Against the Pulsation of War in our Veins
The following is an excerpt from a recent comment on social media. I do believe that this comment is representative of a mainstream line of thought in Estonian society (there's another example in here, its teeth hardly less visible through its veneer of academic respectability), and not at all exceptional, or an extreme. It is commonplace online, in the media, and amongst some people I know. I want to take this line of thought to task, but I can't bear that genre of posting in which strawmen are lined up. So let us have, if not a steelman, a man on the street at least:
Estonian society has deep understanding of Russian imperial conquest culture and understanding that this has not changed unlike the attitudes in Western former colonial societies. Russian people generally still believe that they (as part of the great empire) have the right to rule neighboring countries and to decimate its population by deporting and killing local active people (think leaders, journalists, academics, and artists) to subdue the will to resist. This is accompanied by voluntary-involuntary large migration into the occupied nation, to create new elite and sharply increase the part of society which sees things more similarly as the empire where they come from. Important to mention that in Western countries most of the population does not believe anymore in their divine right to rule and subjugate other countries but Russian people in general still hold on to that value system. There have not been any serious debate in Russian society about its history’s dark aspects, not ever. Of course their have been few brave people voicing that in Russia but nothing in mainstream like in Western colonial powers or Germany’s self-reflection post Second World War. Estonia knows Russian imperial mindset as a society as they have been occupied by Russian empire for centuries and this has happened to other nearby countries as well. Same pattern every time when Russia conquers new territory, be it in eastward to Siberia or to westward into Baltic states and Finland. The list of territories-countries is long, pattern is pretty much the same. And this deep knowledge of Russian will to brutally dominate others shows in a lot of aspects of Estonian culture.
Let us be absolutely clear: the quoted post operates with the logic of racism, and through the language of war. In pointing this out, I am not, at least in the first instance, wagging a moral finger. Racism is wrong because it arrests understanding. It obviously can entail great moral wrong. But at the level of discourse, it is wrong because it is impotent. It is the substitution of explanandum for explanans. In the face of the supposed knowledge of the "Russian's" divine right, the only thing we can do is to be already at war. What the author calls "deep knowledge" is nothing more the epistemology of war. It is the abolishment of historicity in the name of history. There is no more perfect fairy tale for the unreflecting than the idea that one's own tribe comprises the knowledgeable victim while the neighbour's tribe comprises imperially minded aggressors. There is nothing that understands less than this utterly trivial point of view.
Why does the Russian state repeatedly pursue imperial projects? Because Russians have an imperial mindset. How do we know they have an imperial mindset? Because the Russian state repeatedly pursues imperial projects.
Sorry, the Russian people, aka "Russians", not the Russian state. I'm almost giving them too much credit. Look, if the West "used to" be imperialist but no longer is, as the author claims, then this circle is not necessary, and it behooves us to understand why. That begins by giving an answer to the first question other than the one that tells us precisely nothing about how we can intervene in the world.
One of my deficiencies is that I do not quite understand why the sentiments expressed by the post above are widely counted as acceptable opinion. Clearly, there is a long standing class war against the post-Soviet Russian speaking populations in Estonia. But I think one reason why this logic is so readily assimilated, in numerous contexts outside this particular instantiation, owes to the global erosion and collapse of political institutions. It seems unthinkable that there is any way to change our course. And in the present, that might be right, other than in the limit. But that is not a unilateral sickness. It is a pathology whose spores were sown at home.