The multicolored vegetables and the good pieces that are threaded effortlessly on the barbecue do not resemble the cold steel spit that pierces them. Pressed together, slices of meat or fish, rings of pepper, onion and tomato can completely hide the metal axis that holds them all together above the flame and thanks to which they can cook and change substance.
In a recent interview which made a lot of noise, the director of the Hermitage museum designated this axis without ambiguity. “We are militarists and imperialists,” he said. It is indeed on the axis of militarism that one threads multicolored cultural products which hide less and less that their only objective is to support “the special military operation”.
War, Putin’s passion and ideological core of the state
On this axis we line up any salad, fragments of previously incompatible ideas and symbols, hardline speeches and hypocritical phrases about a “truce”, all kinds of exhibitions of paintings, decorations of orthodox priestly vestments or kitsch icons of russian armed forces cathedral. War as Putin’s dominant passion and as the core of the state’s ideology erases any distinction between hinting at the truth and outright lying. This is why nothing and no one prevents Foreign Minister Lavrov from evoking Hitler’s absurd Jewishness as the cause of his anti-Semitism.
Moscow fears Western sanctions, which are painfully felt, and seeks to convince Europe that they are “ineffective”. To ease these sanctions and hide their scope, Putin officials skewer international cultural events that they cook on the “Russian barbecue”. Who will find this infernal cuisine to their liking? Certainly not us!
From now on, we can no longer separate the Ukrainian experience from the new historical experience of other European countries. Paradoxically and constantly, our resistance calls for an interest in the position of other European societies. Today, citizens of any European country can give full meaning to the expression: “We Ukrainians”.
Today, the Kremlin threatens: “Hell is us; be afraid”
The Kremlin seeks to take hostage any society or any state. No European state can have any illusions on this point any longer. What Russia is doing in Ukraine bears the same brand of violence and blackmail as its negotiations with its Western partners, but without the mask of friendliness. Peter Pomerantsev, the great Ukrainian journalist is right: “By relying on Russian gas, Europe has become a victim of abusive relations. There is only one way out: to end it as soon as possible. won’t be easy. It will be expensive. But it has to be done.”
The crimes against the civilian population of which the Russian army was guilty in Chechnya, in Georgia and in Syria, it is now committing them in the heart of Europe. Who can assure us today that it will not go further? That is why by coming to the aid of Eastern Europe you are defending your own home. This defense comes at a cost, unless you can be sure you can tell yourself and your loved ones that you won’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to run for shelter. Such is the new historical experience which is already ours and in which we are going to have to live.
What fundamentally distinguishes Russia’s current cynical regime from the previous Soviet regime? Until the collapse of the USSR and the publication in the media of innumerable damning documents on Soviet crimes, one could claim “that one did not know”. The Soviets could fool themselves and say almost honestly that they knew nothing of the horrors of the gulag. From 1991, such indulgence became impossible and, on the main television channels, the Soviet regime was called a criminal by very many of its victims.
Thus fell the curtain that hid the KGB torture chambers and the camps where millions of evil-thinkers had been sent. Throughout the 1990s, the post-Soviet population as a whole was able to assimilate these facts. This historical experience transformed the model of Soviet xenophobia. In the days of the USSR, all the evil in the world lay abroad, especially in the West. Now we realized that a considerable part of the world’s evil came from at home, from our country and from our society.
Tens of millions of Soviets have seen the Georgian film Repentance, which focused on Stalinist crimes. But the opposite political choice was made. Instead of condemning the crimes, purifying the memory and repenting, a program of revenge and resentment was chosen. It is with cynicism that the illusion of “ignorance” of the crimes has been rejected and that any complex on this subject has been repudiated.
In Soviet times the Kremlin, so to speak, repeated the well-known formula “hell is other people”. Today he bluntly asserts “hell is us”: “Be afraid of us; we will establish hell wherever we want.”
Kateryna, 70, waits with others for humanitarian aid near a destroyed house in Boutcha, Ukraine, June 16, 2022
afp.com/Genya SAVILOV
The war has dug the bed of this river of hatred. Trained by Russian television, whole masses of people accept war crimes and glory in the conquests obtained at this price. Will we succeed in accustoming Western citizens to such cynicism? Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, still close to Vladimir Putin despite the war, will he remain an odious exception? Or will others like him undermine the foundations of democratic rule?
The Kremlin militarists wanted to skewer the city of kyiv along with Mariupol, Kharkiv and Odessa. But now in 2022 Ukraine thwarts this project to expand the Russian barbecue.
Since February 24, six interminable months of war have thrown all the light on the criminal alloy of which this military “pin” is made. The shreds of speeches and myths that decorated it caught fire and fell into the embers. Bare and black with soot, the steel weapon stands in the middle of the 21st century. Covered with wounds, Odessa seizes this ignoble fetish like booty and throws it at the feet of its legendary mayor, the Duke of Richelieu. Irony of the story? In this regard, it was in Odessa that I first heard the expression: “Militarism is the spit of the ‘Russian barbecue’. ” When will the formula finally be outdated? ?
Apparently, it is not for tomorrow: we see circulating on the Internet horrible photos of Ukrainians’ heads planted on peaks by Russian soldiers. The spit metaphor has become bare reality. The intention of this bestiality seems twofold: to incite the victims to discredit themselves before world opinion by indulging in their turn at symmetrical horrors, and, at the same time, to dissuade Westerners from meddling in this conflict by leaving the assaulted alone against his attacker. To all this we must oppose a resolute refusal.
We are not in an electronic game, but in a human reality that we are trying to destroy before our eyes. And it is through each of us – and through our solidarity – that life opposes the inhuman.
Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Constantin Sigov, directs the Franco-Ukrainian laboratory at the University of kyiv. He teaches philosophy at the Mohyla Academy in kyiv.
This article is from our special issue “We Ukrainians”on newsstands August 24, in partnership with BFMTV.
