Seeking to avoid
devastation, like that of World War II, is how Vladimir Putin opens his op ed to the U.S. and its political leaders.
Recent
events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the
American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at
a time of insufficient communication between our societies.
Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood
against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once,
and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international
organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such
devastation from ever happening again.
Devastation. The word comes from the Latin verb,
devastare which means
to lay waste, which is derived from the Latin adjective
vastus –
empty, desolate.
Putin knows devastation.
Putin
was born in 1952, 7 years after the end of World War II, a war
which saw his country and his family devastated. In Russia almost 13%
of the population perished during the war, with over 7 million civilian
deaths and nearly that many military deaths. More Russian civilians
died in WWII than soldiers. All told almost 14 million Russians
perished. These are only Russian numbers, not the whole Soviet Union.
In contrast the United States lost roughly 400,000 soldiers and 1,700
civilians, altogether less than one percent of the total population.
The
rolling tanks, the aerial bombardments, and the brutal warfare along
the Eastern Front left Russia devastated economically as well: a
quarter of its capital resources were destroyed and agricultural output
was lower than it had been in the 1920s. Add the psychotic leadership
of Stalin, who killed an estimated 20 million Soviet citizens, and the
economic disaster of Communism to the destruction of WWII and you have a land made empty, desolate.
Both
of Putin’s older brothers had died; the oldest, a few months after he
was born in the 1930s, the other, of diphtheria during the Siege of
Leningrad. More people died in the Siege of Leningrad than all U.K. and U.S. losses combined for the entire war.
Like his Baby Boomer peers in the United States, born to the
G.I. Generation after the Great Depression and WWII, we can imagine
that young Vladimir was a source of hope for his parents in the
devastated emptiness in which war and death had left their family.
Unlike
post war Russia, the post war America into which the Boomers were born
was a cornucopia. Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, the
United States had not been bombed into rubble. We were the exception.
We had no industrial competition. Everyone in the world bought our
stuff. They had no other choice. That was a
unique moment in history. As the
Economist writes:
These
boomers have lived a charmed life, easily topping previous generations
in income earned at every age. The sheer heft of the generation created a
demographic dividend: a rise in labour supply, reinforced by a surge in
the number of working women. Social change favoured it too. Households
became smaller, populated with more earners and fewer children. And
boomers enjoyed the distinction of being among the best-educated of
American generations at a time when the return on education was soaring.
Yet
these gains were one-offs. Retirements will reverse the earlier
labour-force surge, and younger generations cannot benefit from more
women working… In short, boomer income growth relied on a number of
one-off gains.
To take this historically unique situation and economic anomaly, and to expand it to be a general assumption about national exceptionalism would seem to be a tragic mistake of epic proportions.
Our Baby Boomer political leaders have
never seen the resulting devastation of armies traversing our borders and laying waste to
our territory. They grew up as well-cared-for children in the
brand new, burgeoning suburbs, at a time of unprecedented optimism and
wealth. It was an exceptional time in history. The strength and wealth
of the nation were so secure that they were able to “tune in, turn on
and drop out”, in that fit of Daddy-anger that was the late 1960s.
But
you can’t really blame them for taking everything for granted. The
suburbs had no roots, the new middle class corporate jobs meant GI dad
moved the family for work, a few years in one city, a few in another.
There was material wealth to be sure, but the Boomers were devastated in
their own way, uprooted from their ethnic enclaves in the northern
cities (if Catholic) and from their Midwestern cities, towns, and family
farms (if Protestant), devastated psychically in the wasteland of
Levittown and cul de sacs. In fact Baby Boomers now have the highest
suicide rate of any generation. The Me Generation is an alienated
generation. It was an exceptional mirage, material wealth masking
spiritual devastation.
Tom Wolfe, himself of the Silent Generation
sandwiched between the GIs and the Boomers, described the exceptional
nature of Boomer self-absorption as having discarded the “age-old belief
in serial immortality.”
The husband and wife who
sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to
provide a ‘better future’ for their children … the soldier who risks his
life or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who
devotes his life to some struggle for ‘his people’ that cannot possibly
be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance
or leave wills … are people who conceive of themselves, however
unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something
of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on
in their children … or in their people, their race, their community –
for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their
postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to
flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as
if thinking, ‘I have only one life to live.’ Instead, they have lived
as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offsprings’ lives
and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves
as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are
created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going
to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you
the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural
order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally
worshipped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to
renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has
been to defy what seems like a law of nature.
The Boomer entitles himself to exemption from this legacy.
Since
their transition into political power with the election of Bill Clinton
in 1992 and the accession of Newt Gingrich as House Speaker in 1994,
Boomers have proceeded to spend the
principal of that
exceptional material and economic endowment, so confident in themselves
and the sheltered world they grew up in, and so confident in the America
built and made safe by their fathers whom they revolted against, that
they seek to transform all the world into clones of post war America through mass marketed "culture", porn, or force of arms: “Democracy, Whisky, and Sexy!” as they
said in Najaf, Iraq.
And if not that transformative violence, the
Boomer political class desires at least to invite all the dreamers here,
knowing in their hearts, of course, that everyone in the world dreams
to get that online degree and work in a cubicle to pay for the Boomers’
Social Security, Medicare and the War on Terror.
Are the Boomers on an extended
ballistic tantrum? A cruise-missile hissy fit? Are they just acting
out? They have proceeded to lay waste to the foundations of their
inheritance, graduating from waging ideological wars on the institutions
that raised them, to waging whimsical wars abroad, costing billions,
from Clinton through Bush and Obama. As Baby Boomer Chris Hedges writes, "
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."
They
have indebted their children and grandchildren with these wars of
theirs, for some notional, Platonic ghost of Democracy, which brings
with it market-opening opportunities for
Whisky! and
Sex! to these
bedraggled traditional peoples who only know the ways of their ancestors
and not our enlightened, modern ways, not for any real national
threat, but spuriously, based upon lies and/or to cover up lies.
Putin knows about
the wasteland left by Great Patriotic Wars, and knows about the
decades of U.S. sponsored jihad on his country’s southern borders, and the unintended consequences and blowback of such sponsorship and intervention. (see:
Boston Marathon Bombing)
Putin’s Mother Russia was not just devastated
economically, it was devastated morally and spiritually after the
war, annihilating its own future with some of the highest abortion rates
in the developed world through the 1990s, with alcoholism, and other social pathologies of
devastating effect on their people’s ability to continue as a people
Rus.
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. -Vernon Law, baseball player, Silent Generation
Russia
in general and Putin in particular have experienced the test of war and devastation, learned
the lessons.
Recently, Russian birthrates surpassed those of the US. As
Tom Wolfe noted, this is an indication of belief in a future and a
sense of continuity for themselves as a people and as a civilization.
This practical politician does not want devastation again.
Having
experienced the devastation of war across his country’s borders and in
his own family, Mr. Putin finishes his op ed using the crusading,
religious terminology of the American Baby Boomer political class,
teleological “democracy”, while echoing the Declaration of
Independence.
There are big countries and small
countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and
those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too.
We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must
not forget that God created us equal.
America is exceptional to us because it is ours, not because of the historical,
economic anomaly of the post war years, not because it stands astride
the world as a Colossus.
Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Mexicans, Somalis, Vietnamese, etc. are not deformed Americans waiting to be fully Americanized. They are allowed to love their countries too, to think that their country is exceptional because it is theirs, whose blessings they hope to pass on to their posterity.
The
devastation of the war and the devastation of Communism led to a
devastation of the soul of that great people and their civilization, a
civilization that is literally being born again.
The spiritual
devastation of the Baby Boomers, their antiseptic yet materially rich
upbringing in suburban alienation, has resulted in the material
devastation of whomever gets in the way of their tantrums –be it the
civic institutions they inherited, or the indigenous cultures of small
countries who rub them the wrong way.
Baby Boomers took for granted the material wealth and security in which they were raised. They attacked the very civilization and institutions that had made them the best-raised and most educated generation of children in the history of the world to that point. They exempted themselves from their legacy and borrowed against their posterity.
Tom Wolfe recognized the unintended consequences for the Boomers' rejection of civilizational norms in the 1960s:
In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the
hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors
treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases
that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin
names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the
thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they now returned? It
had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had
migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history
will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all
time.
The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and
restraints of the past and start from zero. At one point, the novelist
Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a
pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon’s
point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over
again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the
communes swept aside--quite purposely--were those that said you
shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s
mattresses without changing the sheets, or as was more likely, without
using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t
drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same
cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by
getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the
scroff, the rot.
This process, namely the relearning--following a Promethean and
unprecedented start from zero--seems to me to be the leitmotif of the
twenty-first century in America. -from Hooking Up
The whimsical way in which
Boomers go to war suggests a need for a great relearning of the rules of civilization. But it also suggests "war as psychotherapy" and is reminiscent of the “World War as an Afterthought” theme in
the background of Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451, when a sick and
decadent nation continually goes to war abroad while waging a domestic
war on the minds of its pharmacologically pacified citizens, and on
culture itself:
[Montag has just come home to find his interactive-television addicted wife overdosed on sleeping pills.]
The
object he had sent tumbling with his foot now glinted under the edge of
his own bed. The small crystal bottle of sleeping-tablets which earlier
today had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped
and empty in the light of the tiny flare.
As he stood there the
sky over the house screamed. There was a tremendous ripping sound as if
two giant hands had torn ten thousand miles of black linen down the
seam. Montag was cut in half. He felt his chest chopped down and split
apart. The jet-bombs going over, going over, going over, one two, one
two, one two, six of them, nine of them, twelve of them, one and one and
one and another and another and another, did all the screaming for him.
He opened his own mouth and let their shriek come down and out between
his bared teeth. The house shook.
The Boomer
devastation, because it is wholly spiritual, is worse than the material and economic devastation that
informed Putin's childhood, which probably made him all the more
practical and ruthless.
Boomer devastation is in their psyche, the pain of their desolation screams out in cruise-missiles and F-16s, pissing away the material wealth that they inherited by bombing deserts.
