| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Simplicity is worse than theft. Gennady Khazanov as a mirror of the Russian revolution |
| 2023-12-23 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Taratorin [REGNUM] The other day, the once idol of the Soviet public from the “calinary technical school” turned to the classics. And he literally bombarded the audience of his Internet resource with quotes from Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Very selective - all about the unacceptability of war and the dangers of patriotism. All together, they added up to a giant fig in his pocket, since he never said what exactly Khazanov had in mind in his contemporary reality. Therefore, we will talk about the adequacy of his position as such. And right away, without any evasiveness, I will inform you that it is completely inadequate. And what was excusable for Tolstoy, who wrote similar things more than a century ago (in fact, even then they were not harmless), sounds completely absurd to any of our contemporaries who have some life experience and the beginnings of analytical abilities. WHY DID HE LEAVE THE TECHNICAL SCHOOL? So, for example, Gennady Viktorovich cited the words of Lev Nikolaevich that patriotism is allegedly used by rulers to “lead the people to slavish submission and renunciation of their human insides, reason and conscience.” I would like to ask, Comrade Khazanov, didn’t you live in the 90s of the last century? Count Tolstoy did not have the chance. But you observed that life and participated in it. What kind of patriotism did the authorities introduce then? For patriotism then there was a single formula, so as not to worry and not to get up twice - red-brown. That is, patriotism was then, exactly contrary to the opinion of Lev Nikolaevich, a form of protest. What does this mean? Exactly that patriotic feelings for a large number of people remain an important (the most important for some) component of their own identity. This is good for some, bad for others. But the fact is that this is a personal choice of people. Khazanov is not able to understand and comprehend this? Or is he, by quoting, if not definitely incorrect thoughts of a classic, then frankly one-sided and shallow, maliciously achieving something? Personally, I think that the first thing is that he is simply not strong in terms of comprehending reality, but he has an OPINION. He also cites a lot of “kind” Tolstoy’s words about war as a phenomenon. About the fact that it is such a bloody absurdity when some people kill others who have not done anything bad to them. And here the claim is made personally to Lev Nikolaevich. He knew very well, of course, that in the years when the action of his brilliant novel “War and Peace” takes place, the envoy of the Savoy King, Count de Maistre, shone in St. Petersburg drawing rooms with his dangerous but irrefutable paradoxes. This is what he said about the war. “By what incomprehensible magic,” asks the count, “is a man ready, at the very first beat of the drum “...” with some kind of joy, also characteristic in its own way, to rush to the battlefield and tear to pieces his brother, who has not offended him in any way - brother, who, in turn, is approaching so that, if he is lucky, he himself will be forced to suffer a similar fate? Does it look like Tolstoy? As a statement - yes. In conclusions - not at all. Next, de Maistre asks a question that was especially clear to the metropolitan public of that time. The Count wonders how it could be that, during his reforms, Peter the Great faced fierce resistance over such nonsense as shaving beards, but could mobilize and send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the battlefields with virtually no problems? And the Count has an answer. Unfortunately, violence is in human nature. Moreover, in nature itself. “In the vast region of living nature, obvious violence reigns, a kind of rage prescribed from above, arming every creature. As soon as you leave the realm of insensibility, you discover that the law of violent death is inscribed on the very border of life,” de Maistre records coldly and gloomily. But how can this be, since he became famous, among other things, as a fierce defender of Christianity from the attacks of admirers of Voltaire and Diderot? There is not the slightest contradiction here. Christianity speaks of the fallen nature of man, which leads him to violence. And it is impossible to completely transform it into good. However, it is possible and necessary to heal it by preaching Love, on the one hand, and, on the other, try to introduce violence here and now within a certain framework. Yes, war is bad. And yet, the most brilliant minds of the Middle Ages struggled with the question: “Is a just war possible?” WHAT IS JUSTICE? And the king of theologians, Thomas Aquinas, ultimately gave his criteria: “For a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the power of the sovereign who gives the order to start the war. Private individuals should not start wars. Secondly, a just war must have just causes. To attack an enemy, he must have earned it through his wrong behavior. As Augustine writes, “a just war is a war of retribution, when a country or state is punished because it fails to compensate for the damage caused by its subjects, or because it refuses to return what was unjustly taken.” Thirdly, the combatants must have righteous intentions, i.e. strive to do good or avoid evil... For it happens that war is declared by a legitimate government on just grounds, but it is illegal because it is inspired by vicious intentions. Therefore Augustine says: “The passionate desire to cause harm, the cruel thirst for revenge, the unpeaceful and merciless spirit, the fever of rebellion, the thirst