Our contemporary conspiracy theorists have never been luckier than now, because life is abundant with opportunities for guesswork, allowing them to make use of their cagy opinions. Take one example, that some colluding coterie of the globally select and privileged are pulling stings to hoard their undeserved riches by robbing the remaining ‘less valuable’ seven billion of humanity. Another: The tens of various and oddly engineered assumptions about John F. Kennedy’s assassination; another: The conjured-up suppositions about Princess Diana’s obscured demise that broke hearts worldwide; another: The interminable attempts to make new world order predictions. Indeed, the list of conspiracy-theory-based stories might be long enough to continue forever.
Especially curious are the forecasts about the war in Ukraine. Even the world-renowned political scientists of the highest possible caliber sound like regular seers in their predictions of its endgame. One can’t actually call them a plainly split bunch of experts; rather, they are a disparate assembly of sharply divergent clusters of specialists who ceaselessly sweat over making the best educated guess in terms of the finale of this most bizarre clash between two parties who could have lived together ‘happily ever after’ had they known a little better. To cut a long story short, the conclusions of these giants of geopolitical thought happen to be sheer surmises, packed with conspiracy-smelling implications and extrapolations.
The desire for conspiratorial conjectures has reached and spread within the boundaries of our beautiful Sakartvelo, too. Moreover, we have some publicly recognized professional local fortune-tellers, whose inferences we often see in print about this country’s looming prospects- some of their deductions being of utterly phantasmagoric category. To wit, the conclusions of futuristic style are forgivable to those who have happily settled with the title of a regular clairvoyant, but when politicians compete with them in conspiracy-driven speculations and frivolous estimations of our future, it is just strange.
Conspiracy-driven thinking prevails especially when it comes both to the ruling-party’s political instruments to win the upcoming election and the oppositional PR facilities to take over the government. In general, a style of concoction and fabrication prevails throughout the entire political gamut of Georgia, dexterously facilitated by the media, whose grasping mind is extremely quick to keep up with the situational readings on both sides of the aisle, and then make use of those readings to the benefit of the political force they are in favor of.
Such are the toolkits and intricacies of the conspiratorial rationale in Sakartvelo. And our friendly West, with its open-mindedness and devotion to Georgia, can’t help. It is commonly known that the West has huge experience in using the stick-and-carrot trick where they want to spread their well-meant clout. In Georgia’s case, the carrot part of the scale clearly preponderates, but this doesn’t seem to be enough. There has to be invented something sharper and wittier to balance out the conspiracy-ridden way of political deliberation.
The Russian kind of conspiratorial insinuation needs mentioning here. To put it in the fairest possible way, it is perfidiously and intelligently enough obfuscated for the public eye to grasp. They are invisible, but they should also be effective enough so as to create their own social-political mark in the soil. They were very successful in this field before, and now, for an effectual performance, they have to be even more careful, smarter and subtler, which they probably are.
Well, conspiracy or no conspiracy, Sakartvelo needs to press for its own cherished goals. This becomes increasingly more difficult when sandwiched between the virile geopolitical powers, each pursuing its own objective, not absolutely going in unison with the philosophy of the entire Georgian nation. There are splits in almost everything here: Even in elementary private discourses among the rank-and-file. Hence that big hunger for conspiracy talk, and walk, too, into the bargain!
Go ahead Georgia, make a good decision: Stay forever in your habitual streetwise politics, with your statements and postulations that the entire world is hearing and cringing at, or devise and construct a political product, the development of which puts you among the most respected and adored fellow nations of the planet.
Op-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
