What the Russians Can Teach Us About Victimhood
Those residing outside the fervor of Moscow simply accepted dramatic political changes as they came, and were unsurprised that after the revolution, life was no better than it had been before.
The Russian word smirenie can best be translated into English as “humility,” “meekness,” or “submission,” but in the Russian context, the word means a great deal more: smirenie is a state of mind, the collective and persistent ideology of the Russian peasant class, serfs, which ultimately made life worth living. For it is from smirenie, the state of misery and of constantly being held down by forces more powerful than you, that one can find meaning, purpose, even pride. In The Slave Soul of Russia, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere poses that the endless suffering inflicted upon Russia has been sustained by way of smirenie and other masochistic tendencies. He writes: “A curious thing about smirenie is that one who achieves it is often proud of it, or at least not deprived of self-esteem because of it. One submits, yet one is not lowered in one’s eyes. On the contrary, one may be elevated, one may be narcissistically gratified.”
I would argue that there are significant parallels between the Russian concept of smirenie and the condition of the Palestinian Arabs after 1948. For from the Palestinian suffering, established by the “original sin” of Israel’s establishment, great purpose is born: a national identity and a utopian vision of the future — “from the river to the sea.” This state of mind should also be familiar to Jews, as it was our central organizing principle before the advent of Zionism.
Russian lexicographer Vladimir Dahl writes: “Smirenie is pleasing God, is enlightening to the mind, is a blessing to the home, is a comfort to the people. Smirenie is a girl’s necklace to a young man.” Linguist Anna Wierzbica continues: “Smirenie is serene acceptance of one’s fate, achieved through moral effort, through suffering...”
Clearly, there is a religious element present in this discussion, something which Nietzsche picked upon in observing nineteenth-century Europe. In Nietzsche’s view, the idea that suffering was holy, more worthy of God’s grace than power and/or happiness, was to be known as “slave morality,” (not unlike the title of Rancour-Laferriere's work: The Slave Soul of Russia), its opposite being “master morality.” Master morality, the natural order of things before the advent of Christianity, heralded violence, conquest, masculinity, and wealth as that which made a human being or a collective people “good.” Christianity was a revolution in human affairs in that henceforth, powerful kings and noblemen would bow to a sickly, crucified body, his most famous lines being “blessed be the meek,” and “blessed who weep now, for you shall soon laugh.”
But of course, Nietzsche wasn’t talking about the Christians in this analysis. He was talking about the Jews, who, in his view, had unleashed Christianity upon the world as “spiritual revenge” against the Roman Empire, who they could not defeat with swords, but with ideas from their own scripture. As far as I’m concerned, though the opinion remains controversial, Nietzsche was correct: the Jews of Europe were the torchbearers of “slave morality,” or what the Russians would call smirenie. By believing that their suffering was ordained by heaven, that their tortured status was a consequence of not being good enough Jews, the Jews could derive spiritual and political meaning from their submissiveness. Every pogrom was another layer in a cosmic catastrophe, one that could only be alleviated by stricter adherence to mitzvot.
Luckily, Zionism changed all that. The advent of political Zionism, which came long before the establishment of Israel, flipped on its head traditional Jewish theology and the smirenie that came with it. The leagues of fighters for Jewish self-defense that sprang into action after the Kishinev pogrom, their legacy being the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the various partisan rebellions during the Holocaust, and the outpouring of Jewish emigrants to Palestine, would have proved to Nietzsche that those who had for so long accepted the commands of “slave morality,” could eventually, especially with the onset of modernity, realize that in weakness, there was no morality at all.
Yet this seizing of self-determination is a tragic anathema among the Palestinians, a society that has been marinating in smirenie for the last century. Indeed, the behavior of the Palestinians over the decades is akin to a small child demanding a cookie, and upon being told that he must share the treat with another child, who has just as much right to the cookie as him, throws a magnificent temper tantrum, disrupting the entire grocery store with wails and protests, and ultimately decides that it is better not to have a cookie at all, but to wait until the other child gets diabetes and is no longer capable of eyeing the cookie jar, or until other children enter the store and beat the child to a pulp for his audacity of reaching into the jar.
The Palestinians have derived great meaning from this immaturity. They are given religious and political purpose, like Nietzsche spoke of. Their cosmic victimhood, smirenie, which is behind the bending of reality, such as misconstruing the term “Nakba” to denote a Holocaust at the hand of the Jews rather than a military failure on behalf of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, is also transnational: one cannot deny that there is an ecstasy in the screaming of college protestors who wave the Palestinian flag, the same ecstasy that Christians express when reveling in the image of their tormented and abused savior. The Palestinian flag elicits meaning simply because it is a symbol of forever victimhood that is intransigent in doing anything to help itself. It is morally pure.
