--- John Bizwas <bizwas at lycos.com> wrote: Western romanticizing of the 'Chechnyan cause' notwithstanding, should we now pretend the Russian military didn't level Grozny and kill a hundred thousand people or that the knowledge of what happened there couldn't have any 'rational' ideational effect on people who weren't there but somehow felt affected and desired to take revenge? Let's wait to find out more about who actually carried out the Beslan massacre. Hmmm...what makes me think it would be more convenient for most people not to know?
Fugazy ---
Not meaning to quibble, and certainly a lot of people died in Chechnya, but the 100,000 figure is way out there. Nabi Abdullaev says 30,000, which seems much more realistic considering the population of Chechnya and the length of the war.
And the Chechen radicals don't interpret the destruction of Grozny in the way you do. This is Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, who is the main ideologue of the Chechen radicals (and was the subject of late Paul Khlebnikov's last and still-unavailable-in-English book), speaking on the subject of the destruction of Grozny:
No matter how blasphemous it may seem, I have to comment that the Russians, by embarking on their latest war, helped us to avoid the fate of being turned into a state and of having a totalitarian power established. Apart from anything else, by their zealous bombing campaigns and artillery barrages, they resolved a problem which the Chechens, in order to find their way back to the Truth, would sooner or later have had to resolve for themselves: the demolition of "their" capital city. Grozny, like any other city, was a hotbed of depravity and dissolute behaviour, of mixing and assimilation, and introduced the putrefying breath of civilisation. Grozny was the embryo, the foundation of a state in Chechenia, since a city is essentially the archteype of a state, a polis. Without the regulatory role of the state, neither the complex infrastructure of a city nor its socially divided, urbanised population alienated from natural law, can exist. It is cities, alienating people from one another and from the natural way of life, which faultlessly and uninterruptedly manufacture the biological raw material needed by the state: all these accumulations of people who have broken their blood ties and are living in an artificial environment. In historical terms, it is when kinship based relations are destroyed and with the appearance of cities, areas where economic blandishments rule, that the state is born with its "internal combustion engine", its economic dictates which underpin the dynamic of innovation and change. This is why spiritual and moral rebirth can go only in the opposite direction to urbanisation, away from the individualistic way of life to the communal.
Praise be to the Almighty, the destruction of Grozny restored to us our barbaric mindset, again increasing for Chechens the meaningfulness of the heritage of the Nokhchi people by helping to reinforce the traditional pillars of their being. By destroying Grozny Russia deprived herself of her most dangerous weapon against the Chechens: the "injections" of civilisation which persistently poisoned our communal ecology; a stronghold of consumerist culture, democratic temptations, and pathological individualism in the Chechen lands. The destruction of Grozny has opened up the prospect of a communal renaissance for the Chechens which will sweep away all the problems which civilisation brought us, ecological, social, moral, psychological, etc. The destruction of Grozny heralds the end of the dream of recreating the Kremlin's historical empire. The ruins of Grozny will become the grave of civilisation: it is only a matter of time. I do not doubt the day will come when Chechens will bring their children to the ruins of Grozny, as they might to a museum, to show them how close to moral savagery their ancestors lived, confined in stone cells and teeming around in concrete anthills.
http://www.noukhaev.com/books/eng/david.htm
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