Estonia, the Monument, and What it Means (Part 2)

In my last blog (which, if you’re reading this, is actually the next blog – so read that first!) I began to question why it is that the Russian populace in Russia and Eastern Europe is so infuriated about the Estonia. As you’ll recall, Estonia decided recently to move a monument that commemorates Russia’s involvement in World War II, a monument that also serves as a grave to an “unknown soldier.” Despite the fact that this was a democratic decision made by an independent nation, Russians are up in arms – some even demanding that the Estonian government step down. It is a time of great tension between Estonia and Russia.

So, what is the problem? Why are Russians so infuriated that a Soviet-era monument is being retired? Why, as Russians I have met here in Moldova have expressed, do they “hate them” (the Estonians) for removing another nation’s statue?

When I have asked Russians here why it is that Estonia should not be allowed to remove this monument to Soviet occupation from within their own borders, Russians typically throw out the same excuse: Because Russia saved Estonia from the Nazis. Indeed, this is the same excuse Russians typically give for why Russia was justified in occupying Eastern Europe after WWII in the first place: Because Russia saved these people from the Nazis. Putting aside for the moment the historical validity of such a claim, there is a certain ethical flaw in this line of reasoning. After all, if I save a girl from being raped by beating away her assailant, that in no way gives me justification to rape her myself. Just so, because Russia assisted in the removal of the occupying force of Nazi Germany from Eastern Europe did not justify Russia’s subsequent occupation of those countries. And, along the same lines, now that those countries are liberated from Russian occupation, there is no moral compulsion for these countries to maintain memorials to Russia, either as a savior or as an oppressor.

Yet, when I have tried to present these lines of logical thought to Russian nationalists, I am met only with a wall of fury and self-righteousness that often involves very personal reflections. “My father fought in World War II,” “My grandfather died fighting the Nazis,” etc. These are very telling responses however, and rather than being mere emotive outbursts should be understood properly. For what really drove Russia to occupy Eastern Europe, and what even today makes Russians feel possessive of these nations, lies in these words.

To explain myself, I’d like to first root my ideas in some theories that have arisen recently within the schools of anthropology. There has been a lot of writing and discussion of late about the concept of a “meme.” Here’s what the on-line dictionary has to say about the definition of a meme:

Meme [meem] - Richard Dawkins's term for an idea considered as a replicator, especially with the connotation that memes parasitise people into propagating them much as viruses do.Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.
The term is used especially in the phrase "meme complex" denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organised belief system, such as a religion. However, "meme" is often misused to mean "meme complex".
Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has become more important than biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits.

A meme, then, is essentially a cultural belief, value, opinion, idea, or conception that is passed along from generation to generation within a society. Human cultures evolve by selecting and adhering to memes, so much so that these memes become as fundamental and as decisive of human nature as any biological consideration. Human beings may be tool-makers, not because of any genetic tool-making trait within our chromosomes, but because the meme of tool-making has been passed down from generation to generation within human societies. Memes, and meme-complexes, are being looked at as ways to explain many unique inclinations of the human animal. But perhaps one of the most intriguing areas of investigation lies in the study of how cultural memes may be responsible for the human inclination for war.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her very interesting book “Blood Rites” posits that human cultures maintain a warlike demeanor because it is a way of memorializing the very significant evolution in human society that occurred when human beings made the transition from prey to predator. For millions of years, human beings cowered from predatory cats and carnivores that fed upon us as upon any other relatively defenseless animals in nature. Yet, at some time, human beings learned to band together and, as a societal unit, defeat those animals that preyed upon us. Indeed, with these skills of pack hunting, human beings learned to become predators themselves. As a result, human beings went from being on of the weakest animals in nature to being some of the strongest. This was such a significant epoch in the cultural evolution of he human being that human cultures maintained reminders of this transition within their societies. One way in which human beings cherished this triumph was through religions that centered on blood sacrifice. Human beings around the world, from South America to Ancient Greece, sacrificed animals and humans to their gods in very bloody, very emotional rituals. These rituals served to prove to society as a whole that humans are capable of killing, to remind the people that humans can be, should be, and are predators now. It is telling indeed that Incan priests wore jaguar skins when they cut the hearts from their human sacrifices. Such a ritual serves to foster the meme in human society that people should band together, cry out, and kill.

