Context. Venentian film festival of 2024 has a “Russians at War” “documentary”, whose director Anastasiia Trofimova (Russian-Canadian who previously worked on propaganda channel “Russia Today”) was posted with Russian army and made a movie whitewashing their invasion.

I am no culturologist, but for a long time now, I have had this uncanny feeling that modern culture has tricked itself into over-sophistication, especially after WWII.

After barely winning over the absolute evil of Nazism (the victory not without its losses and compromises), and in further attempts to become “more humane,” the culture had shifted itself further and further looking into complex tragedies and shades.

When years passed after WWII, and all the necessary things about “good vs. evil” were reflected upon, the time came for deeper takes like Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”—written for the country of war winners to remind them not to romanticize the war (at a time when their country had— problems with it, to put it mildly).

Or Heller’s “Catch-22” about the absurdity of being caught in the army’s machine.

It was all refined culture, built on top of thousands of years of history and on top of implicit understanding of the basic morals: that invading other countries, concentration camps, burning books, and stealing children is actually, you know, bad!

It felt so basic and obvious nobody needed to talk about that explicitly. Like, it was a privilege (and, to some extent, a duty) of the winner, a privilege only possible long AFTER the war: to not become like the ones you fought, to get back to unquestioned humanism.

Skip many generations of thought and information spreading, and where are we at?.. Suddenly, that knowledge so core and obvious nobody paid much attention to it is lost. Nobody repeated the basics for a long time, and now it is as if everything has become grayscale.

I am not in the slightest interested in Trofimova’s motives (she is an obvious pawn of russian infowar), but what about all the Canadian officials sponsoring her movie and international festivals screening it?..

It seems that in their quasi-sophistication, they truly believe you can fast-forward through “wars of conquest should be stopped, genocide is unforgivable, and the whole humanity’s problem, attempting to eradicate the whole nation shouldn’t be tolerated” obvious stuff!

Since almost the first months of the invasion, many of them put themselves in the headspace of the after-the-war sophistication. As if you can skip actually, you know, stopping and disarming the invader, and silencing its lies while it is in power.

You can not.

You can not. It doesn’t work this way.