Some Russia/NATO contacts, frozen in the wake of the Georgia conflict, are now resuming. Also, much to Russia's rejoicing, Georgia and Ukraine have not received a NATO Membership Action Plan. Russia sees this as a victory. However:
[Georgian foreign minister Eka] Tkeshelashvili expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the meeting, in which ministers reconfirmed that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members of NATO and said NATO would accelerate cooperative reform programs with both countries through existing NATO commissions.
The commissions will work on annual assessments of each country’s security and political needs, and on reforms to help them on the long path of NATO membership. Ms. Tkeshelashvili said that Georgia welcomed “a commitment to the process by which we can achieve our goal” of membership, “with maximized efforts to assist Georgia.”
The ministers decided to move ahead with that cooperation and leave to the future, “without prejudice,” decisions about whether both countries will also need to go through a formal “membership action plan,” as Germany and France now insist.
Who's blustering? Russia? Georgia? Both?
Clearly, both Georgia and Ukraine have major domestic problems that would be an obstacle to NATO membership even without concerns about antagonizing Russia. It's hard to say to what extent opposition within NATO to an immediate MAP for Georgia and Ukraine was driven by such concerns. Sure, NATO wants cooperation with Russia, but the respect Russia so craves seems elusive. I was amused by the comments of NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer:
Mr. de Hoop Scheffer, speaking in an interview after the conclusion of a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers, said that Russia’s sense of grievance and encirclement, genuine or not, was difficult for the alliance to assuage.
“It’s not so easy to know how to approach someone, in daily life or in foreign policy, who feels themselves victimized,” he said. “I think there is no reason for Russia to feel victimized, not to be taken seriously, but if that is the perception, we have to discuss it, because I have to try to convince them that democracy and the rule of law coming closer to Russia’s borders – why should that be a problem?”
Do you get the feeling that Russia is being treated like the crazy aunt who needs to be humored because she's got a large estate and because she just might burn the place down if gets really crazy?
The NATO foreign ministers also brushed asside Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's vague proposals for a new "security architecture" in Europe (overtures which the brilliant Russian humorist Victor Shenderovich, speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio, has likened to the behavior of a problem student who is invited for a conference with faculty and administrators and, instead of being glad that he hasn't been expelled from college for bad grades and bad conduct, starts sharing his ideas about how to run the college better). And another bit of important news buried inside the Times report:
Support from the NATO foreign ministers is important; with that, the missile defense installation can hardly be portrayed as a unilateral push by arrogant America.
Okay, I hate to admit it when Bill O'Reilly has a point in his latest "War on Christmas" crusade (see here, here and here on its previous installments), but this time, he does.
At issue is an atheist billboard displayed in the Washington State Capitol in Olympia, Wa. along with a "Holiday tree" and a nativity scene. (Apparently, there is no menorah this year.)
The placard, installed by local members of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, reads:
At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.
According to Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, and State Attorney General Rob McKenna, a Republican, it is the state's policy to allow any group to sponsor a holiday display "regardless of that individual's or group's views."
Here's the problem. The atheist display doesn't simply express the beliefs of atheists or secularists; it attacks the beliefs of the religious. Its message, except for the first line, is entirely negative, and the last line is actively insulting to believers, implying that they are hard-hearted and weak-minded.
A Christmas display on public property, paid for by the taxpayer, that explicitly attacked non-believers would be inappropriate. So is this.
Perhaps Gregoire and McKenna are right as a matter of publc policy. (Though, if all viewpoints may be represented in holiday displays in the State Capitol, where do you draw the line? Would a placard urging Jews to convert to Christianity be appropriate? How about a "God Hates Fags" placard from the abominable Fred Phelps?) However, those fine folks from the Freedom from Religion Foundation are wrong as a matter of respect, civility, and common sense. They have chosen to express their views in a manner almost calculated to cause irritation. They are also perpetuating the stereotype -- which underlies much of the hostility to atheists in America -- that an atheist is not just a non-believer but someone who actively attacks and denigrates religion.
If they truly wanted to get into the holiday spirit, how about a placard saying something like, "At this season of the Winter Solstice, those of us who do not believe in a deity celebrate the beauty of the natural world and join believers in wishing for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men." A positive message that, among other things, would have countered the widespread notion that atheists "believe in nothing."
Yesterday, my column, From Russia with loathing, on Russian anti-Americanism, ran on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
SHORTLY before the presidential election, at a discussion about Russian-American relations I attended in Cambridge, Mass., speakers from both countries voiced the hope that the election of Barack Obama would signal the renewal of a beautiful friendship. These hopes were chilled the day after Mr. Obama won. In an address to the Russian Parliament, President Dmitri Medvedev welcomed President-elect Obama with a threat to deploy Russian missiles on the Polish border if the United States put anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe. While some conciliatory signals followed, it seems clear that the Kremlin intends to keep the “new cold war” going.
Just three days before Mr. Medvedev’s speech, the state-subsidized youth movement Nashi staged a Halloween-themed rally in front of the American Embassy in Moscow. Nearly 20,000 young people held pumpkins marked with the names of “America’s victims,” among them the casualties in South Ossetia. In an amateur film shown at the rally, an actor portraying a drunken George W. Bush bragged that the United States had engineered both world wars and the rise of Hitler to expand its power.
Leonid Radzikhovsky, a Russian journalist, has said that “the existential void of our politics has been filled entirely by anti-Americanism,” and that to renounce this rhetoric “would be tantamount to destroying the foundations of the state ideology.” There is a notion, popular in Russia and among some Western analysts, that this anti-Americanism is a response to perceived threats to Russia’s security — above all, NATO expansion and missile defense in Eastern Europe. Yet top military experts like Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, a former high-level official in the Russian Defense Ministry, are convinced that neither the missile shield nor NATO expansion pose any military threat to Russia.
Russia’s post-cold war humiliation is real. But as the human rights activist Elena Bonner, widow of the great scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, told me recently: “Nobody humiliated Russia. Russia humiliated itself.”
In the post-Soviet era, many Russians are angry because their country has neither the stature nor the living standards that they believe it deserves. Polls shows that most Russians actually favor a Western way of life. Nearly two-thirds would rather live in a well-off country than in one that is poorer but more powerful and feared by others. Unfortunately, most also believe their country will not reach Western levels of well-being any time soon, if ever. As frustrations mount, it is often easier to blame an external force than the country’s own failings. It doesn’t help that the 1990s, when pro-Western attitudes were at their peak, are remembered as a time of poverty and insecurity.
The result is an inferiority complex toward the West and, in particular, the United States, as the pre-eminent Western power and cold war rival. This widespread sentiment combines admiration, envy, grievance, resentment, and craving for respect and acceptance as an equal. Most Russians viewed the recent conflict in Georgia as a victory over the Americans — a matter less of strategic self-interest than of psychological self-assertion.
In his Nov. 5 speech, President Medvedev asserted that “we have no inherent anti-Americanism.” True enough, but in recent years, anti-Americanism has been carefully cultivated by official and semi-official propaganda, especially on government-controlled television, which manipulates popular insecurities and easily slides into outright paranoia.
In 2005, Sergey Lisovsky, then the deputy chairman of the Committee on Agricultural and Food Policy of the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament, said that the avian flu was a myth created by the Americans to destroy Russia’s poultry farming industry. This year, Russian television commemorated the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, with a prime-time program promoting the conspiracy theory that the attacks were engineered by American imperialists in order to unleash war. A staggering 43 percent of Russians agreed in a poll last year that “one of the goals of the foreign policy of the United States is the total destruction of Russia.”
Today, the government may be especially anxious to ratchet up anti-Americanism in response to the election of Mr. Obama, who is likely to make it more difficult for Russia to exploit animosity toward the United States in Europe and even the Third World.
Mr. Obama and his administration need to respond with both firmness and flexibility. He should indicate that we will help the democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to resist Russian bullying while also making it clear that we do not seek confrontation with Russia for confrontation’s sake.
