I am being sent lately pointers to a twitter thread. It’s a lot of puerile outrage, but this claim by… – let’s call the author Dr. X, – caught my eye:
I will fight this person, their grandma, their descendents, and their ghost. Then I will build a time machine and fight them in the past and future. Errybody getting beat up
The person Dr. X wants to beat up is me. Тhey won’t be able to do that to my grandma, though. She died in summer of 1940, seemingly in АЛЖИР (which is Russian for Algeria, but has nothing to do with the country, – it’s the acronym for Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland), reportedly from the heart failure. We never knew for sure: all my dad was able to extract from the Soviet State, after she was posthumously ‘rehabilitated,’ was a short excerpt from the records, and the authorities used heart failure as a catch-all cause of death.
I never saw my grandma. We don’t know where in Kazakhstan her burial site is. We even don’t have a single photograph of her. When my grandmother was arrested my dad became an orphan at twelve, and had hard time keeping an archive. (I have a picture of my grandfather though. He was arrested a year before my grandmother was, and shot after three months of jail, the next day after his 15 minutes trial.)
I sort of understand Dr. X’s enthusiasm. You know, the self-reinforcing nature of a righteous clique, online invincibility, all that jazz. Hard not to whip yourself into a frenzy, whichever the pretext. Most of the folks in that vicinity of twitter are young-ish and not especially thoughtful.
But somehow, this notion haunts me, – of Dr. X imagining getting back in time, and becoming that guard kicking my grandma to catch up with the column of tired women marching to work… Or shouting insults as she lies dying on the dirty bunk in the dark barrack… That guard, I guess, would feel not unlike Dr. X: enthusiastic, full of rage against those enemies of the people, – doing the right thing.
I was kind of amazed by how many other members of that righteous community shared Dr. X’s enthusiasm. The list of likes is a view to behold. A full professor from Italy. A lady (who knows me personally) starting at UW Madison. An educator from New Mexico. So many different people liked that tweet! They also like math and animals. They study geometric topology and what not. And they certainly think of themselves as a compassionate bunch, fighting injustice and enemies of the people.
Just like the guards at the Akmolinsk Camp did.
Yeah, yeah, sure, I know your argument: this is twitter, the most performative space of all performative spaces. The kids (and professors) are just imagining violence, not engaging into it. (They are imagining it quite graphically, I must say.)
But still, but still. Just cannot get rid of the vision: Dr. X traveling back in time to become that guard…