All empires fall

I began reading Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages the other day. It's a tad dry so I'm not exacty sailing it through it. It is, in fact, the perfect book for reading just before going to sleep. It doesn't take many pages before I'm turning off the bedside lamp and starting to snore.

However, one thing did stand out in the section on the lead up to the Middle Ages (basically the period from the 5th century into the 15th, i.e., 400 A.D. to sometime after 1400 A.D.). Cantor discusses the fall of the Roman empire: the dwindling power of the Roman aristocracy, the shift in control over who actually held the title of emperor, and the gradual splintering of the various pieces of the empire, and finally the loss of the western portion of the empire to Germanic tribes in the 5th century. If I recall correctly, the city of Rome fell in 476.

So how did Rome go from being the most powerful country in its part of the world to a gradually shrinking has-been? Cantor mentions a number of factors other scholars have described: the rise of Christianity, for example, meant that many talented men who a few generations earlier would have gone into politics and government chose to become priests and bishops instead. In both power and material wealth, you could gain more by being a priest than by going into government. End result? A lot of mediocrities and incompetents taking up space in government bureaucracies and administration.

And then Rome started outsourcing. The wealthier and more powerful the empire became, the less interest the elites had in doing any actual work themselves. The educational system prepared the Roman equivalent of the 1% to read Greek philosophy and to argue Platonian ideals; it did not prepare them for any involvement in the real world. The idea that a real Roman would be involved in anything remotely resembling "work," which apparently meant anything to do with commerce or industry, was anathema. I'm not sure where the wealthy Romans got their money from -- rents on property managed by minions? -- but for sure they didn't work and they didn't go into the military. End result? The military wound up being comprised mostly of mercenaries who were not Roman by birth.

As I was reading this, I found myself thinking about the United States. As a nation, we've spent decades devaluing any work that involves actually getting our hands dirty. We do a lot of talking about jobs "Americans won't do," like working in meat-packing plants, doing farm work, lawn care, housekeeping in hotels. . . it's a long list. We're adamant that every American high school student should go to college, as if our economy is bursting at the seams with jobs that actually require a 4-year degree. After all, god forbid that a real American would ever have to work at a job that resulted in him or her having to shower after work instead of before. If you work at an occupation where you actually get your hands dirty, somehow your work isn't as important as that of a white collar worker.

The parallels with Rome are intriguing, except we're managing to raise a much larger generation of people who don't think they should lower themselves to engage with the real world. We just had an election in which a lot of people voted for a candidate they're convinced can perform a miracle and bring back manufacturing jobs. Only one problem with that magical scenario, folks, even if the Yam in Human Form could somehow revive the rust belt or expand coal mining, none of your kids would want to work there. They're being raised to believe they're all destined to be managers, not workers, so if and when the jobs ever come back, you know who's going to be willing to take them?

Well, that was predictable

Proving once again that the U.S. has become a nation of sniveling cowards, at last count the governors of twenty-five states, Michigan among them, had announced that those states are now closed to refugees fleeing the bloodshed in Syria. The fact that their announcements are totally meaningless -- it's the federal government that gets to decide whether or not immigrants are allowed to enter this country -- is irrelevant. The governors are more than happy to play to the most paranoid, xenophobic fears of what they perceive to be the public mood.

I knew that was going to be the American response. It's the way we respond to just about every crisis: let's all huddle in a corner figuratively pissing our collective pants because there's a remote possibility something bad could happen somewhere. After all, if we can't have 100% perfect safety, we're not coming out from under the bed. As a society we like to talk a lot about how wonderful Americans are, but when it comes down to reality? Not so great. We're a bunch of sniveling selfish cowards. We're also real good at turning our backs on the rest of the world no matter what the circumstances. Don't believe me? Read some history.

One of the memes kicking around on Facebook for the past couple days is a graphic illustrating how the American populace felt about admitting Jewish refugees when Hitler began persecuting Jews in the 1930s. Polls showed that an overwhelming majority didn't even want to allow children in. The U.S. refused to allow passenger liners loaded with refugees to land -- apparently even a mere thousand refugees were too many for Americans to deal with. But we don't need to go 80 years to find Americans acting like selfish assholes.

