Musings on Russians as Evil Incarnate

 

There is some weird stuff on Facebook and then there is some really weird stuff on Facebook. One of the weirder things I have seen recently on Facebook are several posts, many of them "written" by devotees of the American civil religion, which seem to imply that Russians are a unique species or race who are singularly and inherently evil.

One of the many problems with this notion that Russians are the essence or incarnation of evil in the modern world, a problem that, in fact, characterises all manichean oriented groups including devotees of the American civil religion, is manicheanism. What is missed as a consequence of this manichean division of the world into us good, them evil, are the commonalities that exist among all humans in all core societies on the planet. All modern and postmodern core nations, including the US and Russia, are characterised, for instance, by modern and postmodern bureaucracies, human rights violations, wars, petty bureaucrats, petty politicians, massive chasms between rich and poor, the brutalisation of women, the brutalisation of children, racism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, corruption, poverty, gender inequalities, moronicity, stupidity, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, propaganda, spin doctoring, big cock on the block bullying, and athletes who have been caught using "performance enhancing drugs". 

 

Don't misunderstand me. I will concede that this litany of human commonalities varies in quantity and quality across the core nation world. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland, for instance, seem to be characterised by lower levels of human rights violations, wars, sexual inequality, and corruption, to pick four of the above examples, than the US and Russia, which have higher levels of each of those measures. That said, it must be remembered these traits are not absent or non-existent in each of those kindler and gentler nations. 

 

I am constantly reminded that many in the core nation world are manichean in mentality everyday that I go on Facebook. Just last week, for instance, I saw a post on that social media site that portrayed Russians as apes, something that harkened back to the dehumanising and demonising British and American war posters of Germans in World War I, the dehumanising and demonising American war posters of Japanese in World War II, and the Nazi representation of Jews as vermin. That such images are forms of propaganda is beyond doubt. That not much has changed in propagandistic representations since World War I and World War II is undeniable. That these propagandistic representations suggest that humans, as Devo and Mark Twain have it, did not evolve from lower species but devolved from higher species is a contention that must now be seriously entertained. 

 

I have recently been listening to the magnificent new album by the Swedish rock band Ghost, Impera, an album whose subject is the rise and fall of empires and the mass deaths that inevitably accompany  empire. The previous album by Ghost, Prequelle, was prescient in its focus on the Black Plague and the deaths it brought. These two albums seem to me to be the perfect soundtracks for a world characterised by great power rivalries, a pandemic, hypocrisy, double standards, absurdity, anti-intellectualism, and death. Welcome to Year Zero.