One of Mr. Obama’s top Russia advisers, Michael McFaul, has suggested offering Russia a path toward membership in NATO. The current Russian leadership would, of course, reject any such offer, because it would entail democratic reforms that Russia is not willing to undertake. But the offer would give Russian reformers a tangible goal, and make it harder to convince ordinary Russians that America will always treat Russia as the enemy.
Mr. Obama should make the offer in person, during a trip to Russia. Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1988 went a long way toward dispelling anti-American stereotypes in the minds of many Russians during the twilight of the cold war. Mr. Obama, the object of a great deal of curiosity and fascination, is one American politician who could repeat that feat.
The main claim that Lieven and I and others make that, in his words, “Russian policy at the moment is overwhelmingly a reaction to what the West is doing” is strongly disputed or simply ignored by a disturbingly large number of people in American government and media. To take one example, today Cathy Young bores us with yet another of her myopic columns disputing precisely this claim, the recognition of which is vital to correcting the errors of the last two decades. Inside government, it is more or less taken as a given that the Russians really have nothing to complain about. The administration maintains, however implausibly, that missile defense in Europe has nothing to do with Russia, NATO expansion has nothing to do with Russia, and on and on. These people are somehow unable or unwilling to comprehend that power projection and expansion of a military alliance to Russia’s doorstep will trigger and have triggered hostile reactions.
If Moscow cultivates or uses anti-American sentiment for its own purposes, which is actually beside the point, that sentiment exists and has been increased extraordinarily by what the U.S. government has done and what it proposes to do in post-Soviet space. One of the most dominant myths that prevails in America today is that anti-Americanism is merely an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society (Young recites all of this as you would expect) and has nothing or next to nothing to do with the substance of policy and the aggressive interference that the policy often represents. One of the biggest obstacles to radical change in our Russia policy is this inability or unwillingness to understand this, just as our government seems unable or unwilling to understand why anti-Americanism in Turkey of all places is at record highs. It is much more reassuring to hear that this is just something that results from the actions of a foreign government, which allows us to overlook our role in generating these resentments and reactions.
Allow me to bore you -- "you" being the "us" Mr. Larison refers to -- with a few more thoughts. First of all, I have never claimed that all anti-Americanism is "an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one's own society." I do, as a matter of fact, think that the unilateralism espoused by the Bush administration in GWB's first term was an egregiously bad idea. (In the early days of the war in Iraq, I attended a talk by Charles Krauthammer at the Manhattan Institute arguing that in our new unipolar world, the U.S. should make foreign policy decisions on its own and merely pretend to consult our allies to make them feel better. Uh-oh, I thought.) It not only caused a justified backlash, it also empowered authoritarians like Vladimir Putin to think that "might makes right" was the new American philosophy, so why not get in on the game.
Anti-Americanism in Turkey is a whole other story. It stems mostly from a controversial 2003 incident that included possible questionable activity by Turkey aimed against Iraqi Kurds, and possible mishandling of a sensitive situation by U.S. forces. The resulting bad feeling in Turkey has been further fed by the anti-American, anti-Semitic blockbuster film Valley of the Wolves Iraq, which accuses the U.S. of killing Iraqis for their organs and alleges that the human organ trade was a principal motive for the invasion of Iraq. (And you thought blood for oil was bad.) Whatever responsibility the U.S. may bear for the deterioration of the relationship, is it totally preposterous to suggest that Turkey's internal tensions between secularism and fundamentalist religion might contribute to anti-Americanism (synonymous with rejection of modernity)?
I am not an expert on Turkey. I do, however, have some modest pretensions to being an expert on Russia. And if Mr. Larison thinks I'm bound by American myopia, here's an excellent short essay on the subject straight from the horse's mouth -- or from the belly of the beast, if you will -- by Moscow writer and essayist Lev Rubinshtein.
On to the issue of alleged American threats to Russia. We have heard a lot about how Russia has every reason to feel threatened by NATO "encirclement." Not long ago, there was an interesting exchange on Ekho Moskvy radio between former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and station chief Alexei Venediktov. It started when Gorbachev mentioned Bill Clinton's push for NATO expansion as proof that a Democrat in the White House isn't necessarily better for Russia.
Venediktov: But you weren't particularly scared of NATO. Gorbachev: What's there to be scared of? Venediktov: I don't know, but everyone seems to be scared. Gorbachev: Actually, the point is not that people are scared of NATO but that this raises the question: what's the agenda behind it? I think they see in the United States that the situation is such that they are losing their global dominance, it's going away. Already today, the European Union has a population of half a billion, that's more than the USA. Today the combined GDP of the EU is more than that of the USA. They're lagging behind in the newest technologies. So what's the United States' answer to this? They plunge into an arms race in the belief that only strength can save them. I think they're mistaken.
I am looking in vain for the logic here; what on earth does NATO expansion have to do with the arms race, or with the US shoring up its dominance, considering that most of the EU is part of NATO? But that aside, what I find revealing is Gorbachev's off-the-cuff response, "What's there to be scared of"?
Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin (a former top-level Soviet arms negotiator) has an interesting article on the subject (in Russian). He points out that, given Russia's nuclear potential, a military attack by NATO forces on Russia is unthinkable no matter how many of Russia's neighbors join NATO. The real danger for Russia, in Dvorkin's view, is that it may face "civilizational isolation" if it continues to refuse to democratize and modernize its society, and finds itself surrounded by neighbors integrated into the democratic capitalist West.
In this context, it is useful to recall that Russia's sharp anti-Western and anti-American turn came after the "color revolutions" of Ukraine and Georgia -- peaceful revolutions from below that brought down authoritarian regimes by challenging rigged elections. The Putinistas got a bad scare (today Kiev and Tbilisi, tomorrow Moscow...), and their response was to blame the insidious U.S. conspiracy, with George Soros and George W. Bush implicated in the same plot.
As for the missile defense shield: whether or not it's an effective defense for a missile launched by a rogue state is an issue for another day. The point is, there is simply no way that it could protect the United States from a nuclear counterstrike by Russia (and thus give the U.S. the ability to make a first strike). Russian foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov acknowledges this, but then goes to say:
The missile-defense elements planned for Poland and the Czech Republic are the third phase of what is most likely a broader U.S. strategy to build a universal missile-defense shield that covers the entire globe. After the third phase we could see the United States building a fourth, fifth and sixth phase. The only reason why Washington would push so hard for the third phase in Central Europe -- which on its own is of questionable use -- would be if that project were a stepping stone toward something much larger and strategically significant: that is, if we are talking about the construction of a global missile-defense system that could protect the United States from any threat from any corner of the world. There are serious doubts that this is technologically possible, but this could change in the future. And if it does, the strategic balance in the world would shift dramatically because it would remove the basic principle that has ensured stability in the past -- the threat of mutually assured destruction.
So the threat to Russia is something that might happen in a distant, not-yet-technologically possible future? Frankly, this sounds both paranoid and unconvincing, particularly given that the U.S. has repeatedly offered to allow Russian inspectors on the sites in Eastern Europe and proposed extensive collaboration on missile defense.
We should, absolutely, cooperate with Russia on guarantees of mutual security. But this cooperation should focus on real threats, not threats to Russia's oversized ego and to its increasingly ridiculous delusions of being a great power.
Having said some nice things about Sarah Palin when she first burst on the national political scene in a blaze of short-lived glory, I have been asked, more than once, if I've updated my view.
I have, more than once, on this blog. On top of that, here it is, my absolutely, positively (I hope) last word on Saran Palin, originally published in Newsday and then in slightly longer form on Reason.com: Ms. Wasilla goes to Washington.
By the way, my offhand remark in this article that "The notion that 'patriarchal power' exists in the United States in 2008 is only slightly less delusional than the belief, erroneously attributed to Palin, that God created the dinosaurs 5000 years ago" infuriated a blogger named Chris, who fumes:
Uh.. What? Was there a big announcement that we finally fixed sexism? Maybe it was right after we also fixed racism, which, as Cathy Young will tell you, is entirely black people’s fault these days too. Ugh. Incidentally, if Cathy Young believes patriarchal power no longer exists, what, exactly, is feminism, and what would constitute a “step forward” for it? Why is she even writing about it? It’s like she has this knee-jerk inability to admit that any institutional forces exist, and that to admit they do would be admitting some sort of personal weakness or something. It’s okay, Cathy! Institutions exist! It’s not your fault!
