'Hunter Gray' hunterbadbear@hunterbear.org [marxist]
2014-05-27 00:33:52 UTC
We have, in Ralph's note, some clear lines suggesting how two people can view the world in profoundly different ways. I'm taking the liberty of sending this also to my "EdgeLeft" list.
First, it has become clear to me as the discussion continues, that much of it reflects a basic "American problem". We are a young nation, unique in many ways, but most of all simply in being young, in tending to see things in simplistic ways. One of the first things which strikes me each time I've been in Europe, is how old it is. In some places that leaps at you - in Rome one is aware of being in a museum that has seen emperors and dictators and prime ministers. In Athens, as in Rome, the ruins remind us that these cities (or their ruins) will remain long after we have gone.
Once, at a meeting of the War Resisters International in a small town in France, we walked across the border for a day visit to Basil, and I looked in wonder at the buildings, still very much in use, with the dates of their construction marked in stone - 1407, 1411, etc. Before America has been discovered these buildings had been built. (A German friend in our group remarked that she, also, had never seen such old buildings - she came from a part of Germany so totally destroyed by war).
This is a preface to our failure to begin a basic understanding of how vastly different Western Europe is from Russia. We don't really understand Russia. Until the hard march to industrialization under Stalin, it was largely
a peasant country, and largely illiterate. It certainly produced music and literature as good as any in the West, but Russia always faced East to Asia, as well as to the West. The splits extended to the Church, a great power in the past, with the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Unlike Western European Christians who have seen a plethora of divisions and sub-divisions after the break of Martin Luther with Rome, these religious divisions in the East go far back, almost literally to the beginning of the faith.
So while Ralph, in his statement, sees NATO as an indelible line beyond which the Russian Empire cannot go, this strikes me as a strange reading of history. In the past two hundred years there have been no Russian moves toward Western Europe (with the exception of the take over of Czechoslovakia) - Soviet troops remained in the East European countries the Soviets had taken in the course of the war, and US troops remained in Germany and American bases remained in Italy, Turkey, Great Britain, and Germany. In the immediate post war period the US exercised political control over Western Europe (a very unnatural and momentary state against which West Europe revolted - first and most dramatically by De Gaulle). In the United Nations the US had almost full control of the votes of Western Europe as well as all of Central and Latin America and as far East as Taiwan and Japan.
True, we, the Americans, didn't see ourselves as an empire, though clearly we were. Nor did we understand how temporary our control was. Today, after bloody struggles in Central and Latin America, marked most dramatically by the Cuban Revolution, the whole nature of US control to our South has changed. And, as Western Europe regained its feet and rebuilt its economy, that, too, charted its own course.
Forgive my citing these obvious facts, but they seem to evade Ralph, who writes in terms of "Russian Imperial control", ignoring the point I had tried to make in an earlier post. And that point was that when World War II ended the Soviet Union was utterly exhausted, it had lost 27 million people, all its cities in European Russia, and had to care for a vast number of injured veterans, orphans, widows. The West - particularly the Americans - have never begun to grasp what the war meant for the people living in the Soviet Union.
I had pointed out in earlier notes that Russia agreed to a neutral Austria, and even though Finland had fought on the side of the Nazis (with good reason - they had suffered from the infamous Soviet invasion of Finland on the eve of WW II), the Soviets let them take the path of neutrality. And, having suffered so greatly from German aggression, the Soviets had sought a neutralized and unified Germany. They integrated the GDR into the East European economic zone only after it became clear the US was determined to have West Germany in its own zone of influence. In what way does this suggest "Russian imperialism"? Ralph has forgotten, perhaps, that NATO was created first, and the Warsaw Pact second, or that, until it developed its own nuclear weapon, the Soviets lived in fear of an American nuclear attack. (And, being old, I can remember that in 1948 the talk of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "for peace" was very much in the air).
We saw the brutal (and it was very brutal) Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe as proof of Soviet aggression. I saw it as an effort by a devastated Soviet Union to create a "space" between itself and a Western Europe which had three times invaded it, under Napoleon, under the Kaiser, and under Hitler. But even here, the current fashionable talk in the US of "Russian imperialism" leaps blindly over history, in this case the more immediate history, in which there was a peaceful yielding of control by Moscow to the forces for independence in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc. Compare this with the brutal efforts by the US to prevent any such real changes in areas which had been under our control, and think for a moment of the chance the West threw away - of accepting the new situation provided by Gorbachev, which would have led to a demilitarized and neutral zone in Europe.
This brings us to the current crisis in Ukraine. I've written elsewhere that there are no good sides in this struggle. Russia, led by Putin (who is wildly popular today in Russia), lacks a vibrant civil society, and is run by oligarchs. Ukraine, whether in the East of Ukraine or the West, is also run by oligarchs. Critics of the Kiev regime have made too much of the presence of Nazis in the group which overthrew the government, and have overlooked the fact there are far right elements in both the East and West of Ukraine.
