Horror.
A phrase that I’ve been fascinated by increasingly. And the face of Colonel Kurtz who wasn’t actual. He was a protagonist of a movie, the embodiment of an thought, an emblem, vitality, a phallus, an indication, pure evil, and thirst in hell. It immediately happens to me that I haven’t seen any trams shortly. It’s a wierd thought, a phenomenological one. From the purpose of logic, it’s flawed, it doesn’t mirror precise actuality as a result of I see trams on a regular basis. I stroll previous them each day downtown. Reasonably, I’ve stopped noticing them – they’re additionally solely an emblem, a bridge over the river of occasions that helps us perceive that horror lingers round us. And, if you have to seize onto one thing, you’d higher choose one thing massive. Trams match the invoice. If you happen to cease noticing them, you’d higher consider you’ve hit all-time low. They’re so unusual: time after time, this red-and-white Soviet previous trundles alongside, large, iron, grey, monstrous, like an apparition, solely a loud one.
Nevertheless it’s necessary to carry on to the thought that horror sneaks up imperceptibly, by means of a e-book for instance. Books have at all times been a final refuge, that secure haven in a storm. Instantly they’ve disappeared, too. Why learn anyway? The authors haven’t seen horror, and those who’ve, have turned it into an altar. The colonel didn’t consider in it; he drank with it. A chalice face-to-face with the horror that turned his buddy, like these night bonfires Nietzsche so cherished. Nietzsche would allegedly clamber alongside the rocks at night time and lightweight fires. I can think about him gathering kindling, the fireplace burning, being whipped up by the north wind. In time, the wind of historical past would carry focus camps to Europe. ‘Earth’s nice midday’ would finally power humanity to check out itself by means of the sunshine of World Struggle I and later II: solely bare existence with no social or cultural ‘shadows.’ However we have been nonetheless removed from the horror.
Each battle encapsulates that which individuals would like to overlook. On this sense, all wars are the identical: since historical occasions to the modern Russo-Ukrainian battle, individuals have destroyed others like them with a specific cruelty that has come to be referred to as ‘horror’. If you happen to hint wars by means of historical or medieval artwork, you’ll see severed heads impaled on pikes, captives skinned alive, the defeated with their limbs lower off, and so forth. It’s customary to consider that each one that was a factor of the previous, or at the least peculiar to African nations, the place native wars are nonetheless fought with demonstrative brutality towards one’s enemies.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered this shaky phantasm. However the primary level right here is just not solely the mass homicide and burial of civilians the Russian military carried out within the Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts. In any case, the Russian authorities formally refutes this, trying by means of lies to avoid wasting face within the so-called ‘guidelines of battle’. The crux of the matter is Wagner. The non-public navy firm has develop into well-known the world for its cruelty in the direction of each the troopers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and its personal mercenaries. What’s ‘distinctive’ about Wagner is that – not like the Russian state – it doesn’t surrender its cruelty, however advertises it as an alternative and switch it right into a cult. This cult of horror not solely ensures iron self-discipline inside a construction made up of 1000’s of criminals convicted of notably violent felonies, but additionally generates worry for the exterior client.
The Russian battle in Ukraine has turned horror right into a social phenomenon, one more class of consciousness. Since historical occasions, philosophy has considered these classes as a strategy to method the essence of issues. High quality, Amount, Place, Substance and Time have contained the world, remade and mirrored it. Now the understanding of actuality comes by means of existential horror: slicing off heads, filming it, gathering lots of of likes and constructive feedback. A brand new demand for horror.
This brings us again to Apocalypse Now and its protagonist. Colonel Kurtz is the logic of battle pushed to the restrict. Struggle is barely a software, an accident in a sure sense, one supposed to indicate the true evolution of humanity. And this evolution is in no way in iPhones. It has gone from the cross to the hammer used to drive within the nails. Love (Christ’s cross) has been supplanted by Horror – Wagner’s hammer. Dostoevsky’s ‘grand inquisitor’ of right now isn’t a feeble previous man in a cardinal’s pink gown. He wears epaulettes with stars. He wouldn’t give a prolonged, impassioned monologue earlier than Christ – extra doubtless, he would simply toss his bloodied hammer to his ft. I believe in our time the ‘inquisitor’ wouldn’t say something; his assembly with Christ could be silent.
