History Rhymes and Sometimes Repeats
We have reached the point that we have to pray all the propaganda directed at Russia, and Putin is wrong – utterly wrong. For if we are right and it turns out that Putin is a monster, a psychopath who holds nothing dear and lacks any semblance of human values, then that atomic clock that measures how close we are to Doomsday is no longer needed because midnight is inevitable before the clock is slated to be updated by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who update the clock at the beginning of the year.
The clock originated in 1947 by the scientist responsible for the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. It was first set at 7 minutes to midnight – so close to 12 in recognition of a world in which man had developed and used tools that had the power to destroy human life. In 1991, the Cold War ended, and the clock was reset from 2 minutes to 17 minutes to midnight. The two most powerful military powers on the globe had made peace after more than 40 years of opposition focused on what type of government could best serve humankind. The undeclared winner of the Cold War was seen as the Greater West, where hopes ran high that Western-styled democracies would serve as a template for a new world order.
Tragically, it was already more than 20 years past the time in which celebration would have made sense. In the early morning of June 5, 1968, RFK was assassinated, and with his death came the death of the liberal democracy so beautifully defined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Kennedy’s death came just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The two events are tied very close together in my mind, not just because of their proximity in time but because of the speech RFK in the wake of the King’s shooting. RFK found out about the shooting on a plane that was taking him to a political rally in Indiana. The crowd gathered to hear him speak would not have heard about the tragedy. Thus, he had little time to construct what he would say. The part of the speech that was most affecting, at least in my opinion, was: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote:
“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love–a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”
That night, there were riots in the U.S., but by the standards of the time in which racial tensions and Viet Nam protests ran high and bloody, the rioting was relatively mild. In Indiana, where Kennedy spoke, there was almost no violent response. I watched the events on TV with my roommate in my girlfriend’s dorm. We shared a room off-campus in an all-black neighborhood – the two of us and our landlord were the only exceptions. We were nervous walking home, but both of us hoped that most of the denizens of our neighborhood may have heard the news along with Kennedy’s speech. Of course, I can’t prove it, but no one we passed had even a harsh word to say to us.
The speech marked the last I remember hearing or reading that invoked, in non-platitudinous terms, the sacred, spiritual, or existence of a higher power. Immediate examples were Humphrey’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention and Nixon’s acceptance speech when he won the Presidency. While both well-crafted, they left no feeling that they came from a sacred place. All the speeches can be found on the Internet.
RFK, who had promised to take us out of Vietnam – no questions asked – as fast as possible after the election. The war lasted into the mid-70s and involved a genocide in Cambodia along with a great deal of other horror, including the shootings on the Kent State campus.
But most importantly, the continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam doomed the country to forsake the sacred and non-material and become ever more focused on materiality. The great irony of materiality is that it tramples on freedom of ideas and severely retards material progress – some would argue reverses it. Gordon Moore, who served many years as president of Intel, was one of the last great U.S. innovators. His iconic 1965 prediction about the doubling of transistor density every 18 to 24 months was a prediction he was instrumental in fulfilling, while his predecessor Andy Grove, who joined Intel on the day that Moore and Robert Noyce began the business, earned his spurs under Moore kept the ball rolling through most of the 90’s. After Grove came a succession of leaders more devoted to near-term results than longer-term goals: today, the company is a shadow of itself.
Pragmatic or Cynical?
Back to Russia, which began the new century with Putin replacing a largely dysfunctional Yeltsin, the country only had a GDP per capita of about $1300. Moreover, Russia did not have a functional currency. Vodka was often used to pay for services. According to Jeffery Sachs, whose portfolio in the wake of the end of the Cold War was to put both Russia and Poland on a democratically based growth projection, he has stated many times that the U.S. in the 1990s was very willing to help Poland with loans and but completely unwilling to provide any assistance to Russia. Poland started the new century as a democracy with a decade of strong growth behind it and strong momentum for the future. Russia began the century as a third-world country.
The cynical – or maybe more realistic than cynical – felt that the U.S. had its sights set on Russia’s enormous endowment of resources and was hoping to see it splinter into many separate parts in which it would become easy to control the country’s vast resource base. After a decade of economic turmoil, the Russian President stepped down in favor of little-known assistant Vladimir Putin. Unlike Yeltsin, Putin was highly educated, with a law degree and a Ph.D. in engineering economics. In the 1990s, before serving under Yeltsin, he was a protégé of Anatoly Sobchak, a constitutional scholar who co-authored the constitution of the Russian Federation.
