[266] I.e. those working in a dialogue with the program running on a multimedia computer which generates a certain video stream, accompanying sound and in future — a stream of other artificial sensations of the imaginary game reality.
[267] It is known that substances with a drug-like effect are produced in the organism of a man who falls under the influence of rock-music. Therefore the slogan «Rock-music against drugs» is nonsense: rock-music is a drug itself.
Besides, by suppressing the psyche with short bars and jagged and phase-shifted rhythms, rock-music is capable of suppressing the inner co-ordination of the sensitive and intellectual activity rhythms for a certain time, thereby making the people dependant on it dumb and narrow-minded.
As shown by subsequent investigation, the 19-year old lad who shot dead 16 people at a school in Erfurt on April 26, 2002 (13 teachers, two schoolchildren and a policewoman who arrived at the site of the tragedy among the police unit) and after that shot himself, was brought up by a single mother who did not cope with his upbringing. As a result, he was expelled from school for missing classes and forging documents after he was left in the same form for the second year. He was a fan of computer «shooter» games and rock-music, and a song was found among his «music» records that contained the words like «kill your teacher with a shotgun». A person in that kind of moral and mental condition was yet a legal holder of a weapon and a member of a shooting club, which is evidence of the fact that it was not only him but also German state officials who had big problems with mental health and with conscience, especially taking into account that it is by far more than the first incident of the kind in Germany and the USA.
Scarcely more than a week after the disaster in Germany which was given a cult status by the mass media, especially online ones, all across Europe, on April 30th news came of a similar tragedy that occurred in a school on the territory of former Yugoslavia: a thirteen-year-old teenager shot down several teachers and himself.
Of course, in most cases there is no strict conditionality of a person’s behavior, connecting art and actions. But on the scale of society such dependency reflected in the behavior of a part of the people is revealed by means of statistics. But the people belonging to the I-centric individualist psychical type proceed from the absence of the strict dependency of actions on art in the general case and bluntly refuse to take in that statistics of social life, refuse to make it an object of state policy and the policy of public organizations. And this makes them nothing less than rascals.
This is one of the many circumstances leading to the question: is the artist responsible for the consequences his art has? Or is it the victims of his artistic work and their victims who are responsible for the consequences?
That is why, when M. Zhvanetsky in one of his stories called KGB agents «the fine arts scholars in civilian clothes» he was essentially right: fine art studies are one of the lines of state and social security. But it was known before M. Zhvanetsky.
[268] A. Solzhenitsin has not yet apologized for this calumny, which he so energetically disseminated.
[269] It is a very interesting book, by the way. Even nowadays it would be useful to republish it as a textbook for the faculties of history, sociology and law at universities. It speaks the truth, though not the whole truth, about the White sea — Baltic sea camp of the NKVD. The book reveals the principles on which the system of correctional institutions should ideally be based.
Those who disagree with this approach should know that if society has to have prisons, it must define the aims and principles of running them. And it should take care in practical everyday life that this system of penalty execution and correction operates in conformity to those aims and principles, which are originally determined by the power of social life conception adopted by the society.
[270] Is there someone who wouldn’t like to live in a society where it is safe to walk the streets of a large city at night, or stroll in a park alone or with a loved one without endangering oneself to an attack or abuse? Is there someone who wouldn’t like to live in a society where children are safe in the streets, at school (were there any schoolchildren and teachers killed in Soviet schools by their nutty armed fellow students?) and while driving in a bus, and where any adult will help a child? Is there someone who wouldn’t like to live in a society where a skilled doctor lends help in the nick of time and is interested in curing the patient, not in the customer’s wallet? — One may continue asking those questions relating to the comparison of the civil society’s reality and the world of «dreams» evoked by the works of socialist realism art. And it is the civil society of capitalism that fails to provide answers to those questions.
[271] This aspect can be revealed as a decrease in crime following the end of violence and devilry shown in movie theatres and on television, yet the film industry bosses will never let that happen: profit at any cost.
[272] Otherwise it only remains to assume that the campaign for unhappiness carried out by artistic means is one of the aims of US state policy.
[273] Besides, it taught people «manners» — the norms of politeness existing in the ruling classes of the Russian empire.
[274] One of the paradoxical features of the epoch and of artistic works, which are ascribed to «socialist realism» according to the above-mentioned principle of expressing the campaign for happiness, consists in that many of those works were created by talented unscrupulous time-servers who were no Bolsheviks and communists by their views, moral and actual behavior. This was demonstrated by the diaries of some of them published subsequently and by the previously unknown facts of their biographies disclosed by contemporaries, as well as their own creative activity in the time succeeding the era of Stalin’s bolshevism.
Among such time-servers were V. Vishnevsky — the author of «An Optimistic Tragedy», and A. Rybakov — the author of «The Dagger» and «The Children of Arbat» — an extremely shallow and therefore a slanderous book about that epoch.
One might ask: how should we treat the fact that a bolshevist state was creating its culture through the talent of those who were essentially its opponents? In our opinion one should treat that fact like one treats the ride to St.Petersburg on Christmas night that the devil gave to Vakula the blacksmith in one of the stories by Nikolai Gogoclass="underline" If one has to continue with one’s cause but has nothing to use but evil forces, with God’s help one may use even them. Maybe those who are being used will change their minds and become less evil than they used to be…
[275] Russia is the regional civilization of many peoples. It is different from other regional civilizations by being the only truly regional civilization, which has been developing for the largest part of its history within the borders of a state common for all of its peoples. Due to this circumstance patriotism in Russia can be manifested both as devotion to its civilizational building and in the sense widely used in the West as devotion to a state structure which has formed on a certain territory in the course of history. If Russian history is analyzed, it is clear that the common people of Russia have been more or less consciously engaged in civilizational building while the national “elites” were molding state structure to their own benefit. Due to such a division of labor by castes, as soon as the “elite” state system became on obstacle to civilizational building, the “elite” immediately declared the common people of Russian regional civilization unpatriotic in the sense of being devoted to the historically formed state system.
[276] Real patronymic is Antipovitch.
[277] The worst lie was the thesis: «Stalin is to be blamed for everything which happened in the USSR while he was head of state».