Don't believe me? Go back and take a look at how most people felt about admitting Vietnamese and Hmong refugees after they fled the Communists in the 1970s. Or how we're treating Iraqis and Afghans who worked with the American military and are now being targeted by terrorists in what's left of their countries. The U.S. supposedly has a policy of prioritizing asylum applications from foreign civilians who worked as translators or in other positions, but if you look at the vetting process, it can take many years for the paperwork to wend its way through the system and even then we reject quite a few. If you do a little Googling, you can find numerous heart-breaking stories of Afghani or Iraqi civilians who risked their lives to help American troops, men and women who spent months or years working side-by-side with the U.S. forces, who were promised that if they wanted to come to the U.S. they'd be allowed in with no hassles, and who now are stuck waiting for years for some paper shuffler in Washington to decide their fates.

In short, despite our chauvinistic beliefs that Americans are inherently nice charitable people, the reality is we're hypocrites. We're narrow minded, selfish asshats who are remarkably adept at pretending we're not. We don't even want poor people moving into the same neighborhood as us -- look at the public reaction any time someone suggests incorporating "affordable housing" into a development -- so for sure it's no surprise we don't want any foreigners around. Even if the Paris attacks hadn't happened, we'd still be telling Syrians to stay away.  

If there's a Hell, I hope the Dulles brothers are in it

I just finished reading yet another depressing book about American foreign policy stupidity. This particular narrative describes the first (but definitely not the last) attempt by Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles to mold the world to fit their ethnocentric and elitist view of the way things should be. The great colonial powers -- Britain and France -- were losing their grip on the regions they once controlled so the Dulles siblings decided it was appropriate that the United States "take up the white man's burden," all in the name of fighting Communism.

Every so often when discussions of Iran's relationship with the United States come up, there'll be a reference to U.S. interference in Iranian politics in the 1950s. The fact the CIA engineered the overthrow of a popularly elected Prime Minister and helped strengthen an autocratic monarchy will get mentioned, but often the details are vague or the rationale obscure, e.g., "Iran was going to raise oil prices." That always had me wondering why we'd bother to overthrow a government over oil in the 1950s when we weren't as dependent on foreign oil then as we would be a few years later -- and so far as I know we didn't try to overthrow any governments  in the 1970s when OPEC jacked up oil prices. Now I know the real story -- it wasn't oil that the U.S. worried about; it was Stalin.

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by journalist Stephen Kinzer lays it all out: Iranian history beginning with the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, the importance of Shi'a branch of Islam, the role of the British in the Middle East, and the decision by the Dulles brothers to get the U.S. involved in suppressing nationalism and thus sow the seeds for generations of terrorism to follow. The years following World War II were troublesome ones for the European countries that had established colonies and "protectorates" around the world; more and more colonies decided they preferred governing themselves instead of putting up with exploitation by the British, French, Dutch, and other Europeans. Iran was never an actual colony, but generations of a corrupt monarchy had acquiesced in selling off the nation's resources to foreign interests. In the early 1900s, a British company obtained a concession giving that company exclusive rights to oil exploration and development in a region in southern Iran. On May 26, 1908, they struck liquid gold in what Kinzer describes as the greatest oil field ever found. Later that year, a group of investors formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Within a few years, they had drilled hundreds of wells, laid many miles of pipeline, and built what was for many years the world's largest oil refinery on the island of Abadan in the Persian Gulf.

Under the terms of the concession, the British had complete control of Anglo-Persian. The Iranian government received royalties every year, but no Iranians were involved in managing the company or even working at professional positions such as engineer. The only Iranians employed were persons working at the lowest level jobs (i.e., manual laborers), those Iranians were paid subsistence wages, and the only housing available was a slum with no sewers, running water, or paved streets. In contrast, the British workers lived in a company town that was what Kinzer calls a "typical colonial enclave." These were conditions that anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together would recognize as a status that could not continue indefinitely, but the British chose to remain willfully ignorant.

It was not until after World War II, though, that Iranian unhappiness about the oil concession finally reached the point of no return. Over time, Iranians had become more and more unhappy about the many ways the British were screwing the country over: among other things, the oil company management refused to allow any representatives of the Iranian government to audit the books so there was a strong suspicion that the amount being paid in royalties was much smaller than the actual amount owed. The situation got worse when U.S. oil companies negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia to form the Arab-American Oil Company and agreed to a 50/50 split on the oil revenues. The British flat out refused to agree to such an arrangement. In fact, according to Kinzer, no matter what proposal the Iranians put on the table, the British simply responded with a flat no. As far as the Brits were concerned, there was no negotiating points. From their perspective, everything was fine and they didn't intend to change a thing.

