Salt of the Earth

So how do I take it from what John the Leninist/Stalinist told you? As Joe warned you, I am the child of Russian exiles. What that actually means is that my family, on both sides, were Whites, i.e. fought on the opposite side of the Bolshevik Revolution, and left the country in 1920. What this also means is that I grew up with horror stories of the Civil War and Stalinist purges. As I was telling David Gibbs the other day, I grew up with Reds lurking under my bed – to which he answered: and now you live with a Red IN your bed.

So, how did I get from then to now? One aspect of it has to do with growing up during World War II: My parents had emigrated to Former Yugoslavia, where I was born. I was only 3 years old when the building we lived in was bombed by the Germans in 1941. We were having breakfast and I was in my pajamas when suddenly my Dad scooped me into a blanket, and we ran down into the cellar, and when we came out on the street and I looked up: our balcony was gone, and the wall was gone, and I could look into our apartment like into a doll house. There was much running from bombs after that, and struggle for food under the German occupation. In short, the meaning of war is not an abstraction for me, but a visceral reality.

Another aspect of my growing up was forced labor and then refugee camps in Germany, then colonization and decolonization in North Africa, then immigration to Australia. I was 20 years by then, and my knowing several languages but no English meant that I was a dumb immigrant forced to do menial jobs as domestic or factory worker. In short, however my folks may have identified themselves with their former elite status – my Dad would still kiss a lady’s hand when introduced – our reality was that of bare survival.

This improved when my Belgian-born husband, whom I met at the University of Sydney, and who was a corporate brat, brought me to God’s country in 1962. We did ok, concentrating on study, work and family: ours was a typical middle-class life. And my White Russian assumptions were certainly not challenged by American politics. Just the same, my childhood of war and deprivation spoke against taking everything American at face value. And when the nuclear arms race between the US and the SU screamed from the headlines in the 80s, I became a peace activist.

My next trip took place in 2008, when Rick took me on a cruise on the Black Sea. Let me just say for now that in Yalta and Sebastopol, which are in Crimea, and in Odessa, which is in Ukraine proper, everyone spoke Russian, and only Russian. I particularly want to dwell on visiting Crimea, because Fred Yamashita, when he spoke here last, used a quote I cannot let by without comment. He spoke of his lifelong service to the labor cause, referred to himself as a soldier, and quoted the following: “mine is not to ask the reason why, mine is but to do and die.”

Some of you may recognize the quote from Tennyson’s poem The Ride of the Light Brigade. The occasion was when France and Britain took over from Turkey, by then “the sick man of Europe,” to fight Russia in the Crimean War of 1854. Obviously, Crimea and Ukraine are in the news again. The official version is that the poor oppressed Ukrainians wanted to join Europe, but Putin intervened. Putin likes to ride horses bare-chested, Putin, as has been proven – or has it – has intervened in our elections. As Nancy Pelosi put it, “all roads lead to Putin.”

Indeed. A while back I went to a meeting in Tucson on the subject of dark money where Terry Goddard spoke: the flyer inviting people to attend had this for a headline: Would you like PUTIN to select the next governor of Arizona? Is anyone here worried about Putin selecting the next governor of Arizona? And is that why American submarines were in the Black Sea in 2014?

Maybe we should ask the reason why, and since we do call these meetings “classes” maybe it is ok to say a few words about Ukrainian history. Here goes: The word Ukraine means borderland, and Ukraine has only become an independent state during the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991. Well yes, it was an independent principality at its inception, but its geographical location north of the Black Sea caused it to be a passageway of wave upon wave of invasions from Asia: in 1241 Kiev, the capital of what was then called Rus, was raised to the ground by the Mongols, and its population fled to the north. Eventually, a Russian state coalesced around Moscow. Poland was likewise emerging as a state, and the two entities contested over the borderland between them known as Ukraine.

A fitting comparison would be with Texas: Texas had been a part of Mexico, had claimed, at least for a time, its independence from the United States, and had sided with the separatist South during the Civil War. But like the two Texans who were American presidents, Khrushchev, who was born in Ukraine, represented the Soviet Union and was not a Ukrainian nationalist. His assignment of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was an administrative decision that made geographical sense: Ukraine was a state of the SU, not an independent country.

