The senselessness of war in an absurd world. Patriotism and cosmopolitanism are incompatible
The absurdity of being is inevitably manifested, if not interested in its meanings, deliberately ignoring patterns, not hearing other opinions, showing indifference to the most significant interests of society. If you do not take into account the aspirations and values of neighbors (at home, city, country, planet, on the era), sometimes their own, but for some reason rejected. But the main thing is if you do not take into account the strategic goals and key interests of your country. It is probably easier to convince oneself of one’s exclusivity and the aimlessness of the world. But this is the path to loneliness and insanity, because in an absurd world, consciousness loses benchmarks.
Taking this into account, let us ask ourselves how, from the point of view of scientific knowledge, the solution of the country's strategic tasks, the formation of patriotism and the increase of the military security level of Russia can be useful - this is the position advocated by Yuri Kirshin in the article “A war without references to quotes. Armed confrontation on the background of inter-civilization problems ”(“ NVO ”No. 46, 13.12.13)?
REMEMBER ABOUT
Military security as one of the most important conditions for ensuring a stable progressive development of society has a number of features. One of the features of military security is that it cannot be provided selectively, locally, for example, for a separate social group, an elected social institution or a separate region of the country. Military security can be ensured for the social system as a whole, and, therefore, problems and tasks of military security can be solved only with the active effective meaningful support of the whole society.
This leads to the direct task and duty of specialists in the field of military security - not to distract society from the problems of the country, but to focus the attention of compatriots on them. Not to confuse public consciousness with far-fetched values like cosmopolitanism, which is difficult to imagine in the practical military plane, but to recall the rich military experience of the people of Russia and how this experience was used more than once to liberate other nations of the world, as the Russian people sacrificed their best sons and daughters in the name of a just world on the planet. It is important not to frighten people with the hopelessness and complexity of the situation and not to calm them down with loud bravura slogans, but to point directly to the existing ways of strengthening military security and the possible participation of society in this process.
For this, both the understanding of the essence of the war and the development of a clear and clear ideological position on military security issues are important. Probably, these were the tasks that Yuri Yakovlevich Kirshin had to set himself when he was about to speak to the Russian audience. However, the author’s goals are known only to him, but the impression from his article is at least ambiguous.
The desire of the publicist to avoid quotes does not cause questions. But it is worth noting that the quotes may not be superfluous. Quotation in the narrow sense - a reference to recognized authority, in a broad sense - the realization of the experience of other people. And he is especially necessary in the study of social phenomena and processes.
Other than their own opinion is important in many ways. One of the principles of the modern stage of development of science - the principle of complementarity - reflects the need for different opinions about the subject of research; this contributes to the scientific objectivity, which, as it may seem, is missing in the article “War without references to quotations”. However, it is not necessary to find fault with individual words, and sometimes with judgments. The point, of course, is not the quotations, but the results; the general mood of this publication and many of its theses are hardly added to the authority of the Russian military science, helping to shape Russian identity and patriotism.
ABOUT WAR WITHOUT QUOTATION ... AND ARGUMENTS
The author, who has a formally high position in military science and many years of experience in serious scientific institutions, continues, judging by the headline, to persistently reflect on the essence of war; but at the same time he does not forget to emphasize his commitment to cosmopolitanism. The final conclusion of his article (though not too connected with the main text) was the definition of war, which Yuri Kirshin interprets as “historical universal phenomenon, the way of life of mankind, organized armed struggle of peoples, states, religious denominations using traditional and new types weapons, as well as non-military forms of struggle to achieve political, social, demographic, economic, cultural, ethnic and religious goals. "
This definition has, unfortunately, of little practical value and looks inconsistent from a scientific point of view. If war is the struggle of various actors of the world community "to achieve" their goals with the use of weapons and "non-military forms", then it turns out that war is a synonym for the daily life of influential world actors, for which competition is common, searching for various ways to realize their interests. But such a definition, if you do not focus on the use of weapons, can come to the designation of social activity and relations of almost any subjects of public relations. If we insist that the struggle between the subjects is primarily armed (the concept of "armed" in conjunction with "non-military forms" in this context loses certainty), then modern "religious denominations" do not fit into a number of obligatory participants in such relations.
