Lament of a Green pacifist

The following article is copied from the Berliner Zeitung and was forwarded to me by my new friend Desdemona.

 .A Bundeswehr soldier in front of Marder armored personnel carriers that have been loaded onto a train for transport.

Antje Vollmers’ legacy of a pacifist:

“What I would still have to say”

The ex-vice president of the Bundestag criticizes the Greens for turning away from pacifism. In the essay, she formulates her political conclusion.

Antje Vollmers

23.02.2023 | updated 26.02.2023

Antje Vollmer was vice president of the German Bundestag and was the first signatory of the peace manifesto of Sahra Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer. Vollmer is a pacifist and was an opponent of the wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. As an author, she has worked intensively on the protagonists of July 20, 1944, and the anti-fascist resistance. Antje Vollmer is seriously ill. Her text can be read as a political legacy – it is a great reckoning with the zeitgeist. We publish the guest article in full length. Editorial.

I was standing at the train station in my hometown, waiting for the ICE. Suddenly, a huge convoy approached on the siding, fully loaded with tanks – with martens, cheetahs or leopards. I can’t tell, but I was shocked to read the picture. The transport was going from west to east.

It was not difficult to imagine the opposite image. Somewhere in the east military transports full of Russian battle tanks were rolling from east to west at the same time. They would not meet for a World War I-style tank battle somewhere in Ukraine.

No, this time they would once again mark the arms-locked chasm between two power blocs, where the world might face each other for the last time in a confrontation with a possibly apocalyptic outcome. So we were back in the Cold War and in a spiral of mutual existential threat – with no way out, no perspective. Everything I had fought against politically all my life was present to me at that moment as one huge defeat.

ANTJE VOLLMERS

“…and fight back every day. A Green Diary” (1984) Antje Vollmer was born on May 31, 1943, in Lübbecke, Westphalia. She is a former vice president of the German Bundestag and a Green Party politician. Her awards include the Carl von Ossietzky Medal (1989), the Hannah Arendt Prize (1998) and the 2002 Masaryk Order of the Czech Republic for services to German-Czech reconciliation (awarded by President Vaclav Havel). She has written numerous books, including: “…and Wehret Euch täglich. A Green Diary” (1984), “Hot Peace. On Violence, Power and the Mystery of Civilization” (1995), “Doppelleben. Heinrich and Gottliebe von Lehndorff in the Resistance to Hitler and von Ribbentrop” (2010), “Stauffenberg’s Companions” with Lars Broder-Keil (2013). 

With history it is always important from which beginning you tell it

It has become customary, at the beginning of every mention of the immense tragedy surrounding the Ukraine war, to speak like an oath of the “turning point in time”, of Putin’s brutal war of aggression in violation of international law, with the Russian side clearly being solely to blame, and to humbly confess how much one had been mistaken in trusting in a phase of détente and reconciliation with Russia after the great turning point of 1989/90.

By Antje Vollmers

Berlin

14.07.2022

Where exactly did the defeat begin? Where did the error begin? When and how did this renewed deadly escalation of war, violence and bloc confrontation arise from one of the happiest phases in the history of the Eurasian continent, after the almost non-violent end of the Cold War? Who had an interest in the fact that the then possible peaceful coexistence between East and West did not come about, but fell prey to renewed worldwide antagonism?

And then the question of all questions: Why was it that Europe of all places, this continent with all its historical tragedies and power-political aberrations, did not find the strength to become the center of a peaceful vision for the threatened planet?

What is Russian exceptionalism?

LOST KINGDOM: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation from 1470 to the Present by Serhii Plokhy (2017)

Serhii Plokhy is professor of Ukrainian history and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.  His book,  Lost Kingdom, is about Russian exceptionalism—that is, Russia’s historic claim to lead and rule the eastern Slavic peoples and the pushback from Ukrainians and Belarusians.  

Kievan Rus’

It is an important and complicated story—full of ironies, zigzags and contradictions, and historical turning points that could have turned out differently from what they did.  It provides interesting background to the current war in Ukraine, although I do not think it is the final word on that topic.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus all trace their origins to the culture Kievan Rus’ and the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev to Christianity in 987.  The Kievan Rus’ lands stretched from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Finland and were regarded as a unity.  But most of them were overrun by the Mongol-Tatar Golden Horde in 1237-1239.  