But what is central in Ukraine is history. The history which Putin (and the Russians) grasp very well, the danger of Ukraine being drawn into NATO. The folly of the Americans - and of SOME of NATO (not all of it) - has been the assumption that the military bases of the West could be pushed further East, as they have been in Poland. I say folly because Putin and the Russians would at some point react sharply, as they have now done. The current crisis was not created by Putin or "Russian imperialism" but by the naive policies in Washington DC.
Do I want an independent Ukraine? Yes, I do. But not "independent to join NATO" - that Russia will not accept. I am sometimes a bit stunned at Americans who are so frantic about the Russian desire to have a non-aligned Ukraine, but seem to think the fifty years the US has spent trying to assassinate Castro, to invade Cuba, to bring it back into our sphere of influence, is OK. Or the bloody, criminal record of US military intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, or the coup in Chile. Talk about an empire!! Look to our own country and the trail of blood it has left as it moved across the world. (For the sake of brevity, I do not even dwell on Indochina, Iraq, etc.).
The irony - for me - is that I find I'm accused of taking the side of Putin, or ignoring the repressions in Russia, when I'm only trying to deal with reality. I'm an American radical, not a partisan of Russia. I look at the self-righteous (pardon me Ralph) comments about how free we are here, and then look at Snowden, trapped in Moscow because Washington won't give him safe passage to Latin America. I look at the 2016 election in which we will have no truly free election, only a choice of our very own oligarchs (and if it is Hillary and Jeb, our very own royal families). Yes, Ralph, you and I are free - but within carefully circumscribed limits. Far better than in Russia, yes, but very far from a truly functioning democracy.
Our only honorable place here is in opposition to those who rule us, and would, using terms such as freedom, gain our consent to their wars. We do not have a serious democratic radical movement, and can hope the youth will create one. We are for the moment, as radical pacifists, democratic socialists, anarchists, whatever term you choose, on the side lines of power, reduced perhaps to the role of analysis and witness. But surely not of capitulation.
Peace,
David McReynolds
On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 8:03 AM, Ralph Seliger <***@gmail.com> wrote:
I try to look at contemporary issues in as nuanced a way as possible. You may recall that I have even recommended an element of "appeasement" in dealing with Putin, as preferable to a new Cold War ("Let's avoid new Cold War over Ukraine"). But these responses from David and Larry are very tangential to the main issue. Yes, Western inaction and the original policy of appeasement, drove Stalin into the arms of Hitler, etc. And one can certainly argue as Larry does that the Cold War was a clash of imperialisms (in plural). Still, it is undeniable that NATO has established an indelible line beyond which Russia cannot reestablish its imperial control.
Also as David, Larry and Joanne are all very aware, we are more free to make our critical arguments here in the West than we would have been within the old Stalinist-Soviet orbit, or would be today in Putin's Russia. Obviously, there was no freedom of expression and conscience under Stalinism, and there's precious little that remains under Putinism.
First, it has become clear to me as the discussion continues, that much of it reflects a basic "American problem". We are a young nation, unique in many ways, but most of all simply in being young, in tending to see things in simplistic ways. One of the first things which strikes me each time I've been in Europe, is how old it is. In some places that leaps at you - in Rome one is aware of being in a museum that has seen emperors and dictators and prime ministers. In Athens, as in Rome, the ruins remind us that these cities (or their ruins) will remain long after we have gone.
Once, at a meeting of the War Resisters International in a small town in France, we walked across the border for a day visit to Basil, and I looked in wonder at the buildings, still very much in use, with the dates of their construction marked in stone - 1407, 1411, etc. Before America has been discovered these buildings had been built. (A German friend in our group remarked that she, also, had never seen such old buildings - she came from a part of Germany so totally destroyed by war).
This is a preface to our failure to begin a basic understanding of how vastly different Western Europe is from Russia. We don't really understand Russia. Until the hard march to industrialization under Stalin, it was largely
a peasant country, and largely illiterate. It certainly produced music and literature as good as any in the West, but Russia always faced East to Asia, as well as to the West. The splits extended to the Church, a great power in the past, with the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Unlike Western European Christians who have seen a plethora of divisions and sub-divisions after the break of Martin Luther with Rome, these religious divisions in the East go far back, almost literally to the beginning of the faith.
So while Ralph, in his statement, sees NATO as an indelible line beyond which the Russian Empire cannot go, this strikes me as a strange reading of history. In the past two hundred years there have been no Russian moves toward Western Europe (with the exception of the take over of Czechoslovakia) - Soviet troops remained in the East European countries the Soviets had taken in the course of the war, and US troops remained in Germany and American bases remained in Italy, Turkey, Great Britain, and Germany. In the immediate post war period the US exercised political control over Western Europe (a very unnatural and momentary state against which West Europe revolted - first and most dramatically by De Gaulle). In the United Nations the US had almost full control of the votes of Western Europe as well as all of Central and Latin America and as far East as Taiwan and Japan.
True, we, the Americans, didn't see ourselves as an empire, though clearly we were. Nor did we understand how temporary our control was. Today, after bloody struggles in Central and Latin America, marked most dramatically by the Cuban Revolution, the whole nature of US control to our South has changed. And, as Western Europe regained its feet and rebuilt its economy, that, too, charted its own course.
