This text appeared in response to the reaction of the civilized community to the widely reported horrors that the war unleashed by Russia brought to the civilian population of Ukraine. Those who don’t like long texts can go straight to the last paragraph, but for those who are ready to think with the author about the nature of such cruelty and the reasons for our desired reaction to the open (announced by Russian state policy) genocide of Ukrainians, let’s start from afar.
After a month and a half of the war, the most rosy optimists have to admit that for its quick and victorious end for Ukraine, flocks of Taleb's black swans should rush over us. The realists initially considered either the scenario of a protracted and continuous military conflict, or the scenario of a flickering (sometimes flashing, sometimes “fading”) war used by Russia for a long time. Until Taleb’s swan troops cover the sky of Ukraine, and Datsyuk’s black dragons burn down all Russian ground troops in the occupied territories (I note that these irresistible random forces today have a powerful source - Ukrainian society), we must look for ways to increase the likelihood of their appearance and, along the way, survival in the face of ongoing war is actually a way to prevent genocide.
We have already learned from our own experience in detail the features of the course of such a war, both in its hidden and in its explicit forms. In the latent phase, there is mainly an information war to split the victim society, reinforced by continuous rattling and local use of weapons. In the explicit phase, these forces are synchronized, increasing in intensity by orders of magnitude. After the collapse of the illusion about the march of Russian “liberators” on Khreshchatyk in 2-3 days, Russia quickly switched to the scenario of long-term (albeit less large-scale) conflicts that it had long worked out. According to this scenario, all (both military and civilian) infrastructure is destroyed, and the civilian population is not only systematically exterminated,
What can Ukraine oppose to this, especially in conditions when its own resources are catastrophically small, and Western partners play their own games, in which we were mainly assigned the role of a sacrificial pawn with a gradual shift, unexpected for many, to the role of a fighting rook, covering more like them seems to be valuable figures? Strange as it may seem, the recipe for counteracting both types of war, as well as for preventing genocide, is the same and weakly depends on external factors, but before voicing it, let's recall some features of this very long war.
The beginning of this war can be formally attributed to 2014 (February 24, 2022 is only the beginning of its next active phase). Then a superficial analysis of its causes will make clear the artificially caused split in our society over the language issue. Recall that the population of all regions of Ukraine in the 90s was sympathetic to the Ukrainization of education and public service, until Moscow political technologists presented our narrow-minded “elite” with the idea of electoral division based on language. However, the issue of language can be looked at more broadly, for example, as a time bomb that was deliberately planted even during the formation of the USSR by its policy of famines, forced migration of peoples and Russification not only of numerous groups of people, but of the national languages themselves (from the alphabet to grammar and dictionary stock). Then the attempt to forcefully rewrite the cultural code of entire nations becomes obvious. And the beginning of the war can, again formally, be attributed to the Bolshevik coup, and the national question can also be included in the sphere of conflict.
The trend is probably already clear: the beginning of the war can be consistently pushed back further and further into the depths of the centuries, expanding the scope of problematic issues. Thus, the Russian Empire in all its guises, including the Horde, planted a colonial inferiority complex on Ukrainians: everything that does not strive to become part of the metropolis is despised and punished, but, on the contrary, encouraged and honored. In addition, at this historical stage, there was a consolidation (reinforcement) of the specific hierarchical structure of the empire, based not on the Western sacredness of private property and the corresponding freedoms, but on the Eastern binding of a person’s status to a chair in the hierarchy and on the principle of granting and selecting the right to occupy this chair by a higher hierarch downline. Kievan Rus, as a prototype of the imperial Procrustean bed of unification for the sake of controllability, introduced into our consciousness the fear of not being like everyone else (in terms of power) and at the same time the desire to be away from those in power alien to all human values (the elite of the industrial type): it was the conservation by forceful methods of tribal infantilism of the type “my hut is on the edge” . On the other hand, it was also the conservation of the mass desire to live on their own “farm” with their own mind, even under the most severe terror of unification. This, by the way, is the main difference between Ukrainians and Russians – civilizational tsunamis did not roll over the territory of the latter, mentally separating the Ukrainian people from the ever-changing power. In Russia, the people and the authorities are united - they are held together by the ideology of the sacred value of the state and disregard for the individual, while in Ukraine the authorities are something alien and, by definition, temporary (a hundred years back and forth does not play a role).