The book’s story begins when Prince Ivan III of Muscovy, a vassal of the Golden Horde, married Sophia Palaiologos, a princess of the Byzantine Empire, which  had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.  

Ivan claimed his marriage made Muscovy “the Third Rome,” the successor of the Byzantine and Roman empires.  This was bold talk for the ruler of a relatively small principality.   

Europe in 1470.

Muscovy expanded, step by step, although with a lot of back and forth struggle.  Its rulers adopted the title of Tsar, which is Russian for Caesar.  Muscovy conquered the independent Republic of Novgorod and warred against Tartars, Ottomans and the great and powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  

On the vast Eurasian plain, there were few obstacles to conquest, but also few barriers against invasion.  A Polish army occupied Moscow in 1610-1612 and a Swedish army occupied Ukraine in 1706.   Later on a French army reached Moscow in 1812, and German armies occupied Ukraine in 1918 and 1941.  It’s easy to understand why questions of allegiance and national unity were life-and-death issue.

Plokhy wrote that from earliest days, there was a recognized difference between the Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians) and White Russians (Belarusians).  I recall that the Tsars claimed to be rulers of “all the Russias”—implying that there was more than one.

One turning point was the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796).  She was of German origin, and came to the throne after the murder of his husband, so her legitimacy was questionable.  Although she toyed with the ideas of the European Enlightenment, she doubled down on promoting Great Russian national identity and Eastern Orthodox religion.  

She joined the rulers of Austria and Prussia in partitioning Russia’s old enemy, Poland.  Russia got more than half of Poland, including its capital, Warsaw.  

In the ensuring years, the Polish nobility, remembering their former power and greatness, resisted Russian rule as best they could, while the Russian government tried to Russianize the Poles.

The Russian government began to look on Ukrainian language and culture in a new way, as a possible source of Polish-like nationalism.  This wasn’t altogether wrong.  

As with other subjugated and divided peoples in 19th century Europe, Ukrainian intellectuals began to study their cultural and national roots and think about independence and unification.    Academic studies of linguistics and ethnography in one generation became nationalistic intellectual weapons in later decades.  I think this was the real origin of Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism.

Globalist Germany and nationalist France?

German Chancellor Olaf Scoltz and French President Emmanuel Macron

Diana Johnstone, a long-time independent reporter of European politics, wrote an interesting article about the differences between Germany and France in economic, environmental and military police.

Germany is confident and expansive.  France is defensive and fearful of national decline.  Or so she says.

Germany is committed to green energy, feminism, globalization and an anti-Russian “rules-based international order.”  France is committed to nuclear energy and a nationalistic industrial policy, and is reluctant to join in a new Cold War against Russia.

Franco-German unity has been the key to European unity since the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the European Union, in 1952.   If they can’t stay unified, the EU may not have much of a future.

Germany’s new government is, as she puts it, a “traffic light” coalition.  Red represents the Social Democrats, yellow (or gold) represents the pro-business Free Democrats and green represents the Green Party.

A new Ministry of Economic and Climate will be in charge of reducing CO2 emissions.  Every governmental measure will have to pass a climate check.  

Germany today is heavily dependent on coal as a result of phasing out nuclear energy, and it has delayed certification of the new gas pipeline from Russia.  Itt has a goal of generating 80 percent of Germany’s electricity from renewable energy, mainly wind farms, by 2030, sooner than before.

One of the new government’s priorities is to develop an electric car industry for the export market, both inside and outside the EU.  Germany’s expectation is that all EU countries will be open to importing the new electric cars without favoring their own industry.   The European Commission is considering rules that would require all cars sold in Europe after 2035 to be carbon neutral.

France’s Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, is being pulled to the right, Johnstone wrote.  There is a fear that France is losing its national character and also its position in the world.  France is not going to shut down its network of nuclear-powered electric power plants any time soon.

The French government wants to build up French manufacturing industry.  This might bring it into conflict with EU rules and regulations, which bans government policies to favor domestic industry, except in the military sphere.

There has a strong right-wing, anti-immigrant movement in France, led by Marine Le Pen.  But now there’s an even more extreme movement, led by a journalist named Eric Zemmour.  His party is called the Reconquest Party; the idea is to reconquer France for the French.

The new German government wants strong ties with the United States, which, according to Johnstone, means dropping objections to storing nuclear weapons on German soil.  France hasn’t openly opposed NATO, but is less enthusiastic about the alliance than Germany is.

