Dangerous Rhetoric

Yesterday, I found myself in an unusual situation in more ways than one. As I couldn't sleep, I went to the gym before work... way too early in the morning and found myself running on a treadmill in front of four television screens. The irony is of course that I haven't owned a television in over a decade and so experiences with one are few and far between... but four! It's a bit like being offered piles of riches that you don't think you need and are confused as to why others think they are valuable. This opportunity gave me an interesting opportunity for reflection and experimentation.

As most everyone in the first world probably knows by now, an airplane manned by pilots employed by Malaysian Air was shot down and crashed near Grabovo, Ukraine. With 298 people on board flight MH370 - all who perished- the only thing that seemed known immediately was that everyone on the plane died and that the plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine along the border to Russia. So as I jogged on the treadmill, I looked up at the screens and over the next few minutes I realized my opportunity- all four televisions were showing news from four different stations; ABC, FOX, CBS, and NBC. So for a girl who doesn't watch news, I was able over the course of over a hour to watch all of them at once and really compare their coverage of the situation. And even from a lack of experience as a news hound, what I found wasn't really surprising.

On three of the stations, the story seemed to be covered pretty thoroughly, but also with some caveats. As the news was raw, the situation just unfolding and with very little confirmed information. Only the confirmed facts were given definition and were described in definitive terms – all passengers were dead, the flight, where it went down, etc... After that, the language was was more vague... “Investigations are underway, the black box might be, etc... There were pictures... frankly, terrible and devastating photos and descriptions from eyewitnesses that felt so painful and hard to hear. But not a lot of speculation or opinion. And there would be breaks from this tragedy- each station took time to talk about other events such as wildfires, the situation in Israel and Gaza (just as horrible a problem I might say), the indictment of FedEx over shipping medications illegally and gold found in a shipwreck off the coast of South Carolina. And more such as a court overturning another gay marriage ban, the typhoon headed toward China... The world is a big place with much going on in it.

The same could not be said of FOX news. While they seemed to have the same details, it was pretty astonishing to me with how they used them. Small lettering on the bottom of the screen would say the 'facts', but the people talking didn't give any facts without a lot of supposition and even things that were only opinion.... Most of he time they didn't bother to mention any facts that I was learning from the other stations. I felt the anger of the commentators but I was also impressed by how neatly they could draw me in and if I hadn't been able to see the facts from other sources at the same time, I may never had gotten them. The wording that was used was also extreme and violent in its own right. It is no exaggeration to say that every sentence spoken, every word that was said seemed conveyed to expressed three points and only those three points.

1. That this tragedy was caused by the Russians and ordered by Vladimir Putin himself.

2. That President Obama must 'break' Russia and Putin to show the Russians and the rest of the world that we are the mightiest and must be feared and obeyed. That war, violence, 'blood', all have been caused by the evil that is Russia and we the good must vanquish it.

3. If we as America do not do this, we will all die and only terror will win.... with Russia and Putin as its leaders.

All the rhetoric made me think... and with was terrible. Some of the words still burn in my head over twenty four hours later. “Russia has their fingers printed all over this all ways”.... Really? How do we know? (Don't get me wrong, I suspect that in many ways this comment is true about this situation, but...) And then pictures of John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan would show up on the screen with some of their words in quotes about bringing down Russia, tearing down communism and its evils... and then “The President must, he must... Eye to eye, toe to toe, he must stop them... whatever means are necessary.” “President Obama must show them what happens when Putin sheds the blood of innocents... and perhaps the most ironic quote that sticks in my

mind came from Geraldo Rivera- “I told you yesterday Putin has blood on his hands.” Yup, the same guy that my friends and I used to laugh at in high school who five days a week make the term 'talk show' synonymous with interviewed strippers, skinheads, white supremacists, families who hated each other, etc.... He's now reinvented himself as a political commentator. So I was able to listen to him wax poetic on the evils and wrongs by Putin- many of which must have been exaggerated...something he used to do on his talk show... he was well known for it.