And so, we went down to the roots of our problems, from which all our other problems sprouted, including more than a thousand years of war against our mass maturation and the ability of the majority to live their minds not only at the household level, but also at the state level.
How is all of the above related to the atrocities of the Russian army that are shocking the whole world today?
First of all, it becomes clear that they are not something exceptional for this army. Rather, it is a natural way to increase its effectiveness, which has been practiced since ancient times and is due to the pathological depreciation of human life in the conditions of the specific hierarchical organization of Russian society. Moreover, Russian intellectuals, standing on imperial positions, substantiated and described in detail the use of precisely this kind of violence, accompanied by waves of panic and refugees, as the basis of a strategy for winning at low cost (for Russia) in the war with the entire Western democratic world, due to the extreme instability of the latter. to moral dilemmas and to disruption of the fine-tuning of socio-economic life that provides the West with a competitive advantage over Russia. As an example, we have already mentioned the flows of refugees, which are inhumane to block, although they destroy those very fine settings. Conclusion: as long as Russia exists in its imperial guise, no one in the world will be immune from genocide, because. he is just one of the standard tools of this inhuman regime.
Secondly, the open discussion of these war crimes not only mobilizes the Ukrainian people and the peoples of other countries, but also demonstrates the power of not vertical, but horizontal ties. The strengthening of the horizontal component of social communication is considered nonsense during the war, when, according to all the canons, the power vertical should be strengthened. However, let us recall Ukraine’s many years of appeals to various economic and military structures of the West, which were successfully blocked by their hierarchical organization (bureaucrats of the European Union and NATO could lead us by the nose with their idle talk for a long time at the behest of key players), but the direct appeals of the Ukrainian president to the peoples of these countries had a colossal influence on the mood of the masses, which also influenced the reactions of politicians and state apparatuses of even the most pro-Russian Western democracies. In this regard, the atrocities traditional for any war with the participation of people with a totalitarian worldview turned out to be a powerful incentive for the Western public, weaned from them over 80 years, to rethink the picture of the world, where Ukraine was a small bargaining chip, and Russia was a deft and powerful geopolitical player. Of course, this rethinking was helped by the heroism of the Ukrainian military and the decisiveness of the president, who risked distributing weapons to citizens, and the citizens themselves, who rose en masse to defend their right to determine their own future (unfortunately, often still hidden behind formal patriotism). The demonstration by Ukraine of the impotence of the second army of the world also led to the realization of the virtuality of many aspects of the international image of Russia and the blocking of the main channels for the dissemination of its propaganda.
Conclusion: Ukraine has set a new global trend - an increase in the weight of direct contacts between people, bypassing the ruling elites playing geopolitics with the peoples, which is a chance for Ukraine to reach the level of the subject of this very geopolitics. Thirdly, these atrocities, as well as the complete destruction of all settlements that were in the way of the Russian army, stirred up in Ukrainians the memory of all previous attempts to “solve the Ukrainian issue” and aroused the desire to do everything possible so that they never happen again. Conclusion: we need to understand what and how to do this?
Here is the last paragraph, the content of which could be reduced to three words “we need to grow up”. But for those who immediately jumped here from the first paragraph, let me explain. The civilian population, no matter how cruel it may sound, in the zone of any hostilities is either a hindrance (for “good” people) or a resource (for strangers and “bad” people). Is it necessary to explain why the interests of the civilian population in wartime are taken into account by all parties to the conflict as a last resort? Is it necessary to prove that there is not a single country in the world that, faced with the choice of sacrificing a soldier or a civilian, would put the life of a civilian above the life of a soldier (or why would such countries disappear from the maps even in the process of their formation)? Against this background, is it necessary to clarify that the safety of material assets that are not related to critical infrastructure, in general, the question is not posed as a priority by any side of the conflict? The solution to the problem of the civilian population seems obvious - minimizing the number of civilians in war zones during war. The traditional approach, as we already know, provides for uncontrolled flows of refugees and the physical destruction or “enslavement” (deprivation of all rights, including the right to life) of those who remain. An unconventional approach, which, as we also already know, organically fits into the Ukrainian mentality, is universal military service, when almost the entire adult population is a well-coordinated army organism, when weapons (and not only small arms) and ammunition are kept by every citizen at home, when plans actions in case of war include not only centralized control, So, when all able-bodied citizens are military, the issue of taking into account the interests of the remaining civilian population is greatly simplified. Moreover, an army of 10–20 million well-armed and motivated to act even in complete isolation from the central command of soldiers (especially backed up with nuclear weapons) is the only and so far the most reliable way to prevent genocide. The problem is that we must first realize that this is possible only when all citizens who take up arms must not only learn how to use them professionally, but also take responsibility for solving national issues, i.e. grow up and go beyond the interests of your “farm”, because delegating the right to make decisions to someone (rich, politician, “king”, priest or smart neighbor) is fraught with the same triumph of the oligarchy,