This can be a unusual feeling of pure which means, one which more and more engulfs me. I typically hear: why don’t you write, or write so not often? There’s a lot occurring, simply put it into phrases. However I’ve no phrases. They’re pointless. It appears everybody has already realized this: what might you presumably add to a head lower off or crushed in entrance of the entire world? Analyses, predictions, sympathy, even ire and curses are all incongruous. All the things is grotesque, a caricature of actuality, apart from the phrase ‘horror.’
However it is usually empty, because it immediately crumbles into 1000’s of meanings: everybody imbues it with their very own. Horror isn’t worry, which at all times has an object: dying, heights, spiders. Horror is unimaginable to see in language, which is why solely the existence of horror issues, the processes that occur in parallel, and the distinction – not the outcomes or the shock. A tram noisily racing down the tracks carrying a dozen individuals on their morning errands whereas, on the identical time, somebody’s head is being pressed between a wall and a hammer. What have been we doing when this was occurring? Possibly shopping for groceries, placing eggs and ketchup into our carts, on the very second that, in a stretch of forest in Donbas, a Ukrainian soldier’s head was being sawn off alive, the video ‘leaked’ to Telegram together with the screams.
I bear in mind going to Bucha with my territorial protection unit. Our part hadn’t taken half within the combating and we entered the town on the sixth day after the Russians had left. We already knew in regards to the mass homicide of civilians, and numerous journalists from everywhere in the world have been standing across the church: our bodies have been being exhumed. We determined to drive down some aspect streets as a result of a neighborhood man mentioned he’d seen a pile of burned our bodies that means. Certainly, on Staroiablonska Road, which the entire world got here to know, we got here throughout the stays of the fireplace between some small cottages. We couldn’t inform for certain how many individuals lay there – I personally counted 4. One of many our bodies was ripped in half and some meters away we discovered a burned leg that the hungry native canines, deserted by their house owners once they evacuated, had chewed off. The Russians simply piled up the our bodies and set them on fireplace. If you happen to stood simply ten meters again, they appeared like a pile of strange trash somebody had burned of their yard. And, truly, that’s partially what it was: the charred our bodies lay subsequent to some building detritus. The individuals who did this needed to indicate, consciously or not, that human life meant no extra to them than filth.
However the horror on that day was hiding within the solar. It was a surprisingly sunny day for early April There was a small pine forest throughout the road and the yard itself was surrounded by massive houses that till lately had been occupied by the native center class. Presumably it was a portion of that class that was now being eaten by the canines. It’s unusual, however now, a 12 months and a half since that day, I often open a map of Staroiablonska Road on my laptop and simply have a look at it. I believe that for me this can be a stand-in for that April solar beating by means of these pines onto the burned our bodies. You have a look at the straight line of the streets, the logic of the town, its ponds and timber, and might’t totally consider that it was at this spot on the map that you simply have been overcome by nausea from the yellowed stays of corpses.
Now an apparent however necessary query: methods to overcome the horror? Violence can at all times be met with violence, however responding to horror with horror creates one thing totally different: it doesn’t disappear, solely drives individuals deeper into themselves. Throughout one in all Colonel Kurtz’s monologues in Apocalypse Now, the digital camera pans the books he has been studying deep within the jungle. Considered one of them is Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, an allusion to the movie’s last scene and all of the struggling that Kurtz, who has skilled the horror of battle and cultivated it round him within the type of the severed heads of locals, has gone by means of.
Within the e-book, Frazer, a scholar of comparative faith, tells the story of the rex Nemorensis, a priest of the goddess Diana. A darkish determine retains watch round a sacred tree from morning to deep within the night time. He carries a sword and continuously glances round as if anticipating an enemy to assault. That is the assassin priest and, in the end, the one he awaits will kill him and take his place. This was the regulation of that sacred place. The challenger for the priest’s place might achieve the title solely by killing his predecessor. The victor then held the place till a stronger challenger killed him.
On the finish of the film, Kurtz dies on the hand of an officer whom the military sends to assassinate him when his strategies of battle develop into ‘unacceptable’. At this, the locals bow right down to the murderer who, of their eyes, has develop into the brand new priest. Nevertheless, he rejects this standing and leaves in his boat. Catharsis units in: because the colonel is dying, he whispers, ‘The horror, the horror,’ and with that’s lastly freed of it. Neither his consciousness (‘it’s essential to make a buddy of horror’) nor his implementation of it in on a regular basis life might free Kurtz from the horror he skilled in an Asian village, when he noticed a mountain of youngsters’s arms hacked off after they’d been inoculated in opposition to polio. Solely his bodily homicide frees him from it.
