• am
  • ru
  • en
print version
28.02.2013

INTEGRATION PROCESSES AND INFORMATION POLICY

EnglishРуский

   

Gagik Harutyunyan
Executive Director, “Noravank” Foundation

The intention of the presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia to establish Eurasian Union (EAU) and Armenia’s possible joining the union caused eager discussion in the Armenian society. The main subject of these discussions is the political and economic problems and prospects of the integration process. Less attention is paid to the information component and directly connected with it system of values. Meanwhile it is known that the efficiency of the political processes is essentially conditioned by their “information support”, which is sometimes presented by the REND experts rather as a separate political genre – noopolitik, than simply support action.

It should be accepted that the formation of the EAU in the information context is not in a very good condition, simply because the citizens of a future union are often better informed about the events in Latin America than about what is going on in the future “brotherly republics”. Unfortunately, today it is impossible to discuss the issues of content or quantitative indices of the information component of the integration processes, simply because there are no such studies and analyses (in all fairness it has to be added that “Eurasian Information League” portal1 has been opened recently; it goal is to improve the situation in this sphere).

At the same time in the information materials some terms and ideas are rooted which do not contribute to the integration processes at all and this is topical not only in the plain of the RA-EAU possible relations. Let us try to consider some of them.

Objective assessment of history – the fundament of the integration

In the aforementioned context let us pay attention at the frequently used “post-Soviet space” combination of words. Here prefix “post-“ and adjective “Soviet” give an idea of the political and social past of the these countries but they do not convey meaning regarding the current condition of these countries. And word “space” is associated with some faceless and deserted area. So it is taken negatively and is associated with the inherent in this “space” problems which are as a rule remain unsolved. It should not be excluded either that “usage” and “dissemination” of post-Soviet term is the so-called meme, which is explained by the social psychology as directing regulation which is transferred from one consciousness to the other and forms special, in this case negative perception.

Let us turn to other, more important examples and among them the main in this context is the USSR, the diabolized image of which is used (even at the level of the Secretary of State) in order to inspire fear. It should be mentioned at once that we are not going to idealize the USSR: the Soviet system was established in the worst traditions of revolutionary terror, terror against their own nation (for various reasons and without them) which had lasted for 36 years (1937-1957) till Stalin’s death. According to the Presidential Commission for Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression2, the number of the victims of political repressions constitute 32 million people, 13 million of which in a result of the Civil War and “Sovietization” (1918-1923) when total “red terror” ranged in the country. Part of the victims of the Great Patriotic War can also be imputed to the “peculiarities” of the Soviet regime: it is known that during the large scale military operations there was a great number of casualties and they believed that this was how it should be.

And hence, the Soviet Union defeated fascism and turned into a country with developed science, technologies and culture where the Soviet intelligentsia, which was a bearer of deep knowledge and spiritual values, was formed. Taking advantage of the Khrushchev Thaw and partial reforms, this creative elite to some extent undertook the mission of the spiritual and ideological leader of the Soviet people. It is obvious that the history of any nation is not only the history of its political regime but also (and even primarily) a history of its society and people. In this aspect rather deep and metaphysical formulation for the USSR was given by one of the biggest modern philosophers Aleksandr Panarin in his “Strategic Instability of the 21st Century” book [1]. We think it is necessary to cite fully the following part of this book: “Our hypothesis is that the newest developments in Russia have global historical roots: they are connected with the a global attempt of a revanche of an individual bourgeois directed against all those social-economic, political and ideological formations which has become a response of the mentally and spiritually progressive part of the humanity to the nihilist challenges of bourgeois repudiation. But the real historical types are not formed at the basis of primitive formational determinism as a product of one-dimension class, ideological and other “essence”. The Soviet people could avoid such a unidimensionality due to their classical cultural heritage and first of all the literary and art one. Total literacy is not a mystery it can be implemented by extending appropriate strength and capabilities. The mystery is that it was used by a “Soviet man” on a deep personal level. Those who learned to read can consume numberless comics, detective fiction and “super-detectives”, “small texts with big pictures” (especially those of spicy content). This all can be observed on the example of American mass culture which took over the world. It is more difficult to explain the fact that the boys and girls, who were the first generation literate people, began reading Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky – the level which is considered to be elite on the West”.