Macron has floated the idea of an independent European military force, independent of the United States, but hasn’t gotten anywhere with the Germans and other NATO allies.  Johnstone said he wouldn’t like Ukraine in NATO, because it would expand German influence and its farm exports would compete with French farmers.

Race, ancestry and nationality

Ethnographic map of the world. Click to enlarge.

So-called scientific racism is nonsense.  On the other hand, the idea of identity based on common ancestry is powerful, unifying and non-falsifiable.  It is the most common basis of nationalism.

The question is whether peace is possible in a world of nationalisms based on ancestry.

When nationalism is based on ancestry, a nation’s people are taught that they are like members of an extended family (usually a patriarchal family, headed by a father-figure) and that there is a bright line between members of the national family and all others.

Japan and Korea are two nations in which this idea is strong.  Japanese mythology tells how the Japanese islands were created by the gods and their Emperor is the descendant of the sun goddess; Korean mythology tells how the Korean people were specifically created by the gods.

President Kennedy called the United States a nation of immigrants.  Nobody would ever say that of Japan or the two Koreas.  Nobody would ever call these nations multi-cultural. 

The Han Chinese, probably the world’s most successful ethnic group, also have a strong sense of national unity.  Unlike the Japanese and Koreans, they have a history of being able to absorb foreigners, including conquerors such as the Mongols and Manchus, through intermarriage and cultural assimilation.

The assimilation process is now going on, in a brutal way, with Tibetans and Uighurs.  I think the reason the Vietnamese fear the Chinese more than they ever feared the French or us Americans is because of the real possibility that assimilation by the Chinese could end their existence as a nation.

Modernization and an angry world

These are notes for a presentation to the Bertrand Russell Forum of Rochester, NY, at Writers & Books Literary Center, 740 University Ave., at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 8, 2018.

There’s no denying that world is full of angry people.

There are angry blood-and-soil nationalists, for whom love of country is like a religion, demanding their supreme loyalty. They are angry because they think their nations are under attack.

There are angry religious fanatics, for whom loyalty to a creed is a form of nationalism, defined by opposition to other creeds. They are angry because they think their religions are under attack.

There are angry and violent individuals, whose free-floating anger doesn’t appear to be linked to any larger movement or cause.

Pankaj Mishra wrote in Age of Anger: a History of the Present that most of this anger has a common cause—disappointment with the promise of modernity.

The promise of modernity is that if you give up your outworn prejudices, superstitions and customs, if you embrace science, reason and commerce, if you leave home, get an education and join a wider world, you will not only prosper, but you will be free to choose the course of your life..

The anger, Mishra wrote, comes from those for whom this promise was not kept, or who didn’t believe it in the first place.

The angry men—almost all of them are men—are not people clinging to a traditional way of life. They are men who long for something they lack.

This goes back a long time. It was felt by millions of people in Europe and North America in the 19th century and also billions in Asia and Africa in the 20th and 21st, who were uprooted from village communities and left to fend for themselves in an unforgiving global economy.

The promise of an improved material standard of living was kept for some of us—educated middle class people in North America and Western Europe, and, during the 20th century, great masses of working people.

But it is not humanly possible that the majority of the people in China and India, let alone Africa and the rest of the world, will ever be able to consume as much of the world’s resources as prosperous Americans and Europeans do. And even if they could, that might not compensate for what they have lost.

Is the American South a nation?

What is a nation?  In my opinion, a nation is a group of people who wish to live under an independent sovereign government and whose primary loyalty is to each other.

By that definition, are any of the regional cultures in Colin Woodard’s American Nations nations?

Some North American Indian nations fit that definition.   The French-speaking people of Quebec are a nation; they have achieved virtual sovereignty within the Canadian state.   A certain number of African-Americans and of Mexican-Americans think of themselves as a separate nation.

Woodard described early secessionist attempts in the trans-Appalachian West and talk of secession of New England during the War of 1812, but none of them every came to anything.   There is talk today of secession in California, Texas and other states, but also highly unlikely to come to anything.

The only region within the United States that ever made a sustained struggle to be an independent nation is the American South.

Originally the South, according to Woodard, was not one unified region, nor even two (the mountain and lowland South), but three (which he calls Tidewater, the Deep South and Greater Appalachia).

Click to enlarge.

