HISTORY AND PROPAGANDA: BUSH-41 AND THE THREE DRUNKS

“Rub-a-dub-dub,

Three men in a tub,

And who do you think they were?”

The history of events which hit Europe like a thunderbolt out of the blue sky nearly a quarter of a century ago in the year 1989, known as the year of miracles, have little to do with the propaganda version of them, which currently rules over the history books. The American President George HW Bush was apparently in a kind of panic, and tried to use his personal influence to slow down the process of radical transformation. Eastern European communist leaders were perplexed, and even the toughest opposition in their countries had no intention of going as far as they were being carried by the violent stream of change coming out of… the USSR! According to Arbatov, the cataclysmic chain of events was further precipitated in 1991 by three drunken sots sitting in a steam bath--- the leaders of Russia (Boris Yeltsin), Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk) and Belarus (Stanislav Shushkevich), who, after letting Eastern Europe go, now decided to break up the Soviet Union itself…

But was it up to them to decide? I think that Arbatov is disingenuous here: yes, there was a conspiracy all along, coming directly out of Moscow, but it was a different kind of conspiracy, which was put together by people of a much higher caliber than the said three drunks; and what it wanted to achieve was the collapse of the old world order itself, which would hurt Russia the most, in the short run, but ended up undermining the global power of the United States in the long run, restoring Russia’s power to an unprecedented height, far greater now than at the peak of the Cold War. A good analogy of this occurrence would be the other two Russian catastrophes of the twentieth century: in 1917 and in 1941, each lifting up the nation out of its dire misery onto a higher plane of “self-actualization.”

…History is not made by “three men in a tub.” So, “who do you think they were?” I say they were the same people who had ``previously plunged Russia into the Bolshevik Revolution; the same people who had stood behind the Starets Philotheus when he had prophesied Russia’s Third Rome Destiny.

(Regarding the Third Rome Doctrine, see my entry The Russian National Idea, posted on January 22, 2011.)

VAN CLIBURN IS DEAD…

The death of any human being is an event in itself. The death of a celebrity is even more so, on the public level. Van Cliburn was more than a celebrity. He was a symbol of an epoch. He was larger than life.

To get an important glimpse of his world-historical significance, read my entry Vanechka!, posted on this blog on March 19^th, 2011. For me, he was a personal thing, too. I heard him live four times, and met him once, all in 1958. He was one of the pegs connecting me to the memories of my past.

Rest in peace, good man. You’ve done well...

OPERATION UNTHINKABLE

Whether it was being planned as the last military operation of World War Two or as the first such operation of World War Three, very few people outside a rather narrow circle of historians and Churchillian buffs know the name of Operation Unthinkable and what it was all about. Those for whom it will become a revelation, will find it incredible, and so it is, although it is true, while the reader is advised not to take it too seriously.

“Operation Unthinkable” is not a metaphor for something else. It was a real code word for a real operation. Initially introduced as “a highly improbable event,” it was promptly rephrased as “a purely hypothetical contingency.” Its author was none other than Churchill himself, and it appears that coming up with this idea he was opposed by both the British and the Americans, with the sole exception of General Patton. But by the end of 1945 Patton was dead (as a result of a suspiciously freak accident), and Churchill was out of his job (temporarily and deliberately, as Stalin would say), and the truly “unthinkable,” and essentially nonsensical, operation did not go anywhere.

It starts with the following tirade in a letter to British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, written by Churchill (still the Prime Minister) in May 1945, with a no small touch of his customary literary flair:

“…Terrible things have happened. A tide of Russian domination is sweeping forward. After it is over (the war), the territories under Russian control will include the Baltic provinces (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), all of eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, a large part of Austria, the whole of Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria. This constitutes one of the most melancholy events in the history of Europe, and one to which there has been no parallel. It is to an early and speedy showdown and settlement with Russia that we must now turn our hopes.”

And now, to the essence of the Operation Unthinkable... Ostensibly worried about the might of the Soviet armies at the end of World War II, Churchill envisaged an apocalyptic scenario, in which the USSR entered into a strategic alliance with…Japan--- (Wow! The man really understood a thing or two about recent history and current affairs. Those who have not yet read my entry Yamamoto, published on this blog on February 19^th, 2011, are encouraged to read it, to understand what I mean) ---and, having overrun Eastern and Central Europe, continued with its takeover of Western Europe, on the road to world domination. With this contingency in mind, Churchill suggested that the United Kingdom and the United States together, and enlisting the military remains of Nazi Germany, stage a preemptive attack, or at least put up greatest active resistance to the prospective Soviet aggression, and recommended that the American atomic bomb be used as the new Alliance’s trump card against Comrade Stalin’s divisions. Churchill was obviously showing off his confidential knowledge of the American atomic program, but he somehow failed to realize that having discharged all his masculinity at Alamogordo and on Japan, Uncle Sam’s atomic arsenal could not replenished right away, to be menacingly waved at Russia.)

Some ultraconservatives have actually praised Churchill for his silly and hazardous idea, proclaiming him a prophet of sorts, who had envisaged the very worst-case scenarios of the cold war era, developed in earnest by NATO and other American allies. But before we resign ourselves to a rational analysis of this irrational plan, certain important things need to be factored into the picture. By the time of his conception of the Operation Unthinkable, he [Churchill] was already well aware of Stalin’s plan to blackmail him into political concessions with material of personal nature. He was also aware about the British security leaks from his office all the way to Stalin’s. In fact, historians know that Operation Unthinkable had indeed been leaked to Moscow, virtually, since day one of its existence on paper. Stalin obviously had no interest in rolling Soviet tanks over Western Europe, and no practical expectation of a continued overt relationship with Japan, soon to be occupied by the American troops, anyway. He was also apprised of the fact that, even though the United States was serious about the development and production of the atomic bomb, the existing amounts of enriched uranium and plutonium were insufficient for producing atomic weapons right away in a sufficient quantity, and he had little to fear from the American nuclear genie during this critical period before the Soviet Union would itself acquire a nuclear deterrent to Uncle Sam’s fright-fest. (My most pertinent entry Who Stole The A-Bomb will be posted soon.)

Having taken all of this into account, I am tempted to conclude that Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable was nothing more than his personal statement to Stalin, like so many people in an argument shout obscenities at the other, loud and feisty, but otherwise meaningless. Paraphrasing the proverb, for each big man so much littleness.

MAXIM LITVINOV AS STALIN’S JEWISH CARD

In my entry Stalin, FDR, And Harpo Marx in the Twilight section, I told the story of how Stalin was supposedly humiliated by FDR’s caricaturistic brainstorm of appointing the popular Jewish-American comedian Harpo Marx as a virtual opposite number to Stalin’s Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, equally Jewish. The joke had several subtleties in it, including the fact that Harpo and Litvinov even kind of looked alike, and that of course the name Marx was not accidental in this “equation,” either.

The question whether Stalin’s decision to appoint Litvinov as the USSR’s ‘Jewish face to the world’ was an oversight, or a deliberate ploy, is an important one. Stalin’s mistakes were extremely rare, particularly in all matters which required thoughtful deliberation. Very often in his political career what looked like a mistake at first would turn out into a hidden advantage. Like a good chess player, Stalin was always prepared to lure his opponents into a game of his own choosing, by a clever gambit where he would lose some now, in order to reap a richer harvest in the long run.

