Russia and the Rights of Man

31 Mar 2022 By Susan Barsy in International Tags: atrocities, freedom, human rights, rule of law, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, western culture 2 Comments

Vladimir Putin isn’t a czar. He isn’t a comrade. He isn’t a president. He’s like an old-time Pharaoh, an evil king, killing people deliberately to prove his power. Putin isn’t a westerner, a civilized person. He belongs with the tribal warlords, whose power rests on a foundation of propaganda and fear.

Putin should not be likened to Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s ideology was popular. Hitler expostulated Nazism so effectively that the whole German population fervently rallied around its aims. That rally at Nuremberg.

Far from being enthusiastically behind Putin, Russians are cowed. They are quiescent because they’ve seen activists like Navalny be jailed, beaten and poisoned. Russians have seen bad times and Putin has conditioned them to accept future suffering. They don’t want trouble. Ordinary people trust Putin’s explanations; they see his authoritarianism as a necessity. For years, the Russian population has heard only a steady diet of lies.

Putin himself is a coward, so he conscripts younger countrymen to go to Ukraine to commit war crimes for him. His people go because they are ignorant of what Putin is really doing to Russia’s “brother country,” Ukraine. Russians can’t believe their president would bomb a theater filled with Ukrainian women and children, that he would order the bombing of kindergartens and maternity hospitals, that he would murder pregnant women or shell innocent civilians running for their lives.

Putin is sending Russian soldiers to Ukraine without adequate food, fuel, or strategies. His troops are ignorant of the truth. When they encounter the gross reality of the Russian “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian soldiers are surrendering. They are deserting. They disregard orders. They leave behind their equipment. They have even reportedly shot down Russian planes from the sky.

No one has the nerve to oppose or force Putin out, so they go along with his damned course; they lick his boots and lie. Fortune reports that Russian troops positioned around Chernobyl have run roughshod over the radioactive site, raising the chance of their health being gravely impaired during their month-long occupation. The military mediocrity that such episodes reveal is astonishing.

Yet, the “free world” appears dangerously disadvantaged. It adheres to conventions. Decent democrats seem powerless in the face of Russia’s evil. Yet, for all that, the freedom that the rule of law brings is suddenly all the more precious (and empowering to Ukraine). Russia, once eager to be at the forefront of all nations, has fallen behind–economically, intellectually, and militarily. Its condition is provincial and static, because Putin’s regime depends on a closed society, where citizens have little access to news or information technology.

Having rejected the natural rights philosophy that undergirds representative governments in the West, Putin’s Russia is on a downward trajectory. Clearly not Western, it ever more nearly resembles benighted North Korea.

No wonder every decent American feels and thinks what President Biden had the guts and decency to say of Putin aloud: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Image: from this source.

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Stewards of a Tough and Tender Earth

8 Mar 2022 By Susan Barsy in A Becoming Green Tags: native plants, nature, ordinary life, planetary decay 2 Comments

Two spring flowers and a leaf growing out of colorless soil

While the air is still cold and the dune’s trees are bare, these inconspicuous flowers bloom in the sand. They are useless as far as I know, the hepatica and spring beauty. Deer don’t eat them. The plants don’t need much: given leaf rot and water, voila! they bloom.

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The Freed Slaves’ Prospects; or, The Copperheads’ Revenge

24 Feb 2022 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1860s, anti-federalism, Copperheads, Emancipation, equality, racism, the Union, white supremacy 2 Comments

This drawing from 1863 encapsulates the dangerous anti-federal anti-black sentiment that bubbled up in the Civil War north once the slaves were freed. Dominating the drawing is a figure resembling Lincoln, mowing the field with a scythe and in the process exposing some snakes in the grass. The verse below identifies the snakes as venomous “copperheads.”

Copperheads were a faction of northern “peace Democrats” sympathetic to slaveholding who opposed the war to preserve the Union. Their opposition to race equality and perverse sympathy for Southern rebels clouded the prospects of black Americans and threatened the realization of the Republicans’ plans. (Since the South had seceded and taken up arms, the US government was left mainly in Republican hands.)

The Copperhead faction, whose adherents were mainly from Ohio, Indiana, and other Midwestern states, were vigorous dissenters during the worst crisis Constitutional government had faced to date.