Then the Iranians elected Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister. Mosaddegh decided Iran had been getting cheated by the British long enough; he gave them an ultimatum: negotiate or Iran will nationalize its oil. Once again, the Brits said no, apparently assuming that Mosaddegh was bluffing. He wasn't.

Even before Mosaddegh followed through on the threat to nationalize Iran's oil, the British had begun plotting to overthrow the Iranian government. They had a well-established network of spies and covert operators in Iran; the British Secret Service had no qualms about sabotaging a democratically elected government if that government was threatening Britain's interests. Unlike the Americans who would take over the plotting when the British were expelled from the country, the British were motivated almost solely by greed. British investors didn't want to lose any of the money they'd been getting from the Anglo-Persian Oil company. While the Americans fretted about Communism creeping over the border into Iran from the Soviet Union, the British knew it was an unlikely prospect. Their decades of experience in the country meant they actually had a pretty good idea of what was a real threat and what wasn't. In 1952, as far as the British government was concerned, the real threat was financial and not ideological.

At the same time, the British knew that the U.S. would never agree to help with the Iranian problem if they realized the real issue was monetary rather than ideological. So they started pushing the threat of a Communist incursion, doing their best to make it sound like Mossaddegh and his political allies were one step away from inviting Stalin in to replace the Shah. That ploy didn't work on the Truman administration, but as soon as Truman was gone and Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, things changed. British officials had begun talking with John Foster Dulles and Allan Dulles as soon as Eisenhower was elected. Both men were obsessed with combating the threat of Communism to the point of being unable to accept any other explanation for world events. Rather than seeing the rise of nationalism in former colonies as the natural desire of exploited peoples to be able to govern themselves, they were convinced every revolution was begun by agents funded by Moscow.

In December 1952 Winston Churchill himself insisted to Eisenhower that Mossaddegh had strong Communist leanings, a line Eisenhower apparently swallowed. Mossadegh, in fact, was strongly anti-Communist and was disdainful of even moderate socialism. In March 1953 John Foster Dulles, who was serving as Secretary of State for Eisenhower, directed the CIA (headed by his brother Allan Dulles) to spent $1 million to stage a coup to overthrow Mosaddegh. Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Theodore Roosevelt) was sent to Iran to manage events in person. By the end of August, the CIA's coup d' etat had succeeded, the Shah was firmly on the Peacock Throne, Mosaddegh was in prison, and the British were back in charge of the oil. 

Having placed the Shah firmly back on the throne, the U.S. began funneling massive amounts of foreign aid to Iran to keep the Shah in power. As we all know now, the Shah become increasingly autocratic, the Iranian secret police terrorized the population, and opposition to the Shah and hatred of the U.S. government (the Great Satan) grew exponentially. Following the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. managed to cement its image as the Great Satan even more by welcoming the exiled Shah with open arms. It's no surprise that the Iranian government under the ayatollahs provided funding and guidance to various Islamic radical terrorist groups, such as Hamas. We're still paying today for the arrogance of the Dulles brothers and the British. They gave a good-sized chunk of the world valid reasons to hate us.

As for the Dulles brothers, having succeeded in overthrowing one government, they apparently decided that it would be fun to do it again. The CIA's second coup was in Guatemala, where once again the U.S. helped topple a democratically elected government in order to install a dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the country is still recovering from decades of civil war and unrest. Their obsession with Communism is why we wound up in Vietnam, and it also gave us the Bay of Pigs. They set a pattern for the CIA that probably continues to this day. They may not have been as openly evil as Hitler or Stalin, but they set in motion events that over time may have killed just as many people. The more I learn about the Dulles brothers, the more I find myself hoping that there really is a Hell. If there was ever anyone who deserved to be roasted over a slow fire, they qualify.