Let us remember that Moscow’s Jewish Card did n0t originate with Georgi Arbatov’s stunningly simple, yet devilishly ingenious dictum (which I have quoted and explored on several occasions already) that American Jews would feel much more at home with a Soviet Jew than with an American Gentile, and that this critical weakness could be well exploited by Moscow. Stalin, too, knew how to play the Jewish Card. In his mind the Soviet Socialist state was facing the world’s capitalist monolith (we are talking about 1930 when he already anticipated Hitler but saw the imminent Soviet-German confrontation as the end product of an international capitalist conspiracy), and, having associated capitalism with the Jews, he was ready to play his own Jewish card against them, as if anticipating the future Arbatov rationale.

In this line of thinking, Stalin would not mind that much being the butt of FDR’s joke, as he was obviously aware of the animus existing between FDR and the American Jewish community, made conspicuously explicit by FDR’s Inaugural Address on March 4^th, 1933. (See my entry FDR And The Villains Of The Great Depression, posted on this blog on June 18^th, 2011, as part of the composite entry War And Peace Of FDR.) It was good enough for Stalin that American Jews could not have liked FDR’s joke at their expense. At the same time, Stalin was counting on Maxim Litvinov, with his distinctive Yiddish features, arousing empathy among the American Jews, and if Harpo Marx got involved in the game, the more, the merrier…

When in 1939 Stalin entered an uneasy deal with Nazi Germany, postponing the inevitable war for as long as it could be postponed (about this, by all means, see my entry The Stalin-Hitler Pact, posted on February 18^th, 2011!), he put Litvinov out of sight, but then, in 1941, after the war with Germany had started, he sent him as Soviet Ambassador to the United States, dismissing him again in 1943, for a different reason: Litvinov’s abject failure to sweet-talk Washington into opening the Second Front in Europe.

ORMUZD AND AHRIMAN AS THE PHILOSOPHER’S HELPERS

(This Schopenhauerian entry is also an illustration to the Foreign Religions To The Rescue Of Philosophy entry in the Religion section [posted on January 15^th, 2011, as part of the mega-entry Religion and Culture]. It is one of my salient points that philosophers dabbling in foreign religions are getting themselves an excellent chance to overcome the challenge of the philosophy-religion conflict, stemming from the fact that religion hates the philosopher’s free spirit of inquiry, and philosophy rejects the dogmatic nature of religion by the very nature of its own spirit of doubt.)

Distancing himself from Christianity is what Schopenhauer does with a relish, transferring his inquisitive ethical lens on Oriental religions, be that Buddhism, Hinduism or, in this case, also Persian Zoroastrianism.

The following paragraph from Schopenhauer proves how much easier it is to operate with other peoples’ ethical concepts than with our own, although in this particular case, he has no intention to divorce himself entirely from his ungrateful philosophical burden of dissecting Christianity. But the Persian gods Ormuzd and Ahriman and the Hindu deity Indra are indispensable as facilitators of his philosophical argument.

“In the Christian system, the devil is a personage of greatest importance. God is described as absolutely good, wise and powerful; and, unless he were counterbalanced by the devil, it would be impossible to see where the innumerable and measureless evils, which predominate in the world, come from, if there was no devil to account for them. And since the Rationalists have done away with the devil, the damage inflicted on the other side has gone on growing, and it is becoming more and more palpable; as might have been foreseen, and was foreseen, by the orthodox. The fact is, you cannot take away one pillar from a building without endangering the rest of it. And this confirms the view, established on other grounds, that Jehovah is a transformation of Ormuzd, and Satan, of the Ahriman, who must be taken in connection with him. And Ormuzd himself is a transformation of Indra.” (Schopenhauer on Religion in Parerga und Paralipomena.)

In concluding this entry, an important point needs to be made. The well-recognized preoccupation of many great philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, with foreign religions, has in my view no religious significance whatsoever, in the sense of the philosopher’s religious preference. On the contrary, they see these foreign religions not even as religions demanding as such from their adherents blind faith and reverence, but only as philosophical tools, allowing them to investigate the exciting philosophical aspects of religion without the unwelcome admixture of cultism.

FROM THEOGNIS TO LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

While Schopenhauer’s Die Welt is a more or less conventional, although very beautifully written, work of academic philosophy, his Parerga follows the tradition of Montaigne in its structure, and as such it is close to my own heart, being the form, which I myself have chosen here. Published in 1851, when Schopenhauer was already sixty-three years old, Parerga und Paralipomena brought him an instant fame, which, unfairly, he had been denied all his life prior to then. The book (or books) is indeed a delight to read, the multitude of subjects and ideas dazzling and immensely gratifying.

In his Introduction, Schopenhauer teases the reader with his deliberate subjectivity:

“If my object in these pages were to present a complete scheme of counsels and maxims for the guidance of life, I should have to repeat the numerous rules — some of them excellent,— which have been drawn up by thinkers of all ages, from Theognis and Solomon to La Rochefoucauld; and, in so doing, I should inevitably entail upon the reader a vast amount of well-worn commonplace. But the fact is that in this work I am making still less claim to exhaust my subject than in any other of my writings.”

There is no question that my subjective admiration for Schopenhauer’s masterpiece, reinforced by my own choice of a very similar form in Nunc Dimittis, leaves no unexpected twists, or critical conclusions, to spice up this entry. But there are practical matters too, in which this Introduction is, if not explicitly helpful, then at least reassuring. It concerns both the scope and the organization of my own writing. Needless to say, in my work I also issue a number of counsels and maxims for the guidance of life, particularly, in my primary areas of expertise: history, politics, social studies, Americanology, Russology, etc. As far as being assisted by thinkers of all ages, Schopenhauer’s range from Theognis to La Rochefoucauld is expanded in my own version, especially, by the additions of Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Russell, and there is a resulting possibility that some of my expansive writing outside my specific areas of unique experience and expertise may, indeed, entail upon the reader a vast amount of well-worn commonplace, which I hope will eventually all disappear after future revisions. But to be sure, I make no claim to completeness, and as Schopenhauer proceeds to say in his Introduction: “An author who makes no claims to completeness must also, in a great measure, abandon any attempt at a systematic arrangement.” This is such sweet music to my senses! I’ve amply expressed my initial irritation with Organization & Structure already, throughout the so-named entries of my Thoughts & Sketches collection. Irritation eventually changed to resignation, to the inevitable lack of both, next to a desire to rationalize such a lack, but now it can safely be called a triumph of confirmation, considering that Schopenhauer ipse, in one short sentence above, rules in my favor! “For his double loss in this respect, the reader may console himself by reflecting that a complete and systematic treatment of such a subject as the guidance of life could hardly fail to be a wearisome business.” Fortunately, I am making no pretense at any sort of guidance. My thoughts are just what they are: my thoughts; beyond that reach I am however incompetent to offer anything like counseling at all. “I have simply put down those of my thoughts that appear to be worth communicating — thoughts, which, as far as I know, have not been uttered, or, at any rate, not just in the same form, by anybody else; so that my remarks may be taken as a supplement to what has been already achieved in the immense field.”

All of which raises a relevant Nietzschean question, to be answered with a relevant Schopenhauerian answer offered in his Parerga und Paralipomena: Am I really that wise, to undertake a labor of wisdom? To which Schopenhauer gives this both hilarious and profound definition of wisdom:

“A man is wise only on condition of living in a world full of fools.” To which I say: Amen, and wisely close this entry without any further comment.

SCHOPENHAUER JUNIOR AND SCHOPENHAUER SENIOR

We can, rather superficially and offhandedly, although usefully in practical terms, distinguish between the young Schopenhauer, in his twenties, the author of the world-famous Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and the much older man in his sixties, of the Parerga und Paralipomena fame, which brought him a latter-day recognition after decades of unfair neglect. (Who says that life was ever fair? But, in his case, at least some fairness was restored to him in his autumnal season.)