The difference between Tidewater and the Deep South is that the first is that the Chesapeake Bay region was settled by Cavaliers from southern England, who hoped to reproduce British aristocratic rule as it was in the 16th and 17th centuries, and South Carolina was settled by planters from the British colony of Barbados, who intended to establish the slave society of the West Indian sugar islands.

Slavery in the two regions was very different.   The first Africans imported by the Tidewater plantation owners were indentured servants, who had a legal right to freedom after they served their indenture.   Race slavery was introduced only later.

This explains something that puzzled me.   I learned in a biography of Harriet Tubman, who was enslaved in my home state of Maryland, that Maryland in those days had the highest proportion of free black people of any American state.

Click to enlarge.

Later a fellow Marylander, who visited Liberia in his youth as a merchant seaman, said he was astonished at the number of Maryland place names and family names he saw there.

Where did those free Maryland black people come from?

The free black people in Maryland, and the African-American colonists of Virginia, were the descendants of the indentured servants.   Their presence in Maryland and Virginia meant that, even though free black people lacked virtually any legal rights, they still were not quite reduced to the status of livestock.

In contrast, the slave culture of the Spanish, French and British colonies in the West Indies was more like the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi forced labor camps than it was like serfdom in 16th and 17th century Europe.

The West Indian sugar plantations were strictly commercial operations, controlled by a tiny minority of white people, who used terror, torture and the threat of death and mutilation to try to keep slaves under control.   Slaves died at such a rate that the planters needed a continual supply of new slaves to keep operating.

Slavery in South Carolina and the rest of the Deep South was not quite as bad as that, but it was bad enough.   Slaves in Virginia and Kentucky feared being sold down the river to South Carolina and the Gulf states.   But slave owners in the Deep South threatened slaves with being sent to Cuba, which was even worse.

I don’t, of course, intend to justify slavery in any form.  Any time one group of people has absolute power over another, you will reproduce the Stanford prison experiment.

Neither to I intend to imply that Southern white people were all demons or that Northern white people were angels.

Woodard pointed out that there was a time when there were more African slaves in Dutch New Amsterdam than in the region from Maryland to Georgia.   Much of the African slave  trade operated out of Newport, Rhode Island, from which Yankee skippers took trade goods to west Africa, then slaves to the West Indies and then rum back to New England.    The whole newly independent USA  was involved in slavery, not just the South.

Thomas Frank on Trump’s nationalist populism

Nobody alive has a better grasp of American politics than Thomas Frank.

Above is a video I came across of a talk he gave in April at the Kansas City Public Library.   It’s a bit long, especially to watch on a computer screen, but Frank is an entertaining speaker, as he is a writer, and I recommend listening to him if you have time.  His talk ends a little short of an hour and a question-and-answer period runs for about 30 minutes.

Frank sees Donald Trump as the latest of a line of Republican nationalist populists—his predecessors being Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush and the leaders of the Tea Party.

A populist is someone who claims to speak in the name of the people against the elite.   The old Populist Party, which dominated Kansas politics in the 1890s, represented farmers and laborers and fought against bankers and railroad CEOs.

The Democratic Party used to be this kind of populist party, Frank said, but it no longer is.   Instead it represents a professional class defined by educational credentials.

In the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Democrats spoke in the name of the common people against greedy Wall Street bankers and power-hungry corporate CEOs.   But the present generation of Democratic leaders regards bankers and CEOs as classmates—members of the same college classes and same social class.

This has given an opening to nationalist populists who claim to speak for the common people against meddling bureaucrats, unpatriotic intellectuals and out-of-touch journalists.

The vast majority of Americans are either treading water economically or going under.   They are justifiably angry, and right-wing talk radio tells them a story that explains their plight and channels their anger.

The Republican populists offer no real solution, but Democrats no longer offer an alternative story.  That’s why they’ve been in decline for 50 years.  They will have a hard time coming back, Frank said, even if Donald Trump self-destructs.

I found Frank’s whole talk interesting.  Maybe you will, too.

Neoliberalism vs. nationalism in France

The French election on Sunday narrowed the field to two candidates—Emmanuel Macron, a neoliberal defender of globalization, and Marine Le Pen, a blood-and-soil nationalist, in the run-off election May 7.

Macron is an Obama-like outsider, who offers a vaguely-defined hope and change and, in fact, was endorsed by Barack Obama, but who actually represents France’s financial establishment.

Le Pen is usually described as the “far right” candidate.  She promises to protect France from what she calls the twin threats of globalization and Islam.

