: Not a Culture War #IndiaNEWS #Edit In an interesting recent article in the Times Literary Supplement, the Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and poet Oksana Zabuzhko took Western readers to task for not

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Not a Culture War #IndiaNEWS #Edit
In an interesting recent article in the Times Literary Supplement, the Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and poet Oksana Zabuzhko took Western readers to task for not recognising Russia’s barbarism. Too many people, Zabuzhko argued, believe that the great Russian writers, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, expressed humanistic European values. They have not looked deeply enough into the savage Russian soul.
Zabuzhko believes that Russian literature represents “an ancient culture in which people only breathe under water and have a banal hatred for those who have lungs instead of gills. � Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be understood only through the prism of “Dostoevskyism,� defined as “an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long suppressed hatred and envy. �
This type of cultural analysis has a rather old-fashioned ring. It used to be common to interpret the Third Reich as a sickness of the German soul: “from Luther to Hitler,� the thesis went, implying that Luther’s anti-Semitism sowed the seeds of Nazism some 350 years before Hitler was born. But few people nowadays take such a crude view of German history.
Many applied similar ideas with even greater conviction to Japan in the 1940s. Since Japan lacked a dictator like Hitler or a party resembling the Nazis, critics blamed the country’s culture for its twentieth-century militarism. While Germans could be coaxed back from their murderous cult of racism into the European tradition of Mozart and Goethe, Japan was supposedly different. There, only massive reeducation could cure an ancient cultural sickness related to the samurai spirit and “feudalism. �
After World War II, the US occupation authorities banned symptoms of this alleged disease, such as Kabuki plays, swordfight dramas, and even images of the hallowed Mount Fuji. This irritated many Japanese, but most were having enough trouble surviving the harsh postwar years to push back against the bans, which were soon lifted anyway.
Both Germany and Japan still have far-right groups that strut around in combat gear, but so do most Western democracies. Otherwise, it is difficult to find any trace of the samurai spirit in today’s Japan or of racial barbarism in contemporary Germany. On the contrary, both countries are remarkably pacific, with Germany more welcoming to immigrants and refugees than most other European countries.
This does not mean that cultural reeducation worked. Rather, it suggests that the cultural analysis was always misguided. After all, Nazis read Goethe and listened to Mozart, too. And Japan’s war in Asia was hardly the result of watching too many swordfight dramas.

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