The New Russia
March 14, 2014 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Dear readers: I recalled correctly from my Russian
studies a half century ago that Soviet leaders had stuck Russian
territories into Ukraine, but I mistakenly attributed all of the
transfers to Khrushchev. The first gifts of Russian territory to
Ukraine were made by Lenin.
- PCR
The New Russia
An Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” by Paul Klebnikov, in the May 9, 1994, issue of Forbes magazine
With Russia in chaos, it does sound a bit far-fetched to see her as an aggressor.
Russia today is terribly sick. Her people are sick to the point of
total exhaustion. But even so, have a conscience and don’t demand
that – just to please America – Russia throw away the last vestiges of her
concern for her security and her unprecedented collapse. After all, this
concern in no way threatens the United States.
Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
disagrees. He argues that the U.S. must defend the independence of
Ukraine.
In 1919, when he imposed his regime on Ukraine, Lenin gave her
several Russian provinces to assuage her feelings. These provinces have
never historically belonged to Ukraine. I am talking about the eastern
and southern territories of today’s Ukraine.
Then, in 1954, Khrushchev, with the arbitrary capriciousness of a
satrap, made a “gift” of the Crimea to Ukraine. But even he did not
manage to make Ukraine a “gift” of Sevastopol, which remained a separate
city under the jurisdiction of the U.S.S.R. central government. This
was accomplished by the American State Department, first verbally
through Ambassador Popadiuk in Kiev and later in a more official manner.
Why does the State Department decide who should get Sevastopol? If
one recalls the tactless declaration of President Bush about supporting
Ukrainian sovereignty even before the referendum on that matter, one
must conclude that all this stems from a common aim: to use all means
possible, no matter what the consequences, to weaken Russia.
Why does independence for Ukraine weaken Russia?
As a result of the sudden and crude fragmentation of the intermingled
Slavic peoples, the borders have torn apart millions of ties of family
and friendship. Is this acceptable? The recent elections in Ukraine, for
instance, clearly show the [Russian] sympathies of the Crimean and
Donets populations. And a democracy must respect this.
I myself am nearly half Ukrainian. I grew up with the sounds of
Ukrainian speech. I love her culture and genuinely wish all kinds of
success for Ukraine–but only within her real ethnic boundaries, without
grabbing Russian provinces.
The Greatest Gift for All — Paul Craig Roberts
December 23, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Dear Readers, thank you for your support in 2013. Although you have
kept me working past retirement age, I find it encouraging that there
are some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As
Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the
world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.
My traditional Christmas column (below) goes back to sometime in the
1990s when I was a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at
home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me
that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers
confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or
otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal
institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a
police state. Shall I argue that democracy and civil liberty are the
causes of police states?
Some readers also are confused about hypocrisy. There is a vast
difference between proclaiming moral principles that one might fail to
live up to and proclaiming immoral principles that are all too easy to
keep.
Liberty is a human achievement. We have it, or had it, because those
who believed in it fought to achieve it. As I explain in my Christmas
column, people were able to fight for liberty because Christianity
empowered the individual.
The other cornerstone of our culture is the Constitution. Indeed,
the United States is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the
United States would be a different country, and Americans would be a
different people. This is why assaults on the Constitution and assaults
on Christianity are assaults on all of us. There is not much that we can
do about these assaults, but we should not through ignorance enable the
assaults.
In a spirit of goodwill, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful New Year.
Paul Craig Roberts
The Greatest Gift For All
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush
before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively
new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the
beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a
tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the
season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national
Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise
men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid,
gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were
complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown
accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of
many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take
time from our harried lives to give them thought.
The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a
Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000
years.
In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual
person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to
become a reformer and to take on injustice.
This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization.
It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other
citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and
free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of
struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the
individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so
elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.
Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western
civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a
sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform,
investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial
enterprises, new products and new occupations.
The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted
immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives.
Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.
In recent decades we have lost sight of the historic achievement that
empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of
this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools,
colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices
that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are
being silenced by “political correctness” and “the war on terror.”
Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from
public life. Constitutional protections have been diminished by
hegemonic political ambitions. Indefinite detention, torture, and murder
are now acknowledged practices of the United States government. The
historic achievement of due process has been rolled back. Tyranny has
re-emerged.
Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are
dismantling the culture and the rule of law. There is plenty of room for
cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A
Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a
pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and
religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of
the pre-Christian past.
All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we
are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral
doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the
horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and
the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were
exterminated in the 20th century by National Socialists in Germany and
by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a
race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political
authority. In the beginning years of the 21st century hundreds of
thousands of Muslims in seven countries have already been murdered and
millions displaced, because their religion does not submit to
Washington’s hegemony.
Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is
not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear
when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power,
resting directly on force, not limited by anything.” Washington’s drive
for hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based
entirely on the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable
power.
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such
power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we
religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a
religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on
Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
As we enter into 2014, Western civilization, the product of thousands
of years of striving, hangs in the balance. Degeneracy is everywhere
before our eyes. As the West sinks into tyranny, will Western peoples
defend their liberty and their souls, or will they sink into the
tyranny, which again has raised its ugly and all devouring head?