But she also is in favor of locking in France’s 35-hour work week, lowering the retirement age to 60, bolstering public services and reducing income taxes on low-income workers

Macron is in favor of flexibility on the 35-hour work week, industry deregulation, reduction of government spending and cutting corporate taxes.  So which is the right-winger?

He favors CETA—the Canadian-European Free Trade Agreement—which, like NAFTA and the defunct proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, would restrict business regulation in the name of protecting free trade.  So who is the left-winger here?

Le Pen would replace the Euro with a “nouveau franc,” reestablish border controls and repeal certain European Union laws.  If the EU refused to cooperate, she would call for a referendum on whether France should secede.  If the French voted to stay in the EU, she would resign.

Macron wants to strengthen the Euro and France’s ties with the EU.   He generally favors current French policy on immigration.  Le Pen would restrict immigration to 10,000 persons a year and kick out all unauthorized immigrants, as well as all Muslims on terrorist watch lists.

Neoliberalism and its discontents (2)

What follows is notes for the second part of a talk for the Rochester Russell Forum scheduled at Writers & Books Literary Center, 740 University Ave., Rochester, NY, at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 13.

Neoliberalism has generated an antithesis—blood and soil nationalism, which holds that the supreme human value consists of the ties of loyalty and customs among people of common ancestry who live in the same place.

Blood and soil nationalism is not fascism, although it can fit very well with fascism.  It is not racism, although it can fit very well with racism.

The difference is that fascism and racism are international movements.  They are disconnected from the culture and heritage of any particular place.

Loyalty to a heritage and a way of life, to kindred who live in a particular place, is the most natural feeling in the world.   It is wrong to devalue this feeling.

The problem is that, for many people, local cultures and heritages have already been hollowed out by the consumer culture promoted by the mass media of entertainment and advertising.  What is left is a hollowed-out version of patriotism consisting of loyalty to your own group and hatred of some other group you see as a threat.

People embrace this hollow nationalism as a way of giving a meaning to their lives that the neoliberal consumer and advertising culture does not provide.

Nations of immigrants and the future

Hat tip to Jim Rose.

I’ve always thought of the United States as a nation particularly welcoming to immigrants, but the chart shows many other nations have proportionately larger immigrant populations than the USA.

I’m less surprised at the high ranking of Australia, New Zealand and Canada as at nations such as Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and Ireland, which I’ve always thought of as ethnically and culturally homogeneous.

I’d be interested in the figures for Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries.

[Update 2016/5/19.  I came across an interesting interactive graphic, Origins and Destinations of the World’s Migrants, 1990-2015, from Pew Research Center that answers my question.  Also, I forgot about peoplemovin- A visualization of migrant flows, an interactive graphic to which I linked previously.]

Nationalism and religious fanaticism in Israel

Nationalism and religious fanaticism are a dangerous combination in any country.

It means that people worship their collective selves instead of a universal God, and regard rival nations as the equivalent of demons.

I hesitated to post this video because I don’t want to associate myself with the anti-Semites in the comment thread.  I have had many Jewish friends and acquaintances during my life, none of whom adhered to the theology described by the brave Israeli journalist Yossi Gurvitz.   I do not think that what he describes represents the best values of Judaism.

But I think what he describes is real, and should not be ignored in the name of tolerance.

I do not criticize Israeli policy from the standpoint of moral superiority.  I don’t think the Israeli government has done anything that the American government has not done.

Nationalism and religious fanaticism in India

Nationalism and religious fanaticism are a dangerous combination.

It means that people worship their collective selves instead of a universal God, and that they regard other people as the equivalent of demons.

Very few, if any, countries are immune from this danger—certainly not mine.

What if Russia breaks up?

The Economist had an article speculating on the possibility of the breakup of the Russian Federation.  This doesn’t seem likely to me, but I’m no expert.

The old Soviet Union was a multi-national empire which was united, in theory, by Communist ideology which, in theory, treated all persons and all cultures equally.

The present-day Russian Federation is united mainly by Russian nationalism, based on the Russian language and Russian Orthodox Church.

This may solidify the loyalty of Russians, who are the federation’s largest ethnic group, but not necessarily Chechens, Tatars and other non-Russian peoples, who are treated as second-class citizens by Russian-speakers.

The Russian government had to fight a bloody war to keep Chechnya from seceding and the potential exists for other conflicts.

