Let me be honest with the gentle reader. The idea of this post has been plagiarized by me from a site called EUvsDISINFO, where an article with the above title appeared a few days ago. I do not often plagiarize, which says less about my morals as a scholar than about the state of modern journalism, but I found that article exceptionally interesting.
In Les Visiteurs, one of my favorite movies of all time – I once showed it to Dr. Fleming, who said, after an astonished pause, that “this is the most reactionary film I’ve ever seen” – there is a moment when the hero, a medieval knight who has stumbled into the twentieth century, is being shown the Larousse encyclopedia entry on his illustrious family. “Who is this?” he asks about a descendant of his who lived in the eighteenth century. “Oh, he was a famous revolutionary.” And what does that mean, the knight persists. “He wanted to kill the king.”...
September must be allegory month, and fittingly one of the films now the talk of the Venice Film Festival is an offering from the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky entitled “Dear Comrades.” Its subject is the massacre of striking workers at Novocherkassk, a city near Rostov-on-Don, in 1962, and in fairness it ought to be said that a 2012 TV miniseries, entitled “Once Upon a Time in Rostov,” had done that subject ample justice, notwithstanding that it was made in the first year of what will enter history books as Putin’s Terror. But Konchalovsky regards himself as an artist, and hence...
“No matter how totalitarian is Putin,” one of our readers has asked in response to last week’s post, “is there any other way to keep Russia from falling into the hegemonic abyss represented by our deracinated Western leaders?” The question, to me, is hardly new, at least when raised rhetorically.
The gentle reader did not comment on last week’s post, so I follow the famous orchestra conductor’s advice to slow down if the audience finds your tempo sluggish. With regard to old icons – the “figure” of my metaphor, as a literary critic would say, current news being its “ground” – my meaning was clear enough, I think.
Disinformation, which we Russians lovingly nickname deza, differs from ordinary misinformation in that it is planted or spread knowingly, with malice aforethought and the intent to deceive. This looks good on paper, until a piece of fake news is actually before us and we start mulling it over, and then what is patently a case of carelessness or even of fraudulent intent may begin to take on the configurations of a gospel truth. That fake, after all, has not come out of nowhere. That fake is almost always a palimpsest of earlier fakes, and as one’s mind keeps burrowing deeper...
I’m writing this on a terrace that overlooks cerulean infinity on three sides, yet a day here is costing me less than a cocktail, with an inevitable accompaniment of olives and roasted nuts, at the Cala di Volpe or any number of similarly fancy establishments dotting the map of Italy from the Costa Smeralda upwards
Not a kind word for him anywhere, East or West. They are calling him “Europe’s last dictator,” which only makes sense if neighboring Russia is a country in Asia, and every little French politician, every sniveling British journalist, every U.S. State Department flunky, and every Kremlin lackey are gloating over his political demise, which is said to be imminent. This coming Sunday, Belorussian elections may be won by a random female candidate who is capitalizing on the protest vote against the taciturn mustachioed incumbent, and I sincerely hope this grossly maligned man manages to falsify the result to stay in...
Of everything we are to take on faith as Christians, quite the most difficult thing to believe in is the immortality of the soul. Every human being is said to possess one, yet so much evidence to the contrary seems to pile up almost daily right in front of our eyes that only the best of men can see a way of eschewing doubt on that score
Today marks the twelfth day of hearings in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, where a Hollywood film star – the “Bad” of my title – is suing News Group Newspapers, publishers of the lowbrow and bestselling Sun, for libel.
