Two Videos of Russians Reacting to Tragedies Tell Us a Lot About Them
The moral decrepitude of modern Russia is potent and everywhere
People commenting on the videos (at the bottom of the article) couldn’t help but notice how out of touch the Russians making them and speaking in them seemed.
It was as if they were completely disconnected from not just the reality of the war but from their own feelings. The giggling captured how the average Russian deals with the evil for which their failing society is responsible.
In one video, a Russian jetfighter zooms across the sky near a beach resort in south Russia. The young man filming it comments calmly that the plane is descending. Suddenly, the plane makes an abrupt nosedive toward the sea and vanishes into the water. The pilot was seen evacuating, but because he was so close to the surface of the water, to begin with, he didn’t really go anywhere but up a bit and immediately down.
The young man filming becomes nearly hysterical. He wasn’t crying, though, or upset in any way but laughing giddily. He sounded almost donkey-like in his laugh. In the background, we can hear other people asking what happened. A little girl asks where the plane is, and the young man laughs, “Under the pilot,” who can be seen floating across the water. The pilot died, by the way. He became entangled in his parachute and drowned.
In another video, two women returning from their vacation in Crimea are giggling like hyenas. You can see they have had recent botox treatments done to their lips, eyes, and God knows what other parts of their bodies. The moment is so funny for them that they can barely speak.
“They couldn’t have waited just 30 more minutes before bombing the bridge — uncontrollable giggling — just 30 minutes.”
The girls were trying to cross the Crimean Bridge back from the occupied territory to Russia. A mother and father driving across the bridge with their 9-year-old daughter were killed in the strike, and these two lunatics were almost peeing themselves with laughter.
I know they weren’t laughing at the death of two of their fellow citizens. Just like that young man wasn’t laughing at the pilot’s death in the sea. What is so appalling, though, is how none of this sadness, tragedies, or horror taking place in Ukraine seems to have anything to do with the average Russia.
Nearly 200,000 of their own citizens have died fighting a war of genocide, and Russians, Zen-like, close their eyes to the horror by saying stuff like: I’m not political. Or, if pressed, “Have you seen any of this destruction with your own eyes?”
Or, they say, “Until it touches me personally, why should I really lose sleep over this?”
The reactions of Russians to these horrors are why these horrors and criminality happens. Monsters like Putin count on this reaction. Once the more active and socially conscious make themselves known, they either get arrested or leave the country, and then it returns to the morally decrepit. It returns to the lazy and cowardly. The country returns to the silent, stupid majority, and then the real Russia floats again to the surface of what quickly becomes a stagnant pond.
Russia is in its stagnant-pond mode. There is nothing to do in that country for anyone with a heart and soul. Many sadly have no choice but to be there because they don’t have the means to leave, and, as one friend asked me, “If I leave, who needs me there? I have no discernible skills, I am pregnant, and none of my material wealth can be brought with me.”
She is right. Millions like her are right. But tens of millions, unlike them, are okay with how Russia has become. They don’t care about the bloodshed and the nightmare their country unfolds like a giant map across the Ukrainian nation. These Russians, sadly the vast majority, are just ignorant people. They genuinely believe that the opposable thumbs make them somehow human.
And yet, the only thing they can do, and of very questionable value to this world, is make selfie videos in which they prove that they are more like wild, untamed beasts.
It's like they don't even have souls or something.