Many of the non-Russian nationalities have higher birth rates than the Russians.

What would happen if Russia did break up?  The United States, China and maybe Germany, Turkey, Iran and Japan would probably try to draw the fragments into their sphere of influence—a possible source of conflict and war.

The worst case would be if Russia descended into chaos and anarchy, and some rogue government or movement got control of Russian nuclear missiles.

I don’t think The Economist is seriously predicting this.  But who knows what might happen?

LINK

What if Russia breaks up? The peril beyond Putin by The Economist.

Why the alliance of Netanyahu and the GOP?

The overwhelming majority of Jewish people in the United States vote for the Democratic Party, but it is the Republicans who are the strongest supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  And vice versa.  Why is this?

P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu and GOP Sen. Tom Cotton

I think that Republican hawks see Netanyahu’s Israel as a model of the kind of aggressive, militarist nation that they would like to see the United States become.

American Jewish voters mostly support Democrats because, based on their historical memory as an oppressed people, they favor civil rights, labor rights and humanitarian causes.   These are values rejected by the dominant faction of the Republican Party and by the Likud party in Israel.

I think that another reason is that Republicans appeal to the apocalyptic Christian minority that believes that the establishment of Israel is the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy about the End Times.  Jewish people in the USA find these Christians scary, recalling their history of persecution, but they are exactly parallel to the apocalyptic Jewish minority in Israel.

An excellent question

Why is it not OK to kill people in the name of a religion, but it is OK to kill people in the name of a nation?

via Ian Welsh.

The global rise of Putinism

What do the following leaders have in common?

• Vladimir Putin of Russia.
• Xi Jinping of China.
• Narendra Modi of India.
• Shinzo Abe of Japan.
• Recep Tayyip Erodogan of Turkey.
• Viktor Orban of Hungary.

They all reject the ideals of democracy and human rights as historically understood in the United States, Great Britain and France, and instead embrace authoritarianism, nationalism, state capitalism and religious and social conservatism.  For want of a better name, call the new ideology Putinism.

Other names arguably could be added to this list.  Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, like Putin and Modi, is an ethnic and religious nationalist who turns a deaf ear to advocates of universal human rights.

I wouldn’t say any of these people are movements are exactly the same as Hitler, but neither to I think it is a coincidence that Nazi symbols keep popping up in unlikely places, because the Nazis are the polar opposite of liberal and democratic values.

The Taliban, al Qaeda ISIS and other radical Salafists represent a different kind of anti-democratic backlash.  They’re not Putinists.  They hate Putin, Xi, Modi and Erdogan.  They aren’t nationalists.  Their leaders don’t care whether you’re an Arab, a Afghan, a Chechen, a Uighur, a Somali or even a European, so long as you accept their religious dogma and hate people of different religions.

I think we Americans and others should resist the temptation to take sides in quarrels among freedom’s enemies.  The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Ukrainian history and nationalism

What is a nation?  A nation is a group of people who want to be ruled by an independent government, and who don’t want to be ruled by members of some other group.

Claims to nationhood are often based on common ancestry, common language, common culture or common history, and all these things are important, but not essential.  Often they are invented after the fact.

The Irish and the Poles are nations with long and strong histories of struggling for independence.  The Italians and the Germans had common languages and cultures for centuries before they united under a common government.

On the other hand there are peoples who before nations overnight.  Up until the early 1770s, the English-speaking colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America were loyal subjects of the British king.  A quarter-century later, they were patriotic citizens of the USA.

What are the roots of Ukrainian nationhood?  And how strong are those roots?  It is virtually impossible to find Ukraine on a map prior the 20th century, although there was an independent Cossack nation for a brief period in the 17th century in the territory that is now Ukraine.   The Cossacks were a people on the borders of the Russian Empire who fought the Poles and Turks, and later became the defenders of the Russian frontier.

The Cossacks had a strong sense of national identity, although they never again became a separate nation.  Some years back I read Leo Tolstoy’s novel, The Cossacks, set in the early 1800s, about the Cossacks and Russia’s war against the Chechens.   Nearly 200 years later, the Russians are still trying to subdue the Chechens.

