The Measure of Propaganda -- Ukraine Edition

The corporate news -- such as it is -- has been dominated with an intense barrage of Anti-Soviet propaganda since well before the opening of the Sochi Olympics. The inundation of Anti-Soviet propaganda has been complimented with as strenuous an Anti-Putin demonization campaign as we've seen since the days of Stalin.

Most people alive today never directly experienced Anti-Soviet/Anti-Stalin propaganda and may have difficulty making the connection, but I'm old, and I have witnessed it in the past. I lived through the Post War/Cold War Red Scares and hysterics, and even though I was a child, it made a big impression on me. I knew even then that it was propaganda, and it was mostly based on lies and fantasies. It was story-telling on a grand and destructive scale, intended to keep us from knowing what was true and from thinking critically about any of it.

Similar tactics were used to demonize Saddam Hussain and Iraq in the lead-up to the catastrophe of the Second Gulf War, perhaps the most egregious example of war of aggression since the Unfortunate Era of the 19th and 20th Centuries, when the war of aggression was refined to an art form and implemented widely, not solely by Hitler!!!!™  either. Far from it. The war of aggression was a basic tactic in the Imperialist kit bag, frequently employed by colonialist and imperialist powers -- with or without pretext -- to seize and control what they wanted. The colonialist and imperialist powers were not supposed to do it to one another, but sometimes they did anyway.

That's all water under the bridge, however. We're in a New Century now, the supposed American Century if the neo-cons get their way, and progress requires continued conquest or the game is up. Can't have that.

You'd think they'd learn, but they don't.

Reading the beads and parsing the text, what I'm getting out of the current propaganda barrage regarding Ukraine is that the nation-state called Ukraine is falling apart, disintegrating. The reasons why are somewhat masked under the propaganda barrage, but it might be due to the fact that Ukraine only ever existed before as a satrapy and province of the Russian Empire and relatively briefly as a dependent republic of the Soviet Union. It was never organized into an independent nation-state, in other words, but was always the appendage to some other Empire, state or interest. Even during its brief hey-day under Nazi occupation, the point was never for Ukraine to be an independent nation-state, but for it to be a colonial resource for the benefit of Germany and the Aryan Race, no matter how this status was being sold to the Ukrainian people.

The disintegration of Ukraine is not due to Russian pressure, nor is it due to the return of Crimea to Russian control, though the propagandists like to pretend Russia is the cause of all troubles in Europe's Eastern Partnership. It's just not true.

What seems to be true is that internal tensions are the driving forces underlying the disintegration of Ukraine. The population, for example, is not homogeneous but is in fact quite disparate. It's not simply a matter of Russians here and Ukrainians there. The ethnic issues are far more complex than that. It may be analogous to the situation in Yugoslavia prior to its breakup and civil war. Under Russian Imperial control or Soviet control, the pseudo-state of "Ukrainia" (actually, they do use that term over there) could function relatively well, because loyalty was not to "Ukrainia" but to Russia or the Soviet Union. Ukrainian nationalists were the outliers.

Now it seems "Europe" wants to become the master and overlord of the Ukrainian nation and people as a whole, and it doesn't look like it is going to work. The Ukrainian people(s) have different interests. Their national identity is weak. The various ethnic enclaves each have separatist notions of their own. Russia's modern history in Ukraine (that is since the disintegration of the Soviet Union) is slight at best, something the propagandists can't seem to grasp. Independent Ukraine has been a full-on basket-case from the get-go. Despite the billions of dollars pumped in by the United States and Europe to prop up some form of nationalism and national government, it hasn't worked.

The desperation of the Interim Government (so-called) to "integrate" with Europe is palpable. But to what object? Certainly not on behalf of the Ukrainian people(s). It's self-evidently a personal quest of those in charge for the moment, something they've wanted for themselves, bugger the "people." They're trying to sell a pig in a poke, not even bothering to put lipstick on it, and it's not very pretty.

Russia's claim on Crimea can be disputed on technical grounds, but not on historical, social or practical ones. Europe's counter-claim on the whole of Ukraine under a EU puppet government -- which is what has been installed using local Nazi shock troops to make it so -- is truly outrageous. Russia's claim on Crimea seems modest by comparison. Despite the hysterics in the West, Russia appears to have no particular interest in the rest of Ukraine.

Let them go their own way, poor devils. They'll learn their lesson soon enough. 

And if Ukraine is disintegrating anyway, perhaps the EU/NATO will wash its hands of the mess it has made, leaving the constituent parts of what will come to be called The Former Ukraine to sort out their own fates and futures.

Of course, they'll be unlikely to do that so long as global corporations have their hooks in and assert their prerogatives and power. It's all highly unseemly.

