How to talk to anti-vaxxers United Russia circulates guidelines to State Duma deputies featuring allusions to Stalin and ‘digital concentration camps’
State Duma deputies from Russia’s ruling political party have reportedly been coached on how to respond to anti-vaxxer talking points and objections to pandemic restrictions on movement. Two sources in United Russia confirmed to the news website RBC that the party has circulated guidelines for public engagement to its deputies in the parliament. United Russia’s press service told RBC that it regularly shares such materials with deputies to keep them informed and effective. The recommendations to lawmakers are a bit odd at times. Meduza summarizes the public messaging campaign Russia’s ruling political party has concocted to counter disinformation and paranoia about the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccines developed to fight COVID-19.
The specific advice offered to Duma deputies sparkles with allusions to Stalin and electronic Gulags.
For example, when confronting claims that QR-code vaccine passports are “the start of a digital concentration camp,” United Russia urges members to say:
Then give up your personal tax number! Because in the early 2000s, there was a massive backlash against the introduction of these numbers as “a satanic codification of people.” Back then, people went on about “the mark of the beast” and “a digital concentration camp.” A whole generation has grown up since then and these kids don’t even realize that they’ve been coded and numbered with their parents, and now they’re living in a concentration camp!
What if critics say that QR codes are tantamount to fascism and the yellow stars of the Holocaust?
Show me the bodies of those burned in the ovens and skinned for lampshades because they had tax numbers, insurance numbers, and passport numbers that can be found in every electronic database. Show me the roadblocks, the Delyanov’s counter-reforms, the ban on collective farmers’ passports, the serfs’ redemption payments, the European zoos for blacks, and the “negro” seats on buses.
United Russia also instructs deputies to confront conspiracy theories about mind-controlling “microchips” hidden in vaccines by asking, “Who needs to control you specifically?” As a bonus, lawmakers might add that scientists debate the feasibility of integrating a virus with human DNA. “Vaccines certainly can’t do it,” the party explains.
United Russia also suggests appealing to the public’s historical memory by describing how past leaders might have handled today’s anti-vaxxers. Under Joseph Stalin, the authorities would have “uncovered the denialist conspiracy” and executed a certain number of these people in each region. Under Nikita Khrushchev, anti-vaxxers would have been exiled to areas just outside the Gulag. According to United Russia’s recommendations, Brezhnev would have had these people locked up in psychiatric hospitals, and he’d have shut down the Internet as a source of enemy hostility. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, meanwhile, officials would have declared anti-vaxxers an “interesting phenomenon” and entrusted them to the care of faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky. In the Yeltsin era, the authorities would have sold vaccines delivered as humanitarian aid to private buyers and prohibited the release of pandemic morality statistics.
The guidelines don’t mention Vladimir Putin directly, but the message is clear that Russians should be grateful for living now and not in the more troubled and trying past.