Reuters har gått igenom de nya skolböckerna där Putlerregimen efter bästa förmåga förklarar sina nidingsdåd - inklusive "specialoperationen" i Ukraina - för det uppväxande släktet. Det är lögner och bortförklaringar, fabler och försköningar, skryt och självömkan, hat och hotelser i en enda oskön blandning. Samtidigt kan man mellan raderna klart märka regimens noja över att inte längre kunna kontrollera massorna, i synnerhet inte de yngsta generationerna.
Kremlin aide rewrites Russian history for a society at war
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...ar-2023-08-10/Entitled "Russia Today - The Special Military Operation", the chapter reflects Putin's own disillusionment with the West after he offered Russia's support to the United States during the 9/11 attacks in a gesture of post-Cold War friendship.
"The West became fixated with destabilising the situation inside Russia," the book, a copy of which Reuters has reviewed, says on page 393. "The aim was not even hidden: to dismember Russia and to get control over its resources."
Such an explicitly endorsed history of the kind that has for millennia been used by the powerful to influence their own legacies gives an insight into Putin's own reasoning for war and the insecurities which may lace his domestic hegemony.
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"This is propaganda - it’s not a textbook," Mikhail Kopitsa, a Russian history teacher who left Russia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, told Reuters of the book. He now teaches at a school in Montenegro.
Asked if the book showed the strength or the weakness of Russia, he said it showed both.
"The regime shows its strength: we will do what we want, and you will just have to put up with it, just take it," he said. "It is yet another brick in the wall of this propaganda machine that is aimed at the whole system of education."
"But we can definitely talk about the regime being worried: there is a fear that the Internet generation, the Zoom generation, will turn out to be unreceptive or not receptive enough to propaganda and so they need to strengthen it more and more."