PS
It is also useful to present the effect of “growing up” of Ukrainian society from the point of view of an individual citizen. How will the life of a responsible citizen change, i.e. a person endowed with an inalienable right to independently and consciously make decisions and a duty to defend this right for all? Below I will give my personal vision of such a “matured” society and its citizen, which each reader can add / change at their discretion. I believe that it is precisely for a similar idea agreed between all of us about the unifying idea of our life together, as well as for the very possibility of permanently changing and harmonizing it, that it is worth fighting for - this is the basis of our civilizational doctrine, which, unlike the previous ones, is the most inclusive and the least dominant. So, the status of any citizen in society and the level of his access to the resources accumulated by society is determined not by the size of his fortune or position, but by his “track record”, i.e. the success and scale of its past and present projects, the double evaluation of which is given by their participants and consumers. A responsible citizen works in any field, having the right to co-ownership, subject to the sharing of the relevant risks, and in case of refusal of risks, remains an employee, whose "risk" share in the profit is distributed among the parties bearing these risks. At the same time, a responsible citizen is actively interested in political and economic life both in the place of his residence and / or work, and in the state as a whole, he regularly conveys his idea of living together to his community and society as a whole at referendums and polls, for example, on average once a week or month. A politician becomes an ordinary clerk on the maintenance of a community or the state, whose salary is determined by the average salary in his district, taking into account the index of trust in him, and who is automatically fired when the trust is lost, for example, 50% of the citizens whose interests he is hired to coordinate (moderate approval), legalize and pronounce. The judge becomes a similar hired worker who monitors compliance with the law, and a responsible citizen, for example, once a year for a week becomes a juror in court. All incomes of all citizens should be open (but paid) information, and their discrepancy with real expenses should lead to automatic initiation of legal proceedings. The observance of law in the field should be monitored by professional sheriffs, elected on the same terms as judges, and responsible citizens themselves should be their assistants. Thus, every responsible citizen must be a member of the corresponding territorial militia unit and, for example, once a month, be on duty for one day and one night shift, and also raise the alarm at any time in case of emergency. A responsible citizen, regardless of gender and social status, from the age of 18 to 60 must serve in the army (1 year of initial military training and, for example, 2 weeks once a year thereafter). The army must also act as a homogenizer of a socially heterogeneous society, mixing all citizens without exception (heads of large corporations, ministers, judges, scientists, doctors, workers, politicians, farmers, office workers, etc.) during the meetings and placing them in the same conditions. Servicemen are provided with weapons (not only small arms), ammunition and uniforms and store all this at home, using it, for example, when performing patrol service in the police ranks. All social loads of this kind for a responsible citizen should not exceed, for example, 1.5–2 months per year, and the dates of their passage can be chosen by them based on life circumstances (women for the period of pregnancy and caring for a child up to 3 years old can, if they wish, be exempted from such burdens, except for participation in referendums and polls). At the same time, alternative military service should also be provided, for example, for staunch pacifists in sanitary detachments and hospitals, and for talented scientists and engineers, programmers and technicians in military laboratories and at training grounds (with mandatory training in weapons skills and their maintenance). Labor legislation should provide for the participation of responsible citizens in such workloads and give, for example, a day off after night duty or military camps, as well as release from work without losing it for the duration of such activity itself. If a responsible citizen observes attempts to deprive him or other citizens of the right to independent and informed decision-making, then he is obliged to announce this publicly, and in case of continued attempts to usurp power (for example, if the formation / support of a rigid hierarchy continues after a certain period of military operations, during which the vertical of power is nevertheless inevitably strengthened, or in the event of the appearance in the media of propaganda aimed at dividing society and imposing on it the ideas of domination of someone over someone) to stop such attempts and, if necessary, with arms in hand . At the same time, the project "Ukraine" in this form should be open to citizens of all countries of the world who share the principles of non-dominance and meaningful life of each person with network horizontal (with minimal hierarchization in peacetime) social communication, while creating conditions for self-organization and self-complication (positive evolution) of society.