By the way, the role of religion given by the author in civilizational processes, in the formation of civilizations, also seems exaggerated. In western civilization, several denominations, including non-Christian ones, coexist fairly peacefully.
It is worth noting that absolutization and radicalism are characteristic of the text in question. But the biggest disagreement is caused by the author’s attempt to convince himself and his readers that war is a human way of life, inevitability, norm.
Perhaps it’s all a matter of inaccurate interpretation of the meaning of concepts and categories? Is it legitimate to consider any active confrontation using diplomatic, economic, informational, legal and other means arising between states (countries, powers) to be a war, identifying, for example, critical materials in the media with a missile-bombing attack on an opponent’s territory? Is human life is war? In any case, cosmopolitanism does not really fit in with the war as an attributive, main form of the existence of civilization.
Such a definition does not reflect the qualitative certainty of social life, disorientates the public, erodes the categories of military-scientific knowledge, and cannot be used in the training of military personnel. However, while the category “war” is endowed with conflicting content, the text practically does not speak of inter-civilization problems announced by the subtitle. True, the author claims that the history of mankind is “the history of local civilizations”, but this is an exaggeration. The desire to “localize” history is contradicted, for example, by the wars of Persia and Ancient Greece, the campaigns of Alexander the Great to India and Central Asia, trade along the route “from the Varangians to the Greeks”, and the Russian merchants traveling “beyond the three seas”. Local civilizations, like people, certainly have features, but this does not mean that there is nothing in common between them, that they are strictly autonomous. Otherwise, for modern society (global? Or representing an aggregate of local civilizations little connected to each other?) It was completely unimportant, and the heritage of cultural options that had gone into oblivion was not clear.
Nevertheless, the division of the macrosocium into separate civilizations is not conditional; the degree of this convention seems to increase with the globalization of social relations. The civilizational approach as the only concept of understanding social development coarsens the evolutionary historical process.
On the other hand, the civilizational approach plays its important role in understanding social existence when using its ideas along with ideas of other concepts describing social being and its development, including together with the formational approach. But the formational approach and Marxism as a whole by Yuri Kirshin, who in the past has defended its foundations, today has a special view.
“Dry” MARXISM
The author concentrated his main efforts in the article, perhaps, not so much on clarifying the meanings of war, but on criticizing Marxism. The goal of this activity remains unclear: it does not bring practical use to clarify the essence of war, does not add anything new in understanding civilizational processes, and the criticism of Marxism itself is weak because of the weakness of the arguments.
Thus, it is hardly worth arguing that all representatives of the Marxist point of view, without exception, considered various processes and social phenomena exclusively from the contradictions of the class struggle, rejected the multivariate social development, limited to the formational approach. Even at the stage of the formation of the main ideas of Marxism, in the nineteenth century, its founders understood that the formation approach does not explain all the variants of social evolution (it is worth recalling the Asian mode of production).
The Marxist approach to the views on nature and the human world appeared more than a century and a half ago and during this time experienced many social, including scientific, educational, practical transformations, received a number of interpretations of various aspects of it. This teaching was, and to a large extent remains, popular, and therefore it is quite diverse. Variants and interpretations of Marxism are presented by Plekhanov and Bogdanov, Lifshits and Ilyenkov, Gramsci and Lukács, Bloch and Baudrillard. Marxism does not fit in any one simple scheme.
By the way, judging from past works, the author himself sought to look like a staunch Marxist (see YY Kirshin, VM Popov, RA Savushkin. The political content of modern wars / Editor. PA Zhilin. - M .: Science, 1987). In this work, the main views on the war do not go beyond the Marxist approach.
