In our effort to understand the evolution of the external imperial difference today we should take into account that at any stage of its evolvement it was marked by the black legend logic, well-tested in the rivalry of the British and Spanish empires. In Russia the black legendism also flourishes today and no one has attempted to problematize it yet. The Janus-faced empire represents itself as good, spiritual, kind and fair as opposed to its Western and non-Western rivals. This is expressed in habitual Russian stigmatization of the double standards of the West. Yet these accusations are themselves grounded in morally dubious and logically flawed assumptions exempting Russia from the zone of responsibility for its own actions: if the West …show more content…
But does it really make sense to black-mail the international community with constant military threats? Then soon we will have the Hobbesian society of the war of all against all. Or maybe we already live in it. Would not it be better to abstain from claiming that everyone is equal in violating the laws, but rather act in a more mature and grown-up way and try to formulate such laws and global mechanisms of their implementation which would not infringe upon anyone’s rights? We have to find a global way of negotiating our common future on this planet in order to have any future at all. And global coloniality needs to be globally dismantled instead of trying to carve a better space in its perverse hierarchy or paying it back with equal violence and …show more content…
Thus Russia applies a technique of looking for Western faults while ignoring or shadowing its own deficiencies. This model could earlier be also reflected in more constructive forms as it existed as a mission of the improvement of various Western accomplishments due to the Russian/Soviet inability to offer its own break-throughs. As demonstrated by semiotician Yuri Lotman, Russian thinkers claimed a better understanding and implementation of the Greek doctrine than the original Orthodox Christianity (the Byzantine Empire acting at that point as an equivalent of the West). Later, the Russian interpreters of the French enlightenment once again claimed their better understanding of its main principles than the French. The Bolsheviks also borrowed their main tenets from Western socialist and communist doctrines and then altered them to suit their purposes and presented this alteration as an improvement (Lotman 2002,