I am not a historian, nor an authority on Ukrainian history, but I have read a certain amount of European and Russian history, and I don’t recall reading about Ukrainians prior to the 20th century.   The territory that is now Ukraine was Kievan Russ, whose people were converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity at the dawn of the European Middle Ages.   Kievan Russ laid the foundations of Russian and Ukrainian culture, but vanished from the map of history after the Mongol invasions.  After that the Ukrainian area was ruled by Tatars, Ottoman Turks and Poles, until it was slowly conquered by Russia  the eastern part first and then the western part.

The Czarist Russian Empire had a policy of trying to Russify its conquered Slavic peoples, forcing them to speak Russian and suppressing their own languages. There was some resistance to this.  I read about a 19th century Ukrainian composer who refused to allow the lyrics of his music to be translated into Russian, and thereby gave up the chance of having his works performed in Moscow.

The Ukrainian language is similar to, but different from, Russian.   A British writer, in an article not available on-line, said that if you walked from Moscow to Kiev, every village you walked through would understand the language spoken in all the neighboring villages, and yet, by the time you got to Kiev, the language of the Muscovites would be unintelligible.

During World War One, the German armies created a Ukrainian puppet state under a “Hetman,” a Cossack title.   This state existed for only a few months before being conquered by the Bolsheviks.

Oppression is a great force for creating national consciousness (ask the Palestinian Arabs!) and the Ukrainians suffered greatly under Stalin’s rule.   Millions of Ukrainian farmers died of starvation as the Soviet government confiscated their food and tried to force them into collective farms.  One could argue that this was not aimed at Ukrainians as a people because the same policies were carried out in southern Russia.  I think the descendents of Stalin’s Ukrainian victims would regard that as a distinction without a difference.

The Germans had a good record as occupiers during World War One, and, according to my Ukrainian college roommate Lubaslaw, many Ukrainians welcomed them.  But the German policy was to confiscate Ukrainian grain, let Ukrainians starve and reduce the survivors to slavery and serfdom.

A fascistic Ukrainian nationalist, Stepan Bandera, born in Polish Galacia, proclaimed an independent Ukraine and sought to kill and drive out Russians, Poles and Jews.  Later he turned against the Germans when he realized what they had in mind for Ukraine.   Not all Ukrainians supported him.  Many fought in the Red Army to drive the Nazis out of Ukraine.  And, I suspect, many others just tried to survive as best they could, as most people would do in such circumstances.

After World War Two, Ukraine along with Belorussia were given representation in the United Nations, though still under control of the Soviet Union.  After 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and loosened the grip of the Soviet state, many peoples in the various Soviet republics, including Ukraine, agitated for independence.  A referendum was held in Ukraine in 1990, and 90 percent voted for independence.

Actual independence, however, did not come about as the result of a freedom struggle.  It was the result of a deal by Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, with the presidents of Ukraine and Belorussia, to secede from the Soviet Union and thereby leave Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev without a nation to rule.

The presidents of newly-independent Ukraine were not patriots.  Their corrupt government left Ukraine as the poorest and least dynamic of the former Soviet republics.  Ukrainians both east and east, and both Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking want a more honest and efficient government than they have had.

The Russian Empire conquered eastern Ukraine first and western Ukraine later.  The result of this is that the Russian language is stronger in the eastern part of Ukraine than the western part.  This doesn’t mean that eastern Ukrainians necessarily want to be a part of Russia.  English Canadians speak the same language as us Americans and have a superficially similar culture, but few if any want to be part of the USA.

Similarly there is a sharp political divide between eastern and western Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean Ukraine is on the verge of splitting into two separate nations.  Here in the USA, there is a deep political divide between the so-called Red States and Blue States, but all of us think of ourselves as Americans.

Ukrainians in religion include Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholics, who are a separate communion with their own hierarchy that reports directly to the Pope.  A Ukrainian-American friend of mine told me jokingly that Ukrainians would never be Roman Catholics because Roman Catholics are Polish.

So how united a nation is Ukraine?  I don’t live in Ukraine, I don’t know anybody who lives in Ukraine, I don’t speak Ukrainian or Russian, and I don’t claim that reading a few books and articles makes me an authority on the subject.  Yet, because my government is meddling in Ukraine, I try to understand as best I can.

I see no evidence that the majority of Ukrainians hate each other.  Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but I don’t see evidence that they do.  The YouTube videos and photos of militant groups circulating on the Internet are evidence of the existence of murderous extremists in Ukraine, but not evidence of what the Ukrainian public thinks.  The uniformed Ukrainian military has so far been reluctant to fire on their fellow citizens, and I take that as evidence that ordinary Ukrainians don’t want a civil war.

