Commissioner Disappears
I must admit that for many years now I have been terribly infuriated by the Dugin rhetoric that has become our official (and now even more so) about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and something else - with the bad West and Euro-Atlantic civilization.
There are two problems with these ideas.
First, it's all lies.
In Russia there is no "tradition" - not as a historical tradition and canon, but "live", here and now. Russia is a country of total divorces, a low birth rate, abandoned old age, the absence of older men (and, therefore, zero patriarchy), general cynicism, individualism, a cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (except for self-made paganism and self-made esotericism), mass (and not only elite) imitation of any foreign fashions, torn historical and family memory, indifference to everything national, multi-storey concrete buildings without a sense of the earth and self-awareness of the owners, and, most importantly, the strongest distrust of any public and collective institutions.
The US is an infinitely more "traditional" country than Russia. Almost every second person there has read the Bible and will quote it to you.
But that's okay.
Worse another.
The rhetoric of the fight against the West raises the bar of the current confrontation to a deliberately unattainable height, since the "West" cannot be defeated. In any case, there were no precedents in world history, and even the Bolsheviks could not cope with this.
And, having raised the question so radically that the answer will in any case be unsatisfactory, Russia, in addition, diligently drives itself into the role of world evil - already from the point of view of that side (not the chiefs of the local, but the Western world in principle), presenting abstractly threatening claims that do not imply rational way out - and at the same time not having the resources for such a confrontation.
That is, the Dugin pathos of the "struggle of civilizations" - not confirmed by anything in practice and inflating the real problem to an unsolvable cosmic level - is ideal for losing.
But people love it.
Because solemnly, theatrically, with a swing.
We, they say, are not just here, but we are for the redistribution of the whole world, for good against evil and no nails.
Very sad.
And it would have been a long time ago - and as firmly and loudly as possible - to state the following:
Russia has territorial claims against Ukraine in relation to its regions along the eastern border, as well as along the coast of the Azov and Black Seas. These are Russian lands inhabited by Russian people, whose Ukrainization - and the transformation of these territories into a military foothold against Russia - we intend to prevent.
This is a local problem of two hostile political nations contesting a historically, strategically, ethnically, economically and culturally valuable borderland.
All point.
And then it would be clear to the whole world what happened to us and what we really need.
And at the same time, a simple and sober order would be brought into Russian heads - instead of intellectual devastation.
And decisions in the spirit of Elon Musk - this is there, this is here, this is yours, this is mine, here is such a referendum, here is another referendum, these are separated, here is autonomy, etc. - would immediately become a rational decision, since dozens of such conflicts are known to the whole world , from Anglo-Irish and Greek-Turkish to Indo-Pakistani.
The case is difficult, often tragic, but in a sense banal. Can be solved.
But it was not there.
This is too small for us. We need to fight the world's evil.
Oh well.
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