At chicken giblets

Here is the syllogism, which you have already met in one form or another somewhere: in a conversation with friends and relatives, in a video about policy on YouTube , in the signature for the topical picture, in the Facebook post, in the comments on it, in the publicist column, in the story on the state television channel, in the president’s speech. It looks approximately like this:

A crowd of protesters on the street portends a revolution.

The revolution, as history teaches us, ends poorly.

Therefore, a crowd of protesters does not portend anything good.

Some parts may change slightly, but one element in this syllogism is always in place, because without it the whole structure will fall apart. This is “as history teaches us”: a clear or hidden reference to the past, an alarming historical analogy.

After 2014, the whole vertical of great -power thought, from the imperious elite to the bot on Twitter, infected scabies from the analogies. Every time a new portion of revolutionary pictures (a crowd, inverted cars, broken windows) gets into the media, this itch begins again: “But in 1991 ...” , “I remember 1905, when ...”, “We all passed under Nicholas I/II ... ”

The rhetoric of the Russian television propaganda of recent years has been built entirely at this reception, scaring the audience Maidan, “orange revolutions” and the repetition of the 1990s . Loyalist journalism of a more thoughtful profile looks into the depths of history even further, drawing edifying parallels from October 1917 . The cinema for the state order carefully develops the Decembrist uprising (in the "Union of Salvation"). The most powerful conservative minds are able to cast in their eyes and turmoil, and even ancient Rus'. It seems that Putin and odious historians reach the foundation of the foundations - Prince Vladimir and the baptism of Rus'.

The analogy here works simultaneously as a visual illustration, and as a formidable prophecy. Anyone who does not teach history is doomed to repeat its mistakes - by ignorance or by evil will.

It is noteworthy that analogies are selected almost by accident and are not combined with each other - but it does not matter. The shots of the crowd are interpreted simultaneously through the revolutions of Ukrainian, anti -Soviet and Bolshevik. Navalny is compared with Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Lenin, Kerensky, Pep Gapon, Gavel and Mandelia. The scandalous temple of the Ministry of Defense , uniting in their mosaics the Virgin, Alexander Nevsky, Stalin and Putin with Shoigu, demonstrates a similar ideological reflex - the desire to force the connection of times. In the political culture of Late Putin Russia (if one can talk about one at all), everyone only does that they repeat the lessons of history to nausea.

All this, of course, clearly gives madness.

But such an obsession has quite rational reasons. The American historian Richard Slavkin, analyzing in his book “Deadly Environment” [1] the national myth of the frontier - about the rapid heroic development of Western spaces in the 19th century - traced how the history of Indian wars in the United States gradually turned into a myth, and the events were compressed to compact symbols, to the “cowboys” and “Indians”. The more distant this historical experience of America became, the more abstract the language in which it was transmitted was made. Settlers, railways, a cavalry detachment, heroically dying under the arrows of the Indians, - all of them turned into replicated symbols, in advance of the necessary meaning. For Svetkin, this process was not least connected with the media: repeated retelling of the same events in newspapers, political speeches, width novels ( and in the 20th century - and in cinema) turned them into cliches, legends whose “formal properties and structures became more and more conventional and abstract, until they are reduced to the recruitment of extreme expressive and powerful images ” [2] .

With each new context, a new layer of values ​​was added to America’s legends - because their presentation itself implied a metaphorical connection between the past and the present. Slavkin traces how these images began to be used to explain and justify the current political moment. Theodore Roosevelt mercilessly exploited his cowboy image and front -line symbols, going to the war in Spain and the Philippines. Eisenhower in the midst of the Cold War recalled a sheriff named Wild Bill Hikok and advised the public to “read more westerns” . In 1960, Kennedy spoke of the New Frontir , entering the presidency. And so on-to the next Presidents of Cowboys: Nixon and Bush.

“In the end, myths become part of the language that are deeply sewn into it with metaphors containing all the necessary“ lessons ”that we have extracted from history, and all the main elements of our worldview.”

And in how easy it is to us in Russia of the 21st century, historical revolutionary metaphors jump into the hand, the similar work of ideology is visible.

The language of the myth is extremely convenient precisely by its clarity. According to Sfrotkin, “the myth does not argue his ideology, he clearly illustrates it” [3] . The analogies are extra -historical, they immediately refer us to the principles towering over the privileges. As soon as you rely on the metaphorical interpretation of history, the need for additional arguments disappears: the West repairs us with intrigues, because it has always been like that; Revolutions end poorly, because this is the law of history . The historiosophical speculation impersonates the self -evident law, and each new frame of the crowd in the square only illustratively reinforces this rule.

In this “we have already passed” and lies, according to Sftykin, the danger of the myth:

“The language of the myth works for training the minds that are accustomed to accept some metaphorical interpretations of history for true or reasonable. But the myth treats historical experience paradoxically: although history is material for the myth, the myth organizes this material anti -historically. And when historical memory is transmitted through mythological metaphors, it is falsified in the most fundamental way. The point is not that legends replace or distort the facts - some of them can be quite accurate in important details. What is lost in the transition of history to a myth is the foundation of the story itself is the difference between the past and the present. The past turns into a metaphorical equivalent of the present; And the present seems only to reproduce acquaintances, obsessive patterns <...> . Both the past and the present are reduced to illustrations to a single “law” or the natural principle - supposedly beless, always true, overcoming any historical accidents. As Bart said, “the creature of the myth is determined by the loss of things of their historical properties.” As a result, the myth hides the most important thing: the role of man and his thoughts in the creation of values ​​and ideas, in the formation of material conditions ” [4] .

It is time to finally admit: contrary to the philistine intuition, there is no "we have already passed." The sad (or, indeed, encouraging) fact is that history is not repeated, it does not have the same. The present never repeats the past - neither as a tragedy, nor as a farce. The story teaches, of course - but not by the fact that it offers to mechanically harden its paragraphs and, on occasion, repeat it by heart; She was not crammed.

The reason why thinking “from analogy” became so popular in the second half of the tenth in Russia, twofold. Official national ideology (like any national ideology) falsifies the past, saving it from disputes and unpleasant subtleties to put it in his service. And anyone who uses the past as an illustration actually calls us to his war.

And for the philistine consciousness, the analogy has become a type of magical thinking - soothing, compensatory inherently. At the sight of a complex and contradictory real consciousness, a historical precedent is looking for a historical precedent not to explain today, but to escape from him, frightening and incomprehensible, into the area of ​​invulnerable “eternal” principles.

And yes: along the way, this household fatalism relieves its carrier from the most important thing (perhaps this is its main task)-from the unbearable thought that there is a choice, that human thoughts and actions are important, that something depends on them. And he leads him, of course, to the well-known conclusions: “There is no need to change anything”, “everything somehow by itself” and, in the end, “the authorities know better.”

When they give me an analogy like “But in 1917 ...” , for some reason I imagine people guessing at the chicken giblets.

[1] R. Slotkin. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization , 1800–1890 . - Norman: University of Oklahoma Press , 1998.

[2] Ibid., P. 16.

[3] Ibid., P. 18.

[4] Ibid., P. 24.