Black swan song of Russian Empire

About the moral burden of European responsibility, which is 55 years old

I was reminded of the events of the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia 55 years ago, on August 21, 1968. A former Czechoslovakian colleague wrote to me saying that this time was one of the earliest memories of his life, with Russian tanks in the streets, confronted by crowds of unarmed people…

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Then 23 years of Russian occupation came, and the lives of generations were lost in hypocrisy and socio-economic degradation.

My Western colleague is sincerely happy that Russia's return to military aggression and occupation has met with strong resistance, and assures me that they, the Czechs, will do everything within their modest means to ensure that the Russian invasion of Ukraine goes down in history as the black swan song of the Russian Empire.

However, his countryman Milan Kundera once said it best about the moral side of today's return of the Russian occupation:

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"It is horrible to imagine. In a world of eternal return, any act carries the burden of unbearable responsibility..." This is the responsibility of experiencing compassion when you cannot change anything, only observe violence from the outside, from abroad. This is "a burden he had never known before... All the tons of Russian tanks did not compare to this... It was the seventh day of the occupation."

Kundera became a recognized European and international author. His "Unbearable Lightness of Being," thus the experience of the Soviet occupation, incidentally, channeled the talent of a wonderful Ukrainian author.

But the moral question for our European colleagues remains without a final answer. This is a simple question: How easy is it for you to imagine the horrors of murder and Russian violence on Ukrainian soil? How heavy is the moral burden of returning the bloody occupation and crimes of Russia's war against Ukraine?

I hope that it will finally and truly be unbearable. Otherwise, Kundera taught us the difficulty of living in vain.

Otherwise, the European world will also remain doomed to an eternal repetition of the horror of the Russian world, confirming the rightness of the German critic of impotent morality.

The text is published with the permission of the author.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine