Indecent imitation

The death of twelve passengers of the bus at the checkpoint of the Ukrainian army near Volnovakha prompted President Poroshenko to compare militants from the DPR with Parisian terrorists. And the Ukrainian community on social networks began the JE Suis Volnovakha campaign , trying to achieve the same solidarity with Ukraine in the world of which was manifested after the tragedy in France.

The death of civilians is always a tragedy. But such is the inevitability of any war. The most accurate weapon, the most professional military, the most humane politicians, forced to give orders for hostilities, cannot guarantee that in the course of the armed conflict, people who are not involved in it will not be affected. Even the elimination of single terrorists, hiding behind hostages, sometimes ends with the death of innocent - including from the fire of police snipers. (Certificate of this is a recent story in Sydney, where the hostage died from a ricochet of police bullets.)

The attempts of the warring parties and their ideological allies, squeezing the keyboard buttons - sometimes thousands of kilometers from the place of events are disgusted - use innocent victims to expose opponents. The scheme, repeatedly tested by terrorist groups such as Hamas or totalitarian modes such as Iraqi times of Saddam Hussein, is always the same: here is a portrait of a young victim, it was killed by our enemies, sympathize and help us in our right business. Then, the portrait of the victim with the corresponding inscriptions is copied and broadcast by sympathetic (and out of the principle that they do not want to delve into details) as many times as it is necessary for the "world community" to understand: since there are such victims, something needs to be done.

Pro -Russian militants and their large, but quite monotonously working propaganda infrastructure in the Donbass and in Russia have repeatedly used this tactics. Damaged as a result of shelling of the house and, if the propagandists are lucky, the bodies of the dead local residents since the beginning of the armed conflict in April were constantly appeared in the broadcasts, posts, and demotivators. However, this acted mainly on the Russian viewer or user of social networks - primarily due to the massive recurrence of personnel and their emotional commenting.

The international campaign against terrorism and in defense of freedom of speech under the slogan Je Suis Charlie gave rise to new hope among pro -Russian propagandists. At the beginning of the week, the sites of pro -Russian militants and accounts of the users of social networks were filled with pictures with the signatures of Je Suis ... - Next were the names of settlements controlled by the DPR and LPR, the names of the victims of Odessa events (from the pro -Russian side), as well as people who died in the Donbass. The “Je Suis Vanya” demotivator was especially active with a photograph of a children's face, kitted by fragments and filled with green.

Such a campaign wears all the traces of the cargo-pult. Not knowing how to understand the reasons why millions of people were solidarized with dead journalists (and this is not only sorrow in victims, but also the desire to defend the most important principle of Western civilization), pro -Russian militants tried to copy their form, hoping to lay their meaning into it (the Ukrainian government is poorly, since it kills innocent people). The effect of this action, in my opinion, was small - it could only act on those who are already treated with pro -Russian militants with sympathy. This was not the first attempt by fighters for Novorossia to turn to the international community in, as it seems to them, understandable and effective propaganda. In July-August, against the background of military defeat of militants, Save Donbass Children calls appeared on the sites of their supporters with photographs of children, and then everyone who wanted to star under such a slogan. This campaign also had no result.

The point here is not at all in the indifference of the world community that does not want to respond to the suffering of the population in the "wrong" territory - no matter how the supporters of the militants and fans of the ideas of the revival of the Russian Empire due to neighboring states denounced this callousness. It is impossible to demand from people of mass sympathy to the victims of any misfortune on the planet. Private Russians do not have strong feelings about those painful phenomena that excite the public in the West or are important to the East. Constant tragedies in Africa, the problems of the Indian tribes in Brazil - all this outside their interests. You can demand attention to all victims everywhere either from the alpine height of worldwide compassion (and there are only a few, mostly young visitors to university libraries), or from the disusable hypocrisy and politicism.

