Márton Szerencsés interviewed Robert C. Castel, a senior staff member at our newspaper, for hirado.hu. Below, we share some of his thoughts.
In the West, genocide is the supreme sin, the ultima ratio above all else. Since the full, all-encompassing exploitation of the tragedy of the Holocaust, it has defined public morality and victim politics — what we consider right, who we consider perpetrators and victims. All this horror has in fact already happened to us; it has become part of us. In other words: All Westerners have smelled the smoke of the crematoriums. In this light, what could have happened in Bucha? Will it ever become clear who is responsible?
These questions cannot be answered in general terms.
In such a war situation, a distinction must be made between responsibility and guilt.
The party that controls the territory at a given moment is responsible for everything that happens there and then. Ergo, if during the Russian occupation, Ukrainian criminals took the opportunity to commit robbery and murder, it is the responsibility of the Russians even if it is not actually their crime. It is entirely possible that there were atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere ordered by the Russian command, that there were private actions by soldiers, shootings and crimes among civilians, and perhaps — because this is also not inconceivable — the Ukrainians added their own. It is perfectly understandable that everyone is trying to use these incidents for their own propaganda, but this is far from revealing the truth.
If one really wants to find out — in time — what happened, what dramas took place at these sad sites, one must investigate each murder as a separate case, however difficult that may be. But whoever undertakes this, be prepared for the fact that whatever truth his work exposes will be his private affair.
Are pogroms and ethnic cleansing in the region likely in the near future?
Unfortunately, I cannot think of any reason why this should not happen. The idea that Europe is somehow an exception and that hell will only break loose in the more primitive parts of the world is a very naive illusion. These things are bound to happen.
As terrible as it is to admit it, wars have a Darwinian outcome.
The stronger party always makes sure that the territory it occupies is dominated by its genes.
These are things we bring with us from the animal kingdom. Jane Goodall, the famous chimpanzee researcher, was astonished to see the “warfare habits” of our close relatives. Human, all too human, as Nietzsche would have said.
It seems to me that the Ukrainians are constructing their own victimhood and media strategy in much the same way as the Palestinians. Is it conceivable that a kind of “Ukrainian terrorism” similar to Palestinian terrorism could develop across Europe against Russian or pro-Russian targets?
Who is waging guerrilla warfare? Those who cannot fight a conventional war. Who chooses terrorism? Those who cannot wage guerrilla warfare. These choices are born of weakness. Statistically, the chances of victory are greatest with conventional warfare, but the odds diminish if one side uses guerrilla warfare and diminish even further if the repertoire of terrorism is used. In reality, of course, it is more complex than this, the categories often blur, but this does not change the regularity and clear pattern mentioned above. In this particular case,
we can expect widespread „Ukrainian terrorism” if the Russians occupy all of Ukraine and succeed in suppressing Ukrainian guerrilla activity.
At present, only the southeastern part of the country has a realistic chance of this. In these areas, some form of terrorism may eventually emerge at the level of individuals or isolated groups.
You may think it is a blasphemous suggestion, but I see a lot of parallels between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Israel has failed to make Western public opinion understand the importance of military prevention, it has failed to become a “victim,” or a nation for which people will simply “turn a blind eye.” What can be the lesson to be drawn from this parallel?
The most important is that postmodern morality sees the world simply.
Whoever is weaker, smaller, tanner, or poorer is good. Stronger, bigger, whiter, richer is bad.
You should also never forget who the person is in whose eyes you are being „stigmatised”? What is it exactly that we call „the public opinion of the world”?
It is a narrow and nervous intellectual stratum in the countries of the Western world. That is all. Nobody outside this circle embraces this postmodern morality.
The best example of this is the fact that 150 countries voted to exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, but only 37 have joined the sanctions. Thirty-seven out of 196. That is the true measure of things.
America maintains not only a military but also a moral world order. To put it more boldly, I would say that the morality of the U.S. foreign and secret services is now the morality of Europe. How long can we maintain a situation in which Europe does not have its own moral instincts?
What you call the “American moral world order” has long ceased to be an American attribute. This moral world order is like a creature brought to life by Frankenstein, which has long since become independent and has repeatedly attacked its creator.
