Toxic Nostalgia

Making Russia great again.

What is it about the past? Even though we are condemned to live in the future, we can't stop fantasizing and fetishizing the past, and wanting to go back. On the gentle side, Proust wrote nothing but loving remembrances of his (sometimes mortifying) past, trying to evoke its moods, textures, smells, and feelings. But why does nostalgia so often curdle into bloodlust and terror? For that is where the Russian autocrat is going with his nostalgia for the Soviet era when Stalin ruled even more autocratically over a well-cowed populace extending from Hungary to the Pacific. Ah, those were the days!

It isn't just our current crisis- far from. The Trumpists want to make America great... again. The Muslim jihadists are bent on reproducing the pre-eminent dominance of Islam of 1300 years ago. The Serbs hearken back to their own grand empire of 700 years ago. Shia muslims fetishize their losses and in a theology of repair and redemption. Jews have both bemoaned their losses of their great kingdoms two millennia ago, and militantly sought their promised land back. And fundamentalists of all stripes yearn to get back to the basic tenets of their faith- the pure origins of incendiary belief and miracles.

It all seems a little over-determined, as though the operative emotion isn't nostalgia exactly, but powerlust, seizing on whatever materials come to hand to say that we as some tribe or culture are better and deserve better than we've got. While the future remains ever shrouded, the past is at least accessible, if also rather protean in the hands of dedicated propagandists. In Russia's case, not only did Stalin help start World War 2 by co-invading Poland, but the prior holocaust/famine in Ukraine, followed by the transplacement of millions of Russians into Ukraine.. well, that all makes this current bout of nostalgia far from sympathetic, however well-twisted it has been for internal consumption. Of course the propaganda and the emotion is mostly instrumental, in a desperate bid to fend off the appearance of happy, secure, and prosperous democracies on Russia's borders, which is the real danger at hand, to Putin and his system.

In remembrance of Russia's great patriotic war, which it helped start.

Yet, such nostalgia is strongly culturally binding, for better or worse. Rising states may have short histories and short memories, resented as the nouveau-rich on the world stage. They are not "as good" in some essential way as those whose greatness has passed into the realm of nostalgia. Worth is thus not in the doing but in some ineffible essentialist (read nationalist/tribal) way that is incredibly resistant to both reason and empathy. It is analogous to "nobility" in the class structure within most societies. In the US, we seem on the cusp (or past it) of our time atop the world stage. Do we then face hundreds of years of regret, comforting ourselves with tales of greatness and seething resentment?

With echos of a deeper past.

• Could the West have been smarter; more generous?
• Apparently, we are all going to die.
• Tires are bad.