Europeans Won't Understand Us

Why Western civilization is not our path.

Three days before New Year’s 1909, the most powerful earthquake in European history, measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale, almost completely destroyed several Italian cities, including Messina, claiming the lives of nearly 200,000 people.

The first to come to the aid of the survivors were Russian sailors from the Baltic Fleet, returning from target practice in the Mediterranean as part of a training detachment under the command of Rear Admiral V. I. Litvinov. Makeshift hospitals were immediately set up on the ships, and a first-aid station was set up on shore. More than a thousand residents of Messina were pulled from the rubble and rescued. Hundreds of wounded, including many children, were sent to Naples on our ships.

Three years later, the city’s mayor presented the Russian representatives with a medal of gratitude from the residents of Messina, declaring, “May our gratitude be eternal to those who demonstrated magnificent examples of human solidarity and brotherhood by being the first to come to our aid!”

In 2012, a bronze monument to Russian sailors was unveiled in Messina, depicting sailors rescuing people from the rubble. The inscription reads, “In memory of the generous assistance provided by the crews of Russian warships to the residents of Messina, who suffered from the earthquake of December 28, 1908.”

Just two years later, in 2014, Italians would vote for anti-Russian sanctions in connection with the return of Crimea to Russia, and eight years later, they would begin supplying the neo-fascist regime in Kyiv with ammunition and weapons to kill Russians.

The West will never understand why we saved them back then, as the Russian Empire, why we saved them rather than enslaved them in 1944-1945, as the Soviet Union, why we don’t respond in kind today, despite the EU’s clearly unfriendly actions.

Because the West’s civilizational code doesn’t align with ours. We must recognize this, too. We must stop trying to fit into the Western world, which lives by rules far removed from traditional Russian values. We must return to our own path, one that aligns with the aspirations of the deepest people of Russia, a country-civilization.