Been
away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee,
it's good to be back home
Leave
it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey,
disconnect the phone
I'm
back in the USSR
You
don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back
in the US, back in the US
Back
in the USSR
(Paul
McCartney, The Beatles, The White Album, 1968)
Godless
Communists and Would-Be Heroes
For those of us
raised in the chilliest days of the Cold War, the interactions between Russia
and the US today are hard to imagine. The idea that Americans would ever visit
Russia, much less choose to stay there, would have been inconceivable in 1968
when the Beatles’ satire on the Beach Boys and Chuck Berry rose to the top of
the charts as the lead song of The White
Album.
Knowing how true blue
Americans were supposed to feel about Russians was not difficult during the
Cold War. The Russians and their Cuban dupes were the folks who had come within
one hour of launching the fiery end of the world in a nuclear holocaust in
1962, blinking only at the last moment in the Cuban missile crisis. The
Russians were anti-God, anti-democracy, anti-freedom. Schoolchildren were
taught to deride Russian leaders with new versions of the Christmas song
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer which began “Khruschev, the bald-headed Russian”
even as we learned to duck and cover to avoid being blinded by the nuclear
flash a not so-amused Kruschev might have launched in response.
Perhaps
that’s why today’s news feels so strange to many of us Baby Boomers who wonder
if we’ve awoken from a Rip Van Winkle century long snooze to find
self-proclaimed freedom fighter Edward Snowden accepting asylum in Russia to
escape US legal prosecution for revealing spying tactics. And we have to shake
our heads in disbelief to see the homophobia of 1960s America now championed by
Russian politicians under the tired banner of “family values.”
Cognitive
Dissonance en el Campo
Of
course, this is not the first time I’ve had to deal with the cognitive
dissonance in the face of a world whose previous understanding had been stood
on its head. In 1992 I was a part of a team of seminarians who came to El
Salvador under the auspices of the World Council of Churches to observe the
cease fire in the long, bloody civil war there. One of the sites we visited was
a community of burn victims who had survived horrific injuries from napalm
poured from helicopters down on their heads quite literally. Whole sections of
the countryside still bore the marks of the fiery scouring by napalm where bare
rock stripped of all life, scorched black was all that remained in many places.
The
young man we talked with at the community was scarred from head to toe
including his face. How could anyone have survived such a painful ordeal? He
spoke of being burned as he rushed from his house when napalm began to descend
on his village where rebels against the US-supported regime were living. Trying
to remain as silent as possible given their grievous injuries, he and others
had hid in muddy, water-filled ditches overgrown with weeds as government
troops drove by to mop up those who had survived the aerial assault.
So,
who treated you for your burns, we asked. “The Cuban doctors,” he said.
The
first wave of cognitive dissonance swept over me. In my world, Cubans were
evil, the cause of the missile crisis which caused Floridians to fear imminent
annihilation in 1962. The duck and cover exercises in our schools triggered by
sonic booms of the nuclear bomb laden jets constantly flying overhead from nearby
MacDill, McCoy and Patrick Air Force Bases gave birth to nightmares of fiery
mushroom clouds, Over and over we had been told that the time to say goodbye
before atomic bombs launched from Cuba arrived in Florida was a mere 90
minutes. How could anything from Cuba ever be good?
Later
that same day, our group visited a base community named for the house keeper of
the Jesuit massacred by paramilitary terrorists at the University of Central
America. “We want to show you something,” the village elder said, And so we
walked to the top of the hill where a village square of sorts had been
fashioned among the trees. And towering overhead lashed into the tree branches was
the fuselage of a military helicopter. “This is the helicopter they dropped the
napalm out of,” the elder said.
To
my right, my fellow seminarian softly observed, “It’s a Hughey. It’s one of
ours.”
The
US government had, indeed, provided much of the weaponry used against the
rebels in a number of Central American countries during the 1980s. US supported
regimes resisted the calls for the distribution of fallow lands to farmers
dying of starvation. They branded unions, intellectuals, clerics, anyone who
questioned their heavy handed authoritarian regimes subversive. And they
brutally repressed the inevitable uprisings with the help of US aid, weaponry
and training in terrorist tactics provided by the School of the Americas.