If we consider the processes from Panarin’s point of view, the collapse of the USSR was not only geopolitical but also civilizational and humanitarian disaster which unleashed tremendous destructive energy. The effects of this disaster are not overcome yet and its continuation in terms of the information security is the blackening of their own history and erasing an entire epoch from the memory of people. It is remarkable that one of the evident representatives of the dissident movement Boris Kagarlitsky confessed that such an attitude to their own history is a first of all a mockery of the memory of the victims of totalitarian regime [2].

Current manipulations and erasing of the national memory prove that in this sphere, most probably, the technologies from the information-ontological wars and nation building spheres are used. As a result you can meet in the mass media predominantly “tragic” and “ironical” materials referring to the Soviet period as well as appeals to get out of “clutches of the past”. The style, spirit and “black-and-white” approaches of this obviously “export” material in some cases in a remarkable manner resemble the notorious Bolshevik “agitprop”.

Meanwhile the existing approach to the assessment of the USSR and the distortion of the objective history is not only an ethic problem but it is also a rough violation of all the rules of information security according to which it is necessary to keep continuity while narrating history and preserve the continuity of the national memory. It is remarkable the Bolsheviks (both Russian and Armenian) did the same way with history of the Tsarist Russia and First Armenian Republic. It should be mentioned that the collapse of the system is the latest crime of the Communist nomenclature and among those crimes distorted interpretation of their past occupies not the least place [3]. In our opinion, the peoples of the USSR, which were deprived of the historical basis, somehow were doomed to the “revolutionary transformations” with invariably sad result; something similar is observed today in the Arab world where in consequence of revolutionary movements in some countries the state and economic system collapsed and real sovereignty was lost. Perhaps Carl Schmitt’s words can be a little paraphrased and present his idea in the following way: “philosophical paradigms of Marxism and liberal ideological/economic demonism are the same” [4].

Let us mention that the rules of the information security are wonderfully maintained by the Anglo-Saxons: their conception of historical tradition does not accept the demonization of their own history no matter how tragic it is and this is when we have to learn from them. For example, Cromwell and Charles I Stuart killed by him, wonderfully get along together and are cultivated both on the pages of historical works and literature, cinema, etc. It is natural that such an “irreproachable” British history in such an interpretation and mass replication turned into the element of not only Anglo-Saxon but also global consciousness.

But the demonstration of manipulations, as the character of Bulgakov’s novel Bengalski said, demands “their exposure”. Nevertheless, there are no simple solutions both in “Variety” and in our case and the worst thing to do is to start praising USSR immediately (it would have been a blunder). It is very important not to go to extremities and go for virtual reanimation of the “chiefs of revolution and peoples”; rehabilitation of the totalitarianism is very dangerous and can affect the society. But it is necessary to elaborate the logistics of the sensible information policy, gradually correct the vocabulary and return our history to the definite information niche.

It is obvious that the transformation of the so-called “post-Soviet space” into the geopolitical, economic and civilizational infrastructure is not possible even in theory without a basis, i.e. our history. This circumstance is equally important for both integration processes of Eurasian and European orientation.

1 http://eurasianinfoleague.com

2http://www.lenta.ru/russia/2001/10/29/yakovlev/. It should be mentioned that the conclusions of the commission show that the calculated number of victims is incomplete.

Sources and Literature

  1. 1. Панарин А., Стратегическая нестабильность XXI века, «Москва», ## 4-12 (глава 2, Почему рухнул Советский Союз? Кем же был «советский человек»?), 2002.
  2. Кагарлицкий Б., Политология революции. – М.: «АЛГОРИТМ», 2007.
  3. Арутюнян Г., Распад системы и формирование будущего. – Ер.: НОФ «Нораванк», 2011.
  4. Шмитт К., Политическая теология. – М.: «KAHOH-ПРЕСС», 2000.
“Globus” analytical journal, #2, 2013

Return
Another materials of author