In ancient times, already in a completely different, past life, I lived in Berlin and worked there in a slot machine salon. This is a very good job for a writer: it does not require any intellectual stress and no mental involvement - only reflexes. While people are sitting at the “one-armed bandits”, you can observe them, study their habits and collect traits in a piggy bank.

Then I noticed a curious detail: the gamer is always easier if he knows that someone else is more dependent on the game than he is. Most of all, these people discussed other people among themselves, conversations boiled down to the fact that "Peter completely lost his head" and that "Dieter steeples like crazy." One of the guests asked me every time he came in to say hello to him, as if we were seeing each other for the first time — so that, God forbid, think that he would come here three times a day. Sure, of course, were absolutely all visitors to the ceremonial institution.

I remembered this when I looked at British media publications about the coronavirus and how Russia is fighting the “crown”. No, of course, we are used to our role as a garden scarecrow. Our hackers and our nuclear club scare others to behave well and obey their uncle. But on the world agenda, we have another unenviable role: the role of the player who "completely lost his head." In other words, no matter what happens in the “civilized world”, in Russia, everything is always worse.

British media write about the crisis with hospitals that cannot cope with the influx of patients. The Daily Mirror generally makes a headline comparison with New York: they say that in Moscow everything is developing according to the same scenario. 

Colleagues are hard to blame. Now everyone is scared, and readers of not too intelligent publications like the Daily Mirror are worse than others: from the coronavirus, from the worldwide conspiracy, from 5G towers, and God knows what else. And in this situation, in the simplest way it will be customary to say: look, it’s even worse in Russia, and show, for example, the line of ambulances at the entrance to the hospital.

The authors of the notes hope (perhaps not entirely baseless) that readers of their publications will simply not google. They will not compare Britain, where officially 114 thousand cases of the “crown” and 15 thousand deaths (of which almost 900 are today), with Russia, where 313 people have died all the time.

They will read that the Russians are “not ready”, and take a word for it - and will not remember that, in their home country, until recently, the policy of combating a pandemic was the formula “we will not close anything, and so everything is fine,” because of which the authorities simply missed the moment, and therefore there are so many infections now.

And, of course, they believe that the situation in New York, where 130 thousand people are infected and have already more than 10 thousand deaths, is completely indistinguishable from Moscow.

But even the most unpretentious visitor to BBC sites, having read the material that Putin, on the one hand, wants to use a pandemic to “usurp power,” and on the other, that he wants to avoid responsibility and therefore has given more authority to local authorities - even this reader is simply I must ask: Excuse me, is there a contradiction here? How can usurp power and share powers at the same time?

Well, Donald Trump has done exactly the same thing in America after us, leaving the states to make their own decisions depending on the situation - Donald is a famous usurper.

But Germany - it was originally designed that way, there many important issues are resolved locally. Who is the usurper then - Merkel? Schroeder? Or maybe Conrad Adenauer?

However, why these surprises? Even a gamer is easier to explain that he is sick than to destroy the illusion of the mainstream Western media about the "dictatorship".

That the British, that the American colleagues - will undoubtedly continue broadcasting the "ruins" of Russia in their media - so that the residents do not notice their own longer. They will mourn our citizens, not having time to deliver them to their morgues.

They will grieve over the collapse of our economy - instead of lifting the sanctions and making life a little more tolerant of both our and our own finances. Russia should be afraid, so as not to be afraid of ourselves - contrary to the laws of physics, logic and international law.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.