First of all, I find it quite amusing that Mr. Male Feminist finds it appropriate to adopt such a blatantly patronizing, smug, patting-the-little-woman-on-the-head tone toward a woman who happens to dissent from his brand of ideology. Secondly, "sexism" is not the same as "patriarchal power." Are American women (and in other areas, men) today held back by sexist cultural stereotypes, and in some cases institutional discrimination as well? Yes, they are (though I frankly doubt that institutional discrimination plays much of a role in holding women back in politics). Are American women as a group today subject to "patriarchal power," i.e. male domination and control over their lives? My answer to that is a very emphatic no.
(Oh, and my belief that "racism is black people's fault," apparently, consists of suggesting that the "culture of poverty" is partly responsible for perpetuating the problems of poor people, including those in the black community. Since I'm pretty disgusted with the right these days, I owe Chris some gratitude for reminding me why I loathe the left. Thanks, pal.)
My Weekly Standard article on the broadcast of the 9/11 conspiracy "documentary" Zero, and the studio discussion that followed, is now up. It expands on my earlier blogpost on the topic, and is based on a viewing of the entire program rather than the last 20 minutes. The first half of the discussion was a little less skewed, but the result was still appalling. The article also includes an interesting quote from an interview (not mine) with the host of the program, Alexander Gordon, when he was asked whether its airing was connected to the deterioration in relations with the U.S.
Last night, after receiving a few emailed from truthers urging me to open my mind, I watched the BBC documentary "Conspiracy Files: The Third Tower." What never ceases to amaze me (apart from the belief that any group of people in the U.S. government would have the competence, coordination, and diabolical smarts to pull off this kind of vast conspiracy) is the sheer idiocy of truther arguments about the motives for various aspects of this conspiracy. The truthers argue that Tower 7 (which collapsed despite not being hit by a plane) was brought down by controlled demolition, with explosives planted inside. But why? Apparently because that's where the local office of the CIA was, and was that office that served as the secret control room for the 9/11 plot, and the evidence had to be destroyed. Really? Those plotters were so dumb that they had their super-secret control room in a CIA office right next to the WTC? And couldn't think of a better way to dispose of the evidence than creating a mystery explosion? If they were that dumb, how could they have possibly successfully carried history's biggest cover-up?
In my WS article, I refer to "the fairly credible allegations that the FSB, the KGB's post-Soviet heir, was involved in the 1999 apartment-building bombings in Russia that took nearly 300 lives and were blamed on Chechen terrorists, helping generate public support for the war in Chechnya." Why do I think these allegations, unlike the ones about 9/11, are fairly credible? Because I'm willing to believe that kind of thing about "them," but not about "us"? Well, no. As much as I loathe Russia's ruling clique, I'd rather not believe that they engineered terrorist acts against their own people. Because, if those are the kind of people who rule Russia, we are all less safe.
I think those allegations are vastly more credible than those of the 9/11 "truth" movement because of vast differences between the two situations.
One, the alleged FSB plot is fairly straightforward: explosives planted in apartment buildings. There are no bizarre claims of faked hijackings, nonexistent planes, passengers being taken to secret locations and murdered to supply the bodies, etc. etc.
Two, there was never an independent investigation of the bombings in Russia, only an FSB one; the State Duma voted against an investigation and ordered all documents pertaining to the case to be sealed for 75 years, and several MPs who tried to conduct an investigation of their own had an unfortunate tendency to get assassinated or meet with fatal accidents.
Three, no Chechen separatists ever claimed responsibility for the bombings. Four, at least one officer of the Russian secret services admitted to FSB involvement, though he made this statement in Chechen captivity and later claimed it was extracted under torture.
Five, and most damning, FSB agents were caught red-handed planting explosives with a timer in the basement of an apartment building in Ryazan. FSB director Niklai Patrushev claimed it was an "emergency readiness training exercise." After that, by the way, the bombings stopped.
Under the resurgent authoritarianism of the Putin/Medvedev regime, a "space of freedom" has still remained in Russia: in the print media, to some extent even on the radio (Ekho Moskvy), and of course on the Internet; in independent groups that are harassed if they get too political, but nonetheless exist. There are many reasons to fear that this space has shrunk after the Russia-Georgia war, when Russia's airwaves looked more like Soviet-style propaganda than at any time since the collapse of Communism. But, as one villainous representative of oppressive state power says to another in Russian writer Evgeny Schwartz's play The Shadow, "Sometimes, just when it looks like our victory is complete, life suddenly rears its head." And sometimes, in the most unexpected places.
Last month, Russian prosecutors, acting on a complaint from religious groups, went after the 2 x 2 television channel that specializes in "smart" cartoons, such as The Simpsons and South Park. One of the offenses named in the complaint was the South Park episode "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Special," in which characters including Satan, Hitler and an anthropomorphic turd named Mr. Hankey perform in a Christmas show. The prosecutors concluded that the episode might be "extremist" since it was demeaning to Christians and Jews.
In the meantime, 2 x 2's broadcast license expires on October 17, and there was understandable speculation that it might not be renewed. Alarm bells went off, in particular, when Pavel Tarakanov, chairman of the Duma Comittee on Youth Issues, publicly stated that if 2 x 2 lost its license, its frequency could be given to a young adults-oriented channel that would "reflect the government's position with regard to youth policy." "We need to raise a generation of 21st Century Russians who are proud of living in a civilized nation, therefore we need our own media conduit that would reach the greatest possible number of people," he told the Interfax news agency on September 23.
But suddenly, the Russian public, notoriously apathetic in the past few years, rose up in indignation. In late September, there were pickets, flash mobs, and demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg to protest the attempts to squash 2 x 2; the September 21 rally in Moscow drew about 700 people, who clashed with the police at one point. The protesters carried signs saying, "Hands off 2 x 2! We do not want censorship!" (which rhymes in Russian -- something like, "2 x 2 is here to stay -- censorship must go away!"), "Today they came for Kenny, tomorrow they'll come for you" and "Kenny lived, Kenny lives, Kenny will live!", a play on the once-ubiquitous Soviet slogan about Lenin. (Russians have not lost their knack for sharp political humor.) In just a few days, the protesters collected 34,000 signatures on petitions to keep 2 x 2 on the air.
Russian protester with a poster: "Today, they come for Kenny; tomorrow, they'll come for you." From EJ.ru
On September 25, the Federal Competitive Bidding Commission on Television and Radio Broadcasting -- the Russian equivalent of the FCC, ironically with the Russian initials FKK -- voted unanimously to recommend that 2 x 2's license be renewed. The final decision is up to the State Committee on Communications Oversight, but it is expected to follow the FKK's recommendation. In the meantime, The Simpsons and South Park will continue to be shown on 2 x 2 except for the "offending" episodes.
Sophisticated opposition activists might wince: vulgar cartoons, ill-mannered youths, aggression in the streets. True, this is not about ideas, or compassion for people who are dying in an unjust war [in the Caucasus], or the struggle for democracy and the future of Russia. And yet these events give cause to hope that not everything is lost in this country, that not everyone in Russia is under the yoke of submission, fear and indifference. People who have nothing to do with politics have come out into the streets to defend their right: the right to watch the TV channel they love. It doesn't matter if this channel is worthy of universal love, or of the love of refined conoisseurs of quality television. Its viewers want it, and that's enough reason for it to stay on the air, no matter how revolting it might be to religious fanatics, television aesthetes, or the General Prosecutor's office.
...
Perhaps the future belongs to those who, no matter how little they care about politics, come out into the streets to defend their personal choice, their right to live without following the guidance of the authorities -- even if it's only a matter of a TV channel that shows cartoons.
By the way, Podrabinek vastly underestimates the extent to which South Park and The Simpsons are about "ideas." He's not the only one. In a verse commentary on the 2 x 2 controversy in Ogoniok magazine, the writer, poet and astute political satirist Dmitry Bykov describes the victory as a bittersweet one:
The days of liberty are now behind us, And yet here is a fact we can't avoid: As long as we can say, "Don't have a cow, man!", Freedom in Russia cannot be destroyed. ...
