Hunger strike as a unit of terror

Yakov Krotov, priest

The era of modernity is the era of industrialization: everything is put on the conveyor belt and thus humanity breaks out of poverty and dependence on the environment.

The most striking examples are the manufacture of fabrics, the manufacture of educated people (schools as a foundry), the manufacture of decent people (prisons are like a correctional conveyor, never before has correction been the goal of punishment), the manufacture of healthy people (medicine is a factory).

In the 18th century, the industrialization of war (excuse the neologism) also took place. War has become a mathematically defined pipeline process. Tolstoy sarcastically over this (di erste is colonnaded), but Tolstoy sarcastically over many things, and yet it was precisely such a war that became generally accepted.

It was then that the idea of "terrorism" as a "wrong" violence appeared. Homeschooling was the norm for thousands of years, but now it is the exception, the prerogative of the very rich. Most of them send their children to the rolling mill of the school with a single program, censorship and other nasty things. The manufacture and sale of drugs is a state monopoly. Violence too. Only the state can frighten, intimidate, terrify, and blackmail. If a private person does it, he is a terrorist.

In this sense, "terrorism" is a hate speech, a double standard.

In the case of suicide, an "act of terror" may be devoid of the element of blackmail. A man who commits suicide like Jan Palach or who commits suicide like a kamikaze pilot, killing many other people, blackmails people - those who will survive. Blackmails terribly, playing on compassion, on humanity.

This does not mean that Jan Palach is worse than Brezhnev. It is better. But he responded with violence for violence.

By the way, Gandhi's hunger strikes, it seems, were not blackmail, they were religious acts, he did not announce that he would starve himself to death.

The Old Believers' hunger strikes, who sometimes starved themselves together with their families, were called fanaticism by the state accusers. But fanaticism was to spread rot on the Old Believers, depriving them of their religious freedom. That they took their children with them to the grave is awful, but their opponents, too, did not see free individuals in children. They could flog and frighten children, they could kill them without any remorse.

At the same time, a hunger strike often justifies itself by saying that "I am forced", "I was forced, there is no other way out". This is a classic rapist's self-justification: I was forced, you left me no way out.

At its core, a hunger strike is self-destruction, suicide. This also applies to war, to any murder. The killer not only kills the other, but himself. The Ministry of War is a cancer of the fatherland.

* * *

A hunger strike in a situation where the law provides for force-feeding a prisoner is deliberately meaningless. They will just force-feed. For some reason, everyone is silent about this.

But there is another aspect that makes hunger strike a dubious remedy. This aspect did not manifest itself at all in the 1970s-1980s, when the hunger strikes of political prisoners, even of Sakharov, were their personal actions. In 2021, a new idea suddenly sounded: we must join the hunger strike. It is understood that he did not join - either a coward or a traitor. He's starving, and you're eating buckwheat? Are not you ashamed? How does a piece fit in your throat?

A hunger strike becomes - and quite deliberately - a means of manipulation not only by enemies (who will simply indifferently forcefully feed everything), but above all friends. And manipulation, you will, is not very good. This is an infringement of someone else's freedom.

I call for the immediate release of Navalny!

Original is here.