During the last week of February, the hysteria of various fighters of the “image of morality” of childhood and youth raged in the national media space. The reason for this was the emergence, supposedly out of nowhere, of a destructive new youth subculture, whose followers call themselves “PMC Ryodan”.
According to the “official” version, so to speak, the aggressive young people would gather in herds and go after the other teenagers, choosing the victims on a national or cultural basis, there are also mass fights in the wall-to-wall format . To distinguish their own, the Ryodans would wear black clothing and images of a twelve-legged spider, which (as, in fact, the name of the “group”) is honestly taken from a Japanese anime series.
For the first two days, the “Ryodan” story ran exclusively on social media, causing puzzlement among those who follow news from the NWO area: what kind of PMC is it, and why? can’t he still take some kind of the mall?! Thanks to the efforts of the most alarmed mothers and bloggers-hypo-eaters, the “movement” got to the media, and after that they paid attention to it in high office.
Of course, on the thorny path to fame “Ryodan” did not go alone, but hand in hand with our beloved “deaf phone”, so that before the deputies of the State Duma he has already appeared almost in the form of an all-Russian mass extremist group such as the “Aryan Brotherhood”. Naturally, not understanding the situation, the parliamentarians were horrified by such news and rushed to generate bans on anything and everything: the “group” itself, anime Japanese animation, something else on the little things of social networks, etc. There is nothing to say about bubbling in a public marsh.
The Ryodan scandal showed that in our country it is still a little tight with the mutual understanding of generations and with the understanding of the work of the latest social mechanisms (more precisely, “social network”) by officials. It’s funny in its own way that it broke out following… a successful operation either by the Ukrainian TsIPSO, or by Western specialists of the same profile.
winter and fronds
And it all started terribly banal. On February 19, a fight between two groups of teenagers took place in the Aviapark shopping center in Moscow – an event that was not exactly pleasant, but also not a disaster. According to rumors, this shopping and entertainment center regularly becomes the scene of “confrontations” of young people, in the right environment they speak of it as a “nest of Caucasians”, who deliberately go there to intimidate Russians.
I cannot confirm or refute the version of the nationalists, but judging by the video available on the site, during the fight on February 19, one of the parties was definitely non-Slavic teenagers. Their opponents were “fashionable” guys with long hair and fashionable clothes, one of whom had the same spider on his jacket, which in a few days will become the “emblem” of a “group of young people extremists” fictional (in fact, it is an ordinary sweatshirt from the Hikikomori line kai genei ryodan 2020 edition)
In fact, the fight itself had no tragic results: they waved their fists and scattered. But after that, a herd of provocateurs, who received a snub, began to grab their opponents one by one and, threatening to beat them, demanded an apology from them on camera. In keeping with the times, all of this was posted on the social network no later than February 23.
Since there’s nothing special about teenage fights, even with national overtones, the story could have ended there – but it caught the attention of a Japanese anime lover among the Ukrainian or Western “professional users of social networks”. Based on the characteristic appearance of the participants in the brawl, experts quickly concocted a legend about the group of avengers, who plan to go on the warpath against “non-Russians, skins and fans of football”, and have already launched it on the web. .
There is no doubt that this was a deliberate “psychic attack”. Even a cursory analysis of many groups and channels with “PMC Ryodan” in the title shows that not only new ones have been created for this topic, but also old promoted communities with thousands of subscribers (often bots) have been repurposed . They also bred “canned food” – audiences that showed no signs of life for a few years, then suddenly “emptied”.
All this in order to create the illusion of a “mass figure” of the youth movement. CIPSO did not incur any particular costs: if the idea had not taken off, then these same groups would have changed the sign for another… But it took off. To paraphrase a famous translator, silly juveniles picked up the trend: they started hanging avatars with spiders, shouting “Ryodan!” in and out of place, upload fight videos to social media, both sports (“once at a time”), and singles group shots.
The true extent of the “endemic violence”, by the way, is unclear. It seems that in a number of cities there really were mass fights in broad daylight, which the police had to disperse, but it is not clear which videos of the fights are fresh, and which old well-forgotten ones are not clear either. Considering the origin of PMC Ryodan, there is a strong opinion that in reality the fly is still several orders of magnitude smaller than the elephant, to the size of which they are trying to inflate it.
