Out of the discussion of Georgia and Ossetia...

I learned years ago that we and the peoples of Europe (east and west) and of the middle east look at race, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship in very different, and sometimes incomprehensible ways. This has been driven home to me more than once in very personal and disturbing ways, and a lot of that experience has been bound up in what I have been writing about. 6) I know for a variety of reasons that there are real problems within S. Ossetia that make everyone wish it would just go away, including a LOT of criminal activity and smuggling (of contraband and people), and all sorts of unsavory stuff that the world is better off without. So what was I about earlier?

My focus--what I've been arguing against, if you will--has been the vilification of Russia for responding to what I consider the stupid antics of the Georgians, and also to the cookie-cutter cold war rhetoric about the big evil Russians and the poor, defenseless Georgians. I Was also a bit put off at first by the mostly universal focus of others on the economic aspect of the Russian invasion, and especially on the cost of oil. I've said a lot about all of that, too much by now, but what I haven't really explained to my satisfaction is what I see as the primary root of the problem, and path of misunderstanding and arrogance that I believe is going to lead us into a war we don't really want, and won't be fighting for the same reasons. It boils down to history and ethnicity (or nationality, as some call it).

The people of Europe, and especially the Slavs, do not think of themselves as Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Yugoslavs, Serbo-Croatians, Russians, Czechs and etc., unless they are historically, racially, and culturally so. The world may consider S. Ossetia part of Georgia, but the S. Ossetians consider themselves members of a discrete ethnicity, and they do not consider themselves Russians any more than they consider themselves Georgians. The so-called ethnic Russians in the various countries outside Russia are reviled not because they are of Russian ancestry, but because they consider themselves Russians first and citizens of whatever country they are living in second.

This is not easy to explain, and it was really hard to understand the first time I encountered it--it was like getting hit in the head with a brick. I was in Germany, attending Czech language courses in Munich. Being Jewish, I was invited to share the Friday night meal at the home of a married Jewish couple who taught Czech and Russian at the school. During the evening, I asked how it was that a Russian married a Czech, and was immediately and firmly set straight--they were both Jews, not Russian or Czech. I brushed that aside and said yeah, yeah, but that's just talk, since I'm a Jew too, but I am an American first. Oy, what a horrified response I got! It was NOT just talk to them.

They both pulled out their passports and both had JEW as nationality, not Russian or Czech! I was astounded! And I just cannot explain even now, how utterly appalled I was. Why would anyone, especially a Jew want a passport to say that instead of the country he is a citizen of?!? They, conversely, were appalled that I considered myself an American, not a Jew living in America. I told them that everyone here was like me (with the usual caveats, of course), and that just floored them. They said they'd never even considered that all the different races and religious entities in the U.S. wouldn't consider themselves as separate from being American. I could go on about this, but suffice to say the evening was long and not pleasant because these Jews actually felt I was an embarrassment to the 'race' because I chose to be American first.

I have a friend who is Serbian. He is one of the founders of the movement that overthrew Milosevic. He tried to explain to me what it meant to be Serbian once and while I don't recall all of it, I do recall that he said to be Serbian is to be Orthodox. You simply cannot be Serbian if you are not Orthodox, but being Orthodox does not automatically make you Serbian. Some people here may know that Serbs and Croats speak the same language, almost exactly, but one people, being Catholic, uses the Latin alphabet and the other, being Orthodox, uses the Cyrillic, which is mostly just the Greek alphabet. It's all religion, and there is no more real difference between the Croats and the Serbs than there is between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda (now there's a legacy for the Belgians to be proud of!).

We had a friend who was a Polish national. I could tell lots of tales about her, but I'll simply say that her hatred of Russia and all things Russian, and of all Russians was greater than anything I have ever experienced in the United States--AND she had never experienced any real trauma at the hands of the Russians. Her hatred was fed to her in her mother's milk, and it was soul-deep and implacable, born of centuries of animosity capped by WWII. I've known Russians who felt the same way about the Germans. Anyway, the point of all that is that regardless of what the Western powers have decided, the peoples of the region who consider themselves ethnic-somethings (and there are scores of these) do NOT consider themselves automatically bound to the nation of the majority.

As I said to Grumpy a few days ago, it is NOT just a simple matter of them getting with the program or leaving. To those people, as it was to the Jewish couple I met in Munich, one simply does NOT become a Georgian, a Russian, a Latvian, or any other nationality just because one lives within the borders of the country where those people are the majority. And moreover, the ethnic majority in all of those countries, including most of those in continental Western Europe even today do not consider the ethnic minorities to be full citizens, let alone their equals. If you think I'm making this up, ask people who've tried to be French (I've got a story about that), or German (yeah, like the Turks want to be Germans and the Germans would let them), and so on. And so, to end this for tonight, it comes to this for me (and this has been the focus of my thinking all along). I don't believe the Russians are any more in the wrong on this than the Georgians. I don't believe the U.S. has worked this out as well as it ought, and I think we're playing a strong game in a bad way. We are really rubbing Russia's nose in its lack of power right now, and though it may benefit us in the short term, I don't think our government has near the focus on the Russians that it ought to have, and it's going to cause big problems in the future.

Am I talking about appeasement? Not at all. I would however, really like to see our government not screw things up as often as it does because we think we understand the other side, and because we are once again confusing blatant self-interest with a do-gooder desire to make everyone else "free." Oh, and just for the fun of it, anyone else know what the names Togarma, Gog, and Magog represent? I'm not a believer, but this is where it all starts if you are.... :-) V/R SangerM