Upon arriving in St. Petersburg, my musician friend, an American of Russian descent, noticed some teenagers sitting along the embankment playing the guitar the same way he remembered kids doing when he was a Leningrad youth, and he broke into tears. When they learned that he was an American, the teenagers said: “All Americans should be drowned in the Neva. They are encroaching on our national identity. We want to remain Russian.”
I believe that they were saying what they felt in their hearts. But I also know that they were lying. This is because no one can ever prevent anyone from retaining their national identity. They can preserve their identity by reading their chronicles and folk tales, playing their guslis and ignoring Americans and other Swedes, their films and their jeans. Or by outshining Americans in all areas, from rockets to film and music, so that American kids will start to play guslis and wear fashionable armiaks. But these guys do not want Americans to exist at all! Herein lies the unconscious fracturing of consciousness – they do not want honest competition. And insofar as it is impossible to cut oneself off from the world, the outsider’s complex spills over into aggression. They didn’t even have pity for a Russian river and were ready to drown Americans in the Neva. And these are the sincere feelings not of fighters from bin Laden’s caves, but of young people in European Russia.
Let’s recall the Iranian revolution when the ayatollahs came to power 30 years ago. We Soviet philistines, for whom American jeans were not only fashionable, but also a symbol of honor and prestige, were amazed: they didn’t want jeans, they want hijab [a muslim headscarf.]
So they don’t want it – it’s up to them. They swept away the European oriented Shah, appointed mullahs and introduced the hijab. But no! They are still seething and raging, calling for the destruction of Israel. Why specifically Israel? It basically doesn’t matter to them who gets destroyed.
The western world has created a civilization where human rights and the value of human identity and life reign supreme. Free people respect every human being. Slaves, on the other hand, love to command the weak and easily bow before the strong. They do not know or understand equality, but instead easily fall into a strict hierarchy. Free people and the free world arouse an unconscious irritation in them that transforms itself into hatred. Let’s bear in mind that an aggressive underclass with a complex is the greatest proponent of a strong state. They take all of their failures, shortcomings, defects and weaknesses, and sublimates them into the power and aggression of a state: “In return we will strike you with rockets!” Freudianism pure and simple.
And if there is no aggressive state into which they can sublimate their energy, then the marginalized underclass will find an idea to justify their mentality. Terrorism is a complex of inferiority, a complex of outsiders.
It's easy to create terrorist organizations since these people instinctively gravitate to the herd, to a system of submission. In the contemporary world this is thousands of times easier than it used to be, because there are super-rich people who are organizations, states and empires unto themselves. And within this group, there are also individuals who suffer from an inferiority complex, people with pathological ambitions that cannot be assuaged.
This results in an explosive mixture.
We're under no illusions; this mixture will continue to rock the world for a long time to come. Police measures are a necessary tactic. But the strategy is to decrease the number of marginalized people, the concentration of the explosive mixture, which is what England, for example, is doing. In my opinion, it was wrong to reproach the British government after last year's explosions for excessive tolerance and for upholding an extremely wide range of civil liberties, just as it was wrong to demand a tightening of measures. In support of British policy, I offer an observation made by the Russian admiral Mordvinov.
Count Nikolai Semenovich Mordvinov, a former Navy minister, was a man of pronounced personal opinions. In 1816, a year before the decision to organize an expedition to the Caucasus, when society was in a feverish, antebellum state, he went against the celebratory climate and warned the Russian government:
"It's impossible to conquer such people with weapons. In order to conquer people, we must teach them about what Russia produces and what it can supply them. Then we will not only become friends with them, within their boundaries, but we will also reach their innermost ravines that our cannon balls and bayonets, the only ways to nourish eternal animosity, will never be able to reach.When the people of the Caucasus become closer to us through our provision of their needs, when they are joined to us in an intimate union of hospitality and beneficence, when trading has been established, then the severity of the people will diminish. June 19, 1816."
No one listened to Mordvinov at that time – the war in the Caucasus lasted for 50 years! One hundred eighty years later, Yeltsin and Putin led troops into the region. The result of this is well known – the war in Chechnya has been raging for 12 years. Explosions are already rocking Dagestan everyday.
And this is why, I repeat, the British path seems to be the only true path.
"Whatever the case may be," wrote Andrew Jack, a British journalist at the London-based Financial Times. "Great Britain must maintain its status as a center of tolerance and refuge for those who are trying to escape poverty and repression throughout the world. The country must also stimulate a productive discussion about how to make the Islamic world more ideologically open."