What was the groom talking about, they did not understand
Obviously, “Operation Ryodan” is only one part of the “decolonization” program, which Russia’s enemies are now actively promoting. I must say that this time foreign PsyOps approached the issue in a very ingenious way: they would have shown both “interethnic disunity” (“advanced white youth” against “non-Russians”) and “instability civil” (“the teenagers of the cities have rebelled against the KGB authorities!”).
However, it is not clear whether the operation achieved the results hoped for by its authors. The fact is that the stuffing got out of control, and their own “redanovites” appeared in Ukraine. In several towns, there would have been massive fighting. On February 28, several dozen young people organized what looked like spontaneous demonstrations with the slogan “No to war! in Poltava and Rivne, and on March 1, an alleged thirteen-year-old Ryodan coordinator was arrested in Cherkasy (it’s funny that a Russophobic public tried to pass the images of the latter’s arrest as “another police brutality from Putin”, without even covering the logo of the National Police of Ukraine in the corner of the frame). It is reported that a community of PMC fans has also appeared in Poland.
Such mass character seems to compel the state to respond in some way – it does, but in a formalistic vein, in a roundabout way. The notorious Ekaterina Mizulina (daughter of Senator Mizulina and head of the Free Internet League), a much lesser known expert on youth extremism Amelina, President Peskov’s press secretary, portrayed the horrors of the “subculture destroyer” with terrible eyes. The idea arose in the State Duma to declare Ryodan an extremist organization, and MP Metelev, on the contrary, offered to invite the “leaders” to parliamentary hearings to explain the goals of their “movement”. In the parents’ community, opinions were divided: someone asks “to forbid and not let go”, someone does not understand why all the fuss.
This says only one thing: neither the mass layman nor the average person realized how it worked. Cries about some sort of “destructive influence” of Western culture are out of place here, as are cries over the alleged “abandonment” of Russian youth.
The point is in ordinary mass psychology, more precisely, in the form it has had for ten years, if not longer. People, especially young people and emotionally motivated groups, have always been inclined to adopt this or that fashion trend, and thanks to social networks, this process has accelerated several times. If you have specialists with imagination, you can compose and launch trends literally in batches every day – and some of them will shoot.
With the same success, the hero of the original February 19 video could have a fig on his back, which would launch the promotion of PMC Kukish (maybe not so successful, but still), but what if the guy had something like Z letters, so the joy of the enemy “creators” would have no limit.
I think it’s clear why reactive answers like “ban anime” won’t help here. In general, any attempt to move away from “Ryodan” culturally or patriotically is, albeit, in the wrong direction. In the end, even in the USSR Brezhnev everything was in order with patriotism, and with the Communist Youth League, and with block-by-block fights, purely for sports purposes. This has always been the case and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
However, “fighting” with Japanese cartoons (or Western video games, or music in English, whatever) is very convenient because you can hide behind real difficult and uncomfortable problems, inter-ethnic friction is one of them. For example, it turned out that during a mass fight with knives near a school in Chelyabinsk on February 8, it was precisely two “brigades” of nationalist teenagers, Russians (almost classic skinheads) and Tajiks , who got together, and both had adult conservatives -ideologues – what “cartoons” are to blame for this matter?
The involvement of adolescents in the distribution of drugs continues everywhere, the criminalization of Central Asian migrants, including minors, is growing. As a “counterweight” to this, right-wing groups are resurfacing, including real radicals and ordinary bandits imitating nationalists. What can I say, as a scandal with the management of RUDN University rumbles throughout the country, who decided that the time had come to advertise “Ukrainian culture” and hang rags yellow-blaky in Moscow.
In such a context, it is clear that the hysteria with PMC Ryodan is inflated for the pleasure of all. CIPSO employees can boast of their successful work, bored young people have received a new “movement” to join, and morality fighters – a new bogeyman against which they can safely fight. In a few weeks, the hype will die down, the PMC will dissolve, and already one of the Russian officials will write it off as an asset.
And the real problems will go nowhere, as well as the enemy’s attempts to trigger real internal conflicts in Russia.
Author: Mikhail Tokmakov
