Bogomolov’s Manifesto, “The Rape of Europe 2.0”
Ricochet Solaire, Aloise Corbaz
While the views expressed by Russian theater director Konstantin Bogomolov do not necessarily reflect or coincide with those of the Simone Weil Center or those affiliated with it, we present his controversial manifesto to our readers in that spirit of philosophical freedom which, we believe, is a pre-requisite for thinking as such to exist . Our reflections regarding the meaning, the strengths and weaknesses of Bogomolov’s The Rape of Europe 2.0 can be found here. — the Editors
Konstantin Bogomolov: ‘The Rape of Europe 2.0’
Man is a beautiful but also a dangerous creature. Like atomic energy, he possesses both a creative and a destructive power.
Controlling this energy, limiting its destructive while also encouraging its creative forces – all this is a lofty task. It is the task of building a complex civilization based on the complexity of man. Right up until modern times, it is how the Western world developed. Through religion, philosophy, art and education, it restrained the dark sides of man even as it allowed the darkness to escape, like steam from an overheated boiler, through these same valves.
In the twentieth century, the atomic energy which simply is the human phenomenon got out of control. Nazism became a human Chernobyl. For Europe, the shock and fear that this explosion of the primitive in man evoked proved too great. After freeing itself from Nazism, the West decided to insure itself against such “nuclear accidents” by eliminating the complex person.
Ending scene from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
It decided to insure itself against that complex person whom the long years of Christianity had formed in Europe. That same person whom Dostoevsky had described, the one containing high and low, angel and devil, love and hate, belief and doubt, the thoughtful and the fanatical. Europe was frightened of the beast in man, not realizing that the beast is just as much a natural and organic part of man as is the angelic. Lacking the intellectual and spiritual resources to overcome the consequences of Nazism in a different way, Europe decided to simply castrate the complex human person, to castrate his dark nature and wall off forever man’s inner demons.
Back in the day, Stanley Kubrick shot the film “A Clockwork Orange.” It depicted brutalized young men who, under the influence of drugs, terrorize London by brutally beating and raping its peaceful inhabitants. When the leader of the gang is caught, he is offered, in exchange for early release, the option of undergoing experimental therapy. After fixing his eyelids so that they cannot close, for hours on end he is shown scenes of violence set to the music of his beloved Beethoven. As a result, the young criminal does get rid of his aggression, but that is not all that happens. Now music nauseates him. He cannot stand the sight of a naked woman, and sex disgusts him. If given a blow, he licks the boot of the person who kicks him.
The modern West is just such a criminal who has undergone chemical castration and lobotomy. This is what explains the false smile of goodwill and universal openness frozen on Western faces. It is not the smile of Culture. It is the smile of degeneration.
The New Ethical Reich
The West declares itself a society “oriented” toward the realization of personal freedoms. In fact, today the West is waging an ongoing struggle against the human person -- that complex and difficult to control energy. In the course of this struggle, the functions of the courts and prosecutors and the isolation cell have not been eliminated, and yet they have been largely delegated from the state to society. The state itself, in the form of its police and security services, has indeed been “humanized.” Meanwhile, the nominally progressive part of society takes on the role of the new storm troopers, and with their help, that selfsame state becomes surpassingly effective at combatting dissent.
The contemporary Western world is being reformatted into a New Ethical Reich, one with its own ideology: ‘the new ethics.’ National Socialism is a thing of the past. What we have now is a new, ethical socialism. Queer socialism. Siemens, Boss and Volkswagen have become Google, Apple and Facebook, and the Nazis have given way to an equally aggressive mix of queer activists, fem-fanatics, and eco-psychopaths who have an equally aggressive thirst for the total reformatting of society.
Traditional totalitarian regimes suppressed freedom of thought. The new, non-traditional totalitarianism has gone further. It wants to control emotions. The New Ethical Reich’s aim -- its revolutionary concept -- is to constrain our freedom to have emotions.
Feelings and thoughts had always belonged to the private sphere. Keep your hands to yourself; but as for your heart and your brain – these were left free. Such was the unspoken social contract of European civilization. It understood that man is a receptacle full of emotions and ideas; it understood that hatred -- the flip side of love – may be a difficult and dangerous thing, but for all that is something necessary and an important part of the human personality.
In Nazi society, people were trained like dogs on a leash to hate what was alien.
In the New Ethical Reich, a person is trained to love and deprived of the right to freely hate.
No longer can you say: “I do not love ...,” “I do not like ...,” “I am afraid of ...” You must get your emotions in line with public opinion and social values.
Social values have become the new Wailing Wall to which every unhappy, offended or simply dishonest individual not only can bring a note, but also demand from the new God -- Progressive Society -- that a particular hurt, personal drama, fear, or illness be added to the list held by the new ethical UNESCO, with its social significance recognized; a special budget line created; a quota set aside in every sphere of public life. And anyone who says that that emotional hurt isn’t worth a brass farthing, or that the disease is curable, or that your personal drama is something best worked out in private, will become a victim of a powerful repressive machine – the machine of public opinion.
All against One
Social media has become the ideal tool for this new repressive machine. Its unpaid employees are all the ‘respectable’ and active citizens who are in the social network. They do not wear uniforms, they have no clubs or tasers, but they have gadgets and a philistine lust for power and a secret passion for violence and they have the herd instinct. They have no legal authority, but they assign to themselves moral rightness. In the light of the recent events in the United States, it is obvious that they are not only a self-organizing networked crowd: they are also supported by the authorities, by the new Ministry of Truth represented by the owners of the Internet giants.
The internet has given these new thugs anonymity and distance, and, as a result, impunity. We have a virtual mob, virtual lynchings, virtual bullying, and virtual violence --and the very real mental and social isolation of those who step out of line. These internet informers and prison guards adeptly play on our eternal fear of being left completely alone to face the mob.
In the Nazi state, an artist could lose his job and his life as a result of his ‘degenerate’ art. In the brave new Western society of the future, the artist may lose his job because he supports the wrong system of values. However, it is no longer only a question of an artist or similar figure of influence. The situation is evolving rapidly. Now a junior researcher at some backwoods American institute, or just a peaceful and academically successful college student, can be expelled from their institution for having the “wrong” opinion about current political or social life. And since it is society, and not the state, that implements these repressive measures, they are interpreted as acts of public solidarity, sanctified by the righteous anger of “free” and “progressive” people who demand that those who disagree get down on their knees, and they stand ready to magnanimously grant the right to work and create to those who do. In this new Orwellian state, self-castration has become the only way to survive.
The Sexual Counter-Revolution
The new Reich has declared a war on death. For that same reason, it has declared war on human nature: decline and death are part of the incomprehensible divine plan. The pursuit of eternal youth has become the idée fixe of the new Western society. The reason for this is obvious enough: death is unpredictable and from God. But the queer socialists -- like the national socialists, like the communists -- do not recognize any power over themselves other than the power of their Idea. Idea and Ratio are their God. Or else they themselves are Gods and consider man not as mystery, but as object in an experiment, as dead meat. The war against death is a war against the mystery of being. It is a senseless and stupid war against eternity.
But wherever there is a war against death as something divinely ordained, as the mystically given outcome, there too a war against life is inevitable. For life is just as unpredictable as death. Just as incomprehensible. Which means that it is uncontrollable and dangerous.
Europe quickly progressed from the sexual revolution, which became the new European post-Nazi renaissance, to an all-out struggle with the energy of sex – in other words, with the most vital, emotional and uncontrollable aspect of human existence.
Because sex is freedom. Sex is danger. Sex is the animal in man. But, most importantly, sex is the birth of Life.
Christianity sanctified the sexual act. Conferred upon it beauty and divinity. Erotica was an object of art. Desire -- a manifestation of inspiration. Sex -- the sacred enjoyment of Love. Birth -- a miracle.