Both these works have great value, each in its own way. Die Welt is Schopenhauer’s claim to the elite club of professional philosophy, whereas Parerga is his sure way to the heart of every connoisseur of aphoristic expression and of everything what is good about “non-professional” philosophy (which is of course no less professional than the other kind, except that it is written with an exceptional literary skill, and does not in the least pretend to be esoteric, meant exclusively for the members of the professional club who spend their lives trying to understand each other, and themselves as well, but, privately speaking, never succeeding).

Naturally, Die Welt revolves around a central theme, which is the triumph of Will over Reason, in human psyche, and it is therefore easier to summarize, whereas the multiplicity of themes in the Parerga makes it virtually impossible to convey even in the faintest outline. One cannot, however, overlook the multiplicity of sub-themes in Die Welt, which are interwoven into the fabric of Schopenhauer Junior’s magnum opus, among which we find priceless thoughts on aesthetics, and, of course, the monumental assertion that music represents Wille an-Sich.

Criticizing Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer denies their optimistic assertion that human morality can be at all influenced either by reason or by social conventions. He maintains that man’s chief motivation is Wille zum Leben, which is the dominant driving force of man’s nature, hence, his pessimistic outlook, as he sees that only a superior philosophical mind can find enough strength within itself to renounce, or at least to resist the pressures of the Will. His ethics emphasize the positive value of compassion whereas man’s inherent malice and egoism are the negative forces, supporting the Will and working against man’s better instincts.

Bertrand Russell correctly notices that Schopenhauer’s philosophical edifice is an adaptation of Kant’s, yet Kant had effectively played down his distinctive Ding an-Sich, while Fichte and Hegel had eliminated it altogether. In the presence of such a mighty consensus that the Ding an-Sich was an inconvenient philosophical rudiment, Schopenhauer bravely restored its legitimacy, but found it where Kant never even looked, namely in the Will. Thus, returning to Kant’s old terminology, invested with a brand-new meaning, the Body is the appearance, of which Will is the reality.

What is the good life, then, the life of a sage? It is the life of diminishing the quantity of evil in his self by weakening his will. However, here comes the most pessimistic part of his philosophy. As long as he lives, the will cannot be completely extinguished, because it is the reality of his physical existence. Therefore, the sage’s ultimate goal is not a better life, but an escape from life into non-existence, which is represented by the Indian religions as Re-absorption in Brahma of the Hindus or the Nirvana of the Buddhists.

The essential pessimism of “Schopenhauer Junior” does not go away, but acquires an even greater finality and resignation in “Schopenhauer Senior.” Yet, none of his works is really depressing, but on the contrary, the Parerga und Paralipomena are sheer delight. (Russell quite correctly points to a discrepancy between Schopenhauer’s glum theory and his very different real-life practice, but he fails to make the conclusion to the effect that his theory is not a prescription for life, which he himself hypocritically does not follow, but only a contemplation on life!) He never seems to impose his gloomy view on the reader, but offers it as an alternative outlook, whose vista-broadening possibilities, in fact, constitute the positive, optimistic side of his teaching, unless we should take Byron too narrowly, and denounce any expansion of our knowledge as a curse, in: “Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not that of life.”

SCHOPENHAUER AND HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

I interrupt my ongoing sequence of entries, to commemorate the 225^th anniversary of the birth of the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (22^nd February 1788 – 21^st September 1860). This is the opening entry of my Schopenhauer series. Three more entries are to follow.

Schopenhauer’s lofty place in history, strangely enough, has been disputed. In his Introduction to the 1928 American edition of Die Welt, the American philosopher-scholar Professor Irwin Edman (1896-1954) calls him, rather patronizingly and unpleasantly, “one of the very great second-raters in the history of European thought.” Bertrand Russell, although considerably less unpleasantly, attributes a certain “shallowness and inconsistency” to his philosophy (name me one great philosopher who can be called consistent through and through!), but redeems himself, however, by consistently putting Schopenhauer’s name among the greatest.

Every Russian, who is spiritually a Russian, ranks Schopenhauer among the very greatest and reveres him as Nietzsche’s direct precursor. Nietzsche himself gives him the highest distinction: “Schopenhauer is the last German to be really reckoned with. He is not a mere local or national phenomenon, but a European event, like Goethe, Hegel, and Heine.” (Götzen-Dämmerung: Skirmishes #21.) Needless to say, Schopenhauer is among the most quoted persons throughout Nietzsche’s works, and he is also the subject of his long essay Schopenhauer as Educator.

Some things said about Schopenhauer by Russell in his History of Western philosophy deserve a mention, and here are a couple of important excerpts.---

“Schopenhauer is in many ways peculiar among philosophers. He is a pessimist, whereas almost all others are in some sense optimists. He is not fully academic, like Kant and Hegel , nor yet completely outside the academic tradition.” (He certainly writes much better than Kant and Hegel, and if good writing is a mark of academic outsiders, more power to these, then!) “He dislikes Christianity, preferring the religions of India, both Hinduism and Buddhism. He is a man of wide culture, quite as much interested in art as in ethics.” (In Russia, such is the mark of the Intelligent. Art is an essential part of the Russian intellectual and spiritual outlook.) “He is unusually free from nationalism, and as much at home with English and French writers as with those of his own country.” (On numerous occasions I have mentioned the peculiar Russian eclecticism, which, however, should not be mistaken for a lack of nationalism, on the contrary, Russia sees all the best in Western Culture as her own, and sees herself as the repository of the best.) “His appeal has always been less to professional philosophers…” (who are they, I wonder, after Nietzsche, who was of course, a great admirer of Schopenhauer!) “…than to artistic and literary people in search of a philosophy, which they could believe. He began the emphasis on Will, which is characteristic of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy; but for him Will, though metaphysically fundamental, is ethically evil,-- an opposition only possible for a pessimist.” (Curiously, Nikolai Gumilev counts “renunciation of the Will for the sake of contemplation” as one of Schopenhauer’s most admirable achievements!) “He acknowledges three sources of his philosophy-- Kant, Plato and the Upanishads, but I do not think that he owes as much to Plato as he thinks he does. His outlook has a certain temperamental affinity with that of the Hellenistic age; it is tired and valetudinarian, valuing peace more than victory, and quietism more than attempts at reform, which he regards as futile.”

“…Historically, two things are important about Schopenhauer: his pessimism, and his doctrine that Will is superior to knowledge.” (Not in the moral, but in the physical aspect only.) “His pessimism made it possible for men to take to philosophy without having to persuade themselves that evil can be explained away, and in this way as an antidote it was useful. More important than pessimism was the doctrine of the primacy of the will. It is obvious that this doctrine has no logical connection with pessimism, and those who held it after Schopenhauer frequently found in it a basis for optimism. In one form or another, the doctrine that Will is paramount has been held by many modern philosophers, notably by Nietzsche, Bergson, James, and Dewey. It has, moreover, acquired a vogue outside the circles of professional philosophers.” (But certainly not to the exclusion of the “professionals”! If non-A has a certain quality, it does not follow that A, out of spite or out of something, does not possess it.) “And in proportion as Will has gone up in the scale, knowledge has gone down. This is, I think, the most notable change which has come over the temper of philosophy in our age. It was prepared by Rousseau and Kant, but it was first proclaimed, in its purity, by Schopenhauer. And for this reason, in spite of inconsistency and a certain shallowness, his philosophy has considerable importance as a stage in historical development.”