What about catharsis, anyway? In antiquity, this Greek phrase was principally utilized in two senses: the expiation of guilt or bodily alleviation of an sickness. It’s attention-grabbing that, earlier than he dies, Kurtz tells his assassin, ‘You’ve got a proper to kill me… however you haven’t any proper to guage me.’ It’s not about guilt. It’s about deliverance from a pure existence whose solely which means is the notice of that pure horror throughout.
What does this need to do with the Russo-Ukrainian Struggle? Truly, rather a lot. Maybe, if western analysts understoodthe deep cultural context of what Ukraine was hit with on February 24, then discussions about negotiating with the Kremlin would finish. Western Europe wanted the bitter expertise of the primary 12 months of World Struggle II earlier than its politicians might perceive that there might be no negotiating with Hitler. It will have been absurd to counsel that Nazis and Jews sit on the identical negotiating desk – even in a philosophical sense. What values would they begin their dialog from? Within the eyes of Nazis, Jews weren’t individuals and their extermination was a basis of Nazi coverage. For Jews, then again, the Nazis have been the personification of absolute evil, incompatible with their very own existence. This was an either-or scenario, identical to in Ukraine, which Moscow is right now denying the precise to exist.
Wagner’s hammer is the modern key to understanding {that a} system constructed on the cult of dying, of limitless cruelty, and pure horror is a system doomed to destruction. It’s unimaginable to to come back to an settlement with it. It’s succesful not of compromises, however solely brief breaks earlier than the brand new terror. Putin ascended to his throne over the corpses of his political rivals; consequently, he turned his sword additionally (or, maybe, above all) in opposition to Wagner, who had already wounded him as soon as with their ‘march on Moscow’.
I first encountered Wagner (albeit not directly) again in 2017, in captivity, when a serious from the so-called LNR was thrown into my cell. He had been moved from Luhansk to the Donetsk Izolyatsia, the place they have been attempting to cover him as an necessary witness to the interior battle among the many occupiers in Luhansk. After just a few days of conversations, he revealed that, in 2015, he had fought alongside Wagner commander Dmitrii (Dima) Utkin on the identical part of the frontline. After I requested how he’d characterize Wagner, he gave a brief reply: ‘It’s greatest to be buddies with Dima.’ Because it later turned out, the follow of beheading enemies, burning their our bodies, slicing off their limbs and filming the entire thing began for PMC Wagner in Syria and Africa. Again then, this wasn’t supposed to develop into the corporate’s official doctrine and was nonetheless hidden from journalists who, actually piece by piece, gathered proof of Utkin’s and his males’s battle crimes.
After 24 February 2022, all the pieces basically modified. Horror and the Kremlin’s lack of response (lack of ability to react?) to it turned a robust promotional marketing campaign for Wagner. That very same mountain of tiny chopped-off limbs from Colonel Kurtz’s horror is now being embalmed and placed on show for all who want to see it within the notional museum of up to date Russia. An exhibition has been fabricated from them.
In the end, to make use of one other metaphor, our tram is headed for a wall with a single inscription: ‘Why not?’ That is one other query that arose exterior of Ukraine and has taken a transparent form for European intellectuals for a lot of centuries. Allow us to recall Dostoevsky and his ‘if there isn’t a God, all the pieces is permitted’ and, after him, Nietzsche together with his reassessment of values. Following the World Wars with their expertise of the focus camps and the mass extermination of individuals performed as effectively as potential, the query of’Why not?’ re-emerges in a brand new means in Europe, at the least on the pages of Sartre and Camus. In The Stranger, Camus’s protagonist asks us, ‘What did it matter that Raymond was as a lot my buddy as Celeste, who was price much more than him? What did it matter that Marie now supplied her lips to a brand new Meursault?’[1]
The query ‘Why not?’ has now been solid down from the heights of scholastic metaphysics to kisses in Algerian neighborhoods. After the extermination of individuals within the gasoline chambers and crematoria, the Western logos now not sees grounds for motion on this planet: what ought to an individual be guided by if the focus camps have been defeated not by arguments or values however by planes carrying bombs that turned cities like Dresden and Nagasaki into nothingness? The query is then, is that this a proposition that provides rise to horror, or its grounds, its basis, the horror’s direct end result?
A paradox: the Wagner group mixes the worst of the worst, individuals from Russia’s social backside. However typically it looks like one of many founders may need in actual fact learn these strains: ‘What did it matter that…’ and give you their very own reply – if it doesn’t matter, then all the pieces is permitted.