The new Reich considers sex to be a process of production and the genitals an instrument. Further, in accordance with the precepts of the socialists of the past, and within the framework of the new queer socialism, it socializes the instruments of production and redistributes them. The process of production itself is optimized and put under state and societal control, making of gender something irrelevant.
The burned-out cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris is not the sign of the fall of Christian Europe under the pressure of Islam. No, it is a strange and mystical sign of the New Reich’s war against the sacred mystery of life and death, a mystery revealed in the Cross.
Borders and the New Theory of Race
The transboundary nature of society, globalization, contributes to the creation of a new totalitarian empire. In the old days, a dissident had the opportunity to leave one society and find a place in a new one. Borders helped protect the freedom of the individual. The diversity of ethical and value systems created an opportunity for any given person to find their own – or at any rate the most accepting, or simply the least interfering -- environment within which to realize one’s capacities.
The new ethical empire yearns for the expansion and unification of societies. Thus, a new global village is created, one where the dissenting individual has nowhere to hide from the guardians of ethical purity.
Ethical purity has replaced racial purity. Today in the West what gets put under the microscope is not the shape of someone’s nose, their nationality; no, it is the ethical past of every successful individual. Can we find there, within the dark recesses of multiple decades, at least some case, however small, of harassment, or abuse, or simply a statement that does not correspond to the new system of values? If there is: fall on your knees and repent!
The Europe They Lost
The Bolshevik Revolution isolated Russia from the West for almost a century. After freeing itself from Bolshevism, Russia during the 1990s rushed to join Europe. Russia sought acceptance; it tried to learn; it dreamed of regaining the status of a European country. To regain European values. The values of the wonderful pre-war Europe. The Europe which was unafraid of the complexly varied person. Which respected that person’s freedom to love and to hate. The Europe which understood that nature created man precisely as a complex, contradictory and dramatic creature, and did not consider itself entitled to interfere with the divine plan. The Europe, finally, for which the main value of a person was his or her individuality, expressed not in how a person has sex, but in how one thinks and creates. And creativity itself consisted in the creation of pictures, music, texts, and not in reshaping your own body and coming up with new gender definitions.
Throughout the 90s Russia was searching for such a Europe. She herself dreamed of becoming such a Europe.
Is it necessary today to keep trying to find allies where they do not exist?
Europe has become an abandoned and plundered Cherry Orchard. Firs, the old servant, hides from the crowds of migrants. Lyuba Ranevskaya types are despoiling what remains of their health snorting cocaine. Petya Trofimov writes laws for the EU. Anya now identifies as queer, and the senile Gayevs, living out their days, just like old man Biden, mumble their usual words about goodness and justice.
Modern Russia is -- no argument here -- very far from the Europe it was striving for. But, just as clearly, it has no desire to join the new European panopticon.
Our progressives and Westernizers insist that Russia was and remains a country of prison guards and slaves. This is largely true. It is also true that our long years of living under conditions of unfreedom; and the prison camp fears which entered into our very genetic code, the snitching, the silence and the violence as means of survival, of protecting people from the authorities, and the authorities from the people … all this requires not revolutions, but patience and therapy. The drama of Lancelot is that he didn't truly love either Elsa or those he was trying to save.[1]
I detest the spirit of violence and atmosphere of fear. But this does not mean that I will accept the transformation of a country of guards and slaves into a country where people inform on one another not out of fear, but from the heart; who torment others not because they are primitive, but because they are enlightened; where multi-colored (including white) Shvonders[2] from BLM enter houses and demand that professors kneel down and share their living space and donate money to help the starving Floyds.
