It seems today that it is forbidden to think. A position must be taken—there is a war of aggression unleashed by Stalin-Tsarist Russia, and there is a resistance involving the great majority of the Ukrainian people. This is undeniable.
Before taking a stand, however, if I may, I would like to understand the historical context: the starvation of millions in Ukraine during the Stalin years; the support that many Ukrainians gave to Hitler during the war; the elimination of 1.2 million Ukrainian Jews; NATO’s policy of expansion that is threatening the borders of Russia. Am I allowed to study history? Am I allowed to understand? Or is it only permissible to take a stand, without understanding, without knowing?
I have always thought that Nation is a brutal and stupid concept, a legacy of a bestial era from which culture could emancipate us. I have always thought that Nation is a mask worn by competing predators who send kids to die for profit.
I believed that culture could emancipate women and men from that bestiality. I could not imagine that culture was destined to dissolve as a result of the neoliberal restoration of the natural law of the jungle in which only those who are ready to kill can survive. I could not imagine that the beast was destined to re-emerge as a two-headed monster now biting itself. The two heads are capitalist globalism and sovereign nationalism: from their biting, little national monsters proliferate.
Twenty years ago, crowds shouted the patriotic cry "we are all Americans", as they greeted the great Afghan enterprise that ended on August 21, 2021. (We know how.) Today the Ukrainian people are incited, instigated, exalted by a crowd of excited supporters who are keen to send weapons, but who do not intend to become further involved. But this time the show might come out from the screen, involve the audience, and crush what little remains of civil life.
I watched Winter on Fire
I watched Winter on Fire, a movie by the Russian-Israeli director Afineevsky.
The film shows the people’s resistance, citizen’s solidarity, national pride, relentless determination in the fight against Yanukovich and the military police Berkut. Although it is difficult for me to share nationalism, however it presents itself, I understand this: if the Ukrainians have been able to resist the brutal violence of Yanukovych's Berkut with their bare hands, today, with the weapons we sent them, they will be able to resist bravely against Putin's army. And they will die by the thousands. And they will kill thousands of young Russian soldiers sent to die by Putin's criminal madness.
We send the Ukrainians instead. We promised them NATO, Europe and freedom. The freedom enjoyed by Julian Assange, enjoyed by black Americans and precarious workers everywhere. We promised them democracy, the kind the Greeks experienced in the summer of 2015.
In exchange for this freedom, we ask them to die for NATO, even if they call it the European Union.
But now Zelenski calls us: “Ukraine is ready to die for Europe. Let's see if Europe is ready to die for Ukraine."
Europe is ready to send weapons, not to die. Nor is she ready to find herself overnight without heating and without petrol.
We will cheer from the stands.
Like in the days of the gladiators.
It is the Anders moment in the history of the world
In the 1960s, as the atomic bomb took hold of the world's imagination, Anders reflected on the political and psychological effects of this techno-military innovation.
Jewish, and a philosopher of Heideggerian education, Gunther Anders emigrated to America in the years of the extermination of his people. In articles and books that deserve to be better known, Anders wrote that the Third Reich has only been the dress rehearsal of a show that (as he puts it) our grandchildren will see when Nazism will be everywhere. Now the Anders grandchildren are witnessing the triumph of the New Third Reich, the two-headed monster of white supremacism that does not accept its decline.
Now his prediction is fulfilled: the cult of the Nation and of the Race has returned everywhere to dominate the scene: the war that is raging in Ukraine is a war of Hitler against Hitler. Internal war of extermination in the West.
It is not the first time that a white power has launched extermination campaigns against defenseless populations (the United States, for example). Thanks to the sanctions against Iraq in the first Gulf War, infant mortality rose from 56 per thousand in 1990 to 131 per thousand in 1999. In 1996, in a 60 Minutes interview, the then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright." It seems that 500,000 Iraqi children died of blockades. It is more than Hiroshima. Is it a fair price to pay? " The answer was worthy of the Putin we now see in action: "It was a really hard choice but yes, we think so". (https://fair.org/extra/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/)
But those dead were Iraqis, so they didn't weigh much on the Western conscience. We are much more impressed by those who die in Mariupol because the massacre takes place within the white world.
