Today is another day of heavy bombardment. A group of Catholic monarchists is attacking the pagan front for their alleged neo-Nazi views, the traditionalists are shooting back. With my Logitech mouse, I make a couple of scrolls down, and here I am on another battlefield, this time it’s between the liberals and paleoconservatives. Yet another scroll, and I am amidst the heavy fighting between the national democrats and the creoles.

Following Belarusian blogs through my Livejournal friends’ feed, I am subjected to a never-ending culture war between diverse socio-political groups and subcultures. Identities, worldviews clash nonstop, no ceasefire here.

And it’s normal. The more our society opens up the more discussions arise, the more battles will be fought on the virtual front. When our society opens up even more, the battleground is bound to move from the virtual sphere to the real world. It’s the Belarusian authoritarianism that makes this ongoing debate almost solely confined within the Worldwide Web.

These intellectual skirmishes are nothing alien to any country’s intellectual community. However, the Belarusian case is a bit more complicated since the Belarusian identity is underdeveloped and malformed. There are several identity projects vying between one another. Belarusian nativism (national-democratism), creole patriotism, litwinism, kryvian idea… The list can be continued. Each has historical arguments and claims to prevail over others.

In a way, what we see is a virtual culture war, or rather an indefinite number of wars, fought by the Belarusian bloggers. Most of them, as it seems, oppose the regime, but they have very different ideas what Belarus should be after the regime crumbles.

Once I have written about a Livejournal phenomenon in Belarus. Now the blogging frenzy has subsided a little giving way to social networking on sites like vkontakte.ru, odnoklassniki.ru, and Facebook. But there is no place both online and offline where you can see so much lively discussion between the intellectuals and random public. On Livejounal, you can find well-known names such as Aleksandr Feduta, Vitali Silitski, Lavon Volski, Vladimir Matskevich, Dzyanis Melyantsou and many others. And you can find a random guy from the block passionately arguing about the past, present, and future of his country.

Do you know that the Belarusian population of Livejournal is bigger than that of a mid-sized regional town? Oh, yeah, there are MANY of us out there. And we do like to argue. Flipping through my Livejournal friends’ feed is so much akin to following news from the trenches. Clinging to the radio, you even don’t lower your head every time you hear a burst of fire. In some cases, these fights are pretty bad. They can get personal and offensive. The intellectual feud is more subtle than some drunken brawl, of course. But well, in some cases, I guess, some would use their fists if they were in one room. By virtue of the virtual reality, pun intended, they have to resort to using their fingertips. These culture wars are ongoing. They are fun to follow. I think many of these folks would join their hands at some big post-election rally, but as soon as the regime was toppled, they’d go back to fighting. But then these culture wars would cross over to the real world. So be it as long as no one gets hurt.