The reality of war (even if you call it a "special operation") always deeply upsets people, everyone is stunned by the difficult images and stories. Atomic weapons have not been talked about in that way since the early sixties - as if their use was a matter of days. It's just that back then there was an ideological narrative behind everything, and today this is more like that adolescent "game" with cars - who will turn first.
How everything went in an unexpected direction... Some people remember that it was Baudrillard He called the Gulf War "a war that didn't happen" (because it was exclusively mediated by the media, the war was displaced from reality), so this completely Baudrillardian quip predicted a huge controversy. Today, the most important questions of that polemic seem to be working perfectly pass, or mostly missed. This war is really happening. Classic, dirty war, without postmodern jokes.
And when the war horns drown out everything, something can be seen more clearly. And he hears. Today's clerics behave in such a way that you have to ask yourself - what is (this kind of) Church for?
The other day we read a statement from the Russian Patriarch Kirill. Greater stupidity is hard to find until you get down to those local pops who claim that Montenegrins were created by the Devil himself. (Eh, yes it is...) Says Kirill, that this war is a "fight of metaphysical significance" so that humanity would follow God's laws. I'm supposed to believe that this one represents the god of love, who turns the other cheek?
But, not that Kirill, for whom the popular Morački from folk tales Pop Kirilo was an Oxford student, at least in personal charm and certainly in the basics of faith. It's the gay parade's fault, he announces triumphantly. For Putin imperial ambition? For Russian fear of the West? Whereby, Russia gave the greatest and most beautiful things she gave, in literature, science, and art, when she was European and with Europe.
It is an interesting consciousness that will sooner believe in the effect of the gay parade or "metaphysical" laws than notice the fault of bad government. It is the effect of Tatar heritage - Russian independent state which only changes the ideology and form, but never the essence. And what is the main obstacle to the establishment of democracy in Russia. And perhaps it is even more interesting when this awareness is embodied by a clergyman of this rank, a patriarch, no less.
Not a day goes by that you don't meet someone stuck in those old Russophile pub registers - All this will be done by the Russians with a greener flame... It always amazes me how easily these war sentiments are awakened in our people. As if war is a rare opportunity in life, of "metaphysical significance", as the Russian patriarch would say.
On such occasions, I always remember Buletova (Miodrag Bulatović, a monster from a writer) stories about the bombing of Bijelo Polje during the war, when the peasants from the surrounding villages, overjoyed, almost in a festival atmosphere and beautifully dressed, go to the wounded city, to loot... The city - that mythical breeding ground of immorality, the barbarians believe. That is why cities tremble before them.
War relativizes all possible considerations and morality, that's why our people constantly invoke and dream of it. How many times have you heard - Why won't there be a war to clean everything up?... Such consciousness clearly lacks the imagination to imagine some other way in which society can be changed or "purified". They do not dream of war to purify the world, but to make themselves dirty.
I cannot help but recall an emblematic day from recent Montenegrin history. Which, if nothing else, testifies to Montenegrins' refined sense of the spirit of the historical moment.
Look at the ease with which the Russians are summoned (again) from the Montenegrin streets. However, not as massively as in 1989, at the famous rally in Nikšić, when the entire square chanted "We want Russians!" That was the year when the Berlin Wall came down and when everyone who could escaped from the Russians. And we shouted loudly: "We want Russians!" In order to reduce the fuss (after all, it was 1989, the SFRY was still alive), the "committee" announced that the people were actually shouting "We want fiddles". (And what's the difference?) The message was about culture, actually, not politics, it was meant to be said.
And we're still here. Ukraine is burning, and the Russians are still being summoned here.
Bonus video:
