couple of thoughts

on Russia, dictatorships, identity, nationality, nationalism, country, Western European/White American society. tw: political persecution, colonialism

thought #1

thinking about Russia and measure of punishment in Russia and how, ultimately, You’ll Never Know what would happen. everything is so largely dependent on chance, specific person in power, some other inconceivable circumstance.

i wonder if that is how it is in any dictatorship. would any system ever have enough power to beat people down with equal and maximun force, every time? probably not. sometimes, the cops and the judges and the prosecution probably just can’t be bothered to.

but i wonder if there is design to it, as well, deliberation. can’t stick every person who retweets an anti-war petition in jail for 10 whole years - but can do that with a couple, and that creates a profitable limbo. if people know not to expect the worst, they’ll feel enabled and empowered; bad. if people know that they are constantly living one breath away from the worst - they can become desperate. desperate people can fight tooth and nail. also bad.

when you do not know what to expect, when it’s all so nebulous and up to chance, it seems pretty damn hard to take it.

this is… pretty simplistic, and i do not at all want to imply that people putting themselves on the line out of desperation are doing an easy thing. but i do wonder if the limbo makes it harder to cross certain lines.

back at the start of the war, when me and my mother were talking in not-uncertain terms about what we wish happened to Putin, i moved our phones out of the room. she said, “don’t bother. i have no doubts at all they’re listening, but i don’t think we’re of interest to them”.

there are lines established by the government. i think they lie somewhere at the edge of becoming a proper and prominent activist. then, your online presence, your conversations, your home they will break into and search - everything will become incriminating evidence. until then, or in any other person, it is dormant, having potency but not yet worth their time.

but then sometimes, a person far from activism will get a maximum sentence for an anti-war tweet.

and at the end the message is just… “don’t go being too loud and attracting much attention”. we are not silenced on every turn, but on every Big turn, and sometimes, randomly, on smaller ones. just free enough to not suffocate but never enough to be any sort of inconvenience.

you can have a fairly normal life in a dystopia, is what i’m saying. but you’ll have to carry so much grief in your heart as you do, and feel so, so powerless.

thought #2

finishing “A Tour of Bones” by Denise Inge. would’ve been a pretty amazing book if not for the g slur and general anti-Roma racism and a quote from the fucking W***y A***n. talks a lot about belonging, how tricky it is in a globalized world; about the atomization of Western European society.

it’s making me think a lot about identity… i feel like there is, undoubtedly, still a dominating culture, and a sick one: our classics are so deeply alienating to me. and on one hand, i yearn for a world so much more diverse: people engaging with niche literature, authors unheard by their era and forgotten. i want art to be free, interest dictated by personal passion, not someone with a PhD deeming something “of cultural importance”. “cultural importance” is such an artifical construct: yes, there is a web of interconnected events and pieces and personalities, influencing each other, inhereting from each other - but to pretend it is in any way an exhaustive portrayal of our cultural lives would be silly. to only measure value or relevance of something by how it intersects with the established mainstream culture feels so dry.

at the same time, the collective unconscious rests on the pillars of inherited shared archetypes. it is important to have a shared narrative - that’s how our minds connect. and i am yearning equally for a sense of collective identity that is not a form of violence against me as a genderqueer person, as a CSA survivor. if we all shared kinder stories, maybe i wouldn’t mind the monotony that much.

then again, spiritual and religious self-determination is so very high on my priorities list - and those would be the most fundamental stories told.

either way, Denise Inge talks about a lack of a unifying force in the modern Western European/White American society, and, classics or no classics, same school programmes or not, it does ring true. and i do wonder if the alt-right drive to “unify the nation” is, in a way, an expression of this existential fear of no place to belong to.

western/white identity when it strives to be found and defined is so quick to turn to extreme forms of nationalism and white supremacy - because, well, what else is in our history? Indigenous cultures suffer under our colonialism; the only thing we can counter their deeply rooted identity with is a Nation, defined by a conquering Race. but a nation is artifically constructed - that’s why it can be Expanded through conquest, devouring lands populated by organically ocurring cultures and peoples. but a nation does not want to be amorphous, existing only on paper - it wants definition, belonging, monolith. so it strives to define itself via violent opposition of itself to another.

when studying early Slavic history, we were told the coming together of early Slavic lands and peoples under a single rule was to “unify” them, make them stronger. but i wonder if something was weakning instead and a natural unity was being sacrificed. then again, we all sprout from one source, separate groups all, intrinsically, connected; a weird rhythm, one, many, one, many… also probably natural, in a way; but nothing feels natural about the white supremacist movement.

i have no tolerance for the alt-right, but it would help to have an understanding. so i do wonder if i can see their violent rage through a prism of existential dread.

i really, really wonder about how identity functions within a saturated, natural culture, a truly interconnected community sharing a healthy, secure mentality.