Not everyone in the Russian blogosphere shared concerns about the war; its obscenely rich, glossy, and too self-absorbed fraction carried on as usual. “I don’t give a f**k about this war” is a very loose translation of a post that Artemij Lebedev, one of Russia’s most famous digerati and bohemians (and this year’s Young Global Leader in Davos to boot), wrote on his LiveJournal blog. The post received more than 900 comments and was followed by a photo of a nude woman. Young global leadership for new times, indeed.
Amid the millions of comments that Russian bloggers wrote on the issue, a few themes started to emerge. The dominant narrative was that of a grand anti-Russian conspiracy carried out by the Western media. As reports from American and European media poured in—many with extremely graphic images of the destruction caused by Russia’s bombing of Georgian towns—some Russian bloggers despaired that their government couldn’t respond with its own powerful imagery and words.
Patriotic Russian netizens decided to wage their own propaganda campaigns. Like their Chinese colleagues who, earlier in the year, rushed to YouTube and Web sites of foreign media to leave comments about Tibet and the Olympics, Russians didn’t think twice before flooding the Web sites of CNN and BBC with comments. Even very marginally related online venues—such as the European forum of the popular game World of Warcraft—were hijacked by angry Russian commenters (the threads have been subsequently deleted).
The most educated among them even started posting simultaneously in two languages—Russian and English—to convince speakers of both. Many of their comments pointed to inaccuracies in Western reporting and contained examples of possible mistakes in several graphic images from the war that the West might be taking at face value. “People of the world. You deceive! World mass media conduct propagation of a false information,” begins one such comment titled “Typical Address to Stupid Foreigners.” Bloggers encouraged each other to repost it on English-language sites as part of the campaign to “educate” the Western public (according to Google, this very comment has been reposted hundreds of times in the past few days).
The assumption that some Russian bloggers made was that if only the West could read accounts of the great injustice Georgians had inflicted upon South Ossetia, they could be converted to the Russian cause. So, relying on tools such as Google Docs, a popular online platform for sharing documents, they quickly split the work of compiling and then translating the timeline of the events into English. It seemed crucial to have enough reports to show that it was Georgia that first attacked South Ossetia.
No matter how the real conflict between Russia and Georgia ultimately ends, Russia’s young people are joining their Chinese counterparts in a great fight to make Western media more sympathetic to their countries. They are unlikely to succeed, but their very actions suggest much greater self-confidence on the world stage than their parents could ever exhibit. It remains to be seen whether their belligerence ends at fighting Western media in “comment warfare” or spills into more radical attacks. |