Rhetoric has always played a decisive role in politics, a perennial gray shade in the context of history, even and especially now that the clangs of wars come from the east that move on the wings of inflamed words and speeches.
Il Logos remains the principle behind any relationship. The word is inspiring, it is the argued conviction of justice, it is the demon who, like 3000 years ago, pushes men to kill themselves on a battlefield.
Rhetoric has noble fathers; since classical antiquity there has not been a time when orators capable of convincing the right motivation of their ideas have not appeared. Fichte wrote his Discourses to the German nation between 1807 and 1808; it is pure political literature which, by supporting German nationalism against the Napoleonic occupation, aims to awaken national sentiment by proposing the creation of a nation-state born from the glories of the Holy Roman Empire. Urban II pushes the Crusades in the name of an impalpable God; William Wallace to rebellion against the occupier in the name of an elusive freedom.
Tolkien, a survivor of the horrors experienced in the trenches of the Western Front, gives voice to the courage and hope of characters of a humanity so full that it deserves the chance to live in a Middle-earth populated with ideals so high as to be unattainable.
Shakespeare's Mark Antony, before the Romans, rules and launches the flames of an oration that should have been only funeral, but which anticipates the war. The value of his speech is measured in relation to what is caught between the lines, which becomes an object of desire and need to know. In speaking, he demonstrates that he has lost something precious that brings him closer to the audience, allowing him to bypass it, remaining between the level of a complex communication and the art of persuasion. Marco Antonio doses the terms; he talks to his friends, then to the Romans, and finally to his fellow citizens. Nobody is afraid, everyone feels sharing: he has them in his hand.
There are no commands, but prayers, suggestions suggested with a rhythm that gradually increases the emotional intensity, suggestions that leave only an apparent freedom of decision, according to a strategy that devoid of any possibility of reaction as it is so rapid; suggests, does not pronounce clearly: the attacks, for a class speaker, are indirect but no less lethal.
The speaker declaims because in his pocket he has the guarantee of someone who has left him a proscenium from where he asks questions while suggesting the answers. The speaker believes and, above all, has seen, therefore he is trustworthy.
If you are friends, Romans (maybe Russians) and also fellow citizens, well then you can only love and follow the one who opened his eyes. Perhaps. After all, the ars oratory consists in knowing how to say everything and its opposite without contradicting oneself; it means knowing how to persuade, knowing how to use rhetoric schemes to accompany listeners to understand a concept, to reinforce an idea.
Alan Moore makes his V say: while the truncheon can replace dialogue, words will never lose their power; because they are the means to reach the meaning, and for those who want to listen, to the affirmation of the truth.
Now the oratory refers to the mass, it does not aim at the skill of the individual, it is based on quantity: whoever says best and most wins. Contradiction is not a problem for the political showman; what is important is knowing how to speak, perhaps about nothing, but well. Images, verbal and non-verbal communications, are the object of preventive study, quite the opposite of what Guareschi said, when he asserted about Latin, which is a precise, essential language ... When the era of demagogues, of charlatans, begins, a language such as Latin will no longer be able to serve and any peasant will be able to deliver a speech with impunity and speak in such a way as not to be kicked off the platform. Other times, other speakers.
According to Bismark, people never lie as much as before elections, during a war and after hunting. Very true. It is no coincidence that the Roskomnazor1, a body that controls communications and their blackout, activity increased since the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict, with the imposition of the narrative to be adopted, carefully censoring the terms invasion and war.
The propaganda strikes the Ukrainian Nazi politics, inspired by the historical reference to the controversial character of Stepan Bandera, and is directed towards more generalist drug addicts, a qualification that, falling into the category of any, seems to be attributed because it is the only one subsidized at that moment.
Until a few weeks ago, the Russian audience, despite the fact that it is difficult to have actual figures, confirmed the conviction about the validity of the military intervention, fueling the negative vision of Ukraine and its government. With the closure of various newspapers, public opinion has crystallized and, in favor of the regime, can only condemn the sanctions imposed. It is also true that if the pure and tough say that they would never return to buy the products of the companies that have abandoned Russia, on social networks the problem of where to find the necessary money is more than anything else.
In light of the imposed censorship, the quote from Napoleon III who said he never read the newspapers because they printed only what he wanted so much comes to mind.
When Xi Jinping, someone who loves to popularize his speeches with metaphors of Maoist origin, met Putin in Beijing, he was pleased to announce the arrival of an era characterized by a new international order whose strategy is based, not surprisingly. , on information.
At the time of the invasion, while avoiding providing obvious support, Beijing amplified Russian propaganda according to a narrative style aimed at containing conspiracies, such as the terrible and lying ones born about the origin of Covid.
The Chinese and the Russians are very similar in terms of information governance strategies based on a state-controlled network, endowed as in Russia with sovereign internet laws.
In recent years, a smoke-free war has been waged from China2 that with its disinformation has gone to strike all true or presumed Western evils.
The problem (perhaps) will arise when and if China decides to support peace initiatives that cannot fail to take into account necessarily less nebulous information. In this sense, the Russian RIA Novosti had an effect on the online publication of an article, removed, in which, delighting in the overcoming of the Ukrainian question, the birth of a new world and a new geopolitical order free from global Western domination was welcomed. , with the return of Russia to its historical place of competence.
