“Deplorables” in the US

I Felt it First in Russian Speaking Community in the US.

The drastic increase in hatred: political hatred that quickly became personal. Since 2014, the community became split. And ‘split” does not even cover the extend of it. Broken up, with one part canceling another.

How dare they support Russia? How dare they speak the language or read Pushkin? How dare they support Ukrainian junta and its Nazis? How dare they invade? But then from local ethnic rivalries, something bigger began to emerge. Trump Derangement Syndrome was real and was extremely ugly in its everyday manifestations.

Perfectly normal people became insane. Rejecting the other side as “Kremlin stooges,” “deplorables,” “garbage,” and so on. Trumpists were paying in kind, getting violent with antifa maniacs and showing their signs of intolerance.

I actually broke up with my oldest friend in US, with whom we go back to Columbia years. Now, of course, there is another division, which splits people within each group. Some pro-Israel Democrats are cancelling pro-Palestinian ones, Pro-palestinian Russians are cancelling pro-Israeli ones and so on.

And all this is done in the name of morality. I have morality, you see. And you, therefore, are deplorable. Sadly, the roots of this intolerance, paranoia, and hatred are not new.

Here is what my favorite author, Julien Benda writes in 1928: “our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity.”

Intellectual organization of political hatreds. Supported by some peculiar claims to morality. Morality, that supposed to remind us that we all are brothers, became the instrument of reminding us, that we are all enemies.

And the clercs — that’s how Benda calls intellectuals — the intellectual servants of various religious, philosophical and intellectual orders — have become the main peddlers of hatred. It is them, who constantly demand canceling, who call for wars and violence, who can’t fall asleep without compiling lists of whom to boycott and sanction. How sad.

Intellectuals who don’t learn from the past. The moral crusaders, who get paid for lacerating the wounds. The laceration that always smells of slaughter, as Chekhov once put it. Well, there is Chekhov and Benda, and there are people who sign letters of condemnation and demand more and more money for war. That’s all.