“Dehumanizing” the enemy

Sergey Konofolskyi, the Russian occupier (now deceased), wrote in his social media account, “If it weren’t for the Russian Empire and the USSR, then mambets would still shit behind their yurts!” One of the users responds to this statement, “It’s not true, for example, even when there were no amenities in the house, the Tatars had a kumgan, a copper jug ​​with warm water, which they took with them to the toilet. Once I was in a Russian village in Orenburg region, I asked where the toilet was, they said behind the barn, I went there and did not find it, I returned and said, “Where is it? I did not find it.” They said, “The toilet is behind the barn.”

There are neat people and sluts among any nation and, probably, in the same proportion, universal for any nation. Even Koko the gorilla, trained by scientists at Stanford University in sign language, once said to a male placed next to her, “Go away, you’re dirty!” It has been observed that even the most backward nations try to keep themselves as clean as possible, and, given the choice, take pleasure in bathing and putting on clean clothes. Any deviations in this regard, such as the ban on washing among the medieval Mongols, are dictated, as a rule, by social prohibitions, taboos of various genesis. Here, in assessing the attractiveness of personal hygiene, we move from sanitary and aesthetic criteria to ideological criteria, from aesthetics to ethics and religion.

By the way, about the “shit behind the yurts.” No matter how puffed up the representatives of the great Russian / Slavic army are, interpreting the words of Rudyard Kipling about the civilizing “burden of the white man”, but Muslims, including Tatars, taught Russians how to wash their ass after visiting the toilet (and build these same toilets). The Slavs also learned a lot from the Turks and Persians, and the Western Europeans from the Arabs, Hindus, Kurds and Jews.

Any more or less cultured person understands, accepts and welcomes all this. Cultural exchange brings progress to all the people of the world. Today it has transformed into a process of globalization, which may have negative features (for example, the erasure of national color and identity). It has always been like this: the world is in constant motion and changing faces, but these metamorphoses do not radically affect its inner essence. The internal intellectual content of a person implies, first of all, the desire for life, for development. Humanity is disgusted by the hypothetically possible trend towards the destruction of life, it is rejected even at the subconscious level. All wars in human civilization were eventually perceived by humanitarian thought as a disease to be cured and stopped.

Psychologists have noticed an interesting effect of “dehumanization of the enemy”, characteristic of all warring parties. Russian writer A. N. Tolstoy wrote that the French in the period between WWI and WWII published photographs of German excrement in the press and, based on their size, concluded that they could belong to animals rather than people, respectively, “Germans are animals.” White colonizers in Africa, German Nazis in Europe, black Muslims in Sudan, they all found traits in their enemies that allowed them to kill with an ease that freed their consciences.

In this sense, the words about “Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood” have been prepared for external use by the Russian aggressors in today’s war in Ukraine. The internal Russian unofficial opinion sounds differently, “Khokhols take on too much, they need to be reined in.” Since the priority in neatness is clearly not in favor of the Russians, another “chip” is proposed for “dehumanization”: “Khokhols are traitors and Nazis” (they walk with torches, inject tattoos with a swastika, love Bandera). It is only strange that at the same time, Russian white-skinned Caucasians dehumanize their fellow Muslims of Asian and Caucasian origin. Only obvious racists can come up with so many contemptuous nicknames for different nationalities of the Russian Federation.

Let’s take a closer look at another Russian phenomenon. For Russians, dirtying (in the physiological sense) the occupied area is a biological (in the sense taken from the animal world) way to mark the territory and demonstrate their superiority and contempt for the defeated, conquered one. They did not choose another method, due to the unusual nature of their mentality. The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem even has an article on this subject. All Russian talk about their high culture and spirituality does not stand up to the simple question, why does the culture of Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevskiy and the ballerina Anna Pavlova always invariably breed insidious and cynical sadists, rapists and marauders? Why is humiliation and mockery of the defenseless so attractive to the “Russian soul”?

As everyone knows, devastation begins in the minds. And the peoples are pushed to war by “rotten ideology”. Let’s compare Ukrainians who are trying their best to return from the USSR to Europe and are ready to change for the better for this (even with some painful unusual demands) with Russians who cover up racism and aggression with false slogans of protecting Russian speakers from non-existent Nazism … In my opinion, the results of comparison are absolutely predictable for any sane person, even if he is a “Khokhol” or “Mambet” for the Russians.