Today, we won't be rescued from oppression By Pushkin, Tolstoy, or a Joan of Arc; Instead, it seems, the torch is in the hands of The Simpsons and the kiddies of South Park.
Bykov describes 2 x 2's fare as "the usual jokes on all things excremental." The Simpsons and South Park may not be the Pushkin and Tolstoy of our day, but perhaps Bykov should try watching them. The idea of 2 x 2 as a bastion of freedom (hopefully, not the last) is not that depressing.
More: Some great photos of the 2 x 2 protests here and here.
While busy working on an extended piece about Russia's disgraceful prime-time TV broadcast of a program that endorses 9/11 conspiracy theories, I have been mulling of the question of what to say about Sarah Palin.
Some of the passionately feminist critics of Ms. Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Ms. Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick – what a difference a financial crisis makes – and a more complicated picture has emerged.
As we've seen and heard more from John McCain's running mate, it is increasingly clear that she is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.
Right on. More interesting thoughts from Parker here.
Unfortunately, it seems that Palin has also come to exemplify a far less attractive feature of pseudo-feminism: affirmative action in the worst sense of the word. And the Palin defenders are just as exasperating as the Palin-bashers. Here is, for instance, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in Newsweek:
Many are attracted to [Palin] because she embodies the values of the American West, which they find superior to the values of coastal elites. This was part of the appeal of Goldwater and Reagan—a log-splitting, range-riding conservatism that emphasizes freedom. (Palin adds moose hunting to the list.) It's not irrational or simplistic for voters to prefer candidates who reflect their deepest values.
... And Palin appeals to many voters as a pro-life symbol, with a family—including a son with Down syndrome—that exemplifies a culture of life. Elites may dismiss this as trivial or backward. But there's no deeper question of political philosophy than this: whom do we count as a member of the human family and protect as our own? Palin welcomed a disabled child—the kind of child often targeted for elimination through eugenic abortion. It's not irrational for Americans to support a candidate who is willing to protect the weak.
First of all: why was it vile for Andrew Sullivan, Cintra Wilson, and South Carolina Democratic Chairwoman Carol Fowler to suggest that one of Palin's main qualifications for the job seemed to be the fact that she didn't have an abortion, yet okay for Palin supporter Gerson to suggest the same, with a positive spin? And since when do conservatives espouse the principle that "the personal is political"?
Secondly: I remember Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was my president. And Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan (pace Michael Reagan). Here, I have to agree with Ron Reagan, lefty though he may be:
"Sarah Palin," he said, "has nothing in common with my father, a two-term governor of the largest state in the union, a man who had been in public life for decades, someone who had written, thought and spoke for decades about foreign policy issues, domestic policy issues, and on and on and on."
Check out, too, this post on the Half Sigma blog. Ronald Reagan was not an intellectual, but he had a long history of engagement with and interest in ideas on the preeminent issues of his day. So far, I see absolutely no evidence of such from Sarah Palin. Besides, they didn't call Reagan the Great Communicator for nothing.
Sarah Palin is not Harry Truman, either. Yes, like Truman, she comes from small-town America. However, by the time Truman was picked to be FDR's running mate, he had served in the U.S. Senate for ten years and had gained fame (including a spot on the cover of Time) as the founder and chairman of the Truman Committee which investigated fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the military.
Palin may yet surprise us all in her debate with Biden. But I doubt it.
There was a moment when it seemed that Palin's candidacy could be a big moment for conservative/libertarian feminism in America -- a feminism that, I strongly believe, deserves a place at the table. Instead, with every passing day so far, she becomes more and more of an embarrassment. Particularly when Camp McCain's efforts to shield her from contacts with the media and to ensure that she gets to do the veep debate under easier rules (against Joe "Foot in the Mouth" Biden, no less!) look so much like a cringeworthy display of sexist paternalism. From Xena, Warrior Princess to damsel in distress in two weeks: how pathetic is that?
In the wake of its war with Georgia, Russia (as represented by Medvedev, Putin, and the Russian foreign ministry) has repeatedly made noises about wanting nothing but friendship and partnership with the West, including the United States, and having no interest in a "new Cold War."
In light of these protestations, it's interesting to note that on September 12, Russia's state-owned Channel One broadcast the "documentary" Zero by Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa (who served as the Moscow correspondent for the Italian Communist newspaper Unita in the 1970s) and leading French 9/11 conspirologist Thierry Meyssan, which advances the idea that the World Trade Center bombing was an inside job and that no plane ever hit the Pentagon. The broadcast, in the prime-time program ironically titled "Closed Screening," went largely unnoticed in the West except by 9/11 "truther"sites.
The showing of the film was followed by a panel discussion before a live studio audience (which included both Chiesa, who speaks Russian, and Meyssan). The host, Alexander Gordon, made no secret of his sympathy for Chiesa's viewpoint, though he politely noted that the documentary could have used more objectivity. Several other pro-"truther" panelists, including the rabidly anti-American TV host Mikhail Leontiev, spoke at length in praise of the film, complimenting its makers on their courage and insight, ridiculing the official version of the attacks as absurd (in Leontiev's words, "the ravings of a gray mare" -- a Russian colloquialism that means something like "total nonsense"). TV anchor Alexei Pushkov categorically asserted that while we cannot be sure who engineered the attacks, the idea of "19 Arabs directed by Osama bin Laden in a cave" is completely discredited. He and co-panelist Geidar Jemal, the chairman of Russia's Islamic Committee, also lamented "the death of information" in the Western media and its replacement by "manipulation" -- thankfully, with heroes like Chiesa and Meyssan on hand to resist it. Toward the end of the discussion, explicit parallels were drawn between the Western media's obedient parroting of official lies about 9/11 and their collusion in the "official version" of the Russia/Georgia war.
Giulietto Chiesa
A couple of guests briefly and sheepishly offered opposing viewpoints. Irina Zvyagelskaya, analyst at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, said that she was "unconvinced" by the film and added that if its premise was true and such a cynical act not only toward one's own citizens but also toward world opinion could have been perpetrated, "you don't want to live in this world." Gordon then sarcastically suggested that, in order to be able to go on living, she was going to "shut out" inconvenient truths such as Chiesa's film (to which Zvyagelskaya replied that she would question all versions). TV journalist Vladimir Sukhoi, former Channel One Bureau chief in the US, said -- looking visibly nervous -- that a good journalist should not pursue an agenda or "string facts onto the skewer of his theory," and criticized Chiesa for doing exactly that. His comment went unanswered. When Gordon turned to the studio audience and asked those who believed in the official "19 Arabs" version of 9/11 to raise their hands, not one hand went up.
There are other dangers for Russia in peddling 9/11 conspirology for domestic consumption. Many Russians still have questions about the explosions of two Moscow apartment buildings in 1999, blamed on Chechen terrorists but viewed as an FSB inside job by a number of critics. (Unlike the 9/11 attacks, these bombings were never properly investigated.)
That aside, Condoleezza Rice might want to bring up this disgraceful broadcast -- clearly meant to fan the flames of anti-Americanism in the Russian public -- next time she has a chat with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
We all know that there have been some very nasty attacks on Palin from some feminists, as well as a lot of condescension from the Maureen Dowd types who look down their noses at a small-town, gun-owning, Walmart-going, Bible-believing mom with five kids. But it takes two to do the culture-war tango.
For instance, in The American Spectator, one Jeffrey Lord rightly deplores the feminist attacks on Palin. Then he goes on to say:
This election is now being fought openly between, as Whittaker Chambers once described the same fight in a different era, "those who reject and those who worship God." Between those who believe "if man's mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?" -- and America's own Joan of Arc, Sarah Palin.
If Barack Obama is an atheist, that's news to me. And I certainly hope that Palin doesn't actually see herself as Joan of Arc on a God-given crusade. (It's interesting how the left-wing caricature of Palin is barely distinguishable from the right-wing icon.)