Forgive my citing these obvious facts, but they seem to evade Ralph, who writes in terms of "Russian Imperial control", ignoring the point I had tried to make in an earlier post. And that point was that when World War II ended the Soviet Union was utterly exhausted, it had lost 27 million people, all its cities in European Russia, and had to care for a vast number of injured veterans, orphans, widows. The West - particularly the Americans - have never begun to grasp what the war meant for the people living in the Soviet Union.
I had pointed out in earlier notes that Russia agreed to a neutral Austria, and even though Finland had fought on the side of the Nazis (with good reason - they had suffered from the infamous Soviet invasion of Finland on the eve of WW II), the Soviets let them take the path of neutrality. And, having suffered so greatly from German aggression, the Soviets had sought a neutralized and unified Germany. They integrated the GDR into the East European economic zone only after it became clear the US was determined to have West Germany in its own zone of influence. In what way does this suggest "Russian imperialism"? Ralph has forgotten, perhaps, that NATO was created first, and the Warsaw Pact second, or that, until it developed its own nuclear weapon, the Soviets lived in fear of an American nuclear attack. (And, being old, I can remember that in 1948 the talk of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "for peace" was very much in the air).
We saw the brutal (and it was very brutal) Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe as proof of Soviet aggression. I saw it as an effort by a devastated Soviet Union to create a "space" between itself and a Western Europe which had three times invaded it, under Napoleon, under the Kaiser, and under Hitler. But even here, the current fashionable talk in the US of "Russian imperialism" leaps blindly over history, in this case the more immediate history, in which there was a peaceful yielding of control by Moscow to the forces for independence in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc. Compare this with the brutal efforts by the US to prevent any such real changes in areas which had been under our control, and think for a moment of the chance the West threw away - of accepting the new situation provided by Gorbachev, which would have led to a demilitarized and neutral zone in Europe.
This brings us to the current crisis in Ukraine. I've written elsewhere that there are no good sides in this struggle. Russia, led by Putin (who is wildly popular today in Russia), lacks a vibrant civil society, and is run by oligarchs. Ukraine, whether in the East of Ukraine or the West, is also run by oligarchs. Critics of the Kiev regime have made too much of the presence of Nazis in the group which overthrew the government, and have overlooked the fact there are far right elements in both the East and West of Ukraine.
But what is central in Ukraine is history. The history which Putin (and the Russians) grasp very well, the danger of Ukraine being drawn into NATO. The folly of the Americans - and of SOME of NATO (not all of it) - has been the assumption that the military bases of the West could be pushed further East, as they have been in Poland. I say folly because Putin and the Russians would at some point react sharply, as they have now done. The current crisis was not created by Putin or "Russian imperialism" but by the naive policies in Washington DC.
Do I want an independent Ukraine? Yes, I do. But not "independent to join NATO" - that Russia will not accept. I am sometimes a bit stunned at Americans who are so frantic about the Russian desire to have a non-aligned Ukraine, but seem to think the fifty years the US has spent trying to assassinate Castro, to invade Cuba, to bring it back into our sphere of influence, is OK. Or the bloody, criminal record of US military intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, or the coup in Chile. Talk about an empire!! Look to our own country and the trail of blood it has left as it moved across the world. (For the sake of brevity, I do not even dwell on Indochina, Iraq, etc.).
The irony - for me - is that I find I'm accused of taking the side of Putin, or ignoring the repressions in Russia, when I'm only trying to deal with reality. I'm an American radical, not a partisan of Russia. I look at the self-righteous (pardon me Ralph) comments about how free we are here, and then look at Snowden, trapped in Moscow because Washington won't give him safe passage to Latin America. I look at the 2016 election in which we will have no truly free election, only a choice of our very own oligarchs (and if it is Hillary and Jeb, our very own royal families). Yes, Ralph, you and I are free - but within carefully circumscribed limits. Far better than in Russia, yes, but very far from a truly functioning democracy.
Our only honorable place here is in opposition to those who rule us, and would, using terms such as freedom, gain our consent to their wars. We do not have a serious democratic radical movement, and can hope the youth will create one. We are for the moment, as radical pacifists, democratic socialists, anarchists, whatever term you choose, on the side lines of power, reduced perhaps to the role of analysis and witness. But surely not of capitulation.
Peace,
David McReynolds
On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 8:03 AM, Ralph Seliger <***@gmail.com> wrote:
I try to look at contemporary issues in as nuanced a way as possible. You may recall that I have even recommended an element of "appeasement" in dealing with Putin, as preferable to a new Cold War ("Let's avoid new Cold War over Ukraine"). But these responses from David and Larry are very tangential to the main issue. Yes, Western inaction and the original policy of appeasement, drove Stalin into the arms of Hitler, etc. And one can certainly argue as Larry does that the Cold War was a clash of imperialisms (in plural). Still, it is undeniable that NATO has established an indelible line beyond which Russia cannot reestablish its imperial control.
Also as David, Larry and Joanne are all very aware, we are more free to make our critical arguments here in the West than we would have been within the old Stalinist-Soviet orbit, or would be today in Putin's Russia. Obviously, there was no freedom of expression and conscience under Stalinism, and there's precious little that remains under Putinism.