Don’t touch my stone, knife or bomb

In recent years, the image of the anti-authoritarian left as a toothless peace-lover has emerged in the post-Soviet arena, which, at best, is above the battle of the empire and the colony, and at worst, it has brought not only political but also domestic pacifism to a total inability to resist aggression.

Once, a so-called literary critic, hearing that I had to get rid of a rapist, having competently played on his weakness and caused tears, cried out that I was «a subhuman, prone to violence» — and after all the speech the dialogue was only about a psychological, but not physical pressure on the aggressor. Here also, probably, gender stereotypes worked: the young man attributed to me the female gender by default, assuming that feminist women are only good when they write: «I was insulted, and I cried so, I cried after the demonstration.» Becoming active and ruthless to the enemy by the subject, it is automatically excluded from the field of sympathy.

In 2006, I was called a subhuman by a scoundrel, who I shopped to the police after threats and attempts to attack me. That is, the «new left» non-heterosexual man, positioning himself as an advocate of equality, unconsciously copying the behavior of the heterosexual conservative, and all because his subconscious mind is firmly clogged: the oppressed must not firmly resist the attacker, this is the carbon copy of «the enemy’s» behavior. But if you surrendered the abuser to the law enforcement agencies — this is also bad: you are involved in the system. The ideal left is the dead left.

It went so far that the ideological patriarchal — from the neonazis to the manarchists — and the townsfolk are ready to attribute to any libertarian left grouping «the limited interests of the girls from the Tumblr»; at the same time it is overlooked that girls with a tumblr account speak not only about multiple identities and language reform, but also about domestic violence, deaths from anorexia, murders of LGBT-people. I had to read similar stories about the anarcho-groups, in which the owners of military ranks consist.

Where do the roots of the myth of bad left-libertarian pacifism grow?

Do you remember how the ideas of the American and European «new left» was presented to the people? Frightened by the official propaganda of the townspeople, they expected a red commissar with horns and hoofs, but it turned out that the Communists were funny guys in flared jeans and barefooted maidens with flowers in their hair. «It’s not scary to be left,» the hippies said.

Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit have developed the original concept of revolution for their time as a game, in which an individual is invited to participate, rather than being pounded into a meat grinder at the barrel of a pistol. «Jeu» is also translated as «joke». So, unnoticed, under the jokes and music of people involved in serious work, and, moreover, the «game» — an integral part of the work. This method, like much more, was borrowed by the right.

The right is the monkey of the left, like the devil in medieval theology, the monkey of God. So now we are seeing allegedly harmless «funny» Pepe memes and supposedly non-dangerous intellectuals-libertarians in the image of boys from the nearby campus. Sometimes it is enough to joke that a person is no longer associated with a monster, but the humor of the alt right continually slips into a cannibalistic silence and is not able to distract attention from their crimes on the basis of xenophobia.

As for the left, many of them are too involved in their role. Their ideological heirs, sometimes not remembering where they came from, thoughtlessly reproduce the mechanisms of the struggle «for all good, against all bad things» («To support Ukrainian resistance to Russia? They kill people!»). Hence strange stories: for example, what happened to Amanda Kijera, an American journalist who went to Haiti to help, even after being sexually assaulted by a black man at home. The women insisted that he was her spiritual brother, and she was studying the legacy of Malcolm X, but it didn’t stop the raping.

She summed up: «Women are not the source of their oppression; oppressive policies and the as-yet unaddressed white patriarchy which still dominates the global stage are. Rather than allowing myself to be used in such a fashion, and as opposed to submitting to the frustration and bitterness that can be born of such an experience, I choose to continue to love and educate instead.»

The Libertarian left, unfortunately, especially women, at times resemble the hero of Fenimore Cooper’s novel «St. John’s wort». This is a young girl named Hetty, who decides that if the Indians read the Bible out loud, they would stop taking scalps. Hetty wasn’t killed — the culture of the Iroquois has traditionally been benevolent to the «blessed», but the sense of reading the New Testament is about zero.

And nothing that is parallel to the concept of the revolution-game Franz Fanon spoke of a great armed protest, and Camilo Torres developed the concept of revolutionary violence against the oppressors. Within the framework of that same Christianity, the «liberation theology». The game does not interfere with the provision of arms, otherwise it’s a bad game.

It is enough to associate the left libertarians with natives of well-off bourgeois families who deny any violence to their own detriment. Among us are former workers, army officers, natives of settlements and district centers; among us there are people who, despite their external fragility, who are able to resist degenerates. We are not in paradise, and we have to hide a razor blade between the pages of the conditional Bible.

I respect those who have only the strength to cry, because no one taught them to pick up a stone, a knife or a bomb, but preachers of absurd pacifism in the conditions of the modern post-USSR deserve at least drowning. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Archimedes said to the Roman soldier who burst into his house: «Do not touch my drawings.» Now pseudo-pacifists can be heard to say: «Do not touch my stone, knife or bomb.» We have the right to pick up a stone from the ground. By the way, they do too.