Praising Palin's decision to keep her baby with Down's Syndrome and to encourage her pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol to bear her child, Lord writes:
Twice over in two now ongoing and very public situations, Sarah Palin has focused on the love of God rather than herself. To those who have vested their life and career comfortably believing there is little need for God because what of what rolls around aimlessly in their heads and those of their like-minded friends at any given moment, to those who view government and the power of the state as an object of worship, this is taken as a serious, gut-level threat. A threat to the existence of their own very carefully structured non-religious secular value system.
On a less hysterical note, Jonah Goldberg in National Review defends Palin against the "she's not a real woman" attacks ... and then sneers that the same people would consider "a childless feminist who looks like a Bulgarian weightlifter in drag" a real woman. On Townhall.com, Kevin McCullough speculates that "modern feminists" hate Palin because she's a real woman:
She has a manly, and (according to several women I've overheard) handsome husband. She is content in their life together as a couple where each goes out and works hard. As a mom she is parenting her kids giving them what mothers give best, and her husband, gives what only a father can.
She's not afraid to don some lipstick and use her comely attraction to romance "her guy" one night, and turn around and beat back corruption as a fierce defender of what is right the next day.
As opposed to, say, the notoriously unwomanly Geraldine Ferraro (married mother of three) and Nancy Pelosi (a married mother of five whom a poster on Michelle Malkin's blog charmingly described the other day as "the result of mixing June Cleaver with Code Pink, Steroids and a strap on")?
A pro-life activist suggests one of the reasons liberals despise Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin so passionately may be because she gave birth to her son despite a diagnosis of Down syndrome.
... Mark Crutcher, the president of Life Dynamics Incorporated (LDI), notes that in America today, 90 percent of all Down syndrome children are killed in the womb.
"I wonder what the people who are doing that -- the parents who are 'choosing' to have their child executed -- what they think when they look at Sarah Palin and her family, when they see the example of that family welcoming a Down syndrome child in and loving that child. I wonder what those people think," Crutcher contends. "I also wonder whether this is where you're seeing some of this hatred and venom that's coming from the godless Left directed at [Palin]. I'm beginning to wonder if Sarah Palin isn't rubbing their noses in their own shame."
What hateful tripe. If 90 percent of people who find out they are carrying a fetus with Down's Syndrome terminate their pregnancies, there must be quite a few non-liberals among them (and even, I daresay, quite a few conservatives). And frankly, if Sarah Palin's example is going to be used as a moral club to beat those who make the choice to terminate a pregnancy under those circumstances, an angry response will be justified.
So far, I've been pretty hard on feminists who have bashed Sarah Palin in often sexist terms and have refused to acknowledge that, agree or disagree with her politics, she's a great model of female achievement.But now, let's hear it for the conservatives.
Exhibit A: the silly "lipstick on a pig" controversy. Which looks particularly bad considering that conservatives have always been the ones to mock "politically correct" sensitivity to words that could be interpreted as sexist or racist slights (and, as a number of commentators have pointed out, even worse considering that Palin has decried "perceived whining" in Hillary Clinton's complaints about sexism toward her).
Frum Mobilization through the inflammation of imaginary grievances is an ugly trait of modern American politics. It will only stop when it stops all around. So long as media ground rules make such mobilization profitable for Democrats, it is inevitable that Republicans will follow suit.
Aha, the familiar "they started it/everyone does it/you knock it off first" defense. Which is especially lame in this case, considering that conservatives have (almost) consistently deplored the "inflammation of imaginary grievances."
You must aim your fire at the top of the ticket, John McCain, and not at this beautiful girl, Sarah Palin, about whom you can do nothing.
Beautiful girl? Way to describe a vice presidential candidate. Later, Noonan writes that the attack on Palin "offended the American sense of fairness. And—it still lives!—gallantry."
In other words: You can't beat up on a girl, Democrats. A beautiful girl, no less.
Sexism, anyone?
(Noonan goes on, amusingly, to say that "the Democrats were up against Xena the Warrior Princess." As a Xena fan who sees at least some good things about Sarah Palin, I'm tickled by the Sarah/Xena comparisons. But Peggy, please. "Gallant" protection from rough treatment because you're a "beautiful girl" is the opposite of what Xena was all about.)
Exhibit C: This bizarre piece by Harvey "Mr. Manliness" Mansfield in Forbes, who contrasts Palin to the "bad" feminists who want women to be like men.
[S]he showed none of the features that betray the feminist in action. On the contrary: She spoke proudly of "my guy," grateful to the man who was hers--implying that she needed him, and that any woman needs a guy of her own. She introduced her children, especially little Trig, the one with Down's syndrome. She was displaying a mother's unconditional love, as opposed to the conditional love that insists on a "wanted" child. She did these things unapologetically, quite unafraid of seeming to be a normal, healthy sexist female: one who knows what it is to be a woman and enjoys it.
All Sarah Palin did was to claim her equal opportunity to a job once held exclusively by men. This sort of equality--the opportunity to take on public careers outside the home--is something liberals and conservatives agree on. ... Now, why could the women's movement not have taken advantage of this bipartisan agreement from the beginning? ...
An obvious difference between the women's movement and the civil rights movement is the ease with which the former triumphed. Of course there was malechauvinism at the start, but it was complacent, passive and ineffective. No man could look a woman in the eye and say "you are not equal to me" once the issue was put. There was nothing like the "massive resistance" to racial desegregation in the South; instead, there was a massive movement of women into jobs and careers.
Prof. Mansfield doesn't tell us that he was one of the conservatives who, not that long ago, did no subscribe to this supposedly universal goal of equal opportunity in the workforce. This is what he wrote in a November 3, 1997 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
The protective element of manliness is endangered when women have equal access to jobs outside the home. Women who do not consider themselves feminist often seem unaware of what they are doing to manliness when they work to support themselves. They think only that people should be hired and promoted on merit, regardless of sex.
(The castrating harridans!)
Now, apparently Prof. Mansfield later mellowed out a bit. In his 2006 book In Defense of Manliness, he concedes that careers and equal opportunity are okay as long as appropriate sex roles are preserved in private life. Such as (he suggested in interviews) the wife earning no more than a third of the couple’s joint income and doing no less than two-thirds of the housework. (How do Sarah and Todd Palin fit into that prescription?) Even today, the kinder, gentler Mansfield notes, "You may be sure that I am not the first one to notice that feminist women are unerotic."
Now, leaving aside these particular examples of ridiculousness, there is a broader doublethink at work.
Simple question: If the Democratic veep candidate was a woman with five children, four of them minors and one of them a special-needs infant, does anyone think conservatives would be praising her as a female pioneer? Or would many of them be denouncing the selection as an example of liberal contempt for family values?
Conservative hostility or at least ambivalence toward career women, particularly career women with children, is not entirely a thing of the past. Consider, for instance, this text from It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), a leading social conservative:
Many women have told me, and surveys have shown, that they find it easier, more "professionally" gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children. ... Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism... Radical feminists have been making the pitch that justice demands that men and women be given an equal opportunity to make it to the top in the workplace.
(page 95)
Now, to be fair, the full context of these statements is that full-time mothering deserves equal respect and that "radical feminism" is to blame for the attitude that careers outside the home are "more socially affirming." (See more here.) But the passage still drips with disapproval for women who don't want to "give up their careers to take care of their children" because it's "easier" and "more 'professionally' gratifying" (note the scare quotes around "professionally"). On the previous page, Santorum scoffs that "for some parents, the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home."
Consider, too, that conserative heroine Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the famous talk radio scold, is notorious for her anti-working-mother diatribes. Interestingly, "Dr. Laura" has been one of the few "pro-family" conservatives to stick to her anti-working-mother guns in regard to the Palin nomination. In a September 4 blogpost, Sarah Palin and motherhood, she wrote:
I am extremely disappointed in the choice of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican Party. ... I’m stunned - couldn’t the Republican Party find one competent female with adult children to run for Vice President with McCain? I realize his advisors probably didn’t want a “mature” woman, as the Democrats keep harping on his age. But really, what kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently born with a serious issue, Down Syndrome, and then goes back to the job of Governor within days of the birth?
