By Vitaly Portnikov
04.04.2014 10:51 Radio Svoboda
Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine
Source:http://www.svoboda.org/content/article/25320784.html

In these gloomy days many in Russia are pondering a question that only recently would have seemed phantasmagorical. How is it that Russians, who not long ago considered Ukrainians their brothers and almost more “their own” than many citizens of their own country, have come to see them as “Banderites,” and war with them has become not only acceptable but necessary? Maidan? Propaganda? But in 2004 there were also both Maidan and propaganda – and there was no such universal bitterness, such thirst for war.

To find an answer to this question, it’s worth revisiting another painful question of European history. How did Germans, who had seen Jews as compatriots and who were having trouble telling apart a German Jew from a “true Aryan,” suddenly become anti-Semites, ready to chase Jews from the country and to seek out Jewish ancestry among their best friends? And let’s be clear here – this is not even anti-Semitism as such, this is a desire to find an object of hate.

Of course it is true that pogroms and exile happened in Germany before Hitler, that the Holocaust did not spring from nothing. That is true. But what is important is that the idea of the “final solution” only formed after German Jews began to see themselves as simply Germans of Jewish faith. This was quite logical for a country populated by German Catholics and German Protestants. Of course, one can look for reasons in the xenophobic nature of national-socialism, or the desire to seize Jewish capital. But there was something in which the nature of national-socialism resonated with the mood of the German society itself – the perceived uselessness of their country as a civilisation. The years after Germany’s defeat in the First World War were for many Germans a time of decline and disappointment. When they compared their nation, shrunken into an ethnic republic, to neighbouring empires with their overseas possessions and economic achievements, Germans felt a sense of inferiority that could not be compensated by either democracy or the “Golden twenties.”

The very first serious economic crisis opened the gates to dictatorship and hatred. German Jews became the first object of this hatred simply because they were the most vulnerable sector of the population. Persecution of Jews became a parade that did not require any victims from the victors. The victims came later, when the regime was strong enough and did not need to reckon with either its own people, nor with strangers who had turned into a hindrance to the development of a new living space. But by that point, talk of the uselessness of German civilisation only came from a tiny handful of national traitors.

Something similar happened with Russia. A huge part of her population took the end of the Cold War not as their own victory against totalitarianism, but as the humiliating defeat of a great nation. The citizens of this nation were proud of the fear that they instilled in the rest of the world, and were not ready for fear to suddenly disappear to be replaced by the competition of economies, cultures and social models. In this competition, Russia, shrunken in the mind of the Kremlin to the size of a former Soviet republic, lost, and no democracy, no “golden Noughties” could change that sense of inferiority and provincialism which only increased when travelling to the “decadent West.” And once again there was the need for fear. This desire to instill fear is what many perceive as the new rules of the game from Vladimir Putin.

This drive for the government to instill fear on the world around them exists because of the demands of their own society, a society that does not know how else to make themselves known in this fast-changing world. The Ukrainians became objects of hatred simply because their country became weak after the marauding rule of Kremlin puppets – and also because they never dreamed of shooting at Russians. Thus a young hooligan, who is just starting out in banditry, first attacks a defenseless woman who cannot fight back. For the bully, the main thing is to overcome a sense of shame and to feel the heady buzz of impunity.

But now no-one talks of the uselessness of Russian civilization, except for a tiny handful of national traitors. What happens next, we all know from history. The potential aggressor is either stopped by stronger players – and by stronger values than fear – or goes further and further, until their own and everyone else’s catastrophe. The Germans felt their genuine use as a civilization after the war, when brick by brick they were rebuilding not only their shattered country, but the mutilated soul of their people. I would not want to know that Russians are heading towards a similarly terrible fate.