Russia is part of the West. It is part of the carnivorous race.
The meaning of the word “West” is not clear. In geographical terms, obviously Russia is not a part of the West. In political terms, the West is the free world opposed to autocracy.
Geopolitics matter, and politics matter. But what matters most is the cultural belonging to the Christian white and imperialist world. From this point of view, Russia is part of the West.
The West is the land of decline, the land of the future that is now declining. Russian Futurism and Western Futurism have different roots, but share the same meaning: expansion. And they have the same fate: decline. But we are not even capable of thinking about decline and exhaustion, since the cult of energy and expansion blinds us, and prevents us from understanding that expansion is over, and the West is agonizing.
West is Russia, America, Europe: a world of old people who exorcise dementia with cognitive prostheses of artificial intelligence, old people who cast-out impotence with proclamations of mutual extermination.
This is a war within the carnivorous race that does not resign itself to disappearing, and like Samson wants to take the entire planet to hell with it.
The last act of the white, (Russian, European and American) civilization is this: the destruction of civilization.
Unlimited is the power of the fool
It is said that not even the gods against him can do anything.
Macron recently declared that NATO is in a state of brain death. Yet NATO has risen up and like a zombie — she has taken the place of Europe, definitively destroying the constitutive mission of the Union. Poland is in fact its vanguard. Kazinski's Poland, you know what I mean.
We don't know how the ongoing war will end, but we do know that Biden has already won his war against Germany and against Europe. Germany has been obliged to give the North Stream, and has begun an intensive process of rearmament. Against the Russians, at the moment. Who knows against whom tomorrow.
The power of the stupid is unlimited because the stupid is ready to harm himself in order to harm another.
How we will get out of this war is uncertain. In the worst case scenario we will not get out of it at all: rather than losing (everything), the Autocrat could use all his strength and destroy (everything).
At best, a wave of nationalism will fragment the European continent into a mosaic of fascist armies at war with each other and especially against non-white migrants. The dividing lines are blurred, because the nationalists do not know logic nor universality.
How we will get out of this war is not clear, but what is certain is that misery will spread in Europe, as society will have to pay the costs of a general rearmament. The air will be increasingly unbreathable: coal mines are reopening to meet the growing need for energy. The climatic Holocaust will precipitate.
European governments will incite women to have children for the white homeland, but cancer and asthma will spread along with a suicidal depression pandemic.
Subjected to uninterrupted violence, nature has regained the upper hand: the unleashed nature of rising seas and devouring fires, the warlike nature of humans who have transferred intelligence into artifice. They are now prey to the natural dynamic of identity and passion. Murderous passion.
Suicidal passion.
In a village on the border
A dozen deserters arrive in a village on the Polish border every night. They don't want to get trapped in a nation’s war, perhaps because the nation is as unconvincing of a concept to them as it is to me. Russian soldiers are said to leave their armored tanks and to escape into the woods. Thousands of young Russians flee to Scandinavia because they don't want to be drafted by Putin to kill their Ukrainian peers, and because they don't want to live in a country where free speech is persecuted. They take a few things with them and leave to never return. They are few, cursed as traitors to the homeland. But they leave: maybe they are in love and don't want to die, maybe they are frightened by horror and don't want to kill. In any case, my solidarity, my friendship goes to them. Only to them.
My friendship goes to all those who desert. Those who desert the homeland and the war, those who desert wage labor, those who desert procreation, those who desert political participation. My friendship goes to those who have understood that cancer has already devoured the social body and who are looking for areas of survival and sharing on the fringes of this rapidly disintegrating world.
For everyone else—Russians and Ukrainians, Americans and Italians—I feel only desperate compassion.