The answer to the question "Who to suffer in the world?" largely depends on the media. One of their most important functions in the Western world is to determine which events deserve predominant attention. The death of peaceful people in the Donbass as a whole is recognized as a sad but inevitable consequence of hostilities, the responsibility for which the pro -Russian militants and the Russian leadership supporting them are primarily bearing. And the Ukrainian side during this conflict has not yet committed anything that could qualify as a systematic war crimes and would demand to beat all the bells.

According to the Commissioner for Human Rights in the DPR Daria Morozova, as of January 11 "," since the beginning of the armed conflict in the Donbass in the DPR, 35 children under the age of 18 have died. " So, about one child for every week of conflict. And among the children there are teenagers who were able to wear weapons or at least help the separatists in the battles (reporters from Slavyansk have repeatedly reported this). And no list of victims, and even more so the investigation of the circumstances of their death, has not been presented. But this figure can be discussed a hundred different ways and each time you remember about the "tears of the child."

And we will still think about the scale of the problem. As a result of massaged shelling by Ukrainian troops of multi -sized cities for at least eight months - as the Russian side is trying to present the case - there are less victims among children than a week of Boko Haram in Nigeria or as a result of automobile accidents in the same Donetsk region for six months.

From this point of view, it is very sad that the Ukrainian side has recently adopted the false methods of propaganda of an ideological enemy. Je Suis Volnovakha and Poroshenko’s performance is a truly tragic event. However, was it worth it so hastily accusing the opposite side of purposeful murder of civilians, to allocate a 14-year-old girl from all those killed? When the pro -Russian militants fired at the Ukrainian checkpoint, they are unlikely to have an idea of ​​the murder of a teenager and generally the shooting of a bus with Donetsk women who drove to the Ukrainian side for social payments.

Recall that the successes of Ukrainian civil society and pro -Western political parties during the days of the 2004 and 2014 revolutions were largely connected with successful and innovative propaganda moves - whether it was the orange scarves of the first Maidan (even gave rise to orange in Europe) or the image of the "Heavenly hundred" Maidan of the Second. These symbols gained recognition and distribution, since there were clear meanings behind them, which directly correlated with the Western (and national Ukrainian) understanding of civil rights and freedoms.

However, time goes on. The revolutionary movements, which have become power, lose their former enthusiasm and creativity, lose control of the activities of officials, including their former representatives. Those who were alien to civilian pathos and the ideas of the Maidan come out of the shadow, but now have real power. As a result, instead of free creativity, the state PR is gaining strength, and instead of cooperation with journalists, both their own and Western ones, restrictions on the pretext of secrecy (not to mention searches, beating and interrogations, as, for example, in the case of Arkady Babchenko), naked and straightforward, if not worse, the dull uniformity of the improvised media (just look at one Once on the UNIAN website, so that never go there anymore), the painful and meaningless insults of political and military opponents in once informative blogs, as if the deliberate popularization of neo -Nazis fighting on the Ukrainian side (now not only in the Azov battalion, but also in the Donbass).

Meanwhile, the real horror of life in the part of the Donbass, which is under the control of pro -Russian militants, does not stop. There there are a territory of terror crowded with Stalinists, Islamists and candid bandits. It would be easy to win the information war in this field in the eyes of the Western community without any exaggeration and the Kargo-Cult.

However, over time, the government Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko, as the president, will have to answer several unpleasant questions that are ripening at the Western community. Judging by my conversations with people who are in every possible way sympathizing with Ukrainian reforms and so far help in Ukraine as far as possible, these issues can be approximately the same.

Did everyone do the Ukrainian government and the president to rescue the inhabitants of Donbass from the Russian occupation? Why do people return from Ukrainian territory to their own - even sheated - at home due to lack of money (this was repeatedly noted by volunteers and journalists working in the DPR -LNR)? Why is there no winter refugee winter camps near the occupied zone? If there is no funds in the country's budget, then why not announce it directly and call on the international community for targeted assistance? And what, finally, is Poroshenko’s “peace plan” regarding the civilian population of the occupied territories? What good can it expect from this plan in a close and more distant future?