http://www.geocities.com/eurasia_uk/submarine.html Little by little, the arguments over who is to blame for the loss of the submarine Kursk and what conclusions can be drawn from the tragedy are subsiding. Especially as the media serial "The Ostankino Tower Fire" - probably the last in a series of events of "Black August" - has now been on the agenda for the last few days. The smoke from the fire is now more important than the fog on the Barents Sea. Nevertheless, the submarine saga has made the picture of the new Russian state ideology far clearer, and the arguments of the parties to the dispute have begun to repeat themselves and become solidified. The most important point is that everyone accepts that there has been, is, and will be much political, economic, and ideological speculation surrounding the events on the submarine. The simplest and most obvious is economic speculation, which is based on the simple conclusion that the defense budget must be increased. This is understandable, since no one doubted that the tax police and KGB would also get a pay hike as well as the military on this pretext. The situation of the purchase and resale of ideological values is more complex. Some say that the myths created over several years by "so-called democrats" concerning the bad Army, the harm of the state, and so forth have been destroyed in the arguments over the loss of the submarine. Therefore it is time to "restore" the Army and the state (the church is now also often placed in this category). The arguments of the opposing side boil down to the following: Those who concealed information about what was happening on the Kursk and who refused foreign help for several days have drawn only two conclusions from what has happened - they must tighten the screws and increase the military budget. This is support for purely Soviet myths of secrecy, military might, the self-sufficiency of everything Russian, and our ability to cope with any problem on our own. This is speculation on great-power attitudes and on the national pride of Russians which may lead to the restoration of an autarkic state ideology. In his now-famous Russian TV interview Vladimir Putin said: "We will restore the Army, the Navy, and the state." Not reform - so that, for instance, there is no hazing in the Army, submariners are paid decent money, and the state apparatus is small and free from corruption - but restore. But it is impossible (and unnecessary) to restore the Soviet Army, and the state that once existed ceased to exist in fall 1991, when endless lines for sugar appeared along with the threat of the physical shutdown of any economic processes. What is there to restore? A few days ago Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the main Kremlin ideologists, began to employ (admittedly in the heat of the argument) the language of people who were previously regarded as ideological opponents of the Kremlin - in particular, he used the loaded phrase "defamation of the Army." The change in the authorities' vocabulary is bound to delight the "statist-patriots" - at long last the authorities and their ideologists have begun to employ the language of the newspaper Zavtra. And no one can any longer be surprised at the fact that Aleksandr Dugin, that eminent extreme right-wing geopolitical philosopher and constant author in Prokhanov's paper, is trying to arrange a meeting with Pavlovsky. Extreme right-wing ideology is now not merely becoming the dominant note in Russian journalism and state rhetoric - it is becoming the height of fashion. And Dugin could now be recruited to the team of Kremlin speechwriters: He is an excellent writer, though sometimes obscure.... So the "post-submarine" era has begun. We can regard state ideology as having been finally formed. It is indeed reminiscent of a mild version of Pinochet's social mythology, in which the army, property, and the church were regarded as sacred. Pride of place in the new Russian state ideology goes to the state (the word "democracy" would previously have been in this "high-profile" position), the Army, the Church, and - in the economy - a more or less market policy involving frequent use of the phrase "there will be no redivision of property." We can regard Putin (or his ideologists) as a natural Hegelian - so far as old Hegel was concerned, the state was the central concept of political philosophy. The only problem is that, say, Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini's house philosopher and effectively the dictator's speechwriter, was also not a natural but a very conscious Hegelian. For instance, here is how he described the state: "...it is a nation conscious of its historical unity." How is that any worse than Dugin? You can go very far in flirting with the statist myth. It is no accident that the fire at the Ostankino TV tower was seen as a sinister metaphor for what is happening in the country. We are being blown up by our own bombs and drowning, and now we are also on fire and being deprived of television. And we all live in a yellow submarine. On the other hand, media policy is being rehearsed in the disasters: The day after the fire, Minister of Internal Affairs Rushaylo announced that all news about the TV tower would now be channeled only through his department. The state is indeed becoming a real player in the media field. That is what it wanted.
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