When you look at the official Russian news, you are amazed at how many “experts” there are. Recently, for example, I came across this title: “Abkhazia’s refusal to join Russia is an unfriendly step: Expert.” Here is such an expert opinion: you are a friend only if you are part of our country, otherwise you are an enemy. But, of course, the most preferred occupation of experts, political scientists and other propagandists is to whip the “fifth column.”
One of the masters of this genre (by the way, ending with the surname “-yan”) thinks that the Russians who see their country in the European family are worse than the “fifth column,” they are hiding, waiting for when According to the expert, it will be possible to “enter the West” again. According to him, this is not only harmful for Russia, but also impossible, because in the West “Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky were banned.”
The “fifth column” is a favorite phrase of preachers in all countries. It is also often used in Armenia. Before the revolution, the “pro-Russian Serzh supporters” attached that label to the “pro-Western NGO members.” And the NGOs that actually came to power after 2018 describe the “Serzh supporters” in that way. Interestingly, the phrase “fifth column” had a slightly different meaning at the time of its origin. In 1936, when the Spanish Nazis besieged Madrid, General Emilio Mola, who was leading the “special operation,” addressed the besieged and announced that he would attack the capital with four military columns, but in Madrid, there was a fifth column. He meant that he had many supporters inside the city.
But for journalists who sympathized with the Republicans, that is, the anti-fascists, that phrase quickly became synonymous with a traitor, a spy. And now they call the fifth column all the contradictory characters, starting with the pro-Byzantine Catholicos Petros Getadardz, ending with the Russians who want to live in a normal, modern state. There is, however, a methodological error in the official Russian propaganda. There is no West as such, there are many different countries with their own interests and contradictions. Unlike Russia, there is no “King of the West” who instructs all experts, political scientists and journalists to express the same ideas in the same vocabulary. And whoever does not do that, call them the “fifth column.”
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There is no such compulsion within the separate Western countries. For example, the German Prime Minister’s Office does not order all theaters, concert halls, and publishing houses to ban Russian culture. There are some separate, special structures that come up with such, let me say, marasmic initiatives. But these structures make up a small percentage, and I hope they will give up their absurd behavior in the near future.
… And Russian culture deserves the respect of the whole world. For example, the great Russian writer Tolstoy wrote: “People who think war is not only inevitable, but useful and therefore desirable, those people are horrible with their moral depravity.”
Aram Abrahamyan
