-now-i-know-the-truth-00031740
>
> I Once Supported Putin. Now I Know the Truth.
>
> Anastasiia Carrier believed Russian propaganda — until she moved to America
> and became a journalist.
>
>
> […]
>
> In Sept. 2011, when Putin announced he would run for the presidency again
> in 2012, my friends and I understood that it meant a strong chance of
> another 12 years of Putin.
>
> This was certainly not the democratic direction my friends and I had hoped
> Russia would take. In December that year, the biggest anti-government
> protests since the 1990s broke out across the country in response to the
> accusation that Putin and his United Russia party had rigged the
> parliamentary elections. The visuals of a crowd chanting “Putin is a
> thief!” and “Russia without Putin!” somehow found their way to me on
> VKontakte, a Russian social network inspired by Facebook.
>
>
> My friends and I had heard enough talk about Putin being corrupt to believe
> it. We were finally old enough to vote, and we took it seriously — we
> researched the candidates, debated their campaign promises. Most of us
> liked Mikhail Prokhorov, an oligarch who promised to reverse the
> constitutional amendments and crack down on state propaganda and
> corruption. It felt like our generation, one that grew up under Putin,
> could finally make a change. Even my grandmother’s confidence in Putin was
> shaken, and my whole family considered other candidates.
>
> […] To my shame, it was the annexation of Crimea that placed me squarely
> into the pro-Putin camp. The Euromaidan revolution of 2013-2014 in Ukraine
> received a decent amount of airtime on Russian news. But instead of showing
> Ukrainians protesting a corrupt government and successfully ousting
> pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian narrative painted the
> new Ukrainian government as a fascist gang and extolled Putin’s effort to
> save Crimea and its ethnic-Russian population from fascist rule. The
> process was democratic, the propaganda swore.[…]
>
> It was easier to accept the Kremlin line as truth than to question each
> confusing argument, one by one. I came to believe that Western attacks on
> Putin’s actions were synonymous with attacks on my country. My concept of
> patriotism twisted into blind support of Russia. This time, I didn’t
> discuss it with my friends, but I was certain they felt the same way.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>