Hobbes's sixth law

Andrey Zubov: Why I support Nikolai Desyatnichenko's speech in the Bundestag

Nikolai Desyatnichenko, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy from Novy Urengoy, delivered a short speech in the Bundestag on the memory of the victims of World War II. It is remarkable in itself that I represent a German youth from, say, Schleswig, speaking in the State Duma. But the words spoken by Nicholas were even more remarkable.

Having studied the life of a German soldier, almost the same age as Georg Johan Rau, who died at the age of twenty “from harsh conditions of captivity” in a Soviet concentration camp near Beketovka on March 17, 1943, Nikolai said: “Georg’s story and work on the project touched me and pushed me to visiting a burial place ( of German prisoners of war - A.Z. ) near the city of Kopeysk. This made me extremely sad, because I saw the graves of innocent people, among whom many wanted to live peacefully and did not want to fight. They experienced incredible difficulties during the war, which my great-grandfather told me about, a participant in the war, who was the commander of a rifle company. Nicholas concluded his speech with the well-known words of Prince Otto von Bismarck about the moral inadmissibility of war. And he summarized with a simple, even banal phrase: "I sincerely hope that common sense will prevail throughout the Earth, and the world will never see wars again."

But quite a few people literally went berserk at the words of the Urengoy schoolboy in the Bundestag. And they immediately began to write denunciations to the FSB, demand the dissolution of the school where Nikolai studies, curse Urengoy, accuse Nikolai of "Yeltsin's defeatism", stupidity, dementia, betrayal of Russia. In this sense, Nikolai's speech can be understood as an involuntary medical provocation that once again revealed the serious mental illness of a significant part of Russian people. The diagnosis of this disease is pathological aggressiveness motivated by hatred of a person as such.

It is impossible to live happily with such a diagnosis, and the question is whether it is possible to live at all. It is no coincidence that so many Russians seek bullets in the Donbass, Syria, and God knows where else.

Our society has been grievously ill with hatred for a hundred years now, since the very Bolshevik coup, and perhaps to some extent even earlier, since the era of enslavement and slavery. The treatment of this disease in ourselves and in society is our common duty. Parasitizing on this disease is a low, vile crime.

It is characteristic that in the late Soviet period, after the condemnation of Stalin's "excesses", the emphasis both in school and in propaganda was placed on peacekeeping, although in practice everything was different. Posters hung everywhere: “The world will win the war”, “The USSR is the bulwark of peace”. Brezhnev, as his adviser Chernyaev recalled, was really proud of the fact that he was a “dove”.

Propaganda of violence and war was condemned. The slogans “we can repeat!”, “we will reach Berlin!” were unthinkable. For this, they would immediately be expelled from school.

Afghan, Angola was hidden. And now it's all over the place. Bolshevik Satanism revealed itself in its natural form of vicious all-devouring hatred, glorifying war and homicide. Putin's propaganda sowed the wind of lies and malice, and now a storm has fallen upon us.

In fact, this particular case, I will say that Nikolai performed perfectly. A soldier is precisely an innocent victim of a war not unleashed by him. If a soldier, like the hero of Remarque in the novel A Time to Live and a Time to Die, hated war, fought under duress, pitied the enemy, he is an innocent victim. Thanks to the school, thanks to his parents, thanks to the exchange with Germany, the young man Nikolai turned out to be free from hatred. He is a healthy person. And sick adult madmen want to make him what they are.

As a historian, I am ready to defend any word Nicholas said in this speech in the Bundestag, and be responsible for it.

And in conclusion, I will cite the sixth of the 19 laws of Thomas Hobbes, on which the philosopher considered it possible to create a peaceful human community. This was written in the late 1640s, just when the head of King Charles rolled off the block in England, and Europe was completely depopulated after 130 years of religious wars:

“The sixth law - it is easy to forgive insults ... With a guarantee regarding the future, a person must forgive past insults to those who, showing repentance, wish it. For forgiveness is the bestowal of peace... Not to bestow forgiveness on those who give guarantees for the future is an aversion to the world and therefore contrary to natural law.

We so lack this inclination of the heart to forgiveness.