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treacherous. These themes appear obsessionally in the discourse of the
"black-red" coalition in Russia: the war in Afghanistan was lost, national–
ist writer Aleksander Prokhanov claims, because of domestic traitors. As in
Weimar Germany, post-Leninist Russia is replete with pamphlets
denouncing the "stab in the back" that led to the Soviet empire's end. The
new mythologies are indeed syncretic: they combine a nostalgia for the
social osmosis of the communist state (the myth of equality) with the cel–
ebration of authoritarian, even fascist traditions.
The new mythologies are often demonologies: Jews and liberal intel–
lectuals are unified in the figure of the nihilist foes of the country's imperial
status. The October Revolution is presented as a German-Jewish plot
against Russia. These new mythologies, especially if they try to evoke cul–
tural predecessors, draw from the most unexpected sources: racist
ideologues of the nineteenth century, romantic poets, Christian fundamen–
talists from the West, and the whole subterranean tradition of European
conspiracy theories (anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, anti-Jesuit).
The new exclusionary mythologies execrate the difference and the
alterity. They impose a vertical, strictly masculine, indeed phallocratic
vision of the good society. Parliamentary governments are criticized for
their impotence, softness and failure to deal drastically with the enemies of
the nation . The persecution of sexual minorities is accompanied by a con–
descending, patriarchal treatment of women. Both Russian Nazis and the
members of the Pamiat society are proud of their black uniforms . They
enjoy hatred as a most exhilarating experience. Their sentences are short.
They don't need arguments. Complexity, as much as diversity, is their
enemy. The simpler their statements, the better.
For a Romanian, Hungarian or Slovak chauvinist, the Jew or the
Gypsy is by definition inferior. Even their economic success is an indica–
tion of some devious machinations. Hence the insistence on origins and
the obsession with purity. Hence the need for Russian chauvinists to
demonstrate that Lenin was of Jewish origin, and that his whole Politburo
was nothing but a disguised Sanhedrin. The whole twentieth century was
nothing but a battle between the occult force of Jewish (liberal) experts in
dissolution and the defenders of national, organic values. Any rational
questioning of the mythological premises of such views is immediately
denounced. Exclusionary mythologies operate on the semantic steriliza–
tion of discourse and the anesthetization of cri tical faculties. They are
obsessed with homogeneity, unity, and purity.
All communities have a need to indulge in fantasies of origin, but when
these references become monomaniacal, when the emphasis is entirely on
the uniqueness of the given group, its special role in the world, and conse–
quently, the foreign threats to its prosperi ty or very survival, nationalism