It is thus obvious now, even from Russell’s rather reserved assessment, that Schopenhauer was a trailblazer of the first magnitude, and, as such, he belongs to philosophy’s crème de la crème, no matter what anybody might say about his depth or shallowness, consistency or inconsistency, and my personal partiality for him has nothing to do with this objective assessment of his historical legacy.

KALININ: MORON, MONSTER, GENIUS, SAINT -- PART II

This is Part II of my two-part Kalinin entry. Part I was published yesterday. The following are the Kalinin-related excerpts from my father’s 2006 book Conversations About Stalin, co-authored with his interviewer Ekaterina Glushik. The book is in Russian. All translations into English are mine. Artem’s quotes are given in blue color; my comments are in automatic color.

…Stalin was a good pool player. Once he invited Kalinin to play pool at his dacha, and cleaned his clock. Kalinin pretended to be furious: “A decent host ought to have honored his guest by losing the game to him, and look what you have done! What kind of uncouth creature are you anyway?” (Unlike some other stories of this nature, I have no reason to doubt this one, which rings authentic to me from everything I know. Such humor was common in Stalin’s company, as Stalin always encouraged it, and only some obsequious lackeys of his entourage, whom Stalin despised, never trusted, and eventually repressed, would never engage in such exchanges. It follows, therefore, that Kalinin was not an obsequious lackey, as often depicted.)

Stalin loved and respected Kalinin, who was a peculiar man and a true original. And besides, he was a metal turner of the highest caliber, working not on straight lines only but on all curved configurations: the hardest job in the metal turning profession. And Stalin respected him not just for his dedication and sharp mind, but also for his attainment of such a high level of worker’s skill. (This is true, but once again it shows Kalinin as a skilled worker, and not as a peasant.) He was also a big specialist in peasant affairs. (But this is already a disingenuous nod to Kalinin’s official Soviet legend. Now see how Artem will next try to substantiate his platitude not from personal experience, and not even from the experience of his friends and comrades, but in generalities, quite uncharacteristic of his usual style of memoir.) Peasants used to say that during harvest time he would take a scythe and start working with the others, like a natural-born reaper. (In the last sentence my father is by no means making something up. He is simply repeating an official Soviet legend, created to promote Kalinin’s connection to Soviet peasantry. Nor is the credibility of his narrative compromised here: he is clearly sourcing this story, but this time it is coming from a source of rather dubious credibility: the official Soviet agitprop.)

Now, here is another Kalinin story, this time from Artem’s personal experience, and I am convinced that it is quite true and practically unembellished, as this is not one of those “obligatory cases” where my father feels compelled to alter history for public consumption, ad majorem Russiae gloriam. The story is taken from his interview to the Express Gazette, as always in my translation.

The Kremlin had one barbershop for all. Once-- I was just a boy then-- I was waiting for my turn to have my haircut. Suddenly Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin comes in. My turn happened to be next and I offered him to go in front of me. And he suddenly tells me: “No, one must not do it. It’s your turn now and so you go first. Do we have a law on the books anywhere, which says that Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin must be served ahead of the line at the barbershop? No, we don’t, and I know it because I write them and sign them. So, take your turn now, and I will wait for mine.”

For the benefit of those eager to dismiss this story as sugary and disingenuous hagiography (after all, Artem was Comrade Stalin’s son, and Kalinin certainly knew that), I’ll note that deviousness was not in Kalinin’s nature. From what I heard about him from my parents and from other people who personally knew him, he would have done exactly the same thing for someone who was not Stalin’s son, simply out of a general sense of fairness. On the other hand, I know of quite a few men and women at the Kremlin, the obsequious lackeys, I spoke of earlier, who were plotting day and night how to keep themselves in Stalin’s good graces, but would never see anything wrong in taking a little boy’s turn at the barbershop.

KALININ: MORON, MONSTER, GENIUS, SAINT -- PART I

(“Moron, Monster, Genius, Saint” is a jocular allusion to John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This entry obviously comes out of my Russian/Soviet history subsection, alongside many already posted entries. See, for instance, my postings of February/March 2011.)

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (1875-1946) was a distinguished Soviet statesman, nominal head of state from 1919 until his natural death in 1946. Russia’s westernmost outpost, the former German city of Königsberg, was annexed to the USSR after World War II, and renamed Kaliningrad in his honor.

Habitually depicted as an ignorant fool, picked as a compliant stooge for the post of President of the USSR, he is also described by some post-Soviet re-discoverers of history as an insatiable sexual predator, with one dark allegation of a mysterious disappearance of his mistress, later found dead. It is a fact, however, that his wife separated from him at least twice (which may, or may not, have been linked to her alleged espousal of free love), and when in 1938 she was arrested and sent to a prison camp (from which she would be released shortly before Kalinin’s death in 1946), Kalinin did not seem to protest too much…

That was one side of the picture, the ugly side. There is another side, too, of course. It shows Kalinin as an unrivaled genius in his work, and as a very nice and kind man, during one of the roughest times in Russia’s history. Need I tell the reader that my father Artem promoted this other side, dismissing the former one as a vicious calumny?

But as for myself, I will prefer to start with what I see as a peculiar irony. Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was of peasant birth, but instead of inheriting the peasant gene, sending him into the fields to plough, to sow and to reap, he was anxious to get away from his village and village work, to the city, where he learned the trade of metalwork and was by all accounts a master turner of the greatest level of skill. Thus, he could rightfully call himself a worker, yet he was always called a “peasant” by those same people who hailed the worker as the prime mover of the Proletarian Revolution, but denigrated the Russian peasant as a second-class citizen. Recommending him for the post equivalent to President of Soviet Russia, in 1919, Lenin had the following to say about Comrade Kalinin: “This is a Comrade who is counting twenty years of Party work to his credit; he is himself a peasant from the Tver Region, who has the closest connection to peasant economy...”

Why was he billed as a lowly peasant, even by Lenin himself, when all along he had repudiated his peasant roots and had chosen to be a worker, and to substantiate his claim, his worker’s skills were, indeed, second to none, and became legendary among his comrades? To my knowledge, this legitimate question has never been asked by historians, yet it certainly needs to be asked, as the paradox here is quite obvious.

The most likely answer is that, although extolling the supremacy of the blue-collar worker, the new Soviet power tacitly recognized the national core of Mother Russia, and her intimate and unbreakable connection to the Russian soil. That connection could hardly be expressed through the internationalized symbol of the industrial worker, but it was veritably crystallized in the Russian peasant. Therefore, contrary to its revolutionary Marxist proletarian-rich rhetoric, the new Soviet order sorely needed to find a way to re-emphasize that connection to the peasant, and comically assigned the epitome of a determined defector from peasanthood for that indispensable role. New Russia’s President simply had to be a man of the soil, the all-Russian Village Starosta, whether Comrade Kalinin the master turner liked it or not…

Such is my answer, which is presented here in lieu of a personal opinion of Kalinin, which I do not have, as my “objective” knowledge of him is virtually non-existent. I shall not repeat here the rather bland official tribute to him from the erstwhile Soviet sources, nor shall I dignify with my further attention the indignities attributed to him by old Soviet rumors or new post-Soviet gossip which has little or no value to monumental history. But in Part II of this entry, to be posted tomorrow, I shall be quoting, and commenting on, my father’s memories and opinion of Kalinin, from his 2006 book Conversations About Stalin, co-authored with his interviewer Ekaterina Glushik.

