Postmodern for SK

Doxa's debate - do you need to close a magazine or police?

Expressing the support of DOXA magazine pursued for political reasons, the philosopher called Alexander Bastrykin to the debate. Facebook jokes that it would be good for them to discuss “objective truth”-I remind you that several years ago, the UK developed a bill obliging the court to look for this very “truth”, and not to evaluate the arguments of the parties, because the “adversarial model in the law burdenses to the alien traditional Russian criminal process of the Anglo-American doctrine” ( interview with A.I. Bastrykina "Rossiya Gazeta", 03/16/2012).

Freudomarxist Zizhek, I think there is something to say about the truth; But I would take the courage to offer them another topic - more radical. Let us take as an occasion the book “The End of Policing” by the sociologist Alex Vitale - just her first chapter Doxa was translated and laid out on their website.

The book was published in 2017, but last summer BLM became almost cult. Professor Vitale believes that the US police is a “repressive tool that supports social, economic inequality and racism”.

The cruelty of the police is not “excesses” and not “abuse”, but an integral institutional feature. It is impossible to reform the police,

It remains only to completely disband it and come up with some new forms for replacement. Part of its functions can be transferred to citizens, and huge budgets, supposedly spent on “maintenance of law and order”, transfer to the correction of the criminal environment - education, medicine, etc.

The American supporters of complete abolition (Police Abolition) or, in light versions, large-scale budget contractions (Defund Police), of course, is easy to speak. They are actively criticized - for the matter, because, bringing a lot of data to their support, they completely ignore the numerous evidence of the opposite (in addition, it is unclear who will fight intentional violent crimes in their logic?) - but they listen to them. In a country with a normal political process, every new police crime adds public support to them, and the system responds with reforms (attempts to reform?): Here Obama introduced the cells, here Trump (after the murder of George Floyd) prohibited suffocating techniques.

But the police racism and the critical theory of the American left -wing are far from us; Russian liberals have their own old, very similar dispute. It is called: "FSB - you cannot close it." It is clear that the institutional heritage of the KGB has not gone anywhere, and to no matter who the monument is cast, as a result, Iron Felix will come out anyway.

Our special services - together with the police, the investigation, the courts - being on paper "outside the politics", in fact, on the first order, and sometimes even without it they hurry to save the poor regime from the army of terrible enemies:

From the bloodsuckers of human rights to an ominous, already announced outside of completely all the laws of the FBK (the law requires reporting that the organization is recognized as a “foreign agent.” - Ed. ) .

When (if) a thaw suddenly comes and “democracy and publicity” will return to us, what to do with these structures? Created and always functioning within the framework of autocracies, they may simply have forgotten how to fulfill their immediate duties - and, exactly by the definition of Professor Vital, became a “repressive tool that supports social, economic and political inequality”.

The very work of DOXA is another and, unfortunately, far from the last example of how obviously innocent people are simply judged by the intersection of the “double” in the minds of the authorities and for the sake of intimidating the rest of too brave and free.

All the last months, but years - from beating at rallies to mass searches, inquiry, arrests, real terms for reposts and songs of the Rammstein group, anime locks, absurd sentences, concealment of torture, hell of the FSIN, denial of the existence of performances and the issuance of Ausweights, and finally, the recent core in the form of recognition of the struggle with the struggle with corruption "extremism" is a continuous stream of examples of monstrous dysfunction of the entire Russian law enforcement system.

It would be great if Zizhek talked with Bastrykin about this. When in the American city of Ferguson in 2014 the police entered into a confrontation with the local African American community, the Slovenian intellectual compared the “work” of the police in the slums and the ghetto with the actions of the occupation forces . Interesting, looking at the actions of our police during the last rallies in support of Navalny and, for example, elections to the Moscow City Duma in the summer of 2019, would he express the same analogy in the face of the chairman of the UK?

It would be enough for him to be impudent, albeit Columnist of Russia Today, but an intellectually honest person, formulate the question that bothers us all, but which we are threatened with criminal prosecution are afraid to ask: “Perhaps if our common goal is the world and prosperity of Russia, then for the sake of its good you need to close not DOXA, but the“ law enforcement ”organs of the Russian Federation?”