Political magic and the image of victory

'Magical Reflections on Russia's Defeat', which the West has begun to talk about explicitly, advising them to stop, is another name for military-political propaganda with a neat and quite appropriate appeal to anthropology. Propaganda is the magic of war. The reality spell is quite effective: the magician recites a formula that makes the audience believe in a particular reality. The audience believes and begins to live and act as if this reality announced by the magician were the only one. Step by step, through the convergence of small actions, reality actually becomes close to the signified reality. People create the reality described by the magician (ideological operator, commissar, expert, commentator, journalist, shaman). This is how any ideology works.

Faith in communism and its compulsive magical promulgation helped build, though not communism itself, a huge and powerful socialist state - the red empire.

The magic of liberalism gave Western democracy, the market and capitalism a global character.

Zelensky's clown-Nazi magic allows the extermination of the entire Ukrainian nation, which is disappearing before our eyes along with the state, dragged along by the magical idea of 'kill a Muskal and everything will work out'. This is a magic formula, and with horror it works: Russians are being killed, aid from the West has arrived until recently, and propaganda is silent about the rapid disappearance of Ukrainians and the country itself.

Political magic does not erase realism at all. It is rather rational and pragmatic. It is simply the way every society lives, guided by what Georges Sorel called idea-powers.

Now the West is withdrawing the magic trope of the 'inevitable defeat of Russia'. This is important, but it does not indicate that they have suddenly decided to abandon magic (propaganda) and have admitted the unpleasant truth that the issue is not moving towards this, but towards something else, only that the style and priorities of their global magic theatre are changing.

We, however, should not get too excited about this. We ourselves need the high magic to all intents and purposes of our Victory.

We must imagine the Russian future with even greater effort. Victory, before it is achieved, must be imagined. It must be described in spirit and then realised in will. And for this we need images, words, formulas that capture the emotional flows of mental forces.

This is not at all contrary to cold rational planning, but we live primarily on images, not concepts. To underestimate the structures of the imagination in some cases is simply criminal.

The image of war, its hieroglyphics and signs, must be worked with the utmost care.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini