I’ve just re-watched “Schindler’s List.” What a movie! It is definitely on my personal list of the top 5 best films ever made. It seems to me that one of the most baffling features of any dictatorship is immorality of those scoundrels who serve the ruler.
What kind of person should one be to take part in those mass murders? How on earth could a human being serve in Auschwitz, operating the gas chambers? What could justify his or her actions?
Of course, there is no sense in comparing Lukashenka to Hitler. Luckily, the president of Belarus is much milder. And even if he had ordered something really atrocious, I doubt that the army would have obeyed. But still, following the events of March, pondering over the violent dispersal of the rallies, I’m curious what made those young soldiers, riot policemen, KGB agents overreact, overdo their tasks? Well, I don’t think there was an order from somebody to brandish a gun in front of Siucyk’s forehead and tell him he would be executed. I can’t buy it there was an order to beat up all the arrestees in the buses, throw them on the floor, humiliate them, etc.
But even those who acted on the orders – how could one justify actions of judges who sentenced hundreds to detention, conducted trials like a joke without even a semblance of legality? How could one justify a learned professor flunking a student for his or her political stand? How could one forgive an official overseeing the major electoral fraud, bridling local opposition activists, and doing whatever “the center” orders? Is there any decency in these people?
Dictatorship is all about a test of each and every one of us – are we humans? Or are we just beasts, pets serving the Ubermensch that feeds us? Are we thinking just about today or do we envision ourselves in 10-30 years? Won’t we feel sorry for our actions if we behave like scum?
Now a bit about the sanctions from the EU. Yes, it is like a bad joke – 31 persons on the blacklist, while thousands of foreigners (according to some sources, more than 40 thousands) are not allowed to enter Belarus. Of course, it is hard to check the lists the EU officials must have received from the opposition. The lists must contain all the executors of the orders, maybe the enjoyers of their might, maybe just fearful creatures afraid to lose their jobs and keep on serving the dictator. It is also more than probable that the KGB has some discrediting information on every more or less significant official in the country and all it has to do is pull the strings. But anyway, these must be the people who violated the law and because of them Belarus is the European outsider for so many years. Lukashenka is still in power primarily because of them – the timorous, menial elites, the fawning officialdom. Corny as it gets, but if Belarus ever becomes a democracy, these people should undergo the process of lustration.
And they should make no mistake that they are invincible. As a left-wing satirist, Lolik Uskin, wrote in Nasa Niva, the mild sanctions of the EU came as a real surprise to those people who expected but were not included on the blacklist.