But blood sacrifice is not the only way this meme is transmitted through human society. Another, contemporary ritual that serves to indoctrinate human societies with the notion that we should band together and kill is the ritual of war.

War serves the purpose of maintaining the meme of communal killing within human society perhaps even better than does blood sacrifice. After all, war requires everyone in a society to band together to triumph over a common foe. Indeed, as the jingoism of WWI showed, there is a notion within warring societies that the nation that is most unified and nationalistic in its stance will win its war, other considerations like strategy and technological advancement being somehow sidelined in considerations. Even today, Americans rally around the empty rhetoric of “Support Our Troops,” thinking perhaps that the psychic call of nationalist pride will allow soldiers fighting in Iraq to dodge bullets or fight more valorously. War requires a populace to band together and contribute in order to defeat an evil predatory menace, a stance that preserved us as a species from predators in the wild millions of years ago. Indeed, it was perhaps this lesson learned that forged the first human societies in the first place. Hence, the meme of communal killing (which today is translated into warfare) is passed down in society even today, not because we perceive real predatory threat from the wild, but because this meme is fundamental to the establishment of human society in the first place. A society, perhaps, does not become a society at all until it bands together to kill.

Despite its role in forging societies, however, I would be inclined to say that his meme of communal killing has exhausted itself of its usefulness. After all, with the exception of a few tiger, shark, or crocodile killings per year, humanity is no longer at risk from predators. Many societies today seem to realize this, and instead of finding unity through war find unity through economic, environmental, or moral concerns. Indeed, contemporary warlike nations often do not have the support of all their populace any longer, as the anti-war protests in America today reflect.

However, I cannot legitimately make the claim that humanity no longer needs the meme of communal killing to defend itself, since humanity is indeed in danger of being wiped out by the most voracious and bloodthirsty predator of them all: man itself. And at no time in human history was this better proved than during World War II.

There is no question that Nazi Germany was a predator, that sought not just to conquer land and expand economies but to slaughter specific societies and eradicate them from the globe. Of course, we are familiar with the fact that the Nazis tried to eradicate the Jews. Six million Jews were killed, an act that can only be described as the actions of a predatory beast ravaging its prey. It is no wonder, then, that today Israelis are extremely nationalistic and quick to engage in warfare against their Middle Eastern neighbors. As our human ancestors learned millions of years ago, human societies must band together and kill if they are to survive against predators. Israeli culture, then, has been founded upon a renewed and intensified version of the meme of communal killing (conceived today as warfare, which ironically does not require killing so long as the military machine itself is maintained; it is the capacity to kill that matters today) that underlies the human condition for all of us.

But while it may seem evident that Jewish people suffered a horrible tragedy and, thus, have become so warlike as a result, it is less apparent that the Russian people experienced a similar tragedy in World War II. Nevertheless, Russia experienced a holocaust of its own, one arguably far greater than that experienced by the Jews.

According to Wikipedia, approximately 23,500,000 Russians, military and civilian, died in World War II. Over 13 percent of the population was killed. This is a staggering number of lives lost. Death was so pervasive for Russians in World War II that almost every family lost one of its own. It is understandable, then, that during the war Russians were terrified. Russia had fared badly in its two most significant prior conflicts, the Russo-Sino War and WWI. Now, Russia was not only in danger of being defeated militarily, but its populace was in danger of being exterminated, slaughtered by a predatory beast gnawing piecemeal through the nation. It is no wonder that the meme of communal killing was reinvigorated within the Russian society at this time, a societal instinct that most assuredly did preserve the Soviet Russian nation and allowed it to drive back and help defeat the Nazi predator. The Soviet Union, then, like Israel, came into its own as a society brought together and founded upon a newly invigorated and intensified version of the meme of communal killing.

This meme, the need to be unified and militarily stalwart to stave off the potential predator, perpetuated in Russian society after World War II. Why did Russia annex Eastern Europe after World War II? It is not because Russia legitimately felt that these countries owed Russia their gratitude (and hence, themselves). It is not because Russia wanted to extend the Soviet dream of communal, proletariat harmony to the peoples in these nations. Rather, it is because, “My father died in World War II.” It is because Russians were anxious of the predator, a notion pervasive to Russian society as a whole after World War II and passed down as a meme through the generations since. Russia ringed itself with subordinate nations, from Estonia to Uzbekistan, for the same reason that an African pastoralist fortifies his kraal with a barrier of high, thorny branches: to keep out the predators that hunt in the night. Russians today hate the citizens of former Soviet nations for breaking away and becoming independent – truly hate them – because in so doing Russia has become exposed again to the predators beyond its barriers. “Ethnic” Russians (I put this term in quotes because there is no such thing as an ethnic Russian. Russia today consists of over 100 ethnic groups that have been mixing and intermingling since the Vikings came to conquer the Mongol peoples living there.) living in former Soviet nations maintain a sense of Russian nationalism so strong they refuse to learn the languages of the countries they were born in and deny to be classed as citizens of those countries (“I’m not Moldovan, I’m Russian,” I’ve heard many a person born and raised here in Moldova decry.) because Russian society still perpetuates the meme that Russians must stand unified and at defense against the predator from without. To be Russian is to be unified and on alert against the external foe.

This meme of militaristic unification has been transmitted through Russian society, both in Russia and without, by a number of traditions and means. Russian “Men’s Day” is explicitly a celebration of a man’s virtue to a society as a soldier, not as a father, son, businessperson, or anything else. May 9 is celebrated as a holiday by Russian people to commemorate “Russia’s victory” in World War II, when Russian soldiers are applauded, Russian tanks are paraded, and Russian society as a whole comes together as a military whole. All of these celebrations are in place specifically to convey the meme of military unification from one generation to the next, to recall the nature of the predatory beast and express the necessity to be on guard against it. But perhaps no symbol serves to perpetuate this meme better than the Memorial Monuments that lay established across the former Soviet Union. These serve as rallying points of Russian nationalism, tangible reminders of the real power of the predatory beast (after all, the bones of one of his victims lies beneath each one) and proof of the power that nationalist unity has to defeat it. These monuments stand, not to commemorate a tragedy endured in the past, but to encourage Russians today to be unified and militarily strong against whatever predators lurk in the future.

And this is why the removal of the Soviet monument in Estonia is so unbearable by Russians across Europe today. To remove this monument is to remove Russian society’s power to transmit its meme of unification and defense to subsequent generations in Estonia. The danger inherent, from the perspective of the Russian cultural mindset, is twofold. First, without the monument, a fundamental condition for Russian identity amongst Estonian Russians is threatened to be lost. What if future generations don’t recall the time Russians pulled together to defeat the Nazi predator, and as a result do not heed the meme of communal warfare? Could such people really be called Russians? Second, if these future Estonian Russians do not have the meme of communal warfare transmitted to them, then a gap in the wall of Russian military unity is formed. Russians living in former Soviet countries are aware they are on the “avant guarde” against Russia’s foes. But without military unity present amongst the “ethnic” Russians living in one of these countries, then Russia itself becomes exposed to the predator’s teeth.

These must be the subconscious fears that swirl in the minds of all Russians who have been raised to be fearful of the predator, of all Russians who maintain the meme of unified warfare. Hence, the removal of the Estonian monument is not objected to by Russians because Russians feel that Estonians should respect Russia’s sacrifice in World War II. Nor is it objected to because Russia strives to bully and control the Estonian government. Rather, Russians feel threatened that, without the monument, future generations of Russians in Estonia may not be taught the necessity of posing a united, offensive front against any potential enemies and, as a result, Russians everywhere may be at risk from the next predator that comes to attack. It is a reaction that surges from the most primal societal recesses of Russian identity, a reaction conceived from fear and nationalist purpose at once. To us, looking from without, the Russian response seems irrational, for that is what it is; there is nothing rational about the deepest levels of the human psyche. Nevertheless, it is a reaction that deserves to be understood and appreciated for what it is.

