Pogrom* syndrome: why media and social networks inflate the "national question"

Mikhail Makogon, journalist

Kadyrov's conflict with the state propaganda machine is even more interesting than it seems.

Start over.

In Russia, people are beaten and killed every day. They kill about 20 people a day, plus or minus 1-1.5 children. By European standards, our indicators are fig, by world standards, in the United States 5 per 100 thousand per year, in our country - 8, more, but not many times.

An inadequate gop-company, from which a random passer-by is shocked, is an even more common practice than direct murder. Nothing good, of course, but if you imagine that federal news would record every such crime, then the entire agenda would consist only of them.

Don't get me wrong, it’s terrible when someone is beaten, but it’s statistics, not news. Actually, you can go to any site with extreme vidos and find that Russia (and the CIS), along with Latin America and Africa, are stable suppliers of bloody street content.

This was never news. For a street fight to move from news bulletins to headlines, there must be a Texas chainsaw massacre.

But something is changing very dramatically. Incidents that are very similar in modulus: people of non-Slavic appearance beat a very Slavic person in a crowd - one after another they turn into a big sensation. One gets the impression that here is the beginning of a civil war with elements of ethnic genocide, dark-skinned people catch and beat blonde ones, attack women and children.

It may seem that this is not without reason, that this is a targeted information campaign. When ethnically marked incidents are deliberately selected from reports and immediately picked up by all state and near-state media.

That this is such a renaissance of Surkovism, that there is an idea to scratch the ethnic nationalism of the TV viewer, to give him pogrom moods without pogroms. Black Hundred in the form of a TV show with a break to advertise an ointment for prostatitis.

This is a wonderful topic that at the same time instills a sense of threat, divides society in a meaningless discussion, generates an understandable enemy, pushes real threats, such as torture in prisons and covid to the background, and most importantly - it does not end with anything, not those times for virtual pogroms to become real ... This is Stalin, Lenin in the mausoleum and a monument to Dzerzhinsky with settings above average: social conflict, antagonism of social and ethnic groups, disappearing into the sand.

It all looks like that because this is it.

The nuance is that Surkov's heirs are apparently right that ethnic nationalism in Russia is strong, that the “face of Caucasian nationality” is still a universal enemy, what a gay man with his propaganda will never become, but they have forgotten that since the time of Surkov the political and power weight of individual Caucasian leaders has grown greatly and spread far beyond the borders of their republics.

Original is here.

* Pogrom is a riot aimed at persecution or massacre of a particular ethnic or religious group