Critics Of America.
Even the best country in the world, if such one exists, at its worst is not a pretty sight. But those Americans who expose America at her worst, represent America at her best.
Twilight’s Last Gleaming.
Just as I’m looking back at my by now distant and almost improbable past with a mixture of incredulity and reverence that I would afford to an admirable work of fiction, so does my present view of America come in crashing collision with my view from the old times, when I was officially counted among the topmost Soviet experts on the United States.
In those days I saw my own Soviet nation and everything going on there with arrogant disapproval, as if in a magnifying mirror’s reflection, every tiny dirty pore of the grotesque face painfully visible, all amounting to some diseased, pock-marked aberration, while America from afar appeared so clean, so young, so beautiful, and so wholesome, in fact, almost perfect. Yes, America was the main adversary of the USSR, but wasn’t it a good competition, an exhilarating game of top notch sports, in which it was very sporting to feel a kind of genuine Nietzschean gallantry toward your noble enemy-rival? As if having such a perfect enemy would lift your own overall national standing and self-esteem.
(General Patton, as an undying symbol of America’s ill will toward the USSR? So what? After all, America was Russia’s adversary! There are many vicious words two boxers exchange before their match, and they do not pull punches during the match itself either... But such is the nature of any good competition: the worthiest of enemies make the best of friends!)
Some expert was I! But so were many of my distinguished expert friends, and even some older, presumably, seasoned colleagues. Everybody seemed to look across the ocean at the shining city on a hill as if through a pair of intensely hued rosy glasses. Everybody, that is, except for the staunchly anti-American establishment Jews, who saw a totally different picture of America, those selfish outremer bastards, who, together with the British, had effectively allowed the Holocaust, by delaying the opening of the Second Front in Europe, and were thus directly responsible for the death of six million Jews, none of whom would have been processed through those odious death camps, had the war ended in 1943, as it should have ended… (At the same time, these Russian Jews had a far more benign view of Soviet Russia, than any one of the skeptical us, as seen through the prism of the ethnically and racially unbigoted Soviet State, and… Stalin, their righteous gentile (sic!) who had saved almost two million Polish Jews from the Holocaust. In their eyes, it was the American gentile society, that was patently anti-Semitic, whereas totalitarianism of the Russian/Soviet brand defined “enemies of the people” only in relation to the principle of “state interest,” rather than along racial or ethnic lines and was therefore non-anti-Semitic in their view, which view certainly, at least in this “Jewish” aspect, still fully coincides with mine.)
(There were, of course, those so-called anti-establishment Jews, the dissidents and the refuseniks. None of those I had personally known, at least none of those who had political views on top of the dream of personal economic prosperity, were much different in their negative view of America’s role in the Jewish Question. I wonder how many of these sincere America-haters have settled in America since the early 1970’s in several waves of Jewish emigration?)
(It goes without saying that everything had to change after the cursed 1990’s, when America showed Russia the ugliest side of her imperial disposition. I am quite certain that, in the course of that wretched decade, all sincere Soviet admirers of America had turned into her bitterest haters and only those who intended to profit from the spoils of America’s cold war “victory” had continued to pretend loving her…)
But there was more to that slightly pro-American and anti-Soviet bias of mine, which now needs to be put in its proper perspective, something, which I was incapable of doing at the time.
My double bias was, perhaps, especially understandable as an overkill reaction to official propaganda. That glorious Soviet reality of ours was surely not as glorious as it was depicted in the stupid slogans, and, by an extension of the same logic, the blemishes of the American society and the “evil intentions” of the American government could not possibly be as bad as they were habitually depicted by our silly Soviet anti-American propaganda. Seeing the brainwashing machine going to the one extreme, it was only natural in resistance to go to the opposite extreme: the white was black, ergo the black had to be white!
Ironically, the standard official Soviet anti-American propaganda was not as far removed from reality as our rebellious reaction to it, but on the other hand, with all its doggedness and exaggeration, it was not nearly as discerning of the real defects of the American way of life, and of Washington’s foreign policies, as it should have been in the first place. Apparently, its manufacturers, working also from the outside of the reality they were describing, preferred general broad strokes, and were as insensitive to the actual shades of dark as was their intended quarry, the informed Soviet citizenry.
Today, looking at America from the inside, I am greatly more knowledgeable about this country than at any time in my previous life, when I was counted as a distinguished American expert, so, this is only proper that these days I have been driven out of the business. Politics is a phony business anyway, and it is probably too much afraid of the truth in any form, even when the truth would be making its own point much better.
So, other than vainly trying to affect the political process and the overall public understanding with the truth as I see it, which is, of course, inimical to any propaganda, thriving on professionally manufactured slogans and on an artificial man-made “reality” (which is much more manageable than the unruly truth and therefore indispensable to all propaganda-makers), all I can do is keep jotting down these notes under the wonderfully clever title Twilight’s Last Gleaming and, continuously working on them, eventually expand their volume to a respectable book-sized collection, hoping that eventually my work will indeed survive and in old Horace’s words “vitabit Libitinam,” if that is not too much to ask of Providence…
Even the best country in the world, if such one exists, at its worst is not a pretty sight. But those Americans who expose America at her worst, represent America at her best.
Twilight’s Last Gleaming.
Just as I’m looking back at my by now distant and almost improbable past with a mixture of incredulity and reverence that I would afford to an admirable work of fiction, so does my present view of America come in crashing collision with my view from the old times, when I was officially counted among the topmost Soviet experts on the United States.
In those days I saw my own Soviet nation and everything going on there with arrogant disapproval, as if in a magnifying mirror’s reflection, every tiny dirty pore of the grotesque face painfully visible, all amounting to some diseased, pock-marked aberration, while America from afar appeared so clean, so young, so beautiful, and so wholesome, in fact, almost perfect. Yes, America was the main adversary of the USSR, but wasn’t it a good competition, an exhilarating game of top notch sports, in which it was very sporting to feel a kind of genuine Nietzschean gallantry toward your noble enemy-rival? As if having such a perfect enemy would lift your own overall national standing and self-esteem.
(General Patton, as an undying symbol of America’s ill will toward the USSR? So what? After all, America was Russia’s adversary! There are many vicious words two boxers exchange before their match, and they do not pull punches during the match itself either... But such is the nature of any good competition: the worthiest of enemies make the best of friends!)
Some expert was I! But so were many of my distinguished expert friends, and even some older, presumably, seasoned colleagues. Everybody seemed to look across the ocean at the shining city on a hill as if through a pair of intensely hued rosy glasses. Everybody, that is, except for the staunchly anti-American establishment Jews, who saw a totally different picture of America, those selfish outremer bastards, who, together with the British, had effectively allowed the Holocaust, by delaying the opening of the Second Front in Europe, and were thus directly responsible for the death of six million Jews, none of whom would have been processed through those odious death camps, had the war ended in 1943, as it should have ended… (At the same time, these Russian Jews had a far more benign view of Soviet Russia, than any one of the skeptical us, as seen through the prism of the ethnically and racially unbigoted Soviet State, and… Stalin, their righteous gentile (sic!) who had saved almost two million Polish Jews from the Holocaust. In their eyes, it was the American gentile society, that was patently anti-Semitic, whereas totalitarianism of the Russian/Soviet brand defined “enemies of the people” only in relation to the principle of “state interest,” rather than along racial or ethnic lines and was therefore non-anti-Semitic in their view, which view certainly, at least in this “Jewish” aspect, still fully coincides with mine.)
(There were, of course, those so-called anti-establishment Jews, the dissidents and the refuseniks. None of those I had personally known, at least none of those who had political views on top of the dream of personal economic prosperity, were much different in their negative view of America’s role in the Jewish Question. I wonder how many of these sincere America-haters have settled in America since the early 1970’s in several waves of Jewish emigration?)
(It goes without saying that everything had to change after the cursed 1990’s, when America showed Russia the ugliest side of her imperial disposition. I am quite certain that, in the course of that wretched decade, all sincere Soviet admirers of America had turned into her bitterest haters and only those who intended to profit from the spoils of America’s cold war “victory” had continued to pretend loving her…)
But there was more to that slightly pro-American and anti-Soviet bias of mine, which now needs to be put in its proper perspective, something, which I was incapable of doing at the time.
My double bias was, perhaps, especially understandable as an overkill reaction to official propaganda. That glorious Soviet reality of ours was surely not as glorious as it was depicted in the stupid slogans, and, by an extension of the same logic, the blemishes of the American society and the “evil intentions” of the American government could not possibly be as bad as they were habitually depicted by our silly Soviet anti-American propaganda. Seeing the brainwashing machine going to the one extreme, it was only natural in resistance to go to the opposite extreme: the white was black, ergo the black had to be white!
Ironically, the standard official Soviet anti-American propaganda was not as far removed from reality as our rebellious reaction to it, but on the other hand, with all its doggedness and exaggeration, it was not nearly as discerning of the real defects of the American way of life, and of Washington’s foreign policies, as it should have been in the first place. Apparently, its manufacturers, working also from the outside of the reality they were describing, preferred general broad strokes, and were as insensitive to the actual shades of dark as was their intended quarry, the informed Soviet citizenry.
Today, looking at America from the inside, I am greatly more knowledgeable about this country than at any time in my previous life, when I was counted as a distinguished American expert, so, this is only proper that these days I have been driven out of the business. Politics is a phony business anyway, and it is probably too much afraid of the truth in any form, even when the truth would be making its own point much better.
So, other than vainly trying to affect the political process and the overall public understanding with the truth as I see it, which is, of course, inimical to any propaganda, thriving on professionally manufactured slogans and on an artificial man-made “reality” (which is much more manageable than the unruly truth and therefore indispensable to all propaganda-makers), all I can do is keep jotting down these notes under the wonderfully clever title Twilight’s Last Gleaming and, continuously working on them, eventually expand their volume to a respectable book-sized collection, hoping that eventually my work will indeed survive and in old Horace’s words “vitabit Libitinam,” if that is not too much to ask of Providence…
No comments:
Post a Comment