A rose by any other name

“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.” – W.R. Inge

The Blog Fodder has been doing a series of posts about Russia and Ukraine, their shared history, the differing perspectives, depending on whether you're Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar, Galician, whatever, about that shared history, the different ethnic groups, and the different languages spoken in Ukraine. The official language is Ukrainian, but many people speak Russian as their first language. When the Soviet Union fell apart, there was apparently a half-hearted attempt to make Ukraine an officially bilingual country, but everyone -- even the ethnic Russians -- hated Russia too much to let that happen. It's all very interesting. Also very depressing, of course, but definitely interesting.  

This whole Ukrainian mess got me to thinking about one of the things that does distinguish the United States from the rest of the world. The Blog Fodder mentions that historically in what is now the U.S., English was the language of the colonizers and in most cases indigenous populations hate the colonizers and want nothing to do with their language. He draws parallels between Ukraine and the despised Russian colonists and the American Revolution and the revolutionaries deciding between English and German. It is an interesting analogy, but with one big difference. Yes, it's true there was, in fact, a brief attempt at not using English in the nascent United States. There was a movement to make German the official language because English was the language used by the despised English king George III and his minions. Pennsylvania had a zillion German colonists, so there were a lot of German speakers. 

Well, German would have been the language of the colonizers, too. Not only was the English king a member of the German house of Hanover, all the colonizers -- German, French, English, whatever -- did a really nice job of wiping out the local languages. A noncolonial language back in the 18th century would have been one of the Algonquin or Iroquoian languages common on the East Coast and in Canada. If I wanted to go back 300 years and speak a language native to North America, I'd be signing up for classes at the wemowin wadiswan over in Baraga. 

And if for some bizarre reason I felt compelled to speak the language(s) of my ancestors, my assorted grandparents and great grandparents who emigrated from Europe, I'd have to draw straws or flip coins to decide between Cornish, English, Finnish, Swedish, and possibly Russian. My mother used a lot of Russian terms for common objects instead of the more usual (for this area) Finnish ones so I'm willing to bet her mother grew up in a household where Russian was spoken almost as much as Finnish was. 

I am, in short, a typical American, a product of our cliched melting pot. I engage in symbolic ethnicity much the same way persons of Irish or German or Italian descent engage in symbolic ethnicity relating to their ancestry: I like certain traditional (albeit Americanized) Finnish foods, like pulla, cheer for the Finnish hockey team during the winter Olympics, think the movie "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" is a work of genius, and listen to Finnish bands like Nightwish. I will also remind people that the Cornish invented pasties, not the Finns (as many misguided Yoopers seem to believe), because, after all, I did have a Cornish grandmother. Like a lot of people, my immigrant ancestors were primarily monolingual (their native language with just enough English to get by) and tended to cluster in ethnic enclaves, but their descendants are widely scattered, married into different ethnic groups and religions, and any nationalist fervor they may possess is for the U.S. as a whole, not just a part of it or for a country they've never seen. 

And you know what? Much as I despair sometime about my fellow Americans and their belief in American exceptionalism, this is something we've gotten right. There are still clusters of ethnic enclaves but they're not nearly as rigidly defined or as common as they were 100 years ago. With a few rare exceptions, none of us (the descendants of the colonizers) give a rat's patoot about what languages our grandparents spoke or what happened when someone redrew a border 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Yes, there's some paranoia among right-wing fringe groups about Mexico trying to reclaim what we stole back in 1845, but I'd be willing to bet 99% of the U.S. population neither knows nor cares about that particular long ago war. The more generations away we are from the "old country" and old conflicts, the less anyone cares about the past. One of the same things that can be a weakness is also one of our greatest strengths. Americans as a whole live in the present. Granted, some fringe groups seem determined to return us to an earlier decade (or century), but they're a minority. (There are also major ethical issues with forced assimilation, but that's a subject for a different post.)

In any case, I look at how messed up the former Soviet bloc countries are and find myself thinking, come on, people, stop obsessing about stupid stuff like whose great grandparents were forcibly removed to Siberia by a tyrant who's been dead for over 60 years or what language your granny spoke and focus on the stuff that counts, like eliminating corruption. Which is more important? Having the guy at the DMV (or its equivalent) speaking the language of your ancestors or being able to register your car or being able to get a driver's license without the process taking multiple days, a zillion forms, and requiring a bribe to get the paperwork you need? 

So