Open calls for murder, glorification of the destruction of entire continents, conjuring up Armageddon – all of this is part of the usual tools of Kremlin propaganda. But now a cog in this fabric of hate has managed to reach a nadir that will take even the most bloodthirsty agitators to step back from the abyss. At least that’s how it might appear to an outsider at first glance.
This cog wheel is called Anton Krassowski. The boss of the Russian-language program of the station RT is a phenomenon in himself for the propaganda apparatus. As a homosexual who also makes no secret of his positive HIV status, he would be an ideal hate object for his colleagues.
But Krassowski found a way for himself to survive in this shark tank. In order not to become an object of hate himself, he prefers to make others do it. In the last few months, it was primarily the Ukrainians that Krassowski would have liked to see wiped off the face of the earth. How the murder should take place, he told last week in his program “Antonyme”. The writer Sergei Lukyanenko sat across from him.
But instead of discussing his fantastic works with the most successful contemporary Russian science fiction and fantasy author, Krassovsky preferred to indulge in his own fantasies.
He started the marathon of perfidy with jokes about rape. “Old women would still give their last money so that Russian soldiers rape them,” he began. They should in turn take photos of the women or men who rape them – in order to then report back. “Today I raped 14 80-year-old Ukrainian women,” the Russian soldiers were supposed to be able to boast.
From rape fantasies, Krassowski went over to medieval methods of execution. He happily ranted that the British had killed far more people than the Germans in their concentration camps. “They literally burned her,” he elaborated. A deeply disturbing joyful grin accompanied these words. “This is Europe. They are, the European values,” he added maliciously. Only to impressively demonstrate his own values.
“Should Ukraine stay on the world map at all,” Krassowski wanted to know from his guest and got the astonished answer: “I think so. Because there will definitely be enough people left there with whom I don’t want to live in a common state.” , Lukyanenko explained his point of view. But Krassowski knows the solution to this problem: “Well, then we’ll shoot them.”
These words come from the mouth of a man who, just a few minutes earlier, was raging about the European barbarism of the Middle Ages. It doesn’t make sense to him that mass shootings are in no way inferior to the methods of the Inquisition or the Nazis. He prefers to think about what fate Ukraine should suffer with his guest. Their common vision: a small shred of a country whose population does nothing but perform national dances for Russian tourists. “Without all these nasty inventions like factories or mines,” the writer raved. “They don’t need that.” Imperial chauvinism in its purest form.
And as is well known, where a Russian imperialist shows up, inferiority complexes are not far away. It is that feeling that drove Vladimir Putin to the bloodshed in Ukraine. And it is that feeling that is so painfully remembered by Lukyanenko. The author told Krassovsky about his trips to Ukraine in the 80s. At that time he had to hear from the Ukrainian children that their country was occupied by the “Moskali” (a derogatory term for Russians). If it weren’t for the “Moskali”, the Ukrainians would live like the French, the children would have teased him.
Such a story could not leave Krassowski’s inferiority complex untouched: “These children should have been drowned directly! Drown these children! (…) drown,” he exclaimed. If someone only talks about being occupied by the “Moskali”, “they throw him straight into a river with a torrential current”, Krasovsky described his method of dealing with those who do not want to recognize the Russian imperial greatness. And again a satisfied grin accompanied these words.
But Krassowski has another alternative method, which he explains with relish: “Lock them up in their huts and burn them.”
Drown children or burn them alive – even the Russian officials, who may be used to some depths of their own propaganda, pricked their ears. The head of Russia’s investigative committee, Alexander Bastrykin, instructed the prosecutor’s office to investigate Krasovsky’s statements. Duma deputy Dmitry Savelyev demanded that Krasovsky be “arrested as soon as possible and sentenced according to the strictest law”. “Anton Krasovsky’s statements are a monstrous provocation, these are the words of an enemy of Russia who hates everything living. In my opinion, any sound of this statement is a crime,” said the deputy of the ruling party United Russia.
The storm of indignation against Krassovsky has reached such proportions in the past few days that his boss – the notorious RT boss Margarita Simonyan – even announced that she wanted to end cooperation with the propagandist. “Anton Krasovsky’s statement is brutal and disgusting. Perhaps Anton will explain what kind of temporary insanity led to it,” she wrote on Telegram.
A little later, Somonjan rowed back. You can’t just drop a loyal subordinate, she argued.
But why is the excitement about Krassowski coming now? After all, he built his career on calls to drown. It used to be Alexei Navalny’s followers that he wanted to drown. But at that time he was expected to be promoted to head of the Russian division of RT. Now, however, he is being dubbed a traitor. What happened?
The answer: the war. While a struggle for supremacy has broken out between the various power groups in the Kremlin, the propagandists are also fighting for the steadily shrinking place in the sun. The air is getting thinner. The opportunity to get rid of a competitor for proximity to the leader in the Kremlin comes in handy for quite a few.
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