The
second wave of cognitive dissonance now overtook me. The Cubans were the good
guys in this story. My own government was the villain. It was responsible for
atrocities whose evidence had seared my conscious mind. How was I to make sense
of that?
It
was a valuable if painful lesson in recognizing the constructed nature of
understandings of the world. And it would be only the first of many lessons in the
destructive impact US foreign policy and the ravages of a rapidly globalizing
“free market” has had on the world outside our borders. For all of the good things America has been,
its repressed Shadow is brimming with death and destruction.
Asylum
in the Panopticon
Thus
I found myself once more shaking my head in disbelief as the events of the past
week have played out. Edward Snowden, who took it upon himself to reveal a widespread
pattern of spying that the American government has conducted around the world -
including within the US borders on US citizens – was granted asylum in Russia.
Snowden, whom opponents of the security state seem ready to canonize, came to
Moscow from Hong Kong after China rejected his bid for asylum there.
Neither
state is exactly a beacon of liberty and both have long routinely conducted
spying on their own citizens that would no doubt make the NSA look tame. (Honey, disconnect the phone…and turn up
the radio so we can talk….). Indeed, if Jeremy Bentham were alive today, he
might well proclaim the Russian bear the winner in the race to create a
society-wide panopticon which successfully maintains all its citizens under almost
constant surveillance.
No
doubt, there have been previous Americans who have made this seemingly perverse
flight for freedom into the maws of the Russian bear. Ironically, the only
figure I can recall is Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin of President
John Kennedy, a desperate figure whose rapid disenchantment with the Soviet
empire drove him to return to America within a few years.
Frankly,
an advocate of freedom from governmental snooping who seeks asylum in a
security state which is famed for its efficiency in snooping in order to avoid
facing the music in the country he allegedly sought to save doesn’t make a lot
of sense to me. And, in all honesty, as much as I empathize with Snowden’s
concerns, he simply doesn’t strike me as much of a hero though this hardly fazes
his supporters. Even so, there is no small amount of irony in watching the same
people who have decried godless communism for so long now defending Snowden,
the icon of freedom, defecting to the successors to the Soviet system.
Homophobia
and Ex-Communist Family Values
Perhaps
even more ironic is watching the banner of a rather virulent homophobia dressed
up as traditional, family values being unfurled in Russia on the eve of the
Winter Olympics. Of course, the violence against LBGTIQ people and those who
would dare to support their rights to be treated with equality and dignity in
Russia today is hardly unfamiliar to an America which has only recently begun
to repent of their homophobia.
Historically,
Evangelical Protestant and conservative Catholic wings in America have been key
players in the fight against what they saw as the godless communism of the
Soviets. It is a fight in which homophobia played a major role during the Red
Scare of the 1920s and 1950s. Homosexuality came to be seen as a security risk
by homophobic anti-Communist politicians. It was also seen as a symptom of
moral decay by puritanical religious leaders, the same claim made by many
Russians today who claim membership in the revival of Russian religiosity
post-Soviet Union.
Today
America seems to be on the verge of finally rejecting this base social
prejudice that has informed its cultural values and its resulting law for so
long. It is the successors of the godless communists who now utilize the
rhetoric of God and country in a Russia which has largely committed its
communist system to the dustbin of history.
No
doubt it is more than a little uncomfortable for folks like Pat Robertson to
realize that while most of his fellow Americans have rejected his fear-driven
religious morality, his message finds willing hearers across the ocean in a
Russia who has taken up the banner of homophobia disguised as traditional
family values. According to all the polls, Robertson and company now have more
in common with folks like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the imams of
fundamentalist Islam than their fellow Americans.
You
know that’s got to smart.
Charles
Dudley Warner noted in 1850, politics often makes strange bedfellows. These days
there seems to be plenty of cognitive dissonance to go around.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar
(inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church
(Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities,
Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central
Florida, Orlando
If
the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be
it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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