And as always, the people being squeezed from both sides are the losers. On its present trajectory, no matter what the propagandists tell us, there is no good way for this to end for the Ukrainian people(s). They've been had.

Again.

Momentary Change of Pace: Constructivists

I've been meaning to post this, and actually write quite a bit more about the topic, but I haven't had the motivation.

Still, the Constructivist Movement was very influential in my own development as somewhat of an artist for the stage and privately. Yet I have no memory of ever being exposed to it at all. It's the strangest thing. There's a thread of Soviet Constructivism that runs through practically everything I've painted or designed or built, and yet... I have no idea how it came to me. It must have been in high school, or even before, probably was well before high school.

And yet...

Strange.

Nice video, tho:

Teatr Project

I've been working on a project dealing with Socialist Revolutionary Theater in the first couple of decades of the Soviet Union and its ultimate influence on theater in the West and the research is fascinating and daunting. Over the years, I have collected quite a lot of material on Russian and Soviet theater, but unfortunately it's not cataloged and currently it's all boxed up, so I've relied more on internet resources and what faulty memories I have of projects I was involved in long ago. There is so much. So much of it is in Russian!

Well, I studied Russian briefly on my own when I was in college, never took a course, but I did become more or less familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet and could muddle through a few halting phrases. Now I have to read it, and that's proving to be something of a challenge, though not a hopeless one, and I need to understand spoken Russian much better than I ever did before in order to fathom out some of the un-subtitled film clips I've been looking at. Not too long ago, I picked up some of the language again while interviewing immigrants from the former Soviet Union and I learned a great deal about their experiences -- though of course I had a translator with me, so it wasn't like I was carrying on a conversation in their own language. I couldn't possibly.

With this project, though, I don't have a translator, so it's taking some time, but, Oh My, what I've been learning.

Although I was a theater professional for many years, my interest was always in the art form itself and the practical means of realizing the artistic vision, whatever it might be. I spent far more time analyzing the Greeks and Shakespeare trying to absorb how -- and to some extent why -- they did what they did and how to translate that analysis to the stage today, especially when the play being done wasn't ancient Greek or Shakespeare. The Greeks and Shakespeare are the foundations for contemporary English-speaking theater, even though the work itself may be based in or derived from a very different tradition. What those plays were like to the audience originally is still what we are trying to accomplish today, and part of the problem I've found with productions of the Greeks and Shakespeare is that the approach is all but backwards. All to often, the approach is to try to impose something on the work rather than draw out the depth of what's already there.

One of the most profound works I ever encountered was the "Prometheus Bound" of Aeschylus, very short, extraordinarily powerful, soaring and painful and wonder-struck in every imaginable way, and I pondered it for what seemed like half a year or more trying to fathom what it must have been like for audiences in Athens 2,500 years ago and how any of that spirit could be found or recovered today.

There is no way to deal with a play like the "Prometheus Bound" in realistic terms. It is not a realistic drama. It is a tragedy, one of the purest that's been handed down to us. It is towering mythology, both horrifying and uplifting at the same time. There is no method nor any psychological analysis you can do that will make "sense" of the play, because it isn't a play to be made sense of. It is a play to feel, to touch and experience the deepest emotions you may have -- and to survive it.

Over time, I could draw on a lot of complementary performing arts experience, not merely (oh, well!) the Theater in the conventional sense, but all kinds of street performance, circus, spectacle and pageant, movies, and so forth. And still I pondered the Greeks.

I would ponder the Greeks even when the production was Chekhov or Brecht or O'Neill or (god save me... ) Irving Berlin.

All this is a round about way of getting into the question of Socialist Revolutionary Theater in the newly hatched Soviet Union.

The forms utilized in the early Soviet attempts to create a truly Proletarian Theater weren't entirely new, nor in many cases were the creative people involved, but the way they were combined and recombined and utilized, and the frankly social and political purposes for which they were used was something new, and often the visualizations were entirely new. (On the other hand, sometimes they were recycled.)

But what is striking to me right now is that so much energy and effort was put into reaching as deeply as possible into the emotional core of the People, drawing them in and holding them "bound" if you will, bringing them into the performance, and in many cases having them create -- and live -- the performance themselves from beginning to end. The point is to create a true People's Theater, not impose an idea of Theatre upon them.

Somehow this seems very Greek -- or very Shakespearean -- to me, for at least in part, it is how they did it. The production, the performance was an organic whole from within the community, not something imposed upon it from without.

While there were trusted regulars, there were no "professionals." And so it would be -- or at least it would try to be -- in the Soviet Union.

Outside of an academic context, there's little of what they were doing -- such as their plays and their pageants -- that we are exposed to these days, but in the 1920's and 1930's the influence of Soviet experimental theater was profound in the West, and the deeper nature of what they were trying to get at is to be found in all sorts of places and performances. The Soviet experiments in Revolutionary Theater haven't gone away. They've burrowed deep.