And it is unlikely that Marxism “used the formation approach to know social processes, problems of war and peace, wars and revolutions,” as Yuri Kirshin put it. The doctrine resulting from an interested desire to reveal the laws of society, the study of social relations, does not know anything, it is itself a product of knowledge. Representatives of Marxism, like any researcher or a subject who manifests social activity, can use in their practice various techniques and tools, including those developed in the process of the emergence and development of Marxism.
Marxism in these manifestations is not unique, and it appears in various publications, probably because of its relatively widespread, practical orientation and relatively high (among other similar teachings) effectiveness.
It is difficult to find arguments to confirm the opinion of Yuri Kirshin on the absolutization of Marxism by the war; in the December text in the NVO, they are practically absent. But the absolutization of war (as a way of life, a universal phenomenon, as the author himself confused for his own purposes sees it), is indeed irrelevant either scientifically or politically or ethically.
By the way, representatives of Marxism, in the opinion of the author of the article “A war without reference to quotations” and unlike his own position (if war is a way of life of humanity, then, according to Kirshin, is it eternal?), Still hope for the possibility of extinction wars of public relations in the future. The author uses the colorful verb “to narrow” in the evaluation of the ideas of socialism: “the socialist Fatherland,” writes Yury Yakovlevich, narrowing down the concept of “Fatherland”. It is difficult to assess the correctness of such a thesis, since it is not entirely clear that the author includes in the concept of “Fatherland” a broader than the “socialist Fatherland”, but his view of Marxism does seem to be “narrowed”.
AT THE SIGHT - THE SOVIET UNION?
The beginning of the armed conflict on the island Damansky. 1969 year. Photo from the archive of Hero of the Soviet Union, Major-General of the Reserve Vitaly Bubenin provided by the editors of the newspaper "Bulletin of Heroes of the Soviet Union, Russia and Socialist Labor"
It is not too clear from the text of the article how firmly Yuri Kirshin is sure that his homeland is the USSR, the “evil empire” (such a phrase is used in the text). But in the Soviet past, he finds mainly errors and shortcomings, which, like Marxism, criticizes (as if there is no more rational and correct way to use the history of his country within the framework of the problems under consideration). However, in this part of the criticism is inconsistent. The author exaggerated the class character of Soviet foreign policy, which, as the text implies, prevented “the establishment of allied relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain”. And what prevented such an alliance in the middle of the XIX century, in 1904 – 1905, or in the post-Soviet period of history, on the eve of rocket attacks on Belgrade, Baghdad, despite the fact that Napoleon, Wilhelm, Hitler Britain (in the XX century and the USA) eventually performed with a united front with Russia? Simply, as you know, Britain has no permanent enemies and friends, but there are permanent interests. US interests are no less constant, even though this country is much younger. History confirms that class and other features of countries with which the United States and Britain establish or sever relations have minimal significance.
In this sense, Lenin’s foreign policy position (declared immoral by Yuri Kirshin) is no different from understanding the foreign policy of any pragmatic head of state. It is known, for example, that the Russian emperor Alexander III also did not rely too much on strong western partners, rightly believing that Russia has only two allies: its army and navy. This is not a reason to blame him for the lack of morality.
However, Yuri Kirshin insists on the class basis of the wars and military conflicts waged by the Soviet Union. To agree with this statement can only be partially. Indeed, October 1917 of the year led to the emergence of a completely new type of state and, whatever the subjective opinions on this matter, significantly influenced the world and its further development. By virtue of the ideological differences that distinguished Soviet society from other social systems of the twentieth century, relations between the USSR and other states inevitably had a class character.
The main war, which the USSR won, was a class war because Hitler Germany’s plans included the destruction of the Soviet Union. But we must not forget that according to the plans of the Nazis and the population of the country awaited an unenviable fate.