My assessment of Putin, contrary to popular opinion, I believe the good probably outweighs the bad. Most surveys report that he is well-liked by his countrymen, with surveys conducted by Westerner pollsters reporting approval ratings of about 70%. These approval ratings match his election results. Some may argue the poll and election results stem from fear of opposing an “iron-fisted” list. However, I’m inclined to think they are more or less believable given Russia’s growth under his leadership. In a quarter of a century, Russia’s growth matched – even slightly exceeded China’s.
According to the World Bank (whose largest funder is America), Russia has grown from third-world status to a high-income country under Putin. Still, Putin is often criticized for squashing competition, and I don’t have enough information to argue one way or the other. What I know is that his putative long-term opponent, the late Alexi Navalny, was something less than an angel. Before Putin’s arrival, he had been convicted of several monetary crimes. Trumped-up charges? Who knows. But what we do know from eyewitnesses is that Navalny regularly marched in parades extolling “White Supremacy” and preaching repulsive racist beliefs. Yet, for all we know, it may have been Putin who allowed him to become a well-advertised opponent, while more credible opponents never saw the light of day.
I have read some of Putin’s speeches—speeches that he made to his country—and they are impressive. I was stunned by his references to the New Testament, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. But again, the differences between speeches and propaganda can be a fine line. Still, it is worthwhile that Russia has been a Christian country since the beginning of the second millennium—1000 AD.
If you want to argue that countries filled with places of worship are not necessarily spiritual, you will not get pushback from me. Taking two disparate examples, Thomas Jefferson and Simone Weil were both very spiritual and deep believers in the importance of the non-material that did not belong to a church. Churches, both felt, can fall prey to monetary exigencies, leading to their becoming more political and motivated by material success rather than by celebrating sacred beliefs. Joining a church or any place of worship does not automatically make you spiritual and accepting of the non-material. Humanity needs something more to believe that an individual or country honors sacred beliefs than a proliferation of places of worship.
A powerful, though not the only candidate for that something else is longevity. It is hard to conceive of a country lasting millennia without a non-material culture and spirituality that hold people together during the vastitudes that characterize life on this planet. There is no rule that countries, where power is centered at the top, must be countries where the ruling powers do not encourage freedom of ideas. Indeed, there’s an unspoken rule that even an emperor with absolute power cannot govern in a way that leads to great accomplishments for his empire, complemented by self-fulfillment for most citizens. The period known as the age of the “five good emperors” is an example. Of this period, the great British historian Edward Gibbon stated in his most famous work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that “If a man were called upon to fix that period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the deaths of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”
A spiritual Putin, after all, did go hand in hand with the near miraculous growth Russia has experienced under his leadership. More than that, Russia and China today have achieved the material success that characterized a once-spiritual America. Both have become clear leaders in offensive military weapons – particularly hypersonic missiles. Russia has produced several generations of these missiles, which can fly at over 7000 miles per hour and are all but impossible to shoot down thanks to their evasive capabilities. Despite massive spending, America has yet to include even one maneuverable hypersonic missile in its armaments.
This does not mean Putin was right to invade Ukraine, as in doing so, he violated international law. Nor does it make his rationale for invading necessarily right – there are two sides to that argument. As spirituality is characterized by a belief that we should all do our best to honor and preserve life, it does suggest that Putin will likely do whatever he can to help humanity. This means we can probably take him at his word that short of an existential threat to Russia, he will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. There is strong, tangible evidence that validates this argument. Several days ago, Putin made it clear that any Western attack aimed at Russia would be seen as a ‘no-questions-asked’ reason for viewing NATO, including the U.S., in a war with Russia. Implied in the comment was nothing was off the table. Medvedev, who has been a close confidant of Putin since he assumed Russian leadership about 25 years ago, went so far as to imply that Kyiv would be turned into a boiling stew and that England is a small island that would be easy to sink.
After those comments, at least three missiles using Western technology were fired into Russia and blew up several munition depots. One of the missiles struck close to Moscow. Moreover, because of range limitations on Western missiles, they could not have been fired from Ukraine but very likely were launched from one of the Baltic states and NATO members. So far, Russia has chosen to ignore this crossing of a bright red line. I fully admit that when I saw the explosion, I was scared.
Final Thoughts
My strong feeling – which comes with no guarantees – is that Putin likely will respond but not in a way that necessitates a full-scale escalation. Those who are pounding their chests, saying that Putin is nothing but a bluffer, are simply stupid. Instead, I think we should all be thankful that the only real red line for Putin is an act that unequivocally points to an existential threat to Russia.
Before ending, I want to make one more thing completely clear. I don’t concur with Edward Gibbon that five emperors oversaw the highest point in human history. In America, I believe that between 1946 and 1968-71, Jeffersonian Democracy reached its pinnacle. I pray and hope we can find our way back to when America was “one nation under God.”
“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty… In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way, we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or war.”
Eisenhower on the 1954 unanimous passage of the 1954 act by the U.S. Congress