So. This project is taking time because I'm once again trying to burrow deep into an art form I haven't practiced for fifteen years, and I'm trying to do it in a language I can barely comprehend -- sometimes. The strangest thing is that I've got this silly grin on my face so much of the time while I'm working on it.

---

An animated version of "Prometheus Bound":

Prometheus Bound from Manatee Idol on Vimeo.

Парад Победы

This is really very moving. Most Americans have probably never seen anything quite like it.

The video is of the opening of this year's Annual Victory Parade, May 9, celebrating the Allied victory over the Axis powers in Europe. There are some 20,000 troops from Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union, and from all over Europe and from the United States, too -- the most ever gathered for a Victory Parade they say -- marshaled on Red Square to be reviewed by the Defense Minister and the Colonel General of the Armed Force before marching in parade before the assembled dignitaries arrayed in front of and beside Lenin's Tomb -- which has been decoratively covered by a Russian Federation themed shroud in honor of the day.

A number of things: there seems to be somewhat more Soviet imagery than I recall seeing in previous Victory Day Parades held since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Defense Minister greets the troops: "Товарищи!" "Comrades!" I like it. He and the Colonel General are swanned around the Square in Soviet Era parade cars. While this may seem retro, it's actually good because most of the veterans of the Great Patriotic War on the reviewing stands were Soviet citizens. You cannot have a Victory Parade on Red Square without acknowledging the Soviet Union was the victor and it is the Soviet Union's victory that is being celebrated.

It's interesting how the modern Russian Federation integrates Soviet imagery -- and avoids some of it, too -- in these annual events, and it is interesting to see how it changes over time.

Here's a video of the 1945 Victory Parade, Uncle Joe Stalin officiating. It is quite different, yes, and yet not that much different at all:



For Americans, WWII was all about US fighting the perfidious Nazis and Japs. I'm of the Post War/early Cold War generation, and there was little or no acknowledgement of the Soviet sacrifice and ultimate victory over the Nazis. But they were the ones who took the brunt of the War, losing tens of millions of troops and civilians, seeing almost the entire European portion of the nation destroyed. As bad as the situation was in post War Europe, it was much worse in the Soviet Union. Of course, we learned nothing about this in the 1950s; the Soviets were our blood enemies, and their suffering during and immediately after the War was simply not mentioned. I didn't really learn of it until I was in college.

And then, so much of the anti-Communist propaganda we'd been fed throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s made a kind of inverted, sad sense. And it was then that some of us began to realize that the Soviets were not a threat to the United States, and that their "chiding" -- shall we say -- of America's civil rights and other failures and criticism of American impulses toward Imperialism were actually tonics that helped Americans find ways to improve.

We don't have that Soviet mirror any more, and the current Russian Federation version of it is hardly of the caliber of the former Soviet Union.

I've spoken with some of the survivors of the Great Patriotic War, men and women who came to this country mostly as religious refugees from the Soviet Union. When they think back on what they lived through, what they survived, how they did it, who they fought, they have immense and justifiable pride in what they were able to do against all odds, and when it came to that War, they were without question loyal and patriotic Soviet citizens. Even if later their Republic (most of those I've interviewed were Ukrainians) would rebel.

The shame was that the Better World that was supposed to rise after the Victory began to fall apart almost immediately and for too many, it has become or is becoming a nightmare.

We deserve better.

-----------------------
My sort of half-assed translation of the Defense Minister's statement to the troops:

"Greetings Comrades!" They respond something like: "Greetings, Comrade Defense Minister!" He then says something like, "Felicitations on the Anniversary (66th? couldn't quite make it out) of Victory in the Great Patriotic War!" Then the troops commence to roar. You don't see that every day.

Those Were The Days

Was getting all nostalgic and reminiscing the other day. Going back over some of the Bartcop and Media Whores Online postings from 2002, then jumping back before that, to the '90's -- over a decade now -- when we first hooked up to the Internets on the dialup (was it $2.95 an hour? Don't remember exactly, but I do recall not leaving the computer connected if I had to go off and do something else. Even so, some of the bills were as high as some people's cell phone bills are now. Oh, and we only had one phone line, so if we were connected to the internet, we couldn't get other calls.)

The Leningrad Cowboys (from Finland) and the Red Army Choir sort of crystallize the absurdity of what once was, and in some ways, their astonishing and magnificent theatricality provides an opportunity to consider just how far we've come, how far down the cliff we've slid. And perhaps, maybe, the Soviet experience of vast pretence and imperial ambition (and horror almost without parallel in world history) brought low, yet with a people bringing the country back (under the resolute but now background leadership of KGB agent Vladimir Putin, the Beloved), maybe the Russians will be an example for us.

Those were the days alright.

Some reading