Theology Uncorked

WHY DO WE NEED ENEMIES?

I had initially planned to talk about my peace activism, which included several trips to the Soviet Union, mostly with religious groups, to conduct people-to-people encounters. I will refer to them briefly, but now feel that it might be more timely to focus on the Ukraine issue.

This is, in part, because I heard Father Andriy discuss the Maidan events of 2013 and 2014, but also because I wonder why we are led to demonize others instead of focusing on and dealing with our own problems?

As Tucsonans we are familiar with the refugee issue on our border. But this urge to demonize others did not begin with President Trump. Do you remember Slobodan Milosevic? It was because of his ethnic cleansing in Former Yugoslavia that we engaged in our humanitarian mission there and bombed Belgrade in 1999. Remember, he died in prison in 2006 while on trial at the Hague. Did you know that the same Tribunal cleared him of all charges in 2016? Oh well, if we don’t remember that, I am sure we all remember Saddam Hussein, and how we rescued Iraq from his evildoing in 2003. Then there was Libya – and the madman Moammar Qadhafi, and he got what was coming to him: Do you remember Hilary Clinton, then heading the State Department, laughing out loud on camera when it was announced that he had been not just killed, but sodomized? Then there is Assad in Syria. Remember, Syria was cooperating with us, among other services it rendered was “dark sites” for gentle interrogations of terrorists we delegated to them…. But then Syria as well as Iran were on that axis of evil we were planning to sanitize. But something went wrong in Syria, – oh yes, the Russians intervened – who asked THEM? As Nancy Pelosi put it, all roads lead to Putin.

But let me tell you a little bit about myself first, and how I came to speak as I do. I was born in former Yugoslavia of Russian émigré parents. On both sides of the family (as it happens, my mother’s folk were from Ukraine) they had fought on the wrong side of the Bolshevik Revolution, and had to leave the country in 1920. The family’s subsequent life in exile caused me to grow up on four continents – struggling to survive the major upheavals of the 20th century: World War II and German occupation in Yugoslavia, Forced Labor and then refugee camps in Germany, colonization and decolonization in Morocco, and then immigration to Australia and later the United States.

I was in my mid-twenties when my Belgian-born husband and I came to the U.S., where we settled, worked, and raised our two kids. But our comfortable middle-class life in America could not erase the past, and kept me alert to war and peace issues. When the nuclear arms race between the US and the SU filled the headlines in the 80s, I wondered whether my fluency in Russian could be put to work for peace.

I will have to refer you to my memoir, which has been published in the spring of 2021 and describes the people to people trips I took to understand our contest with “the Evil Empire.” (Prague in 1983, Soviet Union in 1984 and 1988, and The Russian Federation in 1995) Let me only say at this point that it changed me.

The events of the 80s resulted in a number of treaties between the two major contestants, and we could sigh a sigh of relief and look forward to peace dividends. One of the agreements between Gorbachev and James Baker, Secretary of State to George Herbert Bush, took place in 1990. It stipulated that if the Soviets withdrew from East Germany, NATO would not move an inch past the German border. Did we get those peace dividends? NATO has since been inching toward the Russian borders and Yeltsin’s enthusiasm for free-market economics got what Naomi Klein called “shock treatment” in return.

As President Clinton put it, they were hoping that whoever followed Yeltsin (who was a notorious drunkard) would be another, but sober Yeltsin. They got Putin instead – the little street fighter with beady eyes, who is, as it happens, quite sober. The Soviet Union may have been reduced to the Russian Federation, and sanctioned, and surrounded by NATO on all sides – in other words, very much weakened on the world stage – but is it reduceable to Yugoslavia, or Iraq, or Libya? Not quite, and unlike Qadhafi, who was talked into giving up his nuclear program, the Russians still have their nukes, and we are in a new arms race. The well-intentioned UN resolution for a total nuclear-arms ban notwithstanding, the famous doomsday clock is now set in seconds before our collective midnight.

Richard, my late husband whom I lost 4 years ago after 54 years of life together, was not interested in the kind of peacenik trips I had been involved in before. In 2008 we boarded a cruise ship in Istanbul, and proceeded to tour the Black Sea. In Yalta, Sebastopol, and Odessa, the people spoke Russian, and only Russian.

