Hostility and grief

How, after the tragedy in the United States, they are trying to push a rejection of sympathy and humanism into Russian foreign policy

The tragedy in the United States, where dozens of people died and hundreds were injured, is no reason to reiterate Russia's unique place in the world.

Soviet Cold War ideology distinguished between the hostile forces of capital and its agents, the imperialist states, on the one hand, and the peoples living in the respective countries, on the other. It was possible to blame the American military, but one should speak about ordinary American people with unfailing sympathy - they, they say, suffer from unemployment there and envy Soviet citizens. This peculiar humanistic pathos even became the subject of jokes about the "collective farmers of Kansas and Oklahoma".

And the current tragedy in the United States, during which dozens of people died and hundreds were injured, from this point of view, there is just one more reason to recall this state of affairs, to declare our unique place in the world.

Senator Alexei Pushkov writes in his Twitter about the tragedy in Las Vegas: “I don’t think that a country where mass executions regularly occur in schools, then in shops, or on the streets of cities can teach us anything.”

In this mindset, any grief of American citizens should immediately be used as evidence of our age-old Russian rightness. Pushkov invites us to get used to the idea that for the sake of the greatness of the motherland, in the end, no one is sorry, neither strangers nor their own.

Here we have to recall the common truths: no matter what people on the screens broadcast about “geopolitics” and no matter what relations our countries have, this cannot be a reason for gloating. The death of people is always an occasion for solidarity and, when necessary, help. Within the framework of human relations, the grief of your enemy makes you forget about the enmity, at least for a while. Why does anyone want to push other rules into Russian international politics?

Interestingly, unlike the grassroots ideologists, this was not forgotten in the Kremlin. President Putin immediately after the news from the United States expressed his condolences to the relatives of the victims and Donald Trump. Probably, Trump would have done the same in Putin's place. Standard diplomatic protocol becomes a "common human value" and a source of sanity.