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2008 Campaign
Family Security Matters does not stand behind or endorse any candidate for president (or any other public office). However, as the President is also Commander-in-Chief and is responsible for setting national security policy, we will be publishing a variety of articles on both the Republican and Democrat candidates for President during this election year. As always, the opinions of our Contributing Editors are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Family Security Matters.
- IN THIS SECTION
September 2, 2008
Injured Pride Plays a Dangerous Role in History
Americans are not good at sulking. We do not base our foreign policy on historic events that injured our pride - but this is not the case around the world. We need to understand this phenomenon and carefully confront it - not be blindsided by it, as we were with Russia.
• Germany never got over World War I and the reparations imposed on it by the vindictive French. Hitler’s success was built upon milking that national resentment - and providing the Germans with targets of hatred. Resentful cultures never look inward for explanations of failure; they look outward. This mode of thinking is no longer German, with the exception of skinheads in Eastern Germany, who bitterly resent their region’s backwardness when unified with West Germany in 1991.
• Russia has not recovered from the humiliation of the collapse of their empire when the USSR crumbled. Their most unwilling colonies (the Baltic States) quickly declared their independence when Russia became too weak to intimidate them. The Central Asian string of Muslim colonies did the same. Soviet era industry was dead; rule of law was replaced by jungle values; Communist party officials morphed into the criminal mafias that they already resembled; and for the first time in centuries, Russia found itself without a buffer of captive states to protect them from the much more progressive and powerful West.
For the first time in ages, Russia has a leader who is not an alcoholic and is very smart - and vindictive. His country is flush with money from oil and gas revenues, and little of it is being reinvested into something more useful. The population of Russians and other Slavic people is in meltdown, whereas the Muslims who are still part of Russia are increasing. Russia is having difficulty in keeping a primarily Slavic military, and although trying to rebuild their crumbling defense forces, they are a long way from Western standards.
Russia is playing on the resentment card throughout the former Soviet states. Even if they cannot demolish those governments, they can subvert their Russian minorities into revolt and return to the motherland. They are desperate for numbers.
• The Muslim world is also in the grip of injured pride. Rather than make the best of their enormous oil wealth to join the developed world, they focus on an imaginary great past that they want to bring back from the grave. Resentment (and oil money) fuels such terrorists as al Qaeda and its subsidiaries, as well as the notoriously unsuccessful Palestinians, who should have been resettled and flourishing long ago.
• Iran, once the great Persian Empire, is a poster child for resentment and injured pride. Their problems are compounded by their form of Islam, Shia, which enshrines resentment over an election lost in the 7th century, with an undertow of resentment against Arabs, who invaded them. They have a long history of accusing outside powers for their miseries - finding even internal enemies “in the pocket of” (insert here Americans, British, and Israeli powers). This sort of resentment combined with nuclear power makes them potentially dangerous to their neighbors.
• The former Yugoslavia suffered from an extreme form of resentment. The region was a toxic mix of populations that were ethnically the same, but had different historic masters. Part had been under the Ottoman Turks, with bitter Christian Orthodox subjects (Serbia); part was under Austrian (or Venetian) Catholic rule (Slovenia, Croatia); and one area, once Christian, converted to Islam (Bosnia, Kosovo). These old historic antipathies went underground under Communist rule, but emerged again after the death of Tito. For the bitter, events of 500 years ago are as if yesterday.
Many Americans, ignorant of the “history poisoning” of so much of the world, enjoy attending Civil War Reenactments, an entertainment very popular in the American South. But even these events are relatively good-humored, not the nasty stuff of habitual resentment. Yet it might help us understand that the bitterness of the world’s losers is something we must confront and not be taken unaware.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is an historian, lecturer, and author who also writes for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or http://www.globalthink.net/.
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