But as mentioned earlier, Crimea had experienced international intervention before. Russia was this large landlocked territory looking for maritime access throughout its history. In the early 18th century Peter the Great fought the Swedes in the North to open what he called “a window to the West” – that is how St. Petersburg was founded. Later, Catherine the Great fought the Turks in the South, where Crimea was a Tartar holdover under Turkish suzerainty. Did France and Britain attack Crimea to rescue the poor oppressed Tartars the way we are trying to rescue the poor oppressed Ukrainians? Or is something else at stake now as it was then? The contest over Asia between the British and Russian empires was called the “great game” at the time. What is the great game about today?

But is there not denying that the people of Ukraine manifested their will during the Maidan events of 2014? And they did so peacefully: did not Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton’s Assistant for Eastern Europe, walk among the people distributing cookies? But what was she doing there in the first place? As she was overheard, she and the American ambassador Jeffrey Pyatt were arguing over whom to promote to the top after the regime change. She also bragged on a different occasion about the 5 billion dollars invested in the effort to seduce the Ukrainians into the arms of democracy.

As it happens, US promotion of Ukrainian democracy has a long history. There were, indeed, throughout Ukrainian history, attempts at asserting their national identity: one of them took place during the German invasion of World War II. A group of Ukrainian nationalists sided with the Nazi invaders, and their leaders happily massacred Jews, Poles, and Communists. One of the most notorious among them was Stepan Bandera, to whose memory a statue has just been erected. But after the Soviets regained those grounds, the Ukrainian nationalists ended up in exile. Scores of them were welcomed to the United States, the CIA bankrolled the Ukrainian Institute in New York, and supported their nationalist underground activities in Ukraine.

The Orange Revolution of 2003, however, petered out: Yushchenko (whose wife was a Ukrainian American and had worked for the State Department) was not re-elected. Yanukovych was the one elected, and eventually the NATO project was foiled by his cancellation of the deal to join the EU. Well, if color revolutions, which are so photogenic on TV, don’t work, one can count on the nationalists to do the real fighting. To that purpose we have been supplying arms and training them, as it happens, in Texas.

Thus, the initially peaceful demonstrations of Maidan turned violent. Who were the snipers, killing policemen and civilians both, which caused the mayhem that followed? This is a well-worn tactic, and there is plenty of evidence that they were nationalist extremists. Yanukovych, who initially tried to negotiate with the protesters, ran for his life, and the rebels took over the parliament.

But the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine boycotted the election of Poroshenko which followed, because he was promoting unacceptable laws, among them the banning of the Russian language. Donbass resistance was supported by Russian arms the way the US had supported the Ukrainian coup of 2014.

But as Pompeo said on Fox News not long ago, “Do you think Americans care about the Ukraine?” They obviously don’t. Trump wanted Zelenski to out Joe Biden, and the Democrats wanted him to out Trump. The little matter of supplying Ukraine with weapons is incidental to what really matters: our theatrics between Republicans and Democrats on TV. The fact that the death toll of the civil war in Ukraine has reached 12,000, among them many civilians is, obviously, irrelevant.

But what about the rest of us? Should we not “ask the reason why?” Should we not ask WHY we are poking the Russian bear in the eye by wanting to place NATO in Ukraine? I for one, maybe because my folks on my mother’s side came from Ukraine, or maybe because my feminism is not about equal rights to be a soldier, I for one DO want to ask the reason why. Because after a lifetime of struggling to get out of the comfort zone of received opinion, I finally see that there is a method to the madness. I get it what today’s “great game” is all about.

At least throughout the 20th century our free-market religion had cause to fear the Red Threat of Communism. But the SU is no more, so what are we worried about now? Are we in Ukraine because Putin may take over Arizona? Or are we in Ukraine because the likes of Biden and Son want to run the whole world in the name of the multinationals? While the Bidens or the Clintons may be discreet about being in bed with Wall Street while Donald Trump is painfully blatant about it, Putin, unlike Yeltsin, turned out to be brazenly uncooperative.

While the sensitivities of the 0.01 percent club may be offended by Putin’s riding horses bare-chested, why should the rest of us feel that way? Don’t we have other things to worry about, like jobs with justice, and medical bills, and tuition costs for our kids and grand kinds, and climate change and the doomsday clock about to strike midnight? We have plenty of reasons to ask the “reason why” – just as the Russians and Ukrainians – and Bolivians, and Venezuelans, and Chileans and Hondurans and Salvadorans and Nicaraguans and Cubans, and all those others who suffer our blockades and sanctions or our poisoned gifts of weapons. As John put it earlier, why is it our business to kill hope?