Beyond the Mower, episodes of a national saga unfold. The scenes depict the massive social and economic transformation that “Black Republicans” had hoped would follow from abolition. They anticipated that former slaves, once freed from Southern bondage, would become equal participants in a prosperous “free labor” economy on the same terms as whites.

The two halves of the drawing envision this heartening progression, as chattel slaves, depicted on the right under a stormy sky, begin living into the promise of personal freedom and autonomy. Formerly, blacks enslaved in the South lived in demeaning conditions, their well-being dependent on the will of their owners and overseers. At center, a fugitive slave carrying a child is pursued by dogs.

On the left, emancipated slaves labor on the land with dignity. Like other Americans, they are part of a prosperous “free soil” economy, more than sufficient to meet their needs. In the distance, a substantial-looking farmstead telegraphs a “dream home,” come true.

Unfortunately, emancipation ignited virulent opposition in some segments of white America. The Copperheads couldn’t relate to a real shift in American sentiment that had led a majority of the electorate to reject slavery and the South’s “states-rights” defense of its “peculiar institution.” Copperheads viewed the Union war effort as an abuse of federal authority. They pleaded for a peaceful negotiated settlement with the South.

Copperheads were agrarians who feared that the modernization championed by eastern Republicans (which included industrialization) would jeopardize and eclipse their way of life. Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham was so vehement in opposing the federal government that he was tried for treason and exiled to live in the Confederacy. Copperheads were understood to be active in the Knights of the Golden Circle, a fraternity whose goal was Southern expansion around the Gulf of Mexico to preserve the South’s distinctive way of life. In the words of historian David C. Keehn, “The Knights were a militant oath-bound secret society dedicated to promoting Southern rights (including slavery) and extending Southern hegemony over the Golden Circle region,” encompassing the Caribbean Islands, Mexico, and Central America.

The Copperheads’ impolitic opposition to progressive forces at work in US society echoes across the ages, finding voice in the militant anti-federalism fueling Trumpism and other reactionary causes today. Just as baleful was the underlying racism that led Copperheads to embrace the cause of slavery and white supremacy, a world view that justified the exclusion and prejudicial treatment of black Americans.

Image: from this source.

The Storm; Or, Putin’s Race To The Bottom

22 Feb 2022 By Susan Barsy in International Tags: authoritarianism, corruption, repression, Russia, sovereignty, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, war 2 Comments

Outside, rain is falling, and all America is waking to the news that Vladimir Putin is sending troops into sovereign Ukraine, having concocted an excuse that the world is too savvy to believe. It’s a deadly serious day for Ukraine, which has been moving fitfully toward genuine self-government. For Americans, the challenge is to disregard the media hype Putin is deliberately stoking and to see his aggression as the desperate, go-for-broke gesture that it is. If Americans start thinking that Ukraine is our fight, we fall into a trap that proves Putin’s point.

Putin can’t tolerate the shape of the post-Soviet world. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, many of Russia’s former satellite states have gotten used to being self-governing. They enjoy more autonomy; their citizens have more civic and economic freedom. Do they want to end up under Russia’s thumb again? No.

Inside Russia, Putin struggles to turn back the clock politically, cracking down on pro-democracy NGOs and on opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny. Navalny enraged Putin by exposing how Putin’s United Russia party enriches itself at the people’s expense, famously branding it “a party of crooks and thieves.” Despite having all the resources of the Russian state at his disposal, Putin can’t tolerate Navalny’s inconvenient truths. For the past several years, Putin has gone to grotesque lengths to torment Navalny, going so far as to order the KGB to attempt Navalny’s assassination by putting a Soviet-era nerve agent in his underpants. At this point, Navalny’s death (the poor man remains imprisoned) would likely undermine Putin’s already doubtful popularity, just as the latter seeks re-election, in hopes of remaining president for 12 more years.

Russia is shrinking all over, thanks to Putin’s crooked and cowardly authoritarian rule. He chose to turn the nation toward oligarchy and repression, instead of being “a river to his people” and empowering them to become creative, healthy, and autonomous. Russia’s economy is based on the export of oil and natural gas, a narrow base of support for the nation’s population of 144 million people, a population that’s shrinking dramatically and is estimated to have lost nearly a million people in the last year alone.