When Mom and Dad both work full-time (no matter how many folks get involvedwith the children), it becomes a somewhat chaotic situation. Certainly, if a child becomes ill and is rushed to the hospital, and you’re on the hotline with both Israel and Iran as nuclear tempers are flaring, where’s your attention going to be? Where should your attention be? Well, once you put your hand on the Bible and make that oath, your attention has to be with the government of the United States of America.
Schlessinger expressed appreciation for the fact that both Palin and her daughter carried their pregnancies to term, but then delivered an additional slap to Palin for having signed a "Family Child Care" week proclamation in April praising child care professionals.
Child-care facilities are a necessity when mothers and fathers (when they exist at all) are unwilling or incapable of caring for their offspring. Unfortunately, they have become a mainstay of the feminista mentality that nothing should stand in the way of a woman’s ambition - nothing, including her family.
Any full-time working wife and mother knows that the family takes the short end of the stick. Marriages and the welfare of children suffer when a stressed-out mother doesn’t have time to be a woman, a wife, and a hands-on Mommy.
I suspect that this preachy, sexist, treacly intolerance would have been pouring forth from many of Schlessinger's confrères had Palin with her five kids been on the other side of the political divide. "Dr. Laura," at least, is consistent. (Other than being a working mother herself.) Not like Dr. James "Focus on the Family" Dobson, who once penned a column that seems particularly amusing in light of his Palin enthusiasm -- suggesting that mothers of teenagers should not go back to work because, among other things, handling a job, teenage crises, and menopause was liable to prove too exhausting.
("It," obviously, being many feminists' near-pathological hatred of Sarah Palin.)
Obviously, Palin's anti-abortion views (which don't allow even for the standard rape and incest exceptions) do not endear her to most feminists. And for that, I actually don't blame them. I believe the right to abortion, at least in the early stages of pregnancy, is an important and essential freedom for women.
But the reality is that party-line feminists have not been very kind to pro-choice conservative women, either. They hated Margaret Thatcher (see this 2006 column by David Boaz on the subject). In 1993, Gloria Steinem called pro-choice Republican Senate candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator" and declared that "Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one." (Anticipating the feminist sexism of clearly gender-based slurs against Palin -- "It Girl," "pinup queen," etc. -- the late columnist Molly Ivins dubbed Hutchison a "Breck girl.")
One major reason for this, I think, is the one I discussed in my Wall Street Journal article. It's the belief that feminism must support not simply equal rights and opportunities for women and men, not just cultural approval for nontraditional gender roles, but extensive government programs to enable women to combine career and family. See, for the most explicit statement of this view, this article by Katherine Marsh in The New Republic:
Feminism is not just about having the opportunity to do it all. It's also about having the support to do as much as you can. This is why, in the end, feminism needs to be tied to not just an identity, but to an ideology that encourages that support.
Marsh earlier says that Palin "an incredible support system--a husband with flexible jobs rather than a competing career, a close-knit community, and a host of nearby grandparents, aunts, and uncles to lend a hand on the domestic front" -- but apparently none of that counts as "support." Only the government.
It is, in my view, exceptionally bad for feminism to argue that female equality must depend on big government and extensive government involvement in markets and social processes. First of all, such a position automatically turns all proponents of limited government against feminism, associating feminism with the "Nanny State." In a paradoxical way, it also sends the message that women's roles as the primary caregivers in the family are rooted in nature and impervious to change: the only way to lighten the domestic load on women is to get government or government-supported programs to pick up some of it, not to get men more involved. It is also worth noting that in many European countries that have generous social programs and benefits for working mothers (such as extensive paid maternity leave), women's career advancement tends to lag further behind men's than it does in the U.S. The entitlements can make women less desirable employees and turn into a society-wide "Mommy Track."
There is another, more insidious idea at work as well: the idea that conservative ideas on things like free markets, the welfare state, the environment, or gun rights are inherently "unfeminine," because "feminine" values are rooted in compassion, interdependence, peaceful resolution of conflict, caring, sharing, and so on; and that women whose political views are too individualistic, too "harsh," and insufficiently humane, are not "real women." See, for instance, this comment on the Gurdian blog in response to David Boaz:
Thatcher showed only that a woman can survive in politics if she explicitly shows to act nothing like one. I do not believe that she furthered the cause of women in politics, instead she furthered the status quo of the time, and showed that a properly 'de-gendered' woman can do what a man does. So, men can do it well, and women can do it fine too, as long as they forget about what they have in their panties.
See, too, the assumption at Jezebel.com that any pro-guns, pro-hunting female politician is merely "playing by the boys' game."
Somehow, according to some feminists, it's sexist to tell women that their job choices or family roles must be shaped by their gender -- but not sexist to tell them their politics must be shaped by their gender, even on issues that have nothing to do with gender. There would be howls of outrage if a woman with a "masculine" career was branded an unwoman -- "de-gendered," a "female impersonator." Yet it's okay, evidently, to do the same to a woman with what some considered to be "masculine" views.
My interview on this topic, on Greta Van Sustern's show On the Record on Fox News, can be seen here.
For more on the topic see my articles in The Wall Street Journal, "Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin" (like Ann Althouse, I think the title is too generalizing, but I didn't write it, and I have to concede it's eye-catching) and in The Boston Globe, "A Great Moment for Women" (not too happy about that title either).
My position on Palin's candidacy, in a nuthsell (from the Globe column):
Is Palin - whose image as a tough woman has evoked comparisons to historical and fictional female fighters like Joan of Arc and Xena, Warrior Princess - a feminist hero?
To some feminists, the answer is a clear no. Novelist Jane Smiley brands her "a woman who reinforces patriarchal power rather than challenges it."
But the charge is unfair. Unlike right-wing columnist Ann Coulter, to whom Smiley compares her, Palin is not known for attacking the women's movement; she credits it with breaking down gender barriers and creating the opportunities she has enjoyed. While antiabortion, she belongs to a group called Feminists for Life.
As a social issues liberal with strong concerns about religion-based public policy, I have some serious disagreements with Palin, though it's often hard to separate the reality of her views from the caricatures painting her as a zealot. But I also believe that her candidacy is a great moment for American women.
First, more representation for feminism across the spectrum of political beliefs is a good thing. Women, like men, should be able to disagree on gun ownership, environmental policies, taxes, even abortion while agreeing on gender equity.
Second, the biggest feminist issue in America today is the career-family balance. Despite remaining discrimination, motherhood is at the core of the "glass ceiling" holding back female achievement. How inspirational, then, to see that the "mommy track" can be a road to the White House. Palin is a mother of five who resumed an intensive work schedule days after giving birth, and whose husband seems to be a full partner.
Palin's candidacy may also be a watershed moment in conservative politics. The right has long been ambivalent about working mothers; a number of conservative politicians and pundits have been given to chiding "selfish" women who pursue career ambitions after having children. Now, a mother with a high-powered career is a conservative hero, and full-time motherhood may be forever gone from the roster of "family values."
Meanwhile, Neo-neocon has an interest post on the "Palin Derangement Syndrome" that has gripped some, I repeat some feminists.
And here's a good example of this syndrome, from the Jezebel.com blog. This one actually attempts self-examination, conceding that many left-wing feminists fly into irrational fits of hatred at the mere mention of Palin and citing some rather hair-raising and stomach-turning examples of such fits (the readers obligingly provide many more in the comments section).
And the question now is why? Why does this particular pitbull in lipstick infuriate — and scare us — so viscerally? Why does her very existence make us feel — and act — so ugly? New York Times columnist Judith Warner calls Palin's nomination a "thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women," because "Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man." Palin, who obviously is incredibly ambitious, masks that ambition behind her PTA placard and "folksy" talk.
... [F]or a certain kind of feminist, Palin is a symbol for everything we hoped was not true in the world anymore. We hoped that we didn't have to hide our ambition or pretend that our goals were effortlessly achieved ... We hoped that we could be mothers without having our motherhood be our defining characteristic, as it seems to be for Palin. We hoped that we did not have to be perfect beauty queens to get to where we wanted to be in life, that our looks, good or bad, wouldn't matter.
The blogger adds that for many feminists, Palin embodies the stereotype of the "homecoming queen" from high school: "pretty and popular ... catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games." And so the idea of being bested by the "homecoming queen" in the area of achievement induces "white hot anger."