The Great Patriotic War - the fiercest and bloodiest armed confrontation in the entire history of mankind, the main burden of which fell on the shoulders and the fate of the Soviet people - was far from being only class in its content. It was a war against an attempt to establish one subject of international relations with world domination over the rest, that is, from the USSR, for preventing the greatest injustice against humanity. Finally, it was a war of independence. And in this it is similar to the Patriotic War 1812 of the year. It is necessary to take into account the fact that our country did not start wars either in 1812 or in 1941.
The Soviet leadership at the end of the 30-s of the XX century made every effort to create an anti-fascist coalition, that is, sought to prevent war, curb the gaining strength and affirmed in its determination to fight the aggressor. But not supported by Britain and France, it was forced to conclude an agreement with Germany. Class bases in such logic at least do not play a decisive role.
The political and military activity of the USSR itself (including the war with Finland 1939 – 1940) was subordinated exclusively to the interests of the country's security. Neither the class struggle nor the export of the revolution has anything to do with it. The goals were different.
The Soviet Union, like imperial Russia, was indeed preparing for war; This is the normal practice of any large and self-respecting country. Such training was not always equally effective, and not all the wars in which the USSR participated were successful enough for him, but it is impossible to explain them exclusively by class motives.
Finally, the class background (if you remember that a social class is a large group of members of society who have a certain relation to property and power that is similar to each other and different from other classes, their socio-economic status, culture, ideology, etc.) in one way or another manifested in any socio-political relations. Including in social systems whose ideals are far from socialist, as well as in the relations between such systems. Long before the appearance of Marxism, the injustice of the distribution of property and intolerance of dissent, as the causes of social contradictions and wars, was pointed out by the English historian Edward Gibbon.
The saddest thing is that the criticism of the “class basis” of wars by Yuri Kirshin does not contribute to a deeper understanding of the characteristics of modern wars. However, not only it reduces the scientific value of the article. It is strange that an attempt by a scientist to predict what has already happened in reality (and if it did not, it could hardly have happened; everything that should inevitably occur - certainly comes). “If the socialist system continued to exist, wars between countries could occur,” the author believes (at the same level, some readers might well have asked: what could the content of research and the position of some domestic authors be if Russia "continued to exist a socialist system"?)
Of course, there could be wars between countries that aspire to build their policies and society on the ideas of socialism, and there were wars like that (for example, between China and Vietnam in 1979). However, firstly, the main reasons for these wars would hardly be reflected in ideological differences or, on the contrary, in similarities; wars are waged for resources, territories, for international authority and political "weight" of powers. Secondly, unfortunately, humanity still cannot do without wars, but the confrontation between the two superpowers with different ideological platforms in the second half of the last century contributed not only to political tensions, but also to a large extent, kept this tension in the "non-military" framework . The main actors who created the global political divide had to take into account the interests of their rival.
The Soviet period of our history was not easy, not without contradictions. But the Fatherland (at that time socialist), which included the entire vast territory, a considerable population, rich resources, powerful industry, energy, was protected quite reliably.
In a word, unfortunately, in the article “War without citations”, objective analysis and justified criticism of the shortcomings of the Soviet military security system did not come out. But this is exactly what today's serious politicians, the military need. It is a deep understanding of the achievements, problems and contradictions of the past, social systems that are important for new generations of Russian citizens.
ONCE AGAIN ABOUT
The problem of war on the planet is still acute. In addition, at the beginning of the third millennium many political issues, and even more so problems of war and peace, cannot be solved without taking into account the global processes of the macrosocium. Yuri Kirshin draws attention to this, but an attempt to call the war universal, and militarism adds little to world phenomena in deepening the understanding of the essence of war, does not strengthen Russia's security. The author seems to be confusing, confusing the reader, for example, not noticing the differences between terrorism and war. This creates conditions for political speculation, contributes to the distortion of public consciousness, unties the hands of cynical subjects of public (including international) relations.