 

UNITED NATIONS, DIVIDED NATIONS

How does the United Nations fare among the multitude of civil war-torn disintegrating nations, which are supposedly to be protected by the great Organization, as their protection is one of her most solemn duties?

As we can see only too well, the United Nations is helpless, and has been forced to admit it against the better judgment of projecting a positive message of hope. Even I myself, a staunch champion of the UN no matter what, and a former UN official, have to admit that the good Organization has become a pathetic caricature of itself.

Since its inception, and as stipulated in the United Nations Charter, there are sufficient mechanisms within its stated power to quell local conflicts and civil wars, as long as there exists a mutual consent among the Great Powers of the Security Council. Here is the problem, though. There is no consensus among the rulers of the planet, as they are themselves caught at cross purposes. The United States is in pursuit of her global hegemony dream, and one of the perceived tools of achieving such a hegemony is to sow discord among all nations and within all nations that are possibly standing in her way. Hence, it has become the actual policy of the US to divide these nations, and potentially all nations, friends and foes alike, as in their disunity lies the key to the policy’s success. This is exactly what we are witnessing today, especially in and around the Middle East, where the center of gravity has apparently shifted to, on account of Israel.

Accordingly, the United Nations has become a bitterly Divided Nations, both within and among themselves, and this is what the newest “world order” has come to…

What does Europe have to say about this? Nothing, as Europe has been too busy lately, attending to the big bad problem of the economic and financial crisis, with nearly half of the EC going under and threatening an imminent meltdown. Let me remind the reader that the origin of Europe’s present economic problems lies across the ocean, which fact the Europeans had quickly understood and complained about at first, before the “Divided Nations” curse struck them with a vengeance…

Now, what is the role of Russia in all this? I think that the Kremlin secretly, and not so secretly, relishes the plight the world has found itself in because of the deliberate American policy. Moscow has a sharp sense of the long-term effect of the present ugliness, being an accomplished chess player on the world stage. Surely, the Russian leadership believes, not without grounds for it, that everything going on, no matter its outcome, works in Russia’s interest, so why interfere with the enemy destroying himself? as Napoleon wisely said not too long ago, by the Russian clock standards.

I cannot say that I like what the Russians are doing, but I do not know what constructive moves they could have made otherwise, in the face of the unconstructive Washington policy, except to manipulate the situation and to take maximum advantage of the problems of everybody else concerned…

DOES THE WORLD NEED A LEADER?

Our earlier entry (namely, Leader Principle, published on this blog on November 26^th, 2011) raised the subject of America’s belief in the Leader Principle, and it goes without saying that one must indeed believe in this principle, in order to declare oneself the leader of the world. Honestly, it seems almost inevitable that, should there be a vote among the nations as to which of them is to be declared the leader, America will garner more votes than anybody else on the rather questionable but understandable assumption that the leader is the one who pays for the party, and the richest man at the table must therefore get the wallet vote. I am sure however that this question of leadership will never be taken to the vote, and there is a good question which must be raised in this connection: does the world need a leader-nation at all?

My judgment is that even to suggest that the world can have a leader is utterly delusional. Most nations are too proud to accept the role of a follower, especially after the stabilizing principle of bipolarity has been so rudely undermined. I also suggest that any nation, without exception, claiming for herself the mantle of the leader will immediately antagonize the rest of the world, regardless of her objective merits.

Thus it is ridiculous to discuss whether the world needs a leader, as clearly the world just cannot have one, that is, one recognized by all, which is the only meaningful way to have a world leader.

A much better and infinitely more practical solution would be to energize the existing international organizations, particularly the United Nations, where the strong powers will naturally play stronger roles than the weak ones, but where the presence of their strong competitors will provide the necessary balance and thus become acceptable to those who will never be able to pass the leadership test by themselves.

Long live the United Nations, and may her detractors be hoisted with their own petards!

LIBERATORS OR OCCUPIERS?

(On the one hand, this is obviously a dated entry, but, on the other hand, it does raise certain issues of lasting importance.)

After so many years of the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the question that ought to have been asked a long time ago is waiting to be asked with a no less burning urgency.--- What is the difference between liberators and occupiers?

Late in his life, during the second and last exile to Saint Helena, Napoleon was still marveling over the fact of his fatal miscalculation of Russian patriotism, when, at the start of his disastrous Russian campaign, he was very much counting on the “natural” desire of those millions of Russian serfs to be liberated from the yoke of serfdom, only to find out that these wretched peasants flatly rejected his offer of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and zealously supported their Russian slave masters in defeating their generous liberators. That event happened two centuries ago, and this historical mistake of the “greatest Frenchman who ever lived” was supposed to become a textbook illustration of the “good or bad, this is still my country” response of all occupied nations to foreign occupation.

A century later, during the World War I invasion of Russia by the Entente forces, allegedly, to punish the Bolsheviks for their “separate peace” with Germany and to support the White armies who had been fighting the Bolshevik usurpers of power at that time, many old Tsarist generals of the White movement in the areas of the Entente incursion were grudgingly shifting their allegiance to the only Russian government in existence at the time: that of the Bolsheviks! Scoundrels and usurpers all, but at least they were not some opportunistic foreigners! And so, that ill-advised and clueless foreign invasion was to doom the rest of the White resistance to Bolshevism, thus assuring Lenin of a “surprise” victory.

Still a quarter of a century after that Hitler at least made little pretense of liberating anyone, but his fate was the same, going the way of all occupiers.

Yet, twenty years after Hitler was Vietnam, and yet another forty years later, no lessons learned. The great American superpower was now stuck in Iraq, with no prospect other than an ignominious retreat-in-defeat in sight. If there is any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam it must be that same underestimation of the resilience of native patriotism which, ironically and oddly, seems so… foreign to America that one simple question keeps hanging on without an answer: “Had the situation been reversed, and some foreign occupying force had overrun the United States for whatever good reason wouldn’t it have been natural for all good men of the American Union to join the Resistance?” I bet had a strong foreign power invaded the Southern American States before or during the American Civil War, under the honorable pretext of emancipating the slaves, the North and the South would have stood united against such an aggression, leaving their deep domestic dispute over slavery aside, for the moment.

Alas, the American history of national freedom from foreign occupation is both a blessing and a curse, the latter by virtue of this nation’s glaring ignorance of what it truly means to be occupied by a foreign power, be that an aggressive intruder, or an imperialist benefactor of the world. Apparently, there is no wisdom in theorizing without a direct personal historical experience, and such life experience is ostensibly lacking in this wonderful, but terribly spoiled brat of a nation.

By the same measure, America fails to understand the simple truth that the so-called New Europe does not have a congenital hatred for the Russians on the one hand, and an eternal and inextinguishable love for the United States on the other. It is just the fact that for quite a while, in some instances dating from the end of World War II, in others, such as of Poland, much-much longer, these nations had found themselves under the Russian/Soviet occupation, which fact they had naturally resented, and now, regaining independence, it will take another while for the inertia of that old resentment to wear off, but that time, sooner or later, must surely come, accelerated, in a number of cases, by the powerful draw of their historical pan-Slavism, which term with its interesting implications, is not too familiar, I am afraid, to the wishful thinkers of the new Pax Americana.