I am no friend of Vladimir Putin. I do not know him and am aware that living in this country I will not have many opportunities. It has been obvious to me for years that as America and Russia are enemies, the media in this country can never really see anything that has to do with Russia unbiasedly. We as a people are still trying to understand their history and their culture without coloring it through the lenses of our biases and prejudice. And we are doing it poorly. This experiment cemented two things into my head. First of all, I have heard to the polls and studies that show that those who get the majority of their information from Fox news are more ignorant of the reality of the world than people who get their news from anywhere else. But it also explained the constant fear and anger I sense in so many of the people I know who are 'die hard' FOX news fans. How can you not be when you sit and listen to so much anger... and so much falsehood or at least unproven accusations that when they are proved false ... will never be redacted. That language is dangerous for all of us- even those of us who do not hear it. We have to live with the pain and anger it causes in others, many of whom we care about. After over an hour yesterday of interaction and attention, I will avoid giving any of my time to that station again. I only wish that so many others could see it for what it is. There is enough hate and anger in the world as it is without manufacturing more.

Yesterday so many died in a plane crash.... in the conflicts in Gaza, in Africa from malaria, in Syria... everywhere. So many people are frightened and sad and unsure what to do in their lives. In fact, some numbers suggest that 1 in five of the dead in Gaza are children- children may sometimes be called little terrors but very few people would call them terrorists worthy of death. Instead of creating anger, fear and division, couldn't we work together to grieve and to fight it, fight the terror and the pain with an equal amount of love and good will as well as the basic law enforcement stuff? I can only hope.....

Did the Russian State... Part V by Nils Johann (Why, and how to compare the Rule of Henry VIII with the Rule of Ivan IV?)

Maybe the best way to clear the question, of the comparability of the formation period of the Russian State, is by comparing more or less contemporary case. Noam Chomsky formulates this approach in several of his publications but the most elegant formulation stems from“Manufacturing Consent”(1992):

“Interviewer: I'd like to ask you a question, essentially about the methodology in studying 'The Propaganda Model' and how one would go about doing that?

Chomsky: Well, there are a number of ways to proceed. One obvious way is to try to find more or less paired examples. History doesn't offer true, controlled experiments but it often comes pretty close. So one can find atrocities, or abuses of one sort that on the one hand are committed by "official enemies", and on the other hand are committed by friends and allies or by the favored state itself (by the United States in the U.S. case). And the question is whether the media accept the government framework or whether they use the same agenda, the same set of questions, the same criteria for dealing with the two cases as any honest outside observer would do.”

As long as 'The Cold War' lasted, it may have seemed like there was a definite line separating “Eastern” and “Western” culture. The global political power-struggle that took place, did, or at least it seems to have, overemphasized difference. Most likely this dominantly happened as a conscious relation towards the conflict by the authors, and to a lesser degree because of the restricted opportunities to communicate and cooperate across the political divide that was formed by 'The Cold War'. It was primarily a power-political divide, but not necessarily a clear cultural divide. To most conflicts between any given parties, a certain animosity will follow. It becomes easier to dehumanize the enemy, and this is done by starting out, to look for differences, not for
commonalities. Dichotomies that support this attitude of animosity have to be found out and cultivated. When these differences are cultivated and (over)exaggerated, they will after time be held to be basic truths, and misinterpretations will happen.

Surely the period we are going to discuss; Russia, roughly from the 15th to the 17th century, is somewhat removed from the issues of the 'Cold War'. But the 'Cold War ideology' may have been lurking in the background, in the consciousness of the historians interpreting. Even if there is an honest appreciation for historical facts internalized in the scholar, this is not in itself a guarantee for an accurate assessment of the past. At least not in the environment of contagious anti-communism, before, during, and after the time of the Soviet Union.

This paper is not the first attempt at comparison. Edward Keenan already deemed it futile back in the 70's, to find any means of aligning Russian history, with its “European” contemporary counterpart. But for those who have seen his works, it becomes clear how concerned he was with “detail”. In Keenan's world there was not much room for comparing anything. Michael Cherniavsky, Halperin's mentor, however inspires an attempt at comparison, portraying the traits that make Ivan a proper “renaissance prince”. There are many traits that offer themselves as similarities.

