The president’s evening video addresses have long since become background noise. More people turn them off than watch them, and almost no one looks to them for information anymore—people have learned to distinguish conversation from transmission. The address is no longer a way of explaining what is happening. It has become a way of signaling how people are expected to feel about what is happening: how to perceive the war, how to ignore the abuses of draft offices, how not to ask questions about corruption. It is not dialogue—it is instruction through tone.
When a channel stops working, it is not shut down—it is replaced. And it is revealing how exactly this is happening: this time the state is turning to instruments that cannot simply be switched off like an evening address.
The Cabinet of Ministers has authorized the use of emergency alert systems for the daily minute of silence. Every day at 9:00 AM—through the same sirens that for years meant “take shelter.” “We are building a new culture of remembrance,” the prime minister explains.
A quiet but important substitution is taking place here. A siren is infrastructure for alarm. It exists to save lives: you hear it—you hide. Now the same sound will mean “freeze and remain silent.” The emergency and the routine are merging into one. War ceases to be an event with a beginning and, theoretically, an end, and instead becomes air itself—a permanent emotional background into which a person is immersed from nine in the morning onward. This is precisely the state turning inward upon itself: all the energy of society becomes locked onto the war, and any question about how that society is organized—who makes decisions and never answers for them, where the money goes, by what right some people are seized in the streets and sent to the front while others negotiate and remain untouched—automatically becomes inappropriate, almost sacrilegious.
But the most revealing phrase is “a new culture of remembrance.” Memory cannot be created by decree. It grows from below—from families, from names, from the personal. Once it is assigned from above and scheduled down to the second, it is no longer memory but regulated mourning. The state begins deciding exactly when a citizen is supposed to feel and what exactly they are supposed to feel. And whatever can be switched on at 9:00 AM by signal can, if necessary, also be redirected.
Orwell inevitably comes to mind. A telescreen in every room, endless war, a party that tells people what to think. The analogy is obvious—and precisely for that reason it deserves refinement, otherwise it sounds cheap.
In Orwell’s world, the war is fabricated. The enemy is interchangeable, the victims are fictitious, grief is a pure instrument. It is easy to say: our situation is different, our war is real, the dead are real, and observing silence for them at 9:00 AM is not propaganda but duty. That is true. And that is exactly why the situation is not easier but more dangerous.
Orwell was not warning about one specific fictional war. He was describing a mechanism: war exists not to defeat the enemy, but to keep society in a condition where internal questions become inappropriate. Whether the threat is real or not is secondary to the mechanism itself. A real war is even more convenient for it: there is no need to invent anything, because the war itself continuously supplies the dead for whom silence is required.
That is the inversion. False grief can be exposed—genuine grief cannot. Which is precisely why it is so easy to ritualize it from above, to broadcast it through sirens, to embed it into the daily schedule. Real tragedy is not an argument against the Orwellian lens. It is its worst-case scenario. In Oceania, the suffering is artificial and therefore vulnerable. Here, it is real—and therefore impossible to challenge, which also makes it impossible to resist the way it is being managed.
The line between remembrance and emotional management dissolves almost completely. A society turned inward toward war gradually loses the ability to distinguish one from the other—and that is the central danger. Not the minute of silence itself; there is nothing inherently wrong with it. But the slow erosion of a person’s ability to separate genuine feeling from assigned feeling. First the state enters homes through the screen. When the screen stops working—it comes through the siren. And the next frontier toward which all this leads is no longer the home, but the mind itself.
Remembering the dead is the right and the need of the living. But the moment someone from above informs you, at 9:00 AM, through a loudspeaker, that this is precisely when you are supposed to do it—memory quietly stops being yours. And a person whose memory no longer belongs to them is very convenient. At that point, there is no longer any need to speak to them in the evenings.