"Let Moscow burn, let all of Moscow burn": On the unbridled delight certain pro-war German social media commentators are wont to take in the deaths of Russian civilians

Last night, gunmen with incendiary devices attacked the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnagorsk, a Moscow suburb. The death toll stands at around 150 people as I write this, and it will likely rise further, as most of the dead were killed in a fire and a partial roof collapse, and some bodies probably have yet to be recovered. The FSB have arrested eleven people, including four attackers who fled the scene in a white car. Russian authorities have hinted at Ukrainian involvement, while Western sources claim the assault was carried out by Islamic terrorists. For what it’s worth, the Islamic State in Khorasan have claimed responsibility for the attack. Many theories are circulating, but it is too early for me to comment on the plausibility of any of them.

While the carnage was unfolding, the Ukraine boosters of German Twitter developed two equally uninformed if contradictory themes. The first was that the attack represented a false flag event orchestrated by Vladimir Putin “to boost mobilisation” and justify “more strikes on Ukraine’s civilian population.” This accords with what I propose to call the Eugyppius Law of Breaking News, which predicts that the first wave of popular commentary on any new geopolitical event will always include the thesis that it is in some sense not real. Simultaneously, other stalwart defenders of Western liberal democracy ventured to delight in the slaughter. I am not going to link to any of their statements, but I’ll quote a few to give you an idea. “Let Moscow burn, let all of Moscow burn,” said one prominent German Twitter user about a city with over 12 million residents. “May Moscow sink back into the filthy swamp from which it rose to pollute the world with its foul stench,” said another, smaller account. More moderate and therefore more numerous were sentiments that “Russia should also taste what it is like to live in fear,” because “the people there don’t give a shit about what their mass-murdering leader is doing in Ukraine.”

The black, sulphurous fumes emanating from the Atlanticist, more-weapons-for-Ukraine NAFO corners of Twitter never fail to surprise me. We’re not talking here about the natural emotions one can only expect in warfare, because Germany is not a direct party to any armed conflict. It’s additionally remarkable because the bloodthirsty Germans writing this stuff are not fringe lunatics, but staunch supporters of mainstream politics. Many of them have EU flags in their bios, and when they are not dancing on the graves of their imagined enemies, they often find time to express their passion for all that is liberal, peaceful and democratic. You could be forgiven for wondering if the strong pacifist currents of postwar German culture haven’t bottled up some very dark energies, which since the Russian invasion of Ukraine have finally found a socially acceptable release.

I noticed a similar phenomenon during my years as a university professor. Every school I taught at subjected its students to unending rhetoric about the importance of forming a diverse, inclusive and accepting community. All had to be welcome and none could be excluded. This thin facade of universal love and happiness would persist until some minor event provoked the next in a never-ending sequence of hateful campus freakouts. These could be inspired by almost anything – a Halloween costume considered guilty of cultural appropriation, racial graffiti scrawled on a bathroom stall, allegedly insensitive remarks by some professor. Whatever the trigger, all that acceptance and inclusivity would vanish in an instant, as its erstwhile ambassadors indulged in paroxysms of rage and even threats towards these newly available outsiders.

After a while, I realised that this behaviour was an epiphenomenon of the fetish for inclusion. The more self-satisfied virtuous delight you take in extending membership to everybody, the more emotionally necessary it becomes to identify some non-members somewhere. Traditionally, human societies drew clear lines between themselves and outsiders; inclusion and exclusion both had their place and they were both subject to clear rules. In liberal universalist systems that embrace all of humanity, however, exclusion happens sporadically and in uncontrolled ways, generally whenever the harmony and unanimity become unbearable. The tendency of nominally inclusive leftist movements to self-cannibalise in spontaneous purity spirals, the murderous rage that recent demonstrators “against the right” expressed towards phantom “Nazis”, the sudden and quite bizarre eruption of officially sanctioned hatred towards the unvaccinated in 2021, and finally the general popular receptiveness to heedless war-mongering as Ukrainian prospects fade all owe something to this phenomenon.

Late-stage, forward-thinking liberalism has at least one further unexpectedly radicalising quality. This arises from its ‘popular sovereignty’ model of politics, and the concomitant tendency of committed liberals to elide the distinction between state actions on the one hand and the disposition of the people on the other. Western liberals, when contemplating illiberal enemies, can assume one of two attitudes towards the people of these nations. In lower-stakes conflicts, like those arising from neoconservative campaigns to spread democracy, it may be possible to cast the people as the helpless captives of their evil dictatorial leaders. In this case, they are mere victims who require liberation. In higher-stakes conflicts like that in Ukraine, however, it becomes impossible to disentangle the people from the state. Ordinary Russian civilians, because they have failed to protest the war and overthrow their leaders, are thus all assigned some degree of complicity in the Ukraine war. This makes their deaths less regrettable at least, and an occasion for celebration at most.

The long peace that has reigned in Europe since 1945 only further encourages this unbridled bloodlust. We have no recent experience of war to temper the violent fantasies of our politicians and their popular supporters, and we also have precious little in the way of soldiers and arms to defend ourselves. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is probably still unlikely, but with every passing threat and provocation it becomes vastly more probable than it needs to be.