There is no question that Russia is different from Britain during the 16th century, just like every other institution is different from the next. The biggest difference between the two units might be the size and the geographical attributes they contain. In the time, transport by boat was far more efficient than overland travel, giving a comparative logistical advantages to the English. They are surrounded by the sea, whilst the Muscovites were depending on their river-systems, to connect an area that in average was far less densely populated than England, and at least, ten times more expansive. Further difference is that far more sources have survived in England. Wooden Moscow was 'put to the torch' several times by various enemies. In addition England got its first printing press in 1476, while the first Muscovite press was set up in 1553. English sources are also more widely accessible to western scholars, than sources written in Russian variations.

Arguing for a Sonderfall still might not be the most fruitful thing one can do, even though, I must admit it could be done in any case, regarding any institution. -The refusal of the abstract concept of the forest, in favor of our favorite tree. The Crowns of both Henry and Ivan, handle their opponents and the nobility harshly, they constantly make war and their finances suffer. The way their respective parliaments function seems kindred. Behaving like prototypical Autocrats, both are good examples of the ruling-style of their period, being held up as the best form of government in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651) about a hundred years later.

Did The Russian State... - Part II by Nils Johann (On the 'Curse' of the Orient)

In the essay 'The Mongol Origins of Muscovite Political institutions', by Donald Ostrowski, it is suggested that the organization of the Muscovite state could, to a strong degree have been influenced by the Mongol overlords that taxed, or demanded tribute and hostages from the Russ princes in the period. Ostrowski expresses himself quite diplomatically, and is explicit on the stance, that from this, it does not follow that the Russian state, that springs out of this state, later in time, is inherently of 'eastern' conception or constitution. The article makes room for what Ostrowski calls a 'pseudo-Byzantine' development, after the gradual severing of the ties between the Khans and the Lords of Moscow after 1430 -when the princes stopped 'visiting' the Khan in Sarai.

It is a sensible assumption that people or cultures, that are in contact with each-other do learn from each-others techniques. Thus also in the realm of management and statecraft. The problem with this approach however is that it does not seem likely that the Tartars had a refined statecraft, being steppe-nomads and good warriors, that mostly formed their war-bands based on brittle, personal allegiances. Conquest, for the former raiders, therefore, must most likely have been a “learning by doing” experiment. Due to their high degree of personalized, not institutionalized rule, their dominions also get brittle once the ruler dies. With time the tartars also adopt sedentary life, but it is rather a consequence of their dealings with sedentary and urban culture where they conquer.

It was a widely held opinion from the 1850 and onward, that the Asian states were “despotic”. Also the Asian peoples lacked the European/Western ability for rational thought. -Thus a mongoloid Russia would explain a backward Russia. Karl Wittfogel runs with a less extreme notion than above, of what Mongolian influx might mean, as Ostrowski also mentions in his article. To criticize Wittfogel today might seem to be like kicking in open doors, but his most famous work "Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power." "Wittfogel's scientific contribution in the ideological conflict with Soviet Communism" still echoed in the lecturing rooms when I started to interest myself for Russia in 2005. (With that quote it should be abundantly clear that we are not reading history, when reading Wittfogel) The book takes its thesis about the 'Hydraulic society', developed in his book “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas” (1931), and superimposes the concept on Russian history, to explain his contemporary Soviet Union, using the concept as a 'grand theory of everything'. Thus Soviet Communism is explained as follows: Along the great rivers like the Euphrates or the Jiang-tsek-iang, centralized states arose because the coordinated regulation of irrigation was crucial for agriculture, and the steadfastness required by agriculture made people easier to rule. This gave rise to a system of government Wittfogel named “Oriental Despotism”. Later this mode of government would also spread to the whole of Asia, remaining more or less
unchanged up to Wittfogel's time. It is also spread to areas without irrigation-systems, like Russia. With the Mongol invasion, Wittfogel claims, Russia was “asieatesized” and thus the despotic structures that had risen in the Far-East were integrated into the coming Russian systems of government, commencing up until Soviet Communism.

