Among the thousand tragic aspects of the war in Ukraine (the innocent victims, the cities leveled, the very serious impact on the economy of half the world) one little story stands out, almost irrelevant but of great symbolic importance: it’s the Defamation lawsuit that the Russian Ambassador in ItalySergei Razov, filed against the newspaper La Stampa. subject of dispute the article by war correspondent Domenico Quirico titled “When Killing the Tyrant Is the Only Way Out”.
The doubt is that the Russian ambassador only read the titleand not the whole article, which described as “senseless and immoral” the idea that the only way to solve the problem of the invasion of Ukraine would be for Putin to be assassinated by his compatriots. Razov understood the opposite and accused La Stampa of inciting a crime!
In reality, Quirico had asked himself: “Are we sure that taking down the tyrant by force won’t cause even worse chaos?“. And the answer was unequivocal: no, because “in history, the result has almost never corresponded to the desires of those who thought they could solve everything at the cost of a single life”.
The most famous precedent? «1914 the Serbian Gabrielo Princip he thought that killing the heir to the Austrian throne would solve the problems of the Balkans. Instead, he eliminated the one character who probably would have saved Europe from falling into the tragedy of World War I,” Quirico recalled.
Aside from helping to clog the Italian courts with unnecessary causes, The misunderstanding that led the ambassador to sue the journalist speaks volumes about the difficult relationship between the Russian authorities and the free press.
Without dealing with the tragic case of Anna Politoskaia the journalist who denounced the horrors of the war in Chechnya and was found dead in the elevator of her home in Moscow on October 7, 2006, killed by four shots The latest example of disinformation concerns Russian state television, which has been reporting from Mariupol in recent daystransmitted the images of the city devastated by the bombs, but assigned them Responsibility to “Ukrainian nationalists” rather than to Putin’s tanks.
A shift in reality that shifted responsibility for the disaster from the invaders to the invaders, completely overturning the perspective and narrative of the facts. Perhaps there is no place to marvel, for propaganda has always been an instrument of war since the world began: The nice thing is that today in the age of mobile phones and social networks a lot of fake news is denied in real time. And they boomerang for those who spread them.
For this reason too, Putin has long been planning Russia’s exit from the Internet, the global network that connects the world. The project is called RuNet and to ban the Web not only from the entire Russian steppe, but aims to create an intranet under its full control (ie a closed network like large companies use for their internal communication) and national social channels based on the Chinese WeChat model. The goal is clear: to take total control of communications and isolate the Russian people from the rest of the world. Literally: Disconnect all of Russia from the grid, pull the plug.
The striking example is the most severe pandemic in history, not Covid19 but the virus that caused 50 million deaths between 1918 and 1920
It has always been known that communication can influence public opinion’s perception of reality. The striking example is the worst pandemic in history, not Covid19, but the virus that caused 50 million deaths (some even say hundreds) in different areas of Europe and the world between 1918 and 1920. According to some experts, the first outbreak developed in the United States, according to others in China. Then why did this terrible epidemic go down in history like the Spagnola? For the simple reason that Spain was not then involved in the First World War and Spanish newspapers were the only ones not subject to censorship, while in the countries involved in the conflict the news of the spread of the disease among the soldiers in the trenches was deliberate kept hidden. Had the truth been written from the beginning, more appropriate countermeasures might have been taken and many lives saved. A bit like 2019, when China overshadowed what caused the coronavirus in Wuhan for too long. Everyone knows how it turned out.