Russia went through all this in 1917. The feminine gender-specific job titles and other abuses of language; and the attempt to be freed from one’s gender or cultural identity; and the obligatory meetings with discussions about moral character; and the organized campaigns for justice in the name of the working masses; and even the children betraying their parents – something that happened recently in the United States, when a girl Democrat reported her parents to the police after finding out that they had participated in the protests and the assault on the Capitol building.[3] We’ve gone through it all. And how amazing it is to see the Western world, exactly as if it were a new Vera Pavlovna dreaming for the first time her sweet dreams,[4] and how strange to observe the burning eyes and naive speeches of the new Russian progressives, whose moral terrorism against those who dissent cedes nothing to riot police cracking heads in the streets.
All the same, there are many who disagree -- and by no means are they all ‘backwards’ types and fundamentalists. They are modern, cheerful, free people who are educated and successful. They are open to new things and love life in all its variety. They are Russians, Europeans, Americans … all secretly dreaming that these strange and dark times will pass. But they are afraid to speak out. In Russia, they are afraid to become the targets of internet badgering. In the West, they are afraid of being subjected to moral terror and of losing their jobs or funding.
They need support like they need air to breathe. Their feelings and thoughts need to be formalized into words, and the words supported by determination and organization. It is time to clearly and distinctly formulate a new ideology on the right, an ideology set apart from the rigid orthodoxies of the radicals, but that firmly and irreconcilably defends the values of a complex world with the complex person as its foundation.
Russian progressive intellectuals tell us: Russia is at the tail end of progress.
Not true.
As fate would have it, we find ourselves at the tail end of a crazed train heading into a Hieronymus Bosch-style hell where we will be greeted by multicultural, gender-neutral devils. All we have to do is unhitch the wagon, make the sign of the cross, and start building a new world. To build anew our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of, the Europe we have lost. The Europe of the sane.
Konstantin Bogomolov’s manifesto, The Rape of Europe 2.0 was first published on Feb. 10, 2021 in Novaya Gazeta under the title Pokhishchenie evropy 2.0. https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/02/10/89120-pohischenie-evropy-2-0/ Another possible, and, indeed, more literal translation of the Russian title, Pokhishchenie evropy 2.0, would be The Abduction of Europe 2.0. On the other hand, pokhishchenie is the word used in Russian to translate Titian’s painting, The Rape of Europe, and the same is true for the Greek myth on which it is based. A case can be made for either translation.
Translator’s Notes
[1] This is a reference to the Soviet era movie “To Kill a Dragon” (1988), based on the Evgennii Shvarts play, The Dragon, written in 1942-1944. It presents an allegory about a descendent of Lancelot who is called upon to free a reluctant nation from a dragon man who represents state violence. The love interest in the film is the maiden Elsa. See https://is.gd/eVm0vz
[2]Shvonders, a character in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. As the Bolshevik chief of the building committee, Shvonders is an antagonist of the professor who, in Soviet Russia of the 1920s, maintains a large, seven-room house.
[3] Bogomolov does not spell out his exact reference. Novaya Gazeta added a footnote of its own to this passage, in which they write that it is possible that he is referring here to the incident involving a Massachusetts’ 18-year-old and her parents who participated in the riot (see https://abc7chicago.com/politics/massachusetts-teen-turns-in-her-own-family-as-capitol-rioters/9621723/ ) , but they take issue with Bogomolov’s interpretation of that incident. The editors at Novaya Gazeta also make reference to the case of a Texas father who was in Washington, D.C. during the Jan. 6 riot at the capitol and allegedly threatened his adult son and teen-age daughter, warning them not to report him to the police, “because traitors get shot.”
[4] There are two famous Vera Pavlovna characters in Russian literature, one is in Victor Pelevin’s The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna (1991), and the (textually interrelated) Vera Pavlovna who is a heroine of the novel What is to be Done, the late-19th century Chernyshevsky novel which became a classic part of the Soviet school curriculum. The first, from Cherynshevsky, fantasizes about a future utopian socialist community where there are no barriers to love. In the Pelevin novel, Vera Pavlovna is a worker in a public toilet during the Perestroika era; her solipsistic dreams end by her being swept away in a flood of wastewater. In her afterlife, she is condemned to carrying on into eternity as a character in the Chernyshevsky novel.