Come to think of it, some of the Russophobic tendencies, on the part of a few New European governments, are more likely to be caused by their eagerness to please Washington, singing, to the American politicians, the sweet songs, which they are presumably so anxious to hear, in exchange for a couple of extra dollars. It should come as no surprise, however (although I have a feeling that this will strike them like a thunderbolt), that a few years down the road the American intensive presence in the nations of New Europe will, in itself, begin to be regarded as an occupation, and the talking heads of inside-the-beltway may then start scratching their heads and talking about the black ingratitude of the New Europeans toward their generous benefactors, after so much good having been done them…

Live and learn? Perhaps, but even more likely, live and never learn! The uniquely kind historical experience of the United States has made this nation incapable of understanding how it feels to be somebody else.

DOG EAT SELF

First, a general philosophical riddle, courtesy of Nietzsche’s Jenseits (76):

“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” Nietzsche’s aphorism exposes his generally negative attitude toward the Ascetic Ideal, with its self-torture: the zealot-saint killing his Dionysian self. It follows easily that self-abuse is a form of war whenever ‘normal’ war is for any reason beyond the abuser’s reach. Does it mean that the will for [aggressive!] war is a form of religious zeal? To those who will dispute such a suggestion, we might elucidate that any zeal is a form of religion, not a particular religion, mind you, but proselytizing religion as such.

Freedom to kill, characteristic of war, is a very revealing sort of freedom. It goes hand in hand with the two remarkable Hobbesian ideas: of war being the natural state of man, and of liberty as freedom from restraint. Thus, war is the ultimate expression of freedom in the Hobbesian man. Which is why men ought to be organized in commonwealths, according to Hobbes, to put their freedoms in restraints.

The shocking conclusion from this is that the idea of freedom itself may need to be put under restraint. The notion that “I am free” is a very dangerous notion when promoted with unrestrained abandon. “I am free” is translated in Dostoyevsky as “Everything is allowed,” hence we have Raskolnikov on the smaller scale, and the Demons, on a somewhat larger scale. The celebrated Russian nihilists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, were men and women who cried “Freedom! Freedom!” Stalin put severe restraints on Russia’s revolutionary freedom in order to save the freedom-intoxicated Russians from themselves, channeling their bellicosity instead into a defensive zeal in preparation for the great war with Nazi Germany.

...Now returning to the Nietzsche passage above, let us consider this. Granted that the blond barbarian beast is a warlike creature, under what circumstances does he happen to set upon himself? Would not this become an immediate contradiction? Such self-destruction of the healthiest type of man… to add insult to injury, of the fictional man, who has every right to be perfect!... But, perhaps, the forces of nature, such as the warring urge, are much stronger than any ideal, and have been destined to overpower man’s desire for peace?

How do all these things stand together in the American context?

I am sure that if we put the recurrently exhibited American bellicosity under the lens of this argument, we may see things which we have not seen before, and get enlightened with many new insights. So here finally comes the big reason why I am putting this entry in the Twilight section. Here is our neat riddle for the New American Century:

Granted that, even if we like to grumble about the evils of today, as opposed to the good old yesterday, this world of ours has always been a dog eat dog place. Assuming, only hypothetically, of course, that, after all dogs but one have been eaten, a one-dog world emerges,--- does it mean then that the new order of the day is Dog Eat… Self?

This is what can actually happen to a superpower that has lost her noble enemy, and has declared herself the one and only remaining superpower in the modern world. Georgi Arbatov was absolutely right: Russia may have indeed defeated the United States in the apotheosis of the Cold War, by… depriving her of her enemy. (Need I add: her Nietzschean noble enemy?!)

That is why in the absence of such an enemy, America willed to revert to a search for another Vietnam, but this time without even a quasi-legitimate cause, and most definitely an enemy far inferior to either Vietnam or previously North Korea. Iraq in particular, and Afghanistan later on after the al Qaeda rationale had worn off, have represented wars for war sake, to satisfy the excessively cultivated national Crusader zeal of “I am free, he must be subdued,” paraphrasing Nietzsche in Jenseits 19.

But could the new freedom-loving American zealot be satisfied with questionable wars with little enemies? A bigger enemy had to rise or had to be erected in the vacuum created by the collapse of the USSR. Islam? A quick-acting narcotic injection, perhaps, but certainly unrealistic and outright devastating as a long-term solution. That is why our freedom-loving zealot is increasingly seeking gratification on the domestic scene. A frightening form of autocannibalism!… The worst part of it is that we are not dealing with some isolated freaks of nature, who regularly run amok in every society, but with a persistent effort to breed their psychological type by America’s new social engineers…

ON THE ANGLO-AMERICAN UMBILICAL CORD

(Tony Blair is of course no longer in charge, contrary to what this dated entry suggests, but its content makes a point that reaches beyond the life and times of Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown, or anyone who may be next, walking in their footsteps. In fact, this entry raises an interesting general thesis, which is well worth exploring much further. Perhaps, the ‘gene’ pertains to the rationale of any colonial power to justify its colonization of other people by a superior morality and a higher level of civilization (tell it to the Romans colonizing the Greeks!!) which it is contributing to the inferior world? This missionary spirit, however, covers up an essentially selfish motive, a pursuit, above all, of “my own happiness,” as Nietzsche suggests in the cited passage below. How much it contributes to the development of a genuine national self-righteousness is an interesting subject to explore as well. But, on the other hand, England is known as the oldest free society in history, dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215 {not to get myself dragged into a pointless argument with historians, there have been several examples of democratic government on record, dating back earlier than that, but all of those were flurries that would later give way to non-democratic political systems; England though has retained and consistently improved on its democratic institutions, which certainly makes all the difference in the world, at least in our context}, while the United States has, perhaps, justifiably claimed to have taken over the hereditary mantle of enlightened political leadership from her aging, physically well past her best years, mother.)

We have heard so much about the inalienable ties between the Old Country, that is, England, and the New World, as embodied in her most gifted child, the United States (especially these days, when Tony Blair is so desperately trying to woo Uncle Sam’s affection that he might well end up getting his homeland yet another nickname, that of the Poodle Country), that whenever we are able to find traces of evidence pointing to the existence of a genuine umbilical cord between the two, we are well advised to pay attention.

Incidentally, by soap opera logic, the two countries must indeed be closely related as it is apparently normal for a son or daughter to sabotage mother’s business out of revenge for certain iniquities suffered by them in early childhood. Thinking about the crippling blow America delivered on her mother after WWII, when she refused to extend credit to her, and as a result British imperial power promptly collapsed, supplanted by the new global imperial power of the United States, there could well have been a personal family grudge in this ruthless act (besides the legitimate imperial drive of an emerging new superpower), to justify its particular viciousness.

But let bygones be bygones. What also points to the existence of mother-daughter relationship, without having to psychoanalyze personal animosities, is the strong family resemblance. (Let us dismiss right away the silly nonsense of artificial resemblance via plastic surgery, also of soap operatic infamy!) When there is a reliable testimony from a credible witness who knew the mother in her prime, and the same testimony can now be given regarding the daughter in hers, it seems that we can hardly be mistaken in claiming the family connection. And here is our case in point. For the purpose of objectivity, let us approach it with a wide open mind, and without making the very common mistake of claiming our conclusion a priori.

There are occasional passages in the history of human thought, when something observed about something else a long time ago can be easily taken (mind you, I do not say mistaken!) for our own day’s conventional wisdom, but as applied to our current subject matter. What a difference one word makes! In the following passage from Jenseits 228, if we change Nietzsche’s word English into our word American, nobody would ever suspect that this passage has not been written in the new millennium:

“Ultimately, they all want English morality to be proved right¾ because this serves humanity best, or “the general utility,” or “the happiness of the greatest number”¾ no, the happiness of England. With all their powers, they want to prove to themselves that the striving for English happiness¾ I mean, for comfort and fashion (and, at best, a seat in Parliament)¾ is at the same time also the right way to virtue; indeed, that whatever virtue has existed in the world so far must have consisted in such striving.”