As I said on Fox, I find this description (from both Warner and the Jezebel.com blogger, Jessica) baffling. Who is this Sarah Palin they are talking about? Where does Palin "make it clear" that she is subordinate to her husband? How does she downplay her ambition or suggest that she has effortlessly achieve her goals? How is the woman who calls herself a pitbull in lipstick and talks about taking on the "old boys' network" trying to be non-threatening and non-intimidating? The real-life Sarah Palin was not a homecoming queen or a cheerleader in high school -- she was a basketball star who still proudly wears her "Sarah Barracuda" nickname from those days.
My hunch is that the real reason for PDS is the opposite, in a way, of the one given by Warner and Jezebel.com. Sarah Palin does not fit the left-wing feminist stereotypes of the conservative woman. She's very obviously not a "Stepford Wife," as the execrable Cintra Wilson calls her on Salon.com. She's not a man-pleasing cheerleader. She's not a self-effacing, non-intimidating hausfrau.
Try as they might, they simply can't fit Sarah Palin into that box. And that drives them nuts. Almost literally, in some cases.
And more PDS here: a Shakesville post asserting that Palin is a patriarchalist who cares about her sons more than her daughters.
This is not to say that conservatives don't have their own Sarah Palin-related hypocrisies. More on which later.
And now, a relatively light interlude from Russia ... or is it?
On September 5, viewers of Russia's tamed TV were treated to the unusual spectacle of Putin being fingered as a murder suspect on live television.
Only as part of a game, of course. Specifically, a psychic named Alexander Char, appearing on a TV show called Phenomenon on the state channel Rossiya (Russia), telepathically feeding three "witnesses" randomly chosen from the audience clues to a "detective story" he had written and concealed inside a safe. Those clues were then written down with a black marker on a large board by Char's assistant Victor, also randomly selected from the audience.
Watch what happens.
The bald gentleman who strides out onto the stage asking that the name of Putin be erased is Phenomenon host and fitness guru Denis Semenikhin.
The scandalous segment was apparently disappeared in those markets where the show did not air live. Nonetheless, it quickly ended up on Russian websites and on YouTube and its Russian equivalent RuTube.
Conspiracy theories have not been far behind. Some Russian posters refuse to believe that the incident could have been a spontaneous screw-up. A hodgepodge of interesting theories is offered, apparently in earnest, by one Vadim Nikitin at russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/.
... Russia’s current media climate makes the spontaneity of what transpired on stage inconceivable.
There is no way that the show would have remained on the air for even a second longer had the management really been nervous about its proceedings. No one at home would have batted an eyelid; after all, Russian TV brims with technical difficulties.
Which leads inevitably to ask: why did it occur?
Who had written the script, and who was its real intended audience?
Why did state television consider it necessary to show the words “Knife”, “Munich” and “Putin, Vladimir” together on a blackboard for minutes of airtime, the memory of which would be reinforced further by the manufactured commotion/controversy?
The possibilities are tantalising.
1. We have a strong visual of a young girl trying unsuccessfully to erase Vladimir Putin’s name.
Was this a message to the young Medvedev? ie. “if you’re getting any ideas, drop them right now! You couldn’t rub me out, even if you tried”.
2. We have a TV presenter publicly censoring his own show, saying that Putin’s name is inappropriate and that ‘management’ are ‘getting nervous’, without any attempt to hide it.
Was this a staged show of force to the media, and the public, that the state emphatically reserves the right to control what is shown on TV?
Was it an FYI to journalists that Putin’s name is now officially out of bounds?
3. We have an undeniable reference to Hitler’s night of the long knives, the ruthless and surprise purge, on June 30th 1934, of the SA storm troopers led by Ernst Rohm.
Was it yet another signal to the West that Russia is prepared to attack Poland and the Czech Republic over the US missile defence shield?
Was it a threat to Nashi, the crypto-paramilitary youth organisation headed by Vasili Yakemenko? (That seems unlikely, as Nashi are already looking like a spent force, and Yakemenko harbours little ambition).
Was it another ’subtle’ piece of advice for Medvedev, whose personal proximity to Putin strongly parallels that of Rohm to Hitler, to remember his place?
Was it, like the Night of the Long Knives, an announcement of the return of extra-judicial killings at the highest level?
A premonition of a ruthless cabinet purge, or even Putin’s return to the presidency?
The idea that a psychic show on TV would be used to send covert messages to Medvedev, Nashi, the West, or the Russian media is rather amusing. (I'm sure Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and Condi Rice are all devout viewers of Phenomenon.) The Putinistas aren't that subtle. And if the segment was meant as a (completely unnecessary) reminder that the state controls what's shown on TV, then that lesson was not conveyed very well: the offending (incriminating?) name stayed on the slate for all to see, the show was not immediately yanked off the air, no arrests or (as far as we know) even firings followed, and the studio audience laughed. (In Stalin's day, an audience that witnessed such a sacrilege would have stampeded for the exit.)
It's tempting, actually, to scrutinize this phenomenon for evidence of a plot from the other side. Was someone sending Putin a message that his crimes are known and cannot be erased? Or that freedom of the press cannot be crushed? Consider, ladies and gentlemen, the startling elements of this mystery! For instance: The show was co-hosted by the famous spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller, who has dual Israeli-British citizenship. (Geller is seen onscreen in the full version of the clip, just prior to the "Knife -- Munich -- Putin" segment.) The Russian co-host, Semenikhin, spent several years studying and working in the United States in the 1990s. Israel, the UK and the US -- there's the unholy trinity of the Kremlin's foreign policy. To top it off, Geller informs the psychic, Alexander Char, that he looks a lot like Agatha Christie's detective, Hercule Poirot, who is Belgian. Belgium -- Brussels -- NATO, right? All of them joining forces to tell Putin to know his place.
But there's more! The "witnesses" were selected from the ranks of men in the audience named Boris (for leading Russian mystery novelist Boris Akunin) and women named Darya or Tatiana, for best-selling mystery writers Darya Dontzova and Tatiana Ustinova. Since Darya is a fairly rare name, chances are the female witness was named Tatiana. Could the ominous message to Putin be that he was being denounced as a murderer by his own late predecessor Borias Yeltsin -- whose daughter and top political aide was named Tatiana?
But wait! Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a Georgian! Could there be a hidden meaning in that?
Yes, I'm joking, of course. A much more likely explanation is that when it comes to non-political shows, state control of Russian TV is not as absolute as some think; it could be the good old Russian tradition of absolute control made ineffective by sloppiness. Yet some intriguing questions remain. Why did the man who named Putin, and the psychic's handpicked assistant, look so mischievous? Could they have played a trick on the host?
At the end of the segment, the paper was removed from the safe and turned out to contain the words, "Vladimir committed a crime in the city of Munich, using a knife." Being a skeptic about psychics who do TV shows, and finding it rather hard to believe that Char really telepathically fed those words to the "witnesses," I'm inclined to believe that the "witnesses" were plants and the whole stunt was arranged in advance. But what, then, to make of the "Putin"? A little improvised mischief by the "witness," who was supposed to say "Vladimir" but made a slight alteration to the script? Perhaps.
The host's unseemly nervousness at the sudden appearance of Putin's name (jokes about "He Who Must Not Be Named" already proliferate on Russian blogs), and the plea to remove it, speak volumes about Russian authoritarianism. And yet the segment continued, the camera lingered repeatedly on the "Knife-Munich-Putin" on the slate, and the public laughed. A far, far cry from the communist era, indeed.
In the April issue of Reason, I examined the question: Whither Russia after Putin. (Or should that be "Russia after still under Putin"? That depends on what the meaning of "after" is.) Of course, I could not have imagined that the answer to this question would be: To war with Georgia and the triumph of Putinism, a triumph that has pushed the soft-spoken Medvedev to ape Putin-speak and refer to Georgia's leadership as "morons" and "psychos", and ratcheted up the level of brazen lies and propaganda in the official Russian media to Soviet-era high watermarks.
I hope to say more on the subject soon, but for now, I offer those of you who may have missed it my article in The Weekly Standard, Don't Cry for Russia. It's a response to arguments (see here, for instance) that Russia was driven to violence by ill-treatment from the West and the United States in particular.
