Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 4 – “The first casualty of any war is the idea of human dignity,” Viktor Vakhshtayn says. “It is too universalistic and cannot survive the onslaught of the kind of notions war demands, such as ‘people,’ ‘mentality,’ ‘society,’ ‘culture,’ or ‘nation.’” And this loss affects intellectuals as much as other groups – and perhaps even a greater percentage of them.
For many years, the prominent Russian sociologist says, he had lived with “the absurd illusion” that academic specialists were “somehow magically vaccinated” against such things. But while working in the Balkans, he learned that “the percentage of people with academic degrees on the lists of war criminals was much higher” than their share in the population.
At that time, Vakhshtayn says, he accepted Hobsbawm’s explanation that universities have always been “at the forefront of nationalism.” But now that he is seeing the same phenomenon in Russia, he has come to the conclusion that this loss of dignity is “not about nationalism at all” (holod.media/2022/10/04/vahstein-nenavist/).
When he attempted to find out from colleagues who had drunk the kool-aid of Putinism as far as Ukraine is concerned, they responded either that they had made a conscious choice to back this new approach to the world and argued that “after all, ‘human dignity is not a right but a privilege’ [and that] ethical universalism is only a cover for imperial ideology.”
“But the majority,” Vakhshtayn says, blamed what has happened to them on the world around them. “’After Bucha,’” they said, “’you cannot demand sanity from me,’” a position that allows them to avoid taking any responsibility at all for their actions. It turns out that recognition of one’s own insanity is “the key to successful dehumanization.”
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