Someone will need to explain this to me: why do certain Westerners claim to care so much what happens inside Russia (or replace Russia with any other country you’d care to name)? I’m serious. This is the second prominent op-ed about the youth group Nashi in the last week, and it is written in that same tone of alarmed concern. It seems to me that Westerners look at Russia with the same kind of myopia with which Americans look at Europe or Europeans look at America or coastal liberals look at people in “Red” America. The critics always latch on to those elements of the country that they purport to find sinister (usually because the “sinister” elements have different political views from themselves) and then generalise about the condition of the entire country based on this. Where the secular European quakes in dread of American megachurches, or the religious American shudders at the thought of empty churches in Europe and godless Frenchmen cavorting on their long weekends, certain Westerners are filled with horror at the thought of Russian nationalists.
Better yet they are disturbed by things like this:
But it is one thing for French kids to be told about Joan of Arc’s heroism or American kids about Paul Revere’s midnight ride; everyone is entitled to a Robin Hood or William Tell or two. It’s a bit more disturbing to learn that the new Russian history manual teaches that “entry into the club of democratic nations involves surrendering part of your national sovereignty to the U.S.” [bold mine-DL] and other such choice contemporary lessons that suggest to Russian teenagers that they face dark forces abroad.
The textbook’s phrasing is a bit blunt, but I can’t say that I find this statement to be all that inaccurate. Entering the “democratic club of nations” in practice frequently means having your policies dictated to you by foreign governments, the U.S. being chief among them, which offer the “incentives” of gaining membership in other clubs (the WTO, NATO, the EU) and receiving support from the IMF. Once you have joined these organisations, your sovereignty is reduced even more and your policy options are even more constrained. In practice, it often is the case that these nations yield up some of their sovereignty to Washington as an “ally” or to institutions where Washington’s influence is very great.
The legitimate criticism here should be that this statement has little or nothing to do with the study of history. If it were a political science book, it might be different, but there is certainly a level of gratuitous politicisation here in any case. It is the politicisation, and not the message’s content, that we should find objectionable.
It is worth noting that none of this fundamentally changes what our attitude towards the Russian government ought to be. Cooperation with Russia is in the best interests of both our countries. The more people in the West rile themselves up over what the Russians are doing with their textbooks and the like, the harder it becomes to foster good relations with Moscow. The Japanese, of course, have engaged in some of the most appalling revisionism about WWII in their textbooks, but very few people seem terribly upset by this these days such that they try to encourage fear and loathing of Japan.
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August 22nd, 2007 at 6:41 am
Roach
Let’s just speak plainly for a moment. Jews because of their tragic history are fearful of strong expressions of nationalism in Europe. They’re particularly fearful of such expressions in countries where they formerly (1) had bad relations with the locals and (2) at various times oppressed the locals, such as in 17th Century Ukraine on behalf of Polish landlords or in Bolshevik Russia as the first few generations of “nomenklatura.” These nationalist movements redefined the relevant areas and by definition excluded some groups from full participation. Even though Jews had a very privileged position in Communist Russia, the inherent paranoia of the regime and the fear of foreign agents after the establishment of a neutral or pro-Western Jewish state led to their decline. Even then, of course, they remained ahead of their peers due to education etc. The level of oppression they experienced in post ‘67 Russia was a shadow of what some of them had inflicted in the ’20s and ’30s. The old pre-Bolshevik Russia of the Kulaks and the drunken and envious proletarian stir up great fear in Jews; it’s the Cossack with his saber all over again ready to kick them out of their houses, steal their money, beat them up, etc. A Russian who is not a “Soviet” or who is not apologizing for some alleged harm to Jews 100 years ago–as if the intervening 80 years never happened–is someone who cannot be easily brow-beaten.
Any self-confident, nationalist, and explicitly Russian notion of Russian identity threatens existing Jews and ethnic minorities in Russia according to our minority-obsessed culture’s chief theorists exponents, the successful minority par excellence. Russia is a threat to the Western world’s decline because it has the muscular nationalist and ascendant energy of an India or China, but it’s a nation of white people historically who are Christian and ill disposed towards the Jews for alll of the usual reasons. Nashi is just a symbol of this, but for the people who see another Holocaust everywhere it’s far too similar to the HJ.