Truth Out the Window: Putin’s Cynicism with “Special Military Operation” Mocks Russian Intellect and Losses

Note Putin’s dictatorial cynicism in the apparatchik-wording at the Russian Foreign Ministry, reported by Politico covering Russia’s latest free press restrictions retaliating for EU bans on Russia’s state-controlled RT and Sputnik:

The “counter-restrictions” are imposed on “a number of media outlets of EU member states and EU-wide media operators that systematically disseminate false information about the progress of the special military operation,” the Russian ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement.

The word apparatchik was originally a term of derision for a communist bureaucrat obsessed with enforcing picayune legalisms such as calling a war of aggression causing hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties a “special military operation.” It was a derisive term that corroded the Soviet Union’s legitimacy among cynical Soviet citizens.

The term “special military operation” is state-forced speech in Russia, the use of which by the Foreign Ministry reminds Russians it is illegal to use the word “war” to describe Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is illegal to call it war as it would:

(1) expose the folly of the ruler’s premise that conquering Ukraine would be as easy and short as a special military operation;

(2) reveal the hypocrisy of Putin’s use of propaganda about the war-mongering West;

(3) make Russians ask ‘Why are we at war against Ukraine when just two and a half years ago we could peacefully travel there and see relatives?’

(4) accentuate the reality of steep losses of so many men to Putin’s war, losses mocked by the term “special military operation.”

The “special military operation” term is also an admission that Vladimir Putin’s secret police regime over Russia is so paranoid of the Russian people rising up against it that it must control the very words people speak and thereby their thoughts, intellect, and feelings about their steep losses to Putin’s wars.