Russia’s global prestige derives mainly from its military might, but this comes at a high social cost. Its military comprises some 900,000 personnel. A war in Ukraine will have require significant manpower, imposing a heavy burden on Russian families. The population of Russian men aged 20 to 34 is estimated to have been just 14.25 million in 2020. Russia’s failure to pacify the Donbass region, echoing the Soviet Union’s failure to prevail in its 9-year war of agression in Afghanistan in the 1980s, testifies to how limited Russia’s concrete military successes have been. Some observers have noted that, when true crises call for a demonstration of leadership, Putin tends to disappear from view. His decision to send troops into Ukraine will further burden the Russian people and continue to hamstring the Russian economy.

All this needs to be kept in mind as American journalists compare Putin to Hitler and carelessly compare the current moment to WWII. Russia in 2022 is not Germany in 1939; Putin is not Hitler. Russian sentiment is not mobilized around the unwarranted aggression against Ukraine that Putin is bent on. Putin is using a very tired playbook from earlier times, largely because he doesn’t have what it takes to keep his once pre-eminent nation from sliding down to a secondary position in a changing world.

Image: from this source.

The Dawn of Modern American Race Relations

19 Feb 2022 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1860s, black history, Civil War, Freedmen's Bureau, Lost Cause, racism, Reconstruction, slaveholders, violence, white power 2 Comments

This drawing from 1868 remains powerful. It captures the virulent hatred of southern whites toward blacks (their former “property”) just after the South was defeated in the Civil War. Because the South had given its all in defense of slaveholding, Southern defeat, coupled with the federal government’s freeing of the slaves, triggered a rage and resentment that still boils in some segments of the white population.

During the Civil War, the free part of the nation defeated the rebel states. Beyond that, though, the free part of the nation rejected and discredited the ideas that the South’s slave-holding society had embraced. The Northern states, which controlled the federal government, warred against these ideas, defeating and ostracizing them, while protecting liberated slaves and taking numerous steps to outlaw slavery and rectify its wrongs. The world the slaveholders made, which justified black enslavement by asserting whites’ natural superiority, was lost.

A value system at odds with the principle of natural equality: this is what the rebels lost in the 1860s, and what their descendants and admirers nostalgically pine for to the extent that they identify with the Lost Cause.

Of course, some Southerners were capable of shrugging their shoulders and moving on. For most white Southerners, though, the loss was mortifying. The consequences of losing were deeply humiliating and dire. People who owned slaves had believed in their slaves’ native inferiority. This supposed inferiority was the intellectual defense relied on to make slavery conscionable.

Furthermore, the belief that whites were naturally superior boosted the egos of all white southerners, most of whom were not wealthy and did not own slaves. If all whites were superior, all were part of the master class. The Civil War shattered this preposterous notion. The federal government intervened militarily, breaking up the South’s “peculiar institution,” and declaring that blacks were equal to whites.

For more than a decade after the Civil War, the federal government engaged in an extraordinary effort to protect liberated slaves and ensure their freedom and equality. The central figure in the drawing above represents the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency that ran refugee camps for slaves during the war. The Bureau existed to protect newly freed slaves, to promote their well-being by providing shelter, food, and education.

For the times, Freedmen’s Bureau was an extraordinary welfare effort, but Southerners regarded it as an unwarranted federal intrusion into their affairs. The bureau’s work went forward amid whites’ open resentment and vituperation. The freedmen were freed, but now inhabited a fearsome milieu where the threat of violence, victimization, and re-enslavement was pervasive and real. A segment of the white population became intent on denying black equality, because to accept black equality was to equate whites’ worth with that of slaves.

Change the clothes and the architecture, and the drawing could pass for an expression of the race hatred, fear, and resentment still roiling the US today. The tragedy of slavery in the States far surpassed the terrible trauma it inflicted on the enslaved population. Nor did the tragedy end when the Confederates surrendered. It was not over when every slave was free nor when slavery was formally abolished. Even when black Americans were granted equal rights on paper, it still did not end. In the 1960s, when civil rights activists ended racial segregation and battled Jim Crow, when the federal government passed the Voting Rights Act and instated other protections, mighty progress was made. And yet the tragedy of racism and racial prejudice endures.

Image: from this source.