Yuri Kirshin advocates the priority of the military security of the world community over the military security of any state. But how do we practically ensure the military security of the whole world when the United States and NATO can neglect the views of other members of the world community, UN decisions (Grenada - 1983 year, Panama - 1989 year, Yugoslavia - 1995 and 1999) to achieve their goals? Afghanistan - 2001 year, Iraq - 2003 year), when they seek the world to dictate their conditions in all positions, implement their strategy of a unipolar world?
If a convinced patriot of Russia understands the essence of global, realizes the need to take into account the interests of many participants in international relations, insists on using international experience to solve the most important tasks of his country, this indicates the breadth of his views, the creative nature of his position. And what can we call the herald of cosmopolitanism, which sacrifices the military security of its Fatherland to some kind of global security, for which the subjects of world politics with far from harmless ambitions and tools to realize their interests claim?
Practice shows that in these conditions only a militarily strong subject of international relations can reliably defend peace. The famous dictum of the ancient Romans "If you want peace - prepare for war" is relevant today.
Modern Russia is experiencing considerable difficulties in various spheres of public life. There are problems in the system of ensuring the country's military security, which, as we know, is not limited to armed forces. This does not mean that the voice of Russia in defense of peace and justice in solving international problems today cannot and should not be heard. He sounds. Russia's foreign policy is becoming more consistent and successful. Thanks to Russia, military intervention in the internal affairs of Syria was prevented. However, this is not a reason for complacency.
In an era when the planet with a rapidly growing population is becoming less known natural resources necessary to maintain the viability of society, a strong modern armed forces is not a luxury. For Russia, with its vast territory, water, forests, and minerals, taking care of military security is paramount.
The approach of NATO to the borders of Russia, the intention to place in close proximity to the territory of the country elements of the American missile defense system, attempts to test the Russian Armed Forces for durability in real hostilities are only part of the real and probable threats to the country's military security. They require adequate responses. Among them is the possibility of deploying Iskander missile systems in the Kaliningrad region, adopting the latest air defense systems and strategic nuclear submarines, and much more.
Theorists in the field of military security need to develop and offer practitioners of different content and form, but necessarily the most effective possible tools and measures to create a reliable system of military security of Russia. However, this is a topic for another conversation.
The war does not ask when it will fall upon people, breaking not only their plans for the coming weekend or a year, but their whole life, which can be easily and indifferently taken away. No one can say exactly who and how much time is allowed for a peaceful life, when and what kind of war will befall us, which could be a catastrophe for the social system. It is probably more difficult to prevent a war (to avoid it altogether) than to meet the enemy fully armed, but the latter is more likely to promote the first (as well as global military security) than calls for cosmopolitanism.
Therefore, it is more correct not to criticize ideological positions and methodological systems, which have somehow disliked us, how much to take everything useful from human experience to solve the main tasks. Worthy of attention and study are not those theories that are somehow cute or fashionable, but rather correctly explain the nature, the essence of society, and reveal patterns that are characteristic of real society. This also applies to the problems of such an important phenomenon of society as war.
The experience of a large-scale and dynamic armed confrontation with the strongest militarily enemies that befell our country cannot be disregarded in understanding the essence of war. And to consider this experience only for its criticism is at least an empty waste of time and energy. Of course, even a very informed and experienced person in this field can hardly be the only one to understand all the subtleties and processes that make up the preparation, course and end of the modern war. Therefore, interaction between theorists and practitioners, scientists and politicians, engineers and combat commanders is important. In the name of one - in the name of the security of Russia. War is capable of knocking over the lives of millions of people into absurdity.
Today, many people who think of themselves as politicians and artists, highly paid singers of the absurd are trying to affirm their interests, whims, and even overt cynicism, as public morality in society, trying to close true values from people. It is unacceptable to mix and blur senses reflecting the laws of nature and social systems, to multiply the foundations of the marginalization of Russian society, the devaluation of patriotism on behalf of science.
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