© AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin/TASS
In my personal opinion, such systemic institutions of a "civil society" imposed on us from the outside and built not by us as "non-governmental organizations" rank among the most toxic talking points and realities of political practice. Psychologists define toxicity as a tend to negatively assess things through the prism of personal and collective experience. Interests of our state security put under direct and immediate threat, as well as the Russian ruling class’s self-preservation instinct, forced the authorities to urgently demolish all sorts of liberal towers and create a caste of people having special legal status. "Foreign agents", for instance, whom we sinful journalists and public page authors are politely asked to mark with an asterisk when mentioning in the text and indicate their legal status in a footnote.
Hell of a story, but the reader is probably waiting for clarifications of the more mind-blowing issue concerning the "cold civil war". Let me tell you that the phrase is by no means a clickbait. An existence condition of any political regime in Russia after the Soviet Union lost the "hot" cold war was ensuring Western-style democracy and creating a civil society with a network of legitimate non-governmental institutions as a system of checks and balances to fight what they call resurgent aggressive authoritarianism. Forces sure that democracy is absolutely universal and has to be routinely imposed everywhere, have established external control over this system of checks and balances in order to "planish" the Russian government by the hands of "civil activists", "popular bloggers", "corruption fighters" and so on. Hence the conflict between the current political elites and politically motivated "foreign agents". The former understand that conflicts of the kind may well deprive them of their comfortable office chairs and let state subjectivity fall into the wrong hands, which the people won’t certainly forgive. The latter are genetically aimed to demolish these elites, "catching" them in trifles and watching the quantity of such "accusations" evolve into quality.
The West’s victory in the Cold War over the "backward" and stubborn Soviet communists required extraordinary expenses and years of coordinated effort. And today one can easily and effectively control the "civil party" anywhere in the post-Soviet space. Back in 1977, as part of efforts to put the screws on leaders of both the USSR and other socialist countries along the humanitarian track, a special Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor was established with the US State Department. Its work is based on the idea that "promoting freedom and democracy and protecting human rights around the world have long been central components of U.S. foreign policy." Under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the State Department presents the Congress with the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The total amount of reports (based on statements by US embassies on contacts with opposition representatives) on the human rights situation in some 190 countries occupies several thousand pages, which requires a 70-people-strong editorial team.
In order for the reader to get an idea of the Reports’ content, we will quote the one on Russia of 2021 (presented to the Congress on April 12, 2022). "The Russian Federation has a highly centralized, authoritarian political system dominated by President Vladimir Putin. <…> Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: extrajudicial killings and attempted extrajudicial killings, including of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons, <...> severe suppression of freedom of expression and media, overly restrictive laws on “foreign
agents” and “undesirable foreign organizations”; severe restrictions of religious freedom." And so on, and so forth.
The picture is creepy, but once you comprehend all of this official nonsense, the fact we don’t live in America appears quite comforting.
And now let’s get to the point. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the US State Department can be considered an ineptly disguised special service, acquiring numerous voluntary agents across the globe from among those "offended" by local authorities or law, as well as among people of creative occupation and local activists lured by career assistance (invitation to a US college or free seminars to train well-paid investigative journalists). After all, every "human rights violation" recorded is a legal meeting (or legal communication) of a US government official with a person with certain issues (such people can be easily manipulated) who has personally initiated the encounter. It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that his/her personal data becomes a secret file to be handled in line with relevant instructions, and everything stays within the scope of international law. Having spent modest taxpayer funds, the Americans created a powerful mobilized human potential to promote "soft power" and humanitarian diplomacy abroad.
Of course, non-governmental charitable, human rights and other types of organizations are needed and socially useful as institutions integrated into a democratic society. We have independently chosen the democratic principles for building our society, as enshrined in the Constitution. We just need NGOs loyal to the Russian society and able to function in the best national interests on a public, non-governmental basis, rather than to satisfy ambitions of the American political class carried away with playing a global mentor.
We need a national civil guard holding true to the national ideals and defending our national interests in social and humanitarian battles. That’s our path to victory!
