COTD: Wrong, Dead Wrong

neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Notes from Chairman Lenin—and Dostoevsky: "sergey Says:
March 10th, 2009 at 6:26 am

On several occasions I had conversations about Dostoevsky with Westerners and almost every time observed the same knee-jerk reaction. They told me how deeply Dostoevsky understood Russian soul and how better they now understand it after reading him. I objected: Wrong. Dead wrong. He wrote not about Russian soul, but about human soul. Almost everything he wrote specifically about Russians simply is not true – a wishful thinking of a delusional Russian nationalist. But everything he wrote about humans as such is profound and just as relevant to you as to me. Note that Grand Inquisitor has no hallmarks of nationality or time: it is a mysteria, it happens everywere and at any time. (There never was Inquisition in Russia before Dostoevsky; it was created 40 years after his death.) Never delude yourself that your epoch or civilisation is so exceptional that you can be totally immune to medieval horrors and wide-scale societal collapse and regression: nobody is immune, and Germans felt it on their hides during Third Reich. Barbarians are not across the pond, they are inside your skulls.

I also often heard the same tired arguments from the left: Communist experiment got botched in Russia because of Russian mentality; we can do it better. They leave naked wires under high voltage not because they are Communists, but because they are Russians. Wrong again. The same tragedy occured in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Camboja, Zimbabwe – in every land and culture where socialism was imposed on society."

This is an oldie. But as you can see, a goodie.