Putin’s horrors unleash hatred on the Russians

You feel it, it grows, it hovers around us, it gains ground every hour, every day of war: hatred. At the beginning it was specified, even by the Ukrainians who were also attacked and beaten: this is Putin’s war, he wanted it, he infuriates it. It is not the war of the Russians with which we are brothers, in uniform against us there are the deceived or the forced, we offer them a piece of bread when they give up. And for this courage we judged them, the Ukrainians, even more deserving, wrapped in a great drapery of misfortune and pity.

Everything quickly ended in crumbs like cities and the illusions of truces and negotiations, hatred plagues the whole world of this searing and brutal war. Now it has become the war of the Russians, against the Russians: primitives, Asians, barbarians, horde that kill, bomb, rape, plunder, voracious wolves, monsters, anti-men.

Words are always the sign: now we live in hatred which crystallizes like a saturated solution. The fury that at first is a weapon to fight and resist has slipped into something else, blinded it becomes inhumane in turn. Here: the path is almost complete. There is no more distinction. Hate is not an error or an accident of analysis. It is a deep desire to destroy, it reveals an abyss on the skin, it is not behind us but around us, in us. It is a subversive denial that gradually overwhelms even those who are spectators of the war, and the Europeans are: through this descent into hell we want to hide the sense of guilt in order to be just this and basically be satisfied with it.

It is singular and sobering that the main inhabitant of the West and Europe of the third millennium, hatred, with its handmaid fear, has not been the subject of extensive analysis. Maybe because you don’t want to go back to humiliating experiences and hate is. And then there are many types of hatred that each would require a discussion of. A bit like the botanist does when he approaches a particular classification.

We find ourselves talking and thinking in a primitive way because we are forced to defend ourselves against something that is first of all primitive, war. Thus the animal labeling that previously only affected the puppeteer of this bloody disaster extends to an entire people: who are guilty, because they do not rebel, do not throw down their weapons, do not deny and do not deny themselves, because they do not go on strike by refusing to cooperate with the leader. Because with his inaction he forces us to put on clothes that we had placed in the attic as anachronistic: war, bombs, fight, take sides, resist. Damned Russians, fight for Putin as the Germans fought for Hitler! The guilt which for the law is strictly individual becomes collective. It is the ominous mechanism of decimation, of revenge. A specialty of tyrannies.

This is what Putin perhaps imagined and wanted: his enigmatic face gradually disappears behind the condemnation of everything and everyone, the will to lynch form, even in those in Russia who perhaps doubted and abstained, the social bond par excellence. , the one that arises from feeling humiliated and vilified, accused and threatened with punishments in the bunch.

We are, I fear, sliding down this treacherous slope. The crime of the aggressor no longer appears to us as a transgression, as a case to be attributed to a man and his delusion of power, but as an existential form, as the natural behavior of an entire people towards other living beings, aggression, crime as a form of their world. The trial of the guilty (theoretical because first it is necessary to defeat them, capture them in order to apply the very ambiguous justice of the winners) which previously involved the handful of courtiers and direct accomplices of Putin, a few hundred people, is now expanding: the officers, the soldiers who have not disobeyed, those who have not distanced themselves in the rear, the silent ones, the non-heroes: all of them.

Punishing, removing the desire to try again, re-educating these eternally Asian and aggressive peoples towards our perfect “polis”. We are at the key point of the dialogue between Creon and Antigone. “The enemy will never become a friend even after death” says the dictator who denies the guilty even the right to burial. And Antigone replies: “I’m not made to live with your hatred.”

There. This is exactly what must separate us from the aggressor: to set limits to the unacceptable, to warn of the mortal danger of unifying in guilt, to announce the worst that can still happen without fear of being accused as sowers of tares, to lend a hand “objectively”, a terrible adverb that has crushed the lives of millions of men, to the enemy. Putin and the Caliphs throw not only armored divisions or suicide bombers into the fray; what is at stake is the dominion of the spirit, they mobilize hatred, a rare and precious treasure, useful in the service of their frown. They want to infect the minds even before occupying territories, imposing the irremediable: we and them indissolubly separated and enemies.

Apparently nothing has changed in these twenty days of war in our part of the world, people move, work, give exams, love, do sport, applaud the speakers who call for the umpteenth resistance against the new misfortune. Yet there is something elusive in the atmosphere, a collective fluid and it is bad, an aura made of strength and resentment, of inner paralysis, of fury and aversion against “the enemy”. Little by little the peace marches will disappear, the invitations to distinguish, not to be overwhelmed will become heresy, As if oppressed, afraid we would avenge the guilty by emitting black liquid like the struck cuttlefish. What the hell does man need in order not to make the same mistakes?