Colonialism own and alien
Yesterday's sudden talk that "Russia is an anti-colonial power" where everyone lived together hand in hand is, of course, complete nonsense. Russia is an empire, just not a maritime one, but a continental one. Powers of the sea, due to easy logistics, could get to remote corners of the world and spread rot on the natives there. The continental powers crawled like cockroaches and were forced to rely on the enslavement of the "titular" population. While Athens was being robbed across the sea, Sparta terrified her peasants (helots) and developed a whole system of dehumanizing them. The same can be traced further: while the Spaniards and the British were terrifying the natives across the oceans, the continental powers of Eastern Europe were experiencing the "second edition of serfdom", inventing a vocabulary with the word "cattle", and the German princes were trading "Hessian mercenaries".
Russia is from the same clip of continental powers. In the history of Russia there are episodes of "ordinary colonialism" built on the exploitation of the natives. But in general, after the state stopped living off furs, it began to live off the exploitation of the titular population. The empire rested on the serfs who fed it, and the serf recruits who fought for it. The Soviet empire that came to replace it repeated the same pattern, building its power on the blood of disenfranchised collective farmers and workers. Of course, such a system required the dehumanization of most of the population by the elite. Therefore, of all racisms, the social one is the most important for us. Ways to dehumanize their own kind can be the most sophisticated. So social racism can have a benevolent character - like ideas about an unreasonable but kind people who need an enlightened hand to guide (it must be said, many American slave owners were also benevolent towards their slaves). Be that as it may, with a "plus" or "minus" sign, everything boils down to the thesis "the state (elite) is the only European", and the worst thing that can be imagined is "a Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless" (i.e. e. revolt of the local mob against their elite).
What is happening now is essentially another festival of social racism. The most impoverished and uneducated are sent to the slaughter for imperial ambitions, the holes are plugged by "Hessian mercenaries" from former convicts. Now also "1 recruit from 20 yards" (under which residents of the poorest regions also fall first of all). The state broadcasts benevolent social racism in the form of mocking toasts to the Russian people. But on the other hand, unfriendly social racism is pouring - from the fugitive intelligentsia (often also from the former state ones stuck), in the form of howls about deep-seated orcs, a slave mentality and a submissive cattle going to the military registration and enlistment offices. In general, Vasya from the provinces, in any case, turns out to be extreme.
If something unites the Russian intelligentsia with the Russian bureaucracy, it is such a desire to fight with unknown overseas hierarchies in the name of the oppressed Indians, Indians and other blacks, but at the same time, point-blank not to notice their own habitual hierarchies. Fighting foreign colonialism is always easier than fighting your own.
Mihail Pojarsky 01/10/2022