But the reason why this attitude of moralizing with absurd naivety has become dominant is indeed the total American hegemony and the unipolar world it has created. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, we could not be squeamish because the communists would have gotten the better of us. The moment the Soviet Union collapsed and the U.S. became a total power, any existential threat ceased to exist. Realpolitik was replaced by postmodern morality. The precondition for this is an international secular clergy made up of representatives of the media, academia, international organizations, NGOs and legal oligarchs. This very quickly turned on America. This
elite has imposed its ideology of self-hatred on America and the West. The election and policies of President Obama reflected this self-hating desire for atonement.
As for Europe’s „own moral instincts”:
The post-modernist internationals took advantage of American hegemony and a geopolitical „summer break” to build a Potemkin global village of its own dreams. This is the European Union today.
It is not the ideology of its member states but of the international elites. This is the false postmodern self-consciousness.
Europe is therefore not the victim in this morality play, but an accomplice, an accessory, an avatar of the American progressive elites.
Is there good news for those who are looking for a way out of this collective suicide?
There is.
With the collapse of American hegemony, this post-modern worldview is also gone. On the sidelines of events, we still see Fukuyama and Harari trying to patch together this piece of junk together, but these are just rearguard actions on their part.
Yes, with a certain touch of irony, we can say today that “life is determined by consciousness.”
Israel, on the other hand, has its own moral worldview, and everything that happens in the course of fighting and wars is morally justified. Even for those involved in the fighting. What is their secret?
Israel’s secret is to reject universalism and to preserve its own particularism. The vast majority of Israel’s population is nationalist and religious. For them, the source of morality is the wisdom of the Bible, thousands of years old, and not what some bored philosopher or legal acrobat has invented as a basic human right that no one had even heard of 15 minutes earlier.
The dominant worldview is conservative, which in this context means valuing what we have and what has worked for thousands of years.
We want to preserve this. We are not closed to new ideas, because it is well known that Israel is a „start-up nation.” But the burden of proof is always on the innovator.
Israel is the biblical prototype of the modern nation. Throughout its history, it has constantly struggled against multi-national empires and their universalist ideologies.
The secret of Israel is the same as the secret of Ukraine. The Ukrainians drew their energy not from postmodern morality to oppose the empire, but from Ukrainian national sentiments.
This is what motivates young Ukrainians to fight, not the dream of one day being a cheap Eastern European labor force in a German city.
Is it possible that it is not only military goals that are important to the Russian leadership, but also the fulfillment of the economic goals caused by the war? In short, the Western policy of sanctions is weakening the European economy from within, through internal bleeding, which is opening up again the space for the big powers outside the continent. In a few weeks, black suits will appear, speaking in Chinese or “American,” and say “thank you, we’ll take it from here.”
This war was a perfectly logical move on Russia’s part.
This is not about economic policy, it is about security policy. This war fits perfectly into the pattern we have seen in Russia’s geopolitical behavior over the last centuries. Geoeconomics is only one dimension of these geopolitical, geostrategic considerations.
I am sorry to say that
Europe, the European economy and the valued European consumer are not at all important in this game, neither for the Russians nor for the Americans.
Europe is just a table on which this conflict is taking place. For the U.S., Europe is a third-rate theatre of war after the Far East and the Persian Gulf. Europe does not supply the world with vital raw materials (like Russia), nor is it an innovation hotspot like (for example) Israel or the Asian Tigers. With the abandonment of Russian energy, on top of expensive labor, production will become unaffordable in Europe. There will be few goods worth producing on the continent.
Is Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove principle of „stop worrying and love the bomb” still valid today? Or is nuclear war even conceivable?
Let’s turn the question around.
What are the chances that we will succeed in bottling up the genie forever?
In a bipolar world, mutually assured destruction was the guarantee that there would be no nuclear war. In the unipolar world that followed, the U.S. had the undisputed power, the ability to destroy anyone. There was no one to challenge it. The multipolar world we are living in now, which is emerging before our eyes — ab ovo — is more unstable than the previous two constructs, and it follows that it will include a permanent, systemic threat that we have never had to reckon with before.
The result of the sensitivity of the Western world is the grand vision of the end of history. If there is no history, there is no more war, if there is no dynamism, there is no conflict. As a civilian, I ask the soldier: Who sees the end of war and the end of history?
There is no end to history, nor to the history of wars. The end of history is babbled about by ideologues and fantasists who have attributed the triumph of what the political and military hegemony of the USA has created to their own world-changing dreams.
In short:
The Maastricht Treaty was put in place and is maintained by American bayonets.
Read the full interview here.