The story is a nice and elegant one. The narrative is beautiful and it seems at the first glance to “explain it all”, and to make sense. It was well received in the climate of the Cold War. The only problem of course, is that it cannot be true. It's highly incredible, unscientific, speculative and tendentious. The vast oversimplification that was needed to formulate Wittfogel's assertion has with time rendered Wittfogels work to be seen as outdated and incorrect, but his spectre seems to cling on in our discussion. The various weaknesses, are as well made clear by Joseph Needham's Review of Oriental Despotism (1959). Wittfogel work seems perfect for the Zeitgeist that surrounded him in the United States of the 1950's, distancing him from his own past in the German Communist party, while telling a story, elegant, comforting and assuring to his surroundings.

Alexander Yanov (1930-) can be seen as in opposition to Wittfogel's narration. In his trilogy Yanov tells a somewhat different story. He puts the responsibility for the “break with the West” in the lap of Ivan VI. -There was no Mongol imprint. He also rejects that paternalistic tendencies is something exclusively Russian, -something that should be less hard to accept when considering
Western Europe at the same time. Yanov advocates that the period from 1480 till 1560 is a period of “European tradition” in Russia, whilst the 'Oprichnina' of Ivan IV breaks this tradition. After that it was a long and hard struggle for Russia to “get back to Europe”, and it finally gets there after the breakup of the USSR. This is also in part tendentious, as it leans on a positive, highly unrealistic, mythological portrait of western Europe.

The works of Yanov and Wittfogel are representatives of two opposing archetypal interpretations of Russian history and Russia. The one understands it as “meant to be” 'European', the other as 'Asiatic'. -Or 'Western' and 'Eastern'. It is important to note that not all writing about Russia falls into this category. Ostrowski, who's focus is primarily on early Slavic history, has also published extensively in the field of comparative history, and methodology, and this seems to keep him from oversimplification and generalization.

Comments...? Questions...?

Term Post #3 : The Holomodor of Ukraine

“The aim of censoring regimes is to purge historiography in order to make it a tool of the ideology justifying the rulers' position of power”

The Holodomor is the name given to the famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933. The name means 'Hunger Extermination' and even today, it is not lawful to use certain words when describing it inside Russia – it's very existence was denied by the Soviet Union until a few years before the collapse of the government in the late 1980's. Estimates of the numbers of dead are variable due to the suppression of information available from the Soviet government and accessible to study, but a general consensus is guessed at around three million people. Adam Ulan, the director of the Russian research center at Harvard, estimates the loss of life at 5-7 million Ukrainians while other sources suggest that up to fourteen million may have died. (Clearly without more information that is unknown at this time, a more specific and appropriate number can not be defined.) Before this time, Ukraine was considered a part of the Soviet Union and was also starting to have a strong nationalist movement forming that was hopeful for independence from Russia and the Union. It was also at the death of Lenin in 1924 that Josif Visarionovich Dzhugashvili – more commonly known as Joseph Stalin- was able to cement his rise to power over Russia and its unified territories and gain full control over both the government and its propaganda wing, the Communist Party. Once in power, Stalin began a campaign of 'five year plans' to rapidly advance industrialization and modernity into the Soviet Union and its people. The first Five Year Plan contained provisions that removed the individual farmer from the control of their land making the land consolidated property of the state and forcing peasants/farmers to either move to cities and work in the rising industries or continue to farm on the new 'collectives' with new tools and rules. It is thought that the Stalinist government hoped to suppress and control the growing Ukrainian nationalist movement as well as individual support systems that could be used for revolt against them. These were the circumstances/national policies that set the stage for the coming famine and genocide.

With the new policies of land appropriation, things turned challenging for people very quickly. Some of the more well to do farmers burned off their crops refusing to join the collective farms causing many farmers (also known as Kulaks) to be deported to concentration camps to die leaving fewer people to farm. They were also branded as 'enemies' encouraging both the official law enforcement and other citizens to 'liquidate' them as a class. A decree requiring production quotas was passed and so in most cases all grain and food products that were produced were taken by the government for export to gain money to increase the speed of industrialization... living little to nothing for the populace itself to eat. In fact, as the quotas were unable to be met, government representatives were sent to villages to look for hidden food- a true irony as they would walk past those dead or dying of starvation in their search for just a little more food to sell to Europe.

