The Pro-War Attitude and Its Dangers

"On the Barricades" - s04e25

As the war continues in Ukraine, more and more people, intellectuals, journalists, and artists are drawn into the pro-war narrative. The slightest deviation from the official line is deemed to be “pro-Putinist Russian propaganda”. There is no place for debate, for analysis.

In this edition of the Thumbs Down Thumbs Up” of our show Boyan Stanislavski, Maria Cernat and Youri Smouter discussed the vile and toxic media environment and how detrimental this is in the long run, especially for young democracies such as the Romanian, Bulgarian and Polish.

The cartoonish media representation of events is something that will get us closer to the very authoritarian regimes that we want to distance ourselves from. The lack of political imagination and strategic thinking in very complex situations like the one we are experiencing, create the extremely volatile context where incredibly dangerous and irreversible political gestures could be made.

We are drowning in a sea of communication made available by the formidable technological tools, yet information is almost nowhere to be found.