What Can Russia’s Turbulent Past and Present Teach                                                       Americans?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/2/22

The long sad history of the Russian people rolls on. Their plight for century upon century has been tyrants and tyranny. One is prone to ask where is a Gorbachev or a Yeltsin when Russia and the rest of the world need them? The brief interlude of governance by these two men wasn’t exactly western democracy, but as Margaret Thatcher said of Gorbachev, “We can do business together.” President Reagan’s assessment of Gorbachev was that under him the USSR was “less evil than it had been before.”

Our minds are primarily on Ukraine today and they should be; however, we should not lose sight of the full picture of the Slavic world. Ukraine and its neighbors, including “Mother Russia,” are of the same Slavic language family. Contested, split, and ruled at one time or another by Poland, Austria-Hungary, and the Tzarist Romanov family, Ukrainians have struggled  for decades, eventually becoming an independent nation in 1991. It’s abundantly clear that Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin and who considered Gorbachev and Yeltsin weak, desires the restoration of a Soviet Union-like country with iron-fisted power. Sadly, yea dangerously, President Biden has shown neither courage nor savvy in dealing with the world’s most dangerous man. Would that he could be a decisive Truman, Kennedy, Thatcher, Reagan, or Trump.

As for governmental power, can anyone seriously argue that the lives of Russians, Ukrainians, and all of their neighboring lands were made better when Lenin displaced the Romanovs in 1917? Practically all Slavic lands had suffered under the 304-year reign of the Romanovs (1613-1917). Slavs soon learned, however, that Lenin’s socialism wasn’t very social. It was tyranny under a different name proffered by a fellow we all know about, Karl Marx. Even though the “Christian” Romanovs behaved like self-appointed royals behave, they did not send their 97% peasant population to work camps. Socialist Russia did. Seems there’s always a catch to socialists and their claims.

Please do the following things. Compare the continuing unsettled political climate of the Slavic nations to that of the USA. Ask yourself the question, “What’s the difference between brutal and subtle?” In Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America, political change has typically been brutal. Not so in America. We have not experienced military take-overs, or power-hungry men who raised an army and marched to the seat of government, or work camps for those who disagree with the government. Those who apply the word insurrection to the January 6 goonish caper at the U.S. Capitol haven’t consulted a dictionary. Unlike the rest of the world, America has never known experientially what an insurrection is like.

Yet we have known and have been experiencing for many decades the subtle, invasive march of governmental power and the subtle but steady march of bureaucratic/regulatory/executive order rule and Orwellian governmental creep. Draw a map of the United States. Leave space between the states, viewing them as the entities they were meant to be. Ponder the 13 states (“colonies,” actual outposts of the British Empire), those subjects of the British crown who got together and declared they would be free. Consider the document they adopted that delineated the powers their new central government would and would not have. Read slowly the 28 words in Amendment 10. Finally, mentally list the areas of life which our central government involves itself in but which are forbidden in these 28 words. Being a Teddy Bear, I’ll get you started: education and healthcare.

How hard to handle has public education gotten? How many chefs in the education kitchen are there? Who really controls our schools and what they teach? How big a mess is healthcare? Why do at least three entities – the central government, the insurance company, your beloved doctor – have to be involved in your health? If you’re just dandy with all of this, have a good day. You might also like Eastern Europe, Russia, and China. But please understand that subtle, slow-moving, entangling administrativia birthed in our national legislature equals power, and that school curricula which you don’t like or believe in means you’ve given your children away and you never noticed. No tanks or guns or insurrection brought you to it all. Your inattention to current events, your dislike for history, your abhorrence of politics, your dismissal of the poetic line, “No man is an island entire of itself” brought you to it.

Tyranny is tyranny no matter how it arrives, no matter how strong or moderate its grip. In the end we’ve all lost our freedom and have been either too busy, too lazy, or too uncaring to realize it.

 

Roger Hines

March 31, 2022