If indeed Russian society is founded upon a meme of unified militarism, as evidenced by the reaction against the removal of the Estonian monument, what does this portend for the future of the former Soviet Union and the world? In former Soviet countries, at least, it seems unlikely that there can ever be true stability. As long as Russians maintain this meme, then they remain fundamentally distinct from people of other nationalities (with the exception, perhaps, of Israelis, whose national identify was similarly forged.) For, while all human societies maintain the meme of unified offensiveness against the predator foe, the meme that perpetuates in Russian society is of a new, distinct form. To employ the analogy of memes to a virus, if most human societies are infected with the meme responsible for warfare, then Russian society is infected with a newer, more virulent strain of this meme. It has mutated. Most of humanity learned to unify and be wary against a predator that was inhuman. And while we may perpetuate the meme of this lesson through warfare with humans, enemy humans only serve to act as an analogy for the predator (and hence, why most wartime propaganda strives to depict the enemy with inhuman guises – sharp teeth and flared nostrils – and dehumanizes the enemy with rhetoric; “They eat babies,” etc.) But, in the case of Russian society, the predator is not inhuman but rather other humans. Hence, to perpetuate the meme, any other human can serve as the predator, not merely one who exhibits “inhuman” qualities. Russians don’t need to demonize the enemy, for any other human being may serve to epitomize the predator so long as they are not Russian. This may explain why racist hate crimes have become so endemic in Russia, why the government does not act to quell these attacks, and why Russians living in former Soviet countries feel a sense of common humanity between themselves and other Russians living in other lands rather than the people with whom they live every day. For Russians, anyone not-Russian may potentially be the next predator, and hence Russians band together and behave offensively (either passively or not) against anyone who is other, even if the other may be neighbors and citizens living in the same country with them. Hence, there can be no cooperation between Russians and the native populations of former Soviet countries as long as this meme persists, and hence these countries will continue to flounder, as is the case in Moldova, or will experience riots, as in Estonia or Kyrgyzstan.

The danger looms just as great beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union. Russia will conceive of any slight – America’s placement of missiles in the Czech Republic or the EU’s trade restrictions, for example – as potential threats from potential predators, and will bristle in antagonistic response. Again, true cooperation is impossible as long as Russia fears the rest of the world and conceives of any other nation as a potential foe. The value of military unification against the rest of humanity, then, learned by Russia in WWII and transmitted from generation to generation as a meme within Russian society poses one of the largest obstacles to world peace and universal humanity in our time.

Is there a solution, then? How can we expect a people to simply forget the trauma they endured and to dismiss the lessons they learned from that event? How can we expect Russian culture to forego its meme of military unification against the rest of the world? Unfortunately, we cannot, no more than we can expect a society to give up its language or its religion. This meme, like all memes, serves to define what Russian society is. Like in the game of Jenga, to remove one piece would collapse the entire societal structure.

But, it may be possible to understand this perspective and, at least, respect it. For Russians this would mean to appreciate this feeling of Russian nationalism as a traumatic reaction learned in WWII; to embrace it as such, but not to insist upon it at the expense of other people. It is okay for Russians to maintain their nationalist bonds; but they should not impose their culture, language, holidays, monuments, morals, and values upon other people with whom they live, especially when they themselves are the minorities within their nations. At the same time, the rest of the world should honor and respect what Russia endured in World War II and should at least recognize the subsequent societal and psychological effects this has had on Russians everywhere. The situation is analogous to how whites and blacks interact in the USA. White Americans recognize that there is a legacy of oppression that lies deep in the psyche of American blacks and learn to be mindful and respectful of it; and black Americans for their part recognize that how they feel is specific to their own culture and cannot be properly understood by, or certainly imposed upon, the rest of American society. In the same way, the rest of the world should understand that Russia has undergone a horrific trauma and continues to perpetuate the lessons learned from this trauma within its society today, and in its dealings with Russia or Russians be mindful of this fact. There may be no final solution. The peoples living in former Soviet countries will continue to be frustrated at the ethnic Russian minorities that refuse to speak the countries’ languages, and the Russian minorities will continue to be wary of the non-Russians with whom they live; other countries will continue to be frustrated by irrational acts of nationalist posturing on the part of Russia, and Russia will continue to feel unappreciated for its sacrifice in World War II. But, with understanding, there can at least be tolerance. And with tolerance, there can be peace.