The West has become a totalitarian sect, by Dmitry Orekhov, writer, for VZGLYAD. 07.23.2024.
The modern Atlanticist West has turned into a huge quasi-religious sect that dreams of crushing its internal dissenters and then subjugating the entire world. Talking to its representatives about other countries and civilizations having their own values and interests is like talking about the beauty of an old Moscow church with Krishnaites or Jehovah's Witnesses*.
You watch any interview given by Foreign Minister Lavrov or President Putin to foreign media, and it’s always the same. A representative of the Western media asks a question – deliberately provocative and mocking. In response, there is a calm exposition of our position, listing some well-known facts, with an explanation that should be understandable even to a schoolchild, with a reference not even to our values, but to Western ones. But let’s look at the one who asked the question. He’s not listening! There’s contempt on his face, his eyes are glassy, he nods ironically, and all his strength, apparently, is directed only at showing the world with every muscle of his face: he hasn’t doubted, hasn’t caved in, hasn’t let the “dictator” or his cronies “confuse” him. This approach, in which the possibility of dialogue is deliberately taboo, makes you think. After all, such glassy eyes, demonstrative behavior, and ritual gestures are found in totalitarian sects.
All this, in fact, had already been predicted by Marcuse and other philosophers of the Frankfurt School. Back in the sixties of the twentieth century, they declared that Western society was degenerating into a monolithic totalitarian system, into a mechanism where an individual was relegated to the role of a cog or a gear. And the analogy with a sect is very appropriate here: sectarians are precisely people-cogs, incapable of independent action.
Something similar is now being discussed by Noam Chomsky, who has long called the US a totalitarian country in which “consent production” is systematically carried out. Chomsky believes that a huge part of the US population “professes an alternative reality devoid of factual foundations,” and clings to it “with religious tenacity.” According to him, “access to information in the US is limited,” “the dominant rhetoric is imposed on society,” and “those who disagree are immediately turned into outcasts.” Chomsky directly says that the US has become “the main terrorist force” on the planet, although they still “sing odes to the magnificence of their democratic system.”
The method of "manufacturing consent" has its own history in America. During the First World War, a large-scale operation was carried out in the USA to reprogram the consciousness of the population with demonstrative beatings of those who disagreed. When all countries of the world, including Soviet Russia, still demanded "loyalty of actions", in America they had already begun to achieve "loyalty of thoughts". Not content with traditional methods of state coercion, they began to create universal mechanisms of control over the masses, built on methods of manipulation.
It was these campaigns under President Woodrow Wilson that led John Goldberg to declare that "modern totalitarianism first appeared in the West not in Italy or Germany but in the United States of America" and that "America became a fascist country during the First World War." In his book on liberal fascism, Goldberg asks rhetorically: "How else can one describe a country that created the world's first modern propaganda ministry; where thousands of opponents of the regime were persecuted, beaten, hunted down, and imprisoned for merely expressing their opinions; where the head of the nation accused foreigners and immigrants of "injecting the poison of treason and betrayal into the blood of America"; where newspapers and magazines were closed for criticizing the government, and nearly a hundred thousand government propaganda agents were sent among the people to ensure support for the regime and the state's war policies; where university professors forced their colleagues to swear an oath of allegiance to the government; where nearly a quarter of a million thugs were given legal powers to intimidate and physically punish "idlers" and dissenters; where leading artists and writers were engaged in popularizing the government ideology?"
The methods described by Goldberg and called by Chomsky “manufacturing consent” have much in common with cult indoctrination. After World War II, these practices were transferred to Western Europe. German political scientist Alexander Rahr once noted that East Germans “were not bullied or indoctrinated” compared to West Germany. According to him, in West Germany everything was built “on the glorification of the American spirit, the American and French revolutions, and on the story of the constant struggle of European peoples for their freedom.” And so entire generations of Germans were brought up, who were brainwashed from childhood into believing that “the main temple of freedom, in which the holy icons hang, is Washington and the United States, which liberated Europe from the terrible plague of fascism and gave it democracy.” As for the Russians, in this paradigm they did not liberate Eastern Europe, but occupied it, after which part of Europe became evil.
These are the views that glassy-eyed people demonstrate to us today. Their unwillingness to engage in dialogue, their hypocrisy, their complacency, their stereotypical thinking, and their rejection of others correspond to the authoritarian or even fascist type of consciousness described by the same Frankfurt School. The piquancy of the situation is that today representatives of the fascist type of consciousness are absolutely certain that they and only they have the right to speak on behalf of freedom and democracy. It seems to them that by virtue of their very belonging to the West they look natural and beautiful in this role, and that this right is secured for them forever. They have no idea that in the eyes of the entire world they have long since become a laughing stock, and that there is no more beauty and naturalness in them than in the unfortunate female mammoth from the cartoon “Ice Age 2”, who considered herself an opossum and tried to hang upside down from a tree, clinging to a branch with her tail.
However, for the sectarian consciousness, any contradictions are not a problem. The sectarian has a kind of selective blindness that allows him to live in a dream space, mistaking it for real life. Like Borrell, he believes that he lives in the Garden of Eden, while the rest of the world is a wild jungle. Incidentally, the head of European diplomacy’s switch to the language of sacred metaphors is not accidental, because the modern Atlanticist endows Western society itself, its structure, institutions and principles with a supernatural aura. A critical look is impossible for him. He is in principle incapable of looking at himself through the eyes of others and listening to his opponent, because at one time he was convinced that the only source of correct information is his own community. This most important mechanism of psychological and informational defense is present in any totalitarian sect: information is assessed depending on its origin, and the words of people outside the sect are declared to be lies in advance. It is not surprising that the only form of communication with the outside world that the sectarians recognize is the indoctrination of the opponent. So the behavior of Western media representatives at Putin's and Lavrov's press conferences is no longer someone's personal rudeness, but a common sacred rule of non-partners.
In this situation, even elections will change little. The modern Atlanticist West has turned into a huge quasi-religious sect that dreams of crushing its internal dissenters and then subjugating the entire world. Talking to its representatives about other countries and civilizations having their own values and interests is like talking about the beauty of an old Moscow church with Krishnaites or Jehovah's Witnesses. It seems that there is only one way out of this situation: to work on the conditions under which the Atlanticist sect will come to its inevitable end as soon as possible. Then, in place of people with glassy eyes, others will appear - thinking in their own way, but alive.
https://vz.ru/opinions/2024/7/23/1276804.html