Marquis de Custine, a French writer in the nineteenth-century, characterizes smirenie perfectly, noting: “Conforming to this social devotion, he [the typical Russian peasant] lives without joy, but not without pride; for pride is the moral element essential to life of the intelligent being. It takes every kind of form, even the form of humility — that religious modesty discovered by Christians.” Psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel supports the argument in more simple, easily digestible terms: “pride in suffering,” “ascetic pride,” the extreme form of which author Charles Sarnoff calls “masochistic braggadocio.”
There is another Russian term that goes along with smirenie, a different side of the same coin — “sud’ba,” which translates into English as fatalism, “the belief that events are predetermined and therefore inevitable.” Rancour-Laferriere characterizes sud’ba as “the true religion of Russian peasantry... the peasant rarely credited any event, especially a misfortune, to his volition. It was ‘God’s will,’ even where responsibility could be clearly laid at his own doorstep, e.g. when carelessness caused a fire or the death of an animal.” Historian Konstantin Kavelin writes in his 1882 polemic The Peasant Question: “The peasant may be happy, or sad, he may complain about his fate (sud’ba), or he may thank God for it, but he accepts good and evil without so much as a thought that one might be able to attract the former or fight against and defeat the latter. Everything in his life is given, pre-determined, pre-established.”
Whatever came to the Russian peasant, whether it be in the form of monarchic repression, crushing poverty, or miscellaneous revolutionary violence that terrorized the population en masse until the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, the belief that the suffering was “written in the cards” was enough of a justification to carry on another day. Only a minuscule proportion of the Russian population took part in the revolutionary affairs of 1917, that is, acting on the conviction that human action could make life better for the average worker. The vast majority of Russians, living in villages far away from the fervor of Moscow, simply accepted political changes as they came, and were unsurprised that after the revolution, life was no better than it was before. Indeed, years after the revolution, historian Ronald Higley observed that still the Russian rural peasants "would happily exhibit bumps on their forehead” raised through excess of zeal in bowing to their superiors. The more bruised and bloodied the forehead, the more content the peasant.
The concept of sud’ba is embedded deep within the Palestinian psyche. Hamas’s reign of terror in Gaza, combined with the Palestinian Authority’s kleptocratic corruption in the West Bank, produces a reality where the average citizen is resigned to the mindset that all life is suffering, until the dream of unraveling the State of Israel is achieved. The idea of “return” to pre-48 borders is indeed a weapon of repression by Palestinian leadership. So long as the population is convinced that return is coming, any day now, around the corner, a remarkably low standard of living is reinforced and accepted. Palestinian mothers and fathers do not dream of a better life for their children in Gaza and the West Bank under a flag of their own with an economy of their own. Their idea of a “better life” is only one where Israel does not exist, and any amount of needless grief, including martyrdom, the ritualistic sacrifice of family members to the fight of conquering the entire land, is not only necessary, but a net positive — a blessing.
Both smirenie and sud’ba are not confined to the Russians and the Palestinians. As explained earlier, they were also defining characteristics of the Jewish people before Zionism. The genius of Zionism was not just that it established a political homeland with military and diplomatic might, but that it transformed the nature of a people, shattering their millennia-old idea that suffering was a good thing and/or pre-ordained.
Yesterday, news broke that Norway, Ireland, and Spain had unilaterally recognized the independent State of Palestine. In the view of these morally narcissistic powers, granting statehood to an Arab-manufactured refugee population (ignoring the will of the Palestinians leaders who have made it quite clear throughout the decades that they would rather not have sovereignty if it means living next to sovereign Jews) is a step toward a two-state solution and an end to the conflict. But Norway, Ireland, and Spain are wrong, because for a population drowning in smirenie and sud’ba, the only way out of their predicament is to act in the interest of themselves, to recognize that the status-quo is not necessary, and that a brighter future is not coming by way of supernatural miracle or geopolitical climax brought about by foreign powers.
Contrary to popular belief, the Palestinians do practice the right of self-determination. They do have agency. Yet their refusal to acknowledge this remains the catalyst of violence, the most obvious reason for why our conflict continues.
If you're reading this from a pre-subscribed email rather than an Instagram or Twitter link, there is an error in need of correction: it was Ireland, rather than Sweden, which yesterday affirmed independent statehood for the Palestinians.