After all, all these ideas are a overseas language for European cities the place an ambulance racing by means of the town with its sirens on counts as an ‘occasion.’ This language is unimaginable to be taught – you’ll be able to solely bear in mind it once you’ve lived it. Identical to the Baltic states, Poland and Czechia bear in mind it. The identical means the Germans used to recollect it, particularly within the works of their twentieth-century intellectuals, who at the moment are more and more misplaced within the misleading calm of life in fashionable Russia..
About horror earlier than complete Nothingness, Heidegger wrote that individuals uncover themselves within the existence of dying, that’s, from the attitude that in the future ‘I’ll finish’. Sometimes, I think about myself useless and somebody quoting from one in all my ‘prophetic’ essays similar to this one throughout the funeral. This has develop into a each day follow in our nation: the dying of writers, poets and artists whose works are heard for the final time over their coffins. Dying has ceased to be a concept and are available off the pages into the anti-tank trenches and wailing of sirens.
However Kurtz himself meant together with his apocalypse one thing that’s removed from an abstraction: his ‘horror’ was nearer to the ‘horror’ of Céline, who gave rise to it by means of swollen corpses, bomb bursts, human excrement, deep melancholy in opposition to a background of loud laughter, and so forth. Journey to the Finish of the Night time confirmed the horrors of battle, however with a tinge of a carnival, the place opposites don’t stay aside however get combined collectively in a single cauldron.
Right here’s what issues: the additional the characters in Apocalypse Now go down the river into the jungle, the deeper they sink into themselves and the extra their psychological state modifications. I consider the director needed to indicate the logic of battle with this journey into the darkness of the jungle: the longer you’re in it, the extra deformed your consciousness turns into. Is there a means again for individuals who have seen horror? And this isn’t an summary query. It might be requested of somebody particular, or a whole nation that can be traumatized by a long-lasting horror amid its untouched, unhurt European neighbors. It’s doubtless that there was no means again for individuals like Colonel Kurtz: whoever merges with the horror of battle and produces it themself, should finally dissolve in it by dying.
Right here, once more, it’s price mentioning the French. The author Jean Cayrol, who survived the horror of the Nazis’ Mauthausen focus camp, put ahead the idea of ‘Lazarus literature,’ which is in regards to the expertise of surviving the focus camps. Cayrol in contrast individuals who survived their horrors to the New Testomony Lazarus whom Christ raised from the useless. However, for Cayrol, this ‘resurrection’ wasn’t constructive, for the reason that ‘resurrected’ can by no means totally return to regular life, which might entail a sure transcendence of their earlier horror. Individuals who have personally skilled horror (not simply heard about it from another person) can by no means once more be ‘themselves’ on this planet they’re returned to. Psychologically, they’re the identical as Camus’s ‘stranger’: a lonely, apathetic outsider on this planet of the ‘dwelling’. In Cayrol’s opinion, after his resurrection, even Lazarus ought to have felt some unhappiness and even sure repugnance for the earthly world after experiencing the actual transcendence of the afterlife.
After all, after World Struggle II, virtually all of Europe discovered itself on this state: for a very long time, yesterday’s focus camps, the Gestapo, and frozen or starved kids on the streets remained Europeans’ collective on a regular basis actuality, and this made all of them alike. However, right now, the scenario is totally different: for the second 12 months, Ukraine’s collective consciousness is exhuming mass graves and burying kids killed by Russian missiles, whereas simply past Ukraine’s borders the world of the transcendent reigns, wholly incomprehensible to Ukrainians.
However the Ukrainian expertise can be a ‘stranger’ to the Italian Riviera or pubs in Prague. After Ukraine’s victory within the battle, these experiences will collide. We now have nonetheless not been accepted into the European Union due to a collection of reforms and formalities that we should implement. However nobody is considering the truth that, after the battle, Ukrainians in Europe will really feel like Lazarus, strangers incapable of rejoicing on the miracle of getting by means of the horror.
That is nonetheless a good distance away. Not solely due to the occasions on the frontline, but additionally due to the disparity of collective trauma inside the nation itself. In some locations, its depth is the same as the horror of the trenches the place it’s essential to sleep on enemy corpses for heat. In different places, individuals hear about that on TV.
I’m standing in the course of a sunny plaza in Kyiv. Persons are step by step arising from their shelters: the quieting of the sirens brings them again to the warmth.
And a tram rattles by…
The ‘Struggle Is… Ukrainian Writers on Dwelling By Disaster’ essay challenge is created with the assist of Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a Canadian charitable non-profit group.
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