As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back.
"Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave way to a world in which the 'sole superpower' boasted about how it had 'won' the Cold War. Russia was forced to swallow the news that NATO would grant membership to former client states in Eastern Europe, along with former Soviet republics." This theme, particularly NATO expansion as an affront to Russia, has been echoed by many others, from Tom Friedman in the New York Times to Pat Buchanan in his syndicated column.
By contrast, few of the Russians who lament their country's slide into belligerent authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin blame it on "humiliation" by the West. "Russia humiliated itself," says human rights grande dame Elena Bonner, widow of the dissident and scientist Andrei Sakharov. "It spent 70-plus years building Communism, and reaped the results."
Victor Davidoff, an independent Moscow journalist and former Soviet political prisoner who became a U.S. citizen but returned to Russia in 1992, told me in an email exchange that he was "nauseated" by talk of Russia's humiliation. "How did the West humiliate Russia? Gave it money--much of which was pilfered? Sent humanitarian aid? Paid for the dismantling of missiles? Invested in Russian businesses? The Germans don't consider the Marshall Plan a humiliation; why is aid to Russia humiliating?"
Davidoff's mention of the Marshall Plan is fitting, since Samantha Power explicitly contrasts the West's treatment of post-Cold War Russia with that of post-World War II Germany: "On occasion, Western countries have consciously avoided humiliating militant powers. . . . Having neutered Germany following World War I, the Allies showed West Germany respect after World War II, investing heavily in its economy and absorbing the country into NATO."
This is a breathtaking inversion of reality. If ever a defeated power was "humiliated," it was postwar Germany--forced to endure several years of occupation, de-Nazification, a massive education campaign promoting the idea of collective German guilt for Nazi crimes, reparations to countries affected by the war, and loss of territories accompanied by the expulsion of millions of Germans. There was also the small matter of the country being split in half.
The contrast with the West's treatment of post-Communist Russia is stark indeed. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and Europe eagerly embraced Russia's young democracy. Western economic aid to Russia totaled $55 billion from 1992 to 1997 (not counting private charity). While some aid was conditioned on the continuation of market-oriented economic reforms, none of it was tied to political demands for a formal condemnation of the Soviet legacy. Russia was not required to dump the Lenin mummy from the mausoleum in Moscow, to put former party apparatchiks or KGB goons on trial, or to restrict their ability to hold government posts and run for public office. Nor was it forced to pay reparations to victims of Soviet aggression, or surrender territories such as the Kuril Islands, seized from Japan after World War II.
What about the much-maligned NATO expansion? Friedman asserts that it was particularly galling to Russians since Russia itself was disinvited from joining NATO, sending a message that it was still seen as an adversary. Ira Straus, founder of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, tells a more complex story in a paper for a 1997 George Washington University conference on Russia and NATO.
Russia first expressed cautious interest in NATO membership in 1991, when NATO was not prepared to admit any Eastern Bloc countries. By the time the admission of former Communist states was seriously considered, Boris Yeltsin's administration was already backing away from its embrace of the West, mainly as a result of pressure from the neo-Communists and nationalists who scored victories in the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections. In 1995, pro-Western foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev was replaced by Evgeny Primakov, who, Straus writes, emphasized "multipolarism" and (foreshadowing the leitmotif of the Putin-era Russian political elite) criticized "American attempts at unipolar domination of the world through NATO."
Initially, supporters of NATO expansion envisioned Russia's eventual inclusion, and Yeltsin seemed receptive to the idea. But NATO enlargement soon became a bone of contention. Straus writes that in the mid-1990s, the United States often misinterpreted Russia's opposition to the fast-track admission of smaller states into a Russia-less NATO as opposition to expansion per se. Russia in turn sent many conflicting signals. Above all, it was clearly unwilling to commit to a broad acceptance of NATO strategic policy, one of the main criteria for membership set in the organization's 1995 "Study on NATO Enlargement." This was a serious hurdle, since NATO operates by consensus, giving every member country a de facto veto over the alliance's policies.
Samantha Power dismisses Russia's inclusion in NATO's 1994 "Partnership for Peace" as "largely symbolic." Yet the partnership's framework document not only provided for extensive military cooperation but gave each member guarantees that it would be consulted by NATO about any perceived threats to its security. Straus wrote, in 1997, that Russia "held back from full participation" in the Partnership "due to domestic pressures [and] to suspicions of NATO." This was followed by the creation of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. Its work included not only joint anti-terrorism efforts but programs that provided job training and other assistance to discharged military personnel in Russia.
Bonner believes that, far from treating Russia as an enemy out of habit, Western politicians and pundits have been too prone to "wishful thinking" in treating it as an ally in the war on terror. Says Bonner, "Russia wasn't even treated as an equal partner but a favored child who was petted and given treats."
One such treat was an invitation to join the G7 group of industrial democracies in 1998. Despite Russia's dubious qualifications for membership in a club based on such criteria as economic performance, political stability, and low level of corruption, the group became the G8. In January 2006, after Putin had crushed his independent media and political opposition, Russia actually assumed chairmanship of the G8--just as its Freedom House ranking slipped from "partly free" to "not free." (According to a December 2005 National Public Radio report, some eternal optimists hoped that giving Russia G8 leadership would encourage liberal tendencies.)
Much Western hand-wringing over Russia's wounded pride seems to accept the premise that Russia is entitled to dominate its smaller neighbors and to have its ego coddled as no other former empire has had. Such entitlement is also deeply entrenched in the mindset of many Russians. "At least they used to be afraid of us" is a sentiment I heard repeatedly on my trips to Russia in the early 1990s. Another popular phrase in those days, "za derzhavu obidno," can be roughly translated as "makes you feel bad for the country," but really means much more: derzhava has overtones of "great power" and "autocratic state"; obidno conveys shame, hurt and resentment. With such a mentality, Putin's bully rhetoric--"Russia can rise from its knees and sock it to you good and hard," he remarked in 1999--found an eager audience.
The painful humiliation of Germany after World War II had one major positive aspect: The Nazi virus was purged from the nation's system. Russia never truly confronted or rejected the evil of its Communist past. Yeltsin, to his credit, sought to do just that. He outlawed the Communist party (which successfully challenged the ban in court) and spoke of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire." This changed under Putin, whose idea of resurgent Russian pride includes celebrating Soviet-era "accomplishments" while treating the crimes as deplorable, but fundamentally no worse than the blots on any other nation's history.
The new Russia bristles at any effort to account for those crimes, be it Ukraine's attempt to have the state-engineered famine of 1932-33 recognized as genocide by the United Nations or Estonia's prosecution of veteran Communist Arnold Meri for his role in the deportation of Estonian "undesirables" in 1949. In July, the Russian foreign ministry issued a peevish protest against President Bush's Captive Nations Week proclamation that mentioned "the evils of Soviet Communism and Nazi fascism," decrying it as an attempt to "continue the Cold War." "But how can it not continue," asked Soviet-era dissident Alexander Podrabinek in an article on the EJ.ru website, "when those in charge of Russia's foreign policy openly try to whitewash Communist ideology?"
National humiliation is not a thing to wish on anyone. But perhaps, after Russia's 20th-century history, a few lessons in humility would have been useful--and well deserved.
Due to no longer having a regular slot at The Boston Globe, getting published now takes more time and effort. For financial reasons, I have also taken on some fairly time-consuming translating work. Between that and possibly frivolous but nonetheless satisfying fandom hobbies, I have not had much time or energy available for unpaid commentary. Until recently, I also haven't been very inspired to blog.
That may change now, with two stories in the news in which I'm keenly interested: the latest events in Russia, and the feminist firestorm around the Sarah Palin nomination for vide president. I will be posting several items this weekend. After that -- we'll see.
My apologies to the readers I've left in the lurch, particularly those who were concerned about my well-being.
Writer and journalist, author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (1989) and Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (1999). Columnist for Reason (monthly) and, from 2000 to January 2007, for The Boston Globe (weekly). Born in Moscow, Russia in 1963; came to the United States in 1980. Rutgers University graduate.
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