When the starvation became evident, it was seen by Stalin and many in power the result of the peasant's failure to work adequately within the new collective system. Examples of that way of thinking can be seen in the many accounts given by survivors. When a Chairman of the Village Soviet was informed of the many deaths that happened in a village in the county of Cherkasy, the chairman was said to have not wanted to believe the 'story', to object to the use of the word 'starved', and to say that the only deaths that could have happened were to the idle, the lazy, and those who refused to work in the collective farms who needed to be exterminated anyway as “enemies of the people”. Yet one observer during this time stated that peasants in the Ukraine had resorted to 'eating dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, grass-anything they could find... and no matter what they did, they went on dying, dying, dying.” The writer Isaac Babel returned to Moscow after visiting the famine stricken Ukraine and he told a friend that some of the things he had seen were impossible to speak or write about including cannibalism. It seemed to be impossible for those in power or with a strong belief in the ideology of the Communist party to see that the policies of 'progressive humanity' could fail … it could only fail as a result of enemies from without and so the 'five year plan' and the system itself continued to move forward creating not only more death, but endless numbers of enemies would be created by the numberless individuals who were starving. Between the torture and death of his political opponents as well as citizens, Stalin can rightfully be called one of the most successful mass murderers in history.

During this time frame, the Soviet government strongly curtailed freedom of expression and used censorship to try and control the information that was able to be discussed. Many who spoke of the existence of the famine were imprisoned or executed and the official state talking points were of consistent denial that the famine existed at all. This strict code to denial went so far as to also refuse any food aid that other countries did try to send to the individuals in the Ukraine. Information that was given out to other countries relied on these particular talking points, and so even in the United States, Stalin's propaganda and misinformation of the famine was spread. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty wrote during the crisis: “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration of malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”

The changes that the Hunger Extermination brought to the Ukraine were far reaching and are still in work today. Initially, it destroyed the Ukraine's political leadership and also changed the demographics of the population between the deaths and the encouraged resettlement of other Russian ethnic groups into the affected areas. (Even the capital city of Ukraine had been changed from Kharkiv to the city of Kiev where it remains today.) It helped bring the separatist nationalist movement to the core of Ukrainian politics, history and identity. Any effort to have the Holodomor recognized by the United Nations as an act of genocide is heavily resisted by Russia and so the politics over the situation continue on into the current relationships of both countries; many other countries have acknowledged the Holomodor as genocide or as a 'deliberate act of famine' by the Soviet authorities. (The U.N. has recognized that the Holomodor was “a national tragedy of the Ukrainian people caused by the cruel actions and policies of a totalitarian regime.”) While this was certainly not the first major challenge that the inhabitants of the Ukraine had with Russia, it seems to have certainly caused the most pain and remembrance in large swaths of the population. In some ways the Holodomor is still a censored topic: when looking for sources for these writings, I found many books on the history of Russia and the Ukraine that mentioned the Holodomor only as a famine and in one or two short sentences... easy to be missed and forgotten. Other changes that have happened that now have international consequences due to this and other massacres committed or sanctioned by other dictators such as such as Mao Zedong in China, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Pol Pot in Cambodia, is that the International Criminal Court has been developed and no longer (with some exceptions) allows national sovereignty to be the reason that dictators can commit atrocious acts against their own citizens. The system is no where near perfect, but it is much better than nothing.

We still have the challenges of censorship and genocide in our world today. Discovering how to combat it and use speech to attempt to not only right the wrongs that have been perpetrated but to also attempt to keep genocide and atrocities from happening is something that many scholars and individuals still debate today. How much secrecy can a government have and still allow full freedom of expression? How much openness can we have as a society and still have security? How much of either are permissible to be restricted to keep the majority of people safe, secure, and also free? It is a debate that I suspect will continue long into the future... as long as human beings continue to exist.

I hope you enjoyed... or at least learned something new. Not a topic that can really be enjoyed, is it....