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https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://medium.com/@elvirabary/why-russians-fear-the-west-48918122ab6b>
“If you are an aspiring dictator, one of your first problems is very practical:
how do you persuade millions of people to give up freedom, property rights, and
control over their own future?
You cannot place a soldier with a rifle next to every teacher, factory worker,
accountant, doctor, and pensioner. That would be expensive, exhausting, and
impossible to maintain.
So you need something cheaper.
Fear.
Convince people that enemies are everywhere, that the country is always under
threat, and that survival requires obedience. Once people begin to feel like
residents of a besieged fortress, they will give you almost anything "for
national defense." And once they hand it over, you decide what happens to it.
Then you provoke your neighbors. When they respond, you point at their response
and say: "See? They want to attack us."
And when someone demands rights, you call them a foreign agent. When they ask
for evidence, you say the demand for evidence proves the conspiracy.
It sounds absurd. But this mechanism works.
That is why, if the West ever hopes to build a safer relationship with Russia
in the future, it has to understand the fears that the Russian state has been
feeding for generations. These fears cannot simply be ignored, mocked, or
dismissed as stupidity.
For millions of Russians, fear of the West is not just a political opinion. It
is part of their worldview. And once a person has invested years of loyalty,
shame, silence, and moral compromise into a fear, admitting that the fear was
manufactured becomes almost unbearable.
Dictators understand this perfectly. The West may tell Russians, "You have been
manipulated." The dictator tells them, "You are wise, farsighted, and
surrounded by enemies."
Guess which message is easier to accept?
But a dictator cannot create mass fear out of nothing. He can only use fears
that already have historical, emotional, or psychological roots.
Today, I want to show you the main fears that make many Russians distrust the
West — and how Putin's regime turns those fears into a weapon of control.”
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
