separate and unequal

From: Arch Getty <[email protected]>
Subject: separate and unequal
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008

Things look very different from here in Moscow,
almost as if one is observing things from another planet.

The other night I watched a story on Russia
Today, a semi-official Russian news channel.  It
showed CNN footage purporting to come from the
apparent Russian “capture” of the Georgian town
of Gori.  Actually, the film was (unattributed)
Russia Today footage of damage from the Georgian
attack days ago on Tskhinvali, the So. Ossetian capital.

But even aside from the difficulty of getting
anything resembling accurate news here, the
Russian point of view is, predictably, vastly
different from the knee-jerk Russophobia in the
U.S. press.  And to many of us here, the Russian
point of view is at least as compelling as the
mainstream U.S. attitudes we hear about.

Russians have always been sensitive to western
views of them and are particularly alert for
attitudes  that smack of inequality and
hypocrisy.  The vast majority of people here are
amazed, sad, and confused at the way the western
media has transformed the Georgian side, which
started the war, into the victims.  When Prime
Minister Putin decried the west’s cynical
“turning black into white” he spoke for large numbers of Russians.

People here were amazed and insulted when
President Bush bragged about his “stern” warnings
to Putin.  Like Putin, they cannot imagine a
reason to pay any attention to such a person,
whose paternalistic but helpless schoolmarm
lectures are considered here to be “not serious.”

Russians wonder how, before Russian intervention,
something more than a thousand deaths including
the destruction of villages and shooting of
civilians by the Georgians escape western notice.

They wonder why Georgian attempts to suppress the
Ossetian alphabet were not cultural genocide and
Russian defense against Georgian attack is.

They wonder how prying Kossovo away from Serbia
was popular self-determination but So. Ossetian
independence from Georgia is not.

They wonder how President Bush, who for the sake
of regime change invaded Iraq far from his
shores, nevertheless managed to denounce Russian
use of force and complain that the days of regime change had passed.

They wonder why, in 1942 when attacked by Japan,
the U.S. did not follow its own advice about a
“measured response” and stop her counterattack on
Japan at Pearl Harbor.  “Were the Japanese the
victims then, just like the Georgians?”

They wonder why, as one puzzled but sincere
friend put it, “you Americans hate us so much when we do what you do.”

But mostly they wonder why US leaders cannot come
up with a more sophisticated world view for the
21st century than surrounding Russia (which after
all has nuclear weapons and much of the world’s
oil) with verbal abuse, hostile alliances and
provocations.  They don’t understand why US
leaders cannot see beyond or outgrow the cold
war.  Another asked,  “So Cheney and Rice, they
aren’t your most advanced global thinkers, right?”

J. Arch Getty
Moscow
[Professor of History, UCLA]

Johnson’s Russia List
2008-#150
15 August 2008