Basically nothing new, given that much of the content had already been expressed by Putin in his article On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians July 2021. According to the author, the essay, ideological and selective, should have demonstrated Russian-Ukrainian affinities; something like that one face one race that we know well, for which Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians would form a single nation, with borders even prior to those of the USSR. In short, not even Lenin is saved. The resulting geopolitical vision is unstructured, and refers to an imperial motherland that summarizes different peoples and territories.
The propaganda did not stop, and for its success both faces generated with AI and false identities of subjects hostile to the Ukrainian authorities were exploited. This is the case of Vladimir Bondarenko and Irina Kerimova, false owners of non-existent profiles and part of specific disinformation operations that also provide the narratives to be offered in schools.
The problem with propaganda lies in the aftermath, in the return of the soldiers home, of any form of return, whether in a plastic bag or with some permanent impairment.
The Russian president speaks to his compatriots, wearing clothing adapted to circumstances and economic possibilities as appropriate: only the parka worth thousands of euros should horrify the ideologue Dugin, for which Russia must become a point of reference for all those who do not they recognize themselves in the globalist degeneration of a sick West, stigmatized also by Patriarch Kirill, self-appointed spokesperson of a secular culture that is perceived as morally superior to that of the degraded West, intermediary between reality and a god who, however, cannot find on paper Ukraine.
There is therefore nothing surprising in finding the paraphrase of the Gospel of John by a messianic president who reserves for the Russians the certainty that there is no greater value than giving one's soul for the love of friends, leaving the Apocalypse to the Ukrainians. by the Evangelist himself, evidently out of the narrative in those verses. It is the Russian / Orthodox Christianity to be placed on the tip of the bayonets, which does not grant the miracle of a television broadcast free from defects; or maybe yes, maybe interrupting just in the moment of dissent, who knows. In the story, actual facts and historical distortions follow one another, accompanied by the misunderstood concept of civil coexistence between peoples. The rite of the bathing of the crowd is therefore repeated, of the oceanic gathering of cheering masses who appropriate the symbolism created, starting with the letter Z, non-existent in Cyrillic, adorned with the red and orange ribbon of the Tsarist order of St. George, masses who sing and praise a new Marcus Aurelius in a turtleneck who is granted to his people.
Words do not deceive, these are principles that refer to a precise will to power absent in the West since the time of God with us, since Leni Riefenstahl in 1936 with her Olympia takes up all the most typical themes of Nazi aesthetics. As now with Crimea and Donbass, also in '38 the desire was expressed to reunite the Sudetenland with the historical homeland.
But who is on the other side of an ocean that technology has shrunk? A president who is unknown how well versed in war conduct, with an entourage not up to Edwin Stanton3Edward House4, Harry Hopkins, George Marshall, William Lehay5, heir and continuer of various political errors.
Surely in Kiev the cognitive and media war are fighting it, albeit with mixed fortunes, based on the experiences gained in almost 20 years of Kvarta195 the production studio founded by Zelensky. Yuriy Kostyuk, once a screenwriter, today ghost writers with Zelensky himself and Andriy Yermak, he transforms the president of the series The servant of the people, in a dramatically true head of state.
Even for Zelensky, nothing is left to chance, and in the connections with the various national parliaments he empathically cites history and facts, not wearing expensive made in Italy but military clothing. So much is normally aseptic and only the icy Putin, as the evocative and accompanied Zelensky is engaging who manages to arouse the bipartisan applause of the American Senate and Congress. If it is true that there are still and always margins of criticism, as happened for the sudden approach to the Shoa6, it is also true that it was the Ukrainians who found an invading army on the street. In any case, the Ukrainian president's media investment seems to have worked: according to the Washington Post, his communication has in fact influenced Western ways of reacting, leading to the tightening of sanctions and the sending of a significant amount of advanced equipment capable to make the difference.
Moore's V, apologizing for the interruption, would have covered his mute perfidy with ancient expressions extraneous to him stolen from the sacred texts, looking like a saint when he plays the part of the devil! More simply, in a moment of heated and devastating cognitive conflict, remaining in the dystopian world of V, there is a need to defend the integrity of each one down to the last centimeter, however small and fragile, because it is the only thing at the world worth having. We must not lose it or sell it off, we must not allow it to be stolen from us. We should remember this every time we get ready to listen to anyone.
1 Federal service for supervision in the sphere of connection and mass communication
2 On February 22, upon the entry of Russian troops into Donetsk and Luhansk, a Chinese directive ordered not to report information unfavorable to Russia or favorable to the West.
3 A. Lincoln's Secretary of War
4 W. Wilson's diplomatic representative
5 FDR collaborators
6 In the Knesset, a single group intended to boycott Zelensky's speech, the "United Arab List", a union of several Arab opposition parties, characterized by communist and pro-Russian positions, as opposed to Mansour Abbas's Islamist Ra'am party. part of the coalition government
Photo: MoD Russian Fed / Twitter / web / Xinhua
