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.”