My guess is that Ukrainians feel some attraction to the liberal values symbolized by the European Union, but that they don’t want to be part of NATO, they don’t want to be subject to austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund and they don’t want to be rescued by Russia —  not even residents of eastern Ukraine who are taking part in a referendum today about their status in Ukraine.   And my guess also is that the more foreign governments meddle in the affairs of Ukraine, the more united a nation they will be.

What do you think?

[Added 5/12/14]  For the record, more than 90 percent of the voters in a referendum in the Luhansk and Donetsk areas supported independence, which could have meant greater independence within the Ukrainian state, an independent nation or annexation by Russia.

How divided is Ukraine?

Double click to enlarge.

Loyalty to one’s tribe, homeland or city is as old as humanity, but modern nationalism is an idea that arose in 19th century Europe.  Modern nationalism is the idea that any group of people of common ancestry speaking a common language should have their own independent government in order for their culture to flourish.

This made obvious sense to divided peoples such as the Germans and Italians or subject peoples such as the Greeks where a group of people of common ancestry and common language occupied the same territory.  But it is harder to apply where you have populations of different ancestry and language all mixed together in the same territory, which is the case for much of the world, including the whole area stretching from the Balkans in Europe through southwest, southern and southeast Asia..

As the map above shows, not everybody in Ukraine is of Ukrainian ancestry nor speaks Ukrainian as their primary language.  Ukraine also is home to Jews, Tatars and other nationalities not shown on the map.

One of the problems of Ukraine, as in many nations in Africa and Asia, is that its boundaries were not determined by the Ukrainians themselves, but by the ruling nation — in this case, the Soviet Union.   Stalin, like other colonial rulers, was a practitioner of divide-and-rule, and so drew boundaries of the Soviet republics so that each contained minority groups that might look to Moscow for protection.

Now Vladimir Putin says he has a duty to protect Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east from persecution.  A think an east-west vision of Ukraine would be a great tragedy because so many of the “wrong” ethnicity would wind up on the “wrong” side of the dividing line.   Fortunately a Pew survey indicates that an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, east and west, want to remain a united nation, and that even Ukrainians in the east have no desire to be rescued by Russia.

An extremist few could start a cycle of violence and retaliation that could change all this, so it behooves authorities east and west to keep their ultra-nationalists under control.

Bosnian protesters unite across ethnic lies

My e-mail pen pal  Jack Clontz sent me the following link.

He thinks it is important and so do I.

Anger in Bosnia, but this time the people can read their leaders’ ethnic lies by Slavoj Zizek for The Guardian.ho

Click on the link to read about how Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina have joined in protests against corruption and demands for jobs.

As Zizek points out, their action has significance beyond Bosnia, because it shows it is possible to avoid the sterile dilemma of  rule by religious theocrats and rule by materialistic dictators, as seems to be the case in so many countries.

Conflicts among nationalities and religions, and between religious zealots and secularists, helps the powers that be to divide and rule.

Why don’t the Palestinians just give up?

I just got finished reading Max Hastings’ great new book, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945. The book is a vast panorama of human suffering, including an episode almost forgotten today—the ethnic cleansing of the Germans from eastern Europe and from the German territories of East Prussia and Silesia.   German families were sent out onto the roads in winter with what they could carry on their backs, to survive as best they could.  As many as a million perished.  But after the suffering inflicted on the world by the Nazi regime, few had any sympathy for the plight of German people.

I described this to a friend of mine, and he wondered why the Palestinian people can’t accept defeat as the Germans did.  There are winners and losers in war.  The Palestinian Arabs are the losers.  Why can’t they accept that?   I forget what answer I mumbled in reply, but it wasn’t a good one.

The real answer is that this is not a question for me or my friend to decide.   The Irish were defeated time and time again by the British, but they never accepted defeat and eventually won their independence.  On the other hand they came to accept the partition of Ireland as the price to be paid for peace.   The nation of Poland was wiped off the map not just once, but twice, and the Poles reconstituted themselves as a nation.   The people of Chechnia and Kurdistan fight on for independence even though their causes seem hopeless.

Jewish people created a new Israel thousands of years after the original Israel was destroyed, and Armenian people have a new Armenia thousands of years after the old Armenia vanished.   The question is not whether the Palestinian Arabs have been defeated.  It is whether and when they will accept defeat.