This was in 2008, and it is time now to address the subsequent events in Ukraine and Crimea. How many of you have heard Father Andriy speak on the subject? As you may remember, he focused on the Kiev Maidan events of 2013 and 2014. He showed pictures of peaceful crowds: People preparing food, singing. A young man plays the piano before a raw of policemen standing behind their shields. (Bosnia) Some people had built cobblestone barricades and also set a bunch of tires on fire: it was called “the wall of fire,” and Father Andriy characterized it as “the fire in their hearts.” There were pictures of priests in their black cassocks holding church banners.

I have no quarrel with those pictures of peaceful protest – there is confirmation from other sources about the initial peaceful character of the Maidan protests. It’s just that this is not the whole story. Unfortunately, most people have to depend on the media and are not in a position to study the complicated history of Ukraine. Even more challenging may be the job of coming to terms with the US foreign policy of global regime change.

So, let me begin by offering a few words on Ukrainian history: 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 at the time, and the two entities contested over the borderland between them known as Ukraine.

Perhaps a fitting comparison would be with the history of 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. The Premier Nikita Khrushchev was born in Ukraine. But like the two Texans who were American presidents, Khrushchev 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 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.” This is how Petersburg was founded. Later, Catherine the Great fought the Turks in the South, where Crimea was a Tartar holdover under Turkish suzerainty. When Turkey, having occupied the Balkans and threatened Vienna twice, became “the sick man of Europe,” France and Britain turned their attention to Russia. Allying themselves with Turkey, they initiated the Crimean War of 1854. This is when Tennyson wrote the famous words: “yours is not to ask the reason why – yours is but to do and die.”

Asking questions – unless carefully guided by the powers that be – is still not a popular thing to do. And yet there is a deadly civil war in Ukraine, and we should ask the reason why. Father Andriy suggested the seemingly obvious: 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… Do you believe that?

A while back I went to a meeting 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? Are any of you really worried about Putin taking over Arizona? But is it not also said in the Trump impeachment proceedings that the latest Ukraine situation is a matter of national security for the US? Well yes, President Trump is an unscrupulous, self-interested deal maker, but why is it a matter of national AMERICAN security to give arms to the Ukraine? Would you not rather say that US intervention in Ukraine is a matter of RUSSIAN national security?

Well, I admit that Putin has been arming the people of the Eastern Ukrainian Donbass area, and that he did reclaim Crimea. Do you know that the Black See was full of American nuclear-armed submarines at the time? Was Kennedy wrong to react when Khrushchev placed some nukes in Cuba?

But this is not how we are to see events. True, the Maidan events were peaceful to begin with, and Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton’s Assistant for Eastern Europe, walked around 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 about the 5 billion dollars invested in the effort to seduce the Ukrainians into the arms of democracy.

As it happens, US involvement in Ukraine has a long history. There were, throughout Ukrainian history, attempts at asserting their national interests: one of them took place during the German invasion of World War II. A group of Ukrainian nationalists sided with the Nazi invaders, and happily massacred Jews and Poles. One of their most notorious leaders, Stepan Bandera, has just been honored by a memorial statue. After the Soviets regained those grounds from the Germans, the Ukrainian nationalists ended up in exile and 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 boycotted the election of Poroshenko which followed, because he was willing to institute discriminatory policies, among them the banning of the Russian language. True, Donbass resistance was supported by Russian arms. The civil war counts over 12,000 dead thus far, and most of the million people Father Andriy defined as internal refugees actually fled to Russia.

Just the same, now as before, the majority of the Ukrainians want peace, and they just voted overwhelmingly for Zelenski because he ran on a peace platform. But as Pompeo put it on Fox News recently, do Americans care about Ukraine? Hardly. Trump wants them to out Joe Biden, and the Democrats want them to out Trump. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans care about the Ukrainians dying as a result of our supplying them with arms. Putin was not the one who started the whole thing. So, why are we poking the Russian bear in the eye by wanting to place NATO in Ukraine?

At least during the Cold War and even before we were worried about 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 it while Donald Trump is painfully blatant, Putin, unlike Yeltsin, turned out to be brazenly uncooperative.

While the sensitivities of the 0.01 percent club are offended by his riding horses bareback, why should the rest of us feel that way? Don’t we have other things to worry about, like medical bills, and tuition costs for our kids and grand kinds, and climate change and the doomsday clock about to strike midnight? The famous author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, also wrote a book titled The Kingdom of God is Within You. This book happened to inspire a young man named Gandhi who in turn inspired a man called Martin Luther King Jr. I say let’s stop listening to the handsome, smiling faces on TV who want to distract us with tales of Trump and Putin, and remember the real legacy of peace and justice work. When we pray for peace, may we hear the real voice of God within us.