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.