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Title: Collective Responsibility or Death Author: Denis Sultangaliev Date: 12 March 2022 Language: en Topics: war, Ukraine, Russia, collectivism, responsibility Source: Retrieved on 14th March 2022 from https://www.nihilist.li/2022/03/12/collective-responsibility-or-death/
For many days two things are happening simultaneously: the bombing of
Ukrainian cities and the musings of Russian minds on the acceptability
of the collective responsibility. The synchronicity here is highly
significant, as it is impossible to define the primordial process.
Precisely the destroyed Ukrainian cities and thousands of murdered
people provoke the mentioned discussions among the Russians. On the
other hand, the inability of the Russians for collective
self-organization, connected with the eternal demagogy about their own
(ir)responsibility have made the world, where the maternity home in
Mariupol is bombed and the civil citizens in Irpin are shoot.
The thesis about collective responsibility originates from the very
sense of the democratic institutions since, as we remember, even in
ancient Greece, participation in the democratic process primarily meant
the responsibility of all the agents of the process. And everybody
affiliated with the democratic process is still responsible for the
usurpation of the democratic institutions by the ‘tyrant‘. Here is the
institutional argument about the responsibility of the Russian citizens,
who possess political rights.
Following the Greeks, I think that separation of the ethical from the
institutional is unacceptable; and hence, the institutional
responsibility is inherent to the responsibility of the human entity. In
this concrete case, we deal with the fascist political monster, which,
as we wrote earlier, comprises in itself the pervert affection to death
and the nuclear danger for all living things. The responsibility of the
struggle with those global threats is not limited to the state and
institutional borders and should be taken by all humanity.
But certain individuals and nations are included in this collective
responsibility more than others. For instance, they are the Ukrainians,
the Georgians, or the Estonians, who were ’’fortunate’’ to be neighbours
with fascist-minded Russia because of the historical coincidences and
fate. But primarily – the Russians, who are directly connected with the
emergence of putinism due to a multitude of factors: the inability to
organize the effective resistance for the regime; the discourses, in a
creation of which everyone able to speak or write participates.
The only basis on which the separation of the Russians from their
responsibility emerges (apart from the animal fear) is the idea of
individualism, the autonomy of personal fate from the global political
processes. It is funny to recall Bertolucci and Godard’s distant
argument on the primary illness of the epoch: individualism or the
fascist repression of the individual. It is funny since the problem of
the Russian‘s (ir)responsibility synthesizes those two syndromes in the
one illness of putinism. The consumerist individualism of both the
Russian bourgeoisie and the Russian workers, nurtured with the essential
comfort, creates the safe zone for Putin‘s fascism even in their
conventional unloyalty. At the same time, Putin‘s fascism allows
individualism to exist only in the frames, safe for putinism. This way,
the regime destroys the nature of the individual, only quasi-individual
visibility of which remains.
The rejection of personal responsibility with the belief in
individualism is already integrated into the fascist frames of the
permitted. When you drown in the swamp with the golden chains, it may
seem that there is still room for free breath. However, the lungs will
painfully rupture from inside out the next second, and the swamp will
fill the body, organically enveloping viscera.