We propagating humanism, but we practice piggishness: why the Taliban * are stronger than their enemies

Yakov Krotov, priest

Reading about the Taliban and other Black Hundreds, you see such a dry residue. Here is homo sapiens. Another homo sapiens says something in one ear to him. Both are beggars. And in the other ear of Homo sapiens something is trying to get into a megaphone, a powerful, rich system of European enlightenment. Pol Pot graduated from the Sorbonne, bin Laden from Western culture was carried away only by the texts of de Gaulle. Why is one marginalized person more convincing than a powerful propaganda structure of newspapers, books, universities?

And why in Russia in the 1990s the powerful propaganda of Western values was less convincing than the propaganda of all sorts of rubbish, which was not supported by the Kremlin during that decade?

Because the propagandists were crafty.

For the same reason, the powerful mechanism of state propaganda under Brezhnev was so fruitless. Because the bureaucracy. They said one thing and did another. Stole. We filled our pockets. They professed humanism, and practiced disgusting. And they took bribes, and indulged in embezzlement, and cheated. Such are the original builders of democracy. It's the same in the West. There is no faith in the well-fed propagandist of humanism and tolerance, who broadcasts, but thinks about which restaurant to go to in the evening. It is felt, felt ... And the idiot from fanaticism and lack of culture at least says what he thinks, and does not think about the restaurant.

The same applies to the state religion. To the pre-revolutionary state Orthodoxy, the Orthodoxy of well-fed apparatchiks, trembling only for their well-being - it resurrected in the 1990s and has now flourished, only it stinks strongly of oil. It does not rule the country, as the anticlericals stupidly say, it is just a regimental chaplain, but that doesn't make it any better.

The Taliban fought with the enthusiasm of idealists, and they were opposed by twice as many well-armed men with no ideals other than self-preservation and enrichment. Well, you need to fight like the Taliban, with ideology? No, you need to be ideological, but the idea of peace, the idea of anti-war. Don't eat, drink, and the world is a very hot idea, you know.

PS

Only a positive idea has the power - including the power to induce to kill. Dostoevsky always portrayed this wonderfully. And this vision of Sharia society is the power, like the American city on the mountain.

* Terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation

Original is here.