Photo source: pxhere.com
Poverty and ignorance create their truth
Charles Bukowski
This quote by Charles Bukowski perfectly explains what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, the same sort of new identity is being born in Russia. The depth and nature of these changes are difficult to discern, even from the outside. Internally, being part of a collective identity makes it almost impossible to recognize. Only a few are capable of this — people whose moral backbone has not allowed them to substitute culture with propaganda. But the majority, the same notorious «man of the crowd», enthusiastically accepts the mark of Cain that comes with their «own truth».
This truth denies any primordiality: the Gospel, the Quran, the fundamental values and ontological unity and kinship of humanity. The crowd is not the people. It’s another state of human substance with entirely different properties.
Just as the same water molecule behaves differently in liquid, gaseous, and solid states, the «man of culture» and the «man of the crowd» are two different, if not anthropological, then psycho-social types.
Often, they are the same people but in different contexts — social ties with the world and with their peers, formatted by their «own truth», transform them beyond recognition. What is happening now with Russians is already happening with Germans in the 20th century.
At the beginning of World War II, some Ukrainians greeted the German occupation quite favorably. Everyone remembered the «other German» from the First World War. That German was a bearer of the high European culture that gave the world Goethe and Kant. That Germany opened universities in Ukraine.
In particular, the first university in Katerynoslav, now Dnipro, was founded not by the Bolsheviks but by the German occupation authorities. They were a guarantor of order and security amidst the chaos of the civil war.
But in 1941, a very different German came to Ukraine. He exported Ukrainian black soil, enslaved Ukrainians, bombed cities, executed people in Babyn Yar, and made lampshades out of human skin…
In 2022, «other Russians» came to Ukraine and changed beyond recognition by their «own truth». They do not bring liberation to Ukrainians, but death. Not Pushkin’s poems, but aerial bombs. Not brotherly love, but bloody vengeance against everything that doesn’t fit into their «own truth».
They gaze only into the distorted mirror of propaganda and do not lean on the Gospel or even on «Soviet internationalism.» The latter approach is understandably unpopular even among the «imperial Marxists» in Russia.
Because, in reality, the Russian soldier in Ukraine is fighting for the interests of the very elite that robbed him: for their palaces in Gelendzhik, their villas on Lake Como, their yachts on the French Riviera, and the trillion dollars withdrawn by Russian officials from their own country, which the West is now hunting down.
War is an old trick, as old as the world itself, used to redirect social protest away from one’s bloodsuckers and onto the «terrifying outsider» — Jews, witches, heretics, Bandera followers…
It’s not for high ideals or to save anyone’s lives, but purely for power and money that the current Russian regime has turned its citizens into killers and Ukrainians into their victims. But the «man of the crowd» of today’s Russian mold, of course, will never understand this.
Just like the Germans in 1941, in 2022, he will be convinced that he has every right to his own «living space» in his interpretation.
Forgetting that, after asserting one’s «own truth», not only victorious mass killings justified by it follow, but also one’s «own Nuremberg».