There is no doubt that a close family resemblance can be established here right away between Nietzsche’s England and, say, Wilsonian (that is, Woodrow Wilson’s) America. But is there a possibility that such ties still exist between the two nations today, when the United States has been taken over by a manifestly foreign neoconservative ideology? (Which ideology has not originated with George W. Bush, nor gone down with him, as the current Obama Administration’s policies clearly reveal).

That is, if we are to give ourselves the greatest benefit of the doubt possible, as to the actual nobility of our intentions, which, if we consider the intentions of this nation’s handlers, may be light years from being the case. I cannot even imagine that America’s neoconservative ideology has anything in common with English morality, far from it. Yet, this uncanny parallel suggests that there must be some truth to genetics; in other words, that in spite of all irregularities, weird coincidences and such, the umbilical cord must indeed exist.

CELEBRATING DIVERSITY THE RIGHT WAY

Those who have lived both in Europe and in America, have hardly failed to notice that food, like bread, dairy products, etc., tastes differently on the other side of the Atlantic.

This difference is a well-established fact, and there is an authoritative explanation for it: the difference in the soil makes the difference in everything that is growing or feeding on it. And there is only one proper way of looking at it: more power to the gourmet!

By the same token as "saporific" diversity enriches the gourmet world of choice eating, there can be absolutely no substitute for cultural exchanges and interaction, where individuals of different backgrounds rooted in different soils honestly exchange the fruit of their native upbringings. The purpose of such exchanges must not be to convince each other that “the bread is the same,” which of course is not true, but to point out those differences, to make them comprehensible, predictable, thus dramatically reducing the fear of the unknown. Supposed to promote peace among nations, honest cultural exchanges between the nations of the world are a sacred duty of all individuals, representing these different nations, and it is a real crime against humanity to misrepresent your own roots either by trying to please the foreign culture that plays host to you, feigning similarity, or in a prudent effort not to shock your gracious host with a presumably high degree of revealed dissimilarity. Playing the chameleon in such a case would be an immense disservice, just as devastating as deliberately telling them, with an ulterior motive, only what one thinks they would love to hear.

It is true that truth can be hard to swallow. In extreme cases it can even lead to war. But it is the cover-up of truth that advances the bleeding and inhibits the healing. The short-term effect of being ‘pleasant’ promotes the cancerous growth beneath the symptom-free surface, and the inevitable long-term effect of withholding truth is a metastasis of the malignancy.

I wish I’d known the ultimate magic of being both truthful and pleasant. But with the multitude of experts descending on America from the regions, all vying to ingratiate themselves on her by telling what she loves to hear, the truth is bound to be condemned, even if it tries to adapt itself to the rules of the etiquette. There is no hope for the voice in the wilderness, unless the stranger knocking on the locked door turns around and goes elsewhere, to find an open mind... somewhere, somehow…

The core of the problem here is not with the scoundrels who come to America bearing sweet lies. It is in the atmosphere of self-admiration permeating this country and making such scoundrels welcome, and their lies amply worth their while.

…Celebrating diversity the right way. This is something America has yet to learn.

X, AS IN XENOPHOBIA

(This is an old entry, only slightly updated some time ago. Yet, it has by no means lost its currency, as the subject is increasingly turning itself into a runaway train.)

Is American society, which has always been so proud of its ethnic and racial diversity, becoming an actual Generation X, in the sense of developing a severe case of Xenophobia? “Congratulations” to the inciters of interracial hatred: they seem to have succeeded!... There is no more place for bearded Imams on board America’s glorious airliners… An Arab student at the UCLA, falling into the misfortune of walking into the University library without his ID, gets himself tazered… Then, there is a deadly shooting at a Sikh temple in the state of Wisconsin, where the killer may have mistaken her victims for Moslems, or, perhaps, didn’t even care who they were, as long as they did not look American… Et cetera, et cetera…

I am reminded of the scene in Shakespeare’s Richard III, where the hapless Duke of Clarence finds himself being sent to the Tower “because his name is George!” Change his name to Abdullah, place him in today’s America at some public place, outside his “ghetto,” and the obscene similarity between these two situations is no longer ridiculous, but genuinely frightening, as an omen of things to come.

Incidentally, how would the different-looking Hasidic rabbis and their bearded flocks feel when a paranoid American public might fail to recognize and promptly acknowledge the difference between an Ultra-Orthodox Jew and a practicing Moslem and will start sending “the good guys” off the planes in handcuffs? And, which is not altogether too farfetched, what about America’s own version of Kristallnacht, as a result of mistaken identity?

Why don’t all those “arsonists of human firestorms” (quoting Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev) think about it? Especially with regard to a situation where the last-mentioned calamity should start targeting victims for their distinctive identity by no mistake at all?

The ongoing “war of civilizations” is already having a huge and morbid effect in two directions. One is domestic, as the level of violence inside America has reached unconscionable proportions, deadly shootings and mayhem becoming a virtually daily occurrence. I attribute this surge of senseless violence to the pervasive climate of permissible violence, as the public has become dangerously desensitized to the concept of war, and particularly of war of choice, as most of the international bloodshed of the last ten years, involving the military might of the United States on a continuous basis, has had little or nothing to do with the tragedy of 9/11 more than a decade ago, or with al Qaeda as such. The fact that the non-stop war has been devoid of all constructive meaning must be terribly demoralizing to the best and the brightest of the American Army, while encouraging the murderous instinct among its worst, which all comes back to American soil on troop rotation, and somehow infects the more susceptible exceptions among the civilian population.

On the other hand, the international situation does not get any better, but much worse, after all this effort, and after the terrible expenses of blood and treasure. With all those paranoidally high levels of xenophobia in American society of today, how can the nation at all develop even a semblance of what is essential to an operational foreign policy: sensitivity and understanding of what the world of those others--- such as a billion-plus Moslems, and yet another five billion of others, who are not “US”--- is all about?

MOTHERLAND, FATHERLAND, HOMELAND

One of the most emotive, endearing, and semantically loaded words in the Russian language is the beautiful word Rodina, normally translated as Motherland (also available in Russian version as Rodina-Mat’). There is another parental word Otechestvo, Fatherland, no less meaningful but in the masculine way, as befits the distinction between the fatherly and motherly love.

Motherland and Fatherland are two very proper English words, but, ironically, there is nothing like them in modern American usage. There is of course another word, Homeland, made very common after it was used in the name of the recently established Department of the Federal Government--- Department of Homeland Security. I confess that in this phrase, which is remarkably reminiscent of the Russian-coined Committee of State Security (the KGB) the word Homeland does not evoke any positive emotions whatsoever, and that is an obvious shame, because in the conspicuous absence of Motherland and Fatherland from the active vocabulary of modern-day America and with the term Homeland reduced to the rather unpleasant connotation (compare this also to the German word Geheime of ill fame), how does an average American express his or her patriotism, love of his country?

This land is your land, this land is my land,

From California to the New York Island,

From the Redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters--

This land was made for you and me…

Apparently this originally politically-incorrect, but later “cleaned up” golden oldie by Woody Guthrie (look up my earlier entry This Land Is Your Land in this section, published on my blog on July 15, 2011) is about all that my land and your land can yield us, in the absence of the parents: fatherland and motherland.

