Why we have overlooked Russian fascism P.1 The main slogan of | Настигло

Why we have overlooked Russian fascism P.1

The main slogan of May 8 and 9, the Time of Remembrance and Reconciliation, is "Never again" [here in post soviet countries, in the context of a large war with many victims not only the Holocaust itself]. Such words are one of the cultural ciphers, and if we are not attentive to them, they can mislead us. This is what happened, in my opinion, with "Never again". The slogan sounds like a loud heavy point as if a huge tombstone had been placed on fascism overnight — and we only have to respectfully walk past that enormity.

The phrase "Never again" hastily and presumptuously postulated the final victory. And the victory over fascism in 1945, for one thing, was never even achieved. In the introduction to his The Question of German Guilt, Karl Jaspers writes that at the Nuremberg trial, one fascist country, i.e. Nazi Germany, that had been destroying people in concentration camps, was sitting in the dock, while another fascist country, USSR, that was also destroying people in concentration camps, was feeling great among judges and prosecutors. Everything is clear about political realism: thank you for uniting and defeating a situational common enemy — but in such a setting "Never again" seems a very premature postulate. This was not the final victory, but only the very beginning of the struggle. And as we can see now, the world has not taken it seriously enough these past 80 years.

We have overlooked Russian fascism because we have persistently pathologized dictators. We have forgotten that dictators do not exist without the support of a considerable number of people, who receive privileges for it, and without the apathetic passivity of frightened masses looking for a "strong hand”. A dictatorship may seem like an exception, but only at first sight: there is nothing exceptional about the love for the power of some people, their greed and desire to gain as many resources as possible at the expense of others — nor about the inertia of others, their easily inflated fears, their unwillingness to take responsibility and so on.

Timothy Snyder, in his 2017 book On Tyranny, analyzing the U.S. drift toward a fascist dictatorship under Trump, argued that Americans' vigilance was sedated by the "politics of inevitability" — the belief that history moves from bad to good on its own and that therefore nothing bad that happened in the past can happen today anymore. We make this same mistake every day on a personal level, thinking that our path of development is only a movement from bad to good and from good to even better. Such an approach is a fallacy based on naivety, narcissism, denial of what is common in human biopsychology, and simply blindness and lack of criticism of ourselves.

I often hear echoes of this way of thinking from people reflecting on Russia's position and its aggressive genocidal war in Ukraine: they speak of their bitter surprise that this is possible in the twenty-first century. It is as if these numbers mean not just the number of centuries, but some quality of those! There is no evidence that humans as such have changed — neither in 20 centuries nor in 20 millennia. What has changed are the systems we build which organize our nature into an artificial order. But what is built by humans can just as easily be destroyed by them.

Technological progress is not equal to humanity's moral, emotional, or psychological growth. They are mere conveniences, they have no built-in ethics (which we are just now trying to add manually due to the development of AI).

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