for power, and so on of the same kind - all this must be condemned in time of war.” Isn’t it true that these criteria were relevant more than seven hundred years ago when they were formulated, and no less today? But Tolstoy’s dream of a world without wars, as one might expect, revealed its absurdity and futility in the 20th century. Tolstoy’s contemporary, philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, gave a very precise formula: “We should not strive to build heaven on earth, the main thing is to prevent hell.” But every time they try to organize heaven, everything turns into hell with absolute, mathematical inevitability. No wonder Lenin called Tolstoy “the mirror of the Russian revolution.” He wrote: “Tolstoy is funny, like a prophet who discovered new recipes for the salvation of mankind. (...) Tolstoy is original, because the totality of his views, taken as a whole, express precisely the features of our revolution.” And then he says that the goal of this revolution, of course, is “to destroy the whole world of violence to the ground, and then...”. Let's decipher this idea. In fact, its essence is that Tolstoy’s beautiful reasoning cleared the way for Lenin’s bloody experiment to yet again build an earthly paradise. And, by the way, Khazanov’s like-minded emigration supporters still believe today that such a claim itself is completely legitimate. WHAT SHOULD PUTIN AND TRUMP TALK ABOUT? A great opportunity to explain what is Reaction and what is Revolution was given recently by foreign agent and political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov. He writes: “Although the revolution is, according to Marx, the locomotive of history, wishing for yourself and others, if you are not a masochist or a misanthrope, to survive the revolution is unnatural. However, there are situations when revolution becomes the only real way to save society from disintegrating and plunging into historical oblivion. That is, revolution as a positive choice is always an edge. It is not about a better future, but about an alternative to civilizational catastrophe.” And the demand from Pastukhov is stricter than from Khazanov. He cannot help but know that neither the French nor the October revolutions prevented any “civilizational catastrophes.” That both Russia under Nicholas II and France under Louis XVI were not threatened with anything terrible in terms of development prospects. And in this case we can easily detect the underlying reason for this lie. Pastukhov thinks in the liberal-progressive paradigm. And for him, evil is everything that stands in the way of progress. And faith in him is the root of the Revolution. But the Reaction (the reaction of a healthy person to utopia) is the belief that progress can only be in the spiritual development of man. And disbelief that the Revolution is facilitating it. And, on the contrary, the conviction that it always and everywhere leads to the opposite. So Khazanov also turns out to be a “mirror of the revolution” for us, because, like Lev Nikolayevich, not fully understanding this himself, with all the inconsistency characteristic of artists of the spoken genre, branding “everything bad”, he absolutely does not see the picture as a whole. At the conclusion of his speech, for some reason (perhaps because of the “militarism” of this sovereign) he decides, again with a quote from Tolstoy, to denounce Peter the Great. Lev Nikolayevich wrote about him: “A raging, drunken beast, rotten from syphilis, has been killing people for a quarter of a century, executing, burning, burying alive in the ground, imprisoning his wife, debauchery, drunkenness, amusingly chopping off heads, blaspheming.” And here’s what another living classic, Eduard Limonov, wrote about this: “Peter I was a degenerate from a whole string of bearded, bald, petty Romanov kings, he was an anomalous phenomenon. (...) There is no doubt that, if not for Peter the Great’s terrible revolution, Russia would have decayed and died of a mangy disease, mixed with the Ostyak principalities, and would have reached the rank of some Tuva. Thanks to some proteins that accidentally got caught on nuclides or whatever, as a result, Peter came out of his mother’s womb with deviations from the usual Romanov riffraff. It is not important what kind of revolution Peter I made - European or Asian - what is important is that his revolution made Russia powerful.” Isn't it funny? Again the same thing is repeated as in the case of assessments of the war by Tolstoy and de Maistre. In terms of facts, there is almost complete coincidence. In terms of assessment, it’s an absolute contrast. Because it’s not for nothing that the Russian people say “simplicity is worse than theft.” It is strictly forbidden to approach complex phenomena with simple assessments. As a result of such “theft,” one can easily steal from people the ability to think, except with naked slogans about “everything good.” And, by the way, have you noticed that Putin, in his rhetoric, strictly adheres to the criteria of a just war according to Thomas Aquinas? But when various activists demand that specific goals of the operation be identified, preferably as geographically distant from the borders of the Russian Federation as possible, they insist that the president cross out these criteria. But here’s the thing, it is they (the criteria) that allow us to remain in the same conceptual field with Western reactionaries and realists. Such, for example, as the same Trump. And if there is nothing to talk about with modern LGBT revolutionaries, then there is definitely something to talk about with their opponents. For example, about such a structure of the world that would, as far as possible, be guaranteed against sliding into hell. |
| Posted by:badanov |