Overcoming the baboon

From time to time I come across reproaches: they say, where are the millions of anti-war rallies in the Russian Federation? Moreover, such disappointment is seen not only among external observers, but also among the participants in those protests that exist. Well, yes, there are no millions of anti-war rallies in the Russian Federation (yet), but this is quite expected. And the point is not only that everyone here has long been intimidated by batons, administrative officers and criminals. How many protests were there in the US in the 70s when Vietnamese children were burned with napalm? And how many were there who said that petty commies get their due and generally support our troops? Yes, then a powerful anti-war movement eventually appeared, but it did not appear immediately - and certainly not on the 20th day of the war. How many protests were there about the bombing of Serbia, clearly going beyond what was necessary to protect the Kosovo Albanians? How many people resented the torture in Abu Ghraib or how, even retreating from Afghanistan, they managed to ditch an entire family from a drone?

The problem is that, in principle, it is quite difficult for people to get used to the idea that their country, their state, their collective "we" is doing obvious injustice. People willingly take to the streets on an internal agenda, be it BLM or yellow vests, when the big collective "we" is not affected, but small "we" are acting - for example, we liberals are against them dogheads. Whereas a protest against such a thing as war, which inevitably has a collective connotation, requires reaching a certain level of abstraction, the ability to make independent moral judgments, the readiness to overcome the inner baboon, which, in the voice of Danila Bodrov, repeats "we do not abandon our own."

Mass rallies in Europe are taking place, among other things, because for Europeans now this is a free virtue signaling. Not in the sense that they are not ready to incur material costs - many are ready (both to receive refugees and to embargo). But in the sense that the condemnation of someone else's war is not some kind of complex moral act. You simply call white white and black black. It is quite another thing to condemn your own when your own tribal identity is involved, which tells you to declare "not everything is clear" when it is black and white in front of you.

Therefore, to demand an ultimatum from Russian millions of protests now means to demand from Russians a special morality that no one else has shown. In reality, the beginning of military operations in most countries of the world is greeted with tribal solidarity frenzy - and only subsequently there is a sobering up. Therefore, looking at domestic protests, dismissals and departures, we can say that in Russia there were unexpectedly many people capable of independent moral judgment. In other words, those who have a conscience. And surprisingly, there are few who want to merge into the collectivist baboon frenzy. Despite all the efforts of propaganda, no one wears the letter Z on the streets. We have to collect the old-fashioned serf theater of state employees, in an attempt to pass off as popular support. Most of them are simply in a daze. What to do, to overcome the inner baboon is difficult.

Mihail Pojarsky 2022-03-20