What does it tell us about America that we do not know? That, being a nation of immigrants, even her most patriotic citizens restrain themselves from using this most patriotic of all linguistic symbols: the land of my fathers, my mother land, perhaps subconsciously reserving it for their old country, which they, or their parents, or ancestors had come from? Doesn’t it mean that a deep-seated sense of patriotic loyalty to that other place: England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, etc. (not to mention the distinctly different Oriental, African, Hispanic cultures, which cannot but perpetuate their allegiance if not to their old country, then certainly to their old culture) has psychologically blocked the acceptance of these particular patriotic expressions in the popular psyche of the “American nation”?

…I wonder…

AMERICA IN THE ROLE OF DOLORES UMBRIDGE

Why would I want to compare America to Dolores Umbridge, perhaps the most reprehensible character in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series? Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, and High Inquisitor, she does very unpleasant things with a pleasant smile, and looks at the world around her as an assortment of inferior creatures, whose main function in life is to do what they are told by the supreme authority which she represents.

I wonder what Ms. Rowling had in mind creating this uncannily comparable personage, but I eagerly invite my reader to track each episode of the Harry Potter septology, where she makes an appearance, under the angle which I am presently suggesting, and I promise an abundance of totally unexpected surprises. For this occasion, however, let us look at just one episode in Chapter 33, Book Five: Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix.

In this scene Umbridge is addressing the centaurs, the intellectually superior creatures into whose part of the forest she has just trespassed, in pursuit of Harry and Hermione’s “secret weapon.”---

“I am Dolores Umbridge! So be very careful! By the laws laid down by the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, any attack by half-breeds such as yourselves on a human…

“(What did you call us? shouted a wild-looking centaur. There was a great deal of muttering and tightening of bowstrings around them. But Umbridge continued.)

“…Law Fifteen B states clearly that Any attack by a magical creature who is deemed to have near-human intelligence, and therefore considered responsible for its actions…

“(Near-human intelligence?… We consider that a great insult, human! Our intelligence far outstrips your own… What are you doing in our forest? Why are you here?)

“Your forest? said Umbridge shaking with indignation. I would remind you that you live here only because the Ministry of Magic permits you certain areas of land… (An arrow flew close to her head. She let out an earsplitting scream…) Filthy half-breeds! Beasts! Uncontrolled animals! I am Senior Undersecretary!!!… You cannot…”

There’s an uncanny resemblance here to the way America has been talking to the rest of the world since the days of the erstwhile Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; the torch now having been passed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice. Generally speaking, the revolting character of Dolores Umbridge comes across as a dead-on allegory of the currently existing “unipolar” world order, recently with that same “great deal of muttering and tightening of bowstrings around them” as depicted in the enlightening scene above… But I am afraid that if you really want to find out what happens next to the American Dolores Umbridge, you really need to read the rest of Harry Potter…

FREEDOM TALKERS AND FREE THINKERS

Freedom Tower:

The New York City Freedom Tower… Why call it Freedom Tower? Was America previously unfree, but is free now? Nonsense! Does it have something to do with America’s freedom victorious in its war against the perpetrators of 9/11? Hardly! The so-called “war on terror” is admittedly still going on. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, American freedom has suffered a serious setback since 2001, a setback beyond Osama bin Laden’s wildest dreams, and well beyond his al Qaeda’s maximum capacity…

So, whose freedom are we talking about? Certainly not about the freedom of the incessantly terrorized people of the ‘liberated’ Iraq, many of whom, Shiahs prominently included, are today nostalgic for the stability of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. Certainly not about the freedom of the Afghanis, or the Libyans under the post-Qaddafi chaos, or the Palestinians under their newly gained quasi-statehood… Generally speaking, the world at large is a terrible place these days, and the word “freedom” sounds like a very cruel joke…

Apparently, this word comes out with a twist, in the new “Freedom Tower.” “Freedom” in the new century means being pro-American. The people of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are freedom people, just because their rulers are pro-American… Those who do not obey Washington’s guidelines of freedom, are slaves in need of liberation… Easy! That’s “Freedom Tower.”

Freedom Talkers:

Never in my previous life had I imagined that the word “freedom” would one day be making me sick. But so it does today, and I wonder what they are thinking, all these cynical scoundrels and intellectual perverts who say freedom in that most obnoxious sense of the word.

The freedom talkers of America, both the brainwashers and the brainwashed--- what are they thinking when they say this word which they obviously do not understand as they never have traveled to its pristine source themselves, and never have forfeited their eye as the price of knowledge?

Freedom Thinkers:

There is an unbridgeable chasm between the authentic free thinkers and these manipulative freedom talkers, who use the word freedom in order to enslave. And, alas, as I have repeatedly pointed out, it is much easier to enslave the relaxed minds of free-talking citizens of ‘free societies’ than the intensely watchful minds of the free-thinking citizens of the world’s most oppressive tyrannies. Indeed, as the following shocking, but convincing argument made by my family friend and professional colleague General Mikhail Milstein, goes:

“Our Soviet public, in terms of its susceptibility to propaganda, is much better off than in a country such as America. Here (in Russia) everyone knows that our agitprop people are doing their job, and take what they hear always with a large grain of salt. But in America people are so sincerely convinced that they are free, that their minds are really careless and willing to be played with. Yes, they may all be street smart as much as they want to be, but in politics they are pretty gullible to propaganda, as long as they do have their little vanity toy to play with: the “choice,” the two-party system, obligingly allowing them to make up their own mind as to whose mush they will be having for breakfast for the next four years.”

Thus, it follows that for the purposes of genuine freedom, free thought is of far greater importance than free speech. What can be worse than “controlled” free speech, the speech of ignorance and propaganda?

Free Speech:

Incidentally, free speech, the one, which is so much protected in Western democracies and so much abused in other places, should be indeed controlled in all societies, but not by suppressing it, as is usually the case in all controlled societies, but simply by denying it the authority of “ipse dixit.” For, it is customary for the people anywhere, but especially in free societies to bow to the authority of an authority, if I may put it this way. It is the bowing to the authority, which cheapens the value of free speech in free societies, making the citizens easy prey for manipulation and brainwashing.

At the same time, I have sadly witnessed the fact that even in free societies, and America is most certainly one of their foremost, there are many ways, both crude and refined, to control free speech, allowing filth or mere trivium to pass as free speech, as long as it is politically harmless to the power elite, while effectively suppressing the speech, which the elite sees as threatening to their status quo, that is to their hold on power. This suppression of “dangerous” (sometimes known as politically incorrect) speech reaches such levels of forcefulness, that the only difference between the free us and the unfree them, meaning, of course, between free and unfree societies, will be the severity of punishment for the persons who are the actual perpetrators. Meanwhile, the actual punishment for the chief offender herself, free speech, is effectively the same, which is the capital punishment of silence.

Last Word:

And now the last word on this matter. If the harshness of my judgment sounds excessive, I should refer my reader to some other sections of the book, particularly, to Russia and the Lady. Why is it, I used to be asked fairly often, that I’m the only one speaking of such things? In the past I used to think that what I was saying others may not have known. These days I realize that the reason why nobody knows the things which are so elementary in my mind is not some general ignorance about them, but a conspiracy of silence tantamount to the suppression of free speech. While I have not been denied the opportunity of ‘free speech,’ to which this blog, plus a few published articles of mine bear witness, my free speech has been rendered worthless by denying it the authority which comes with a successful career, and we all know that a successful career possesses such an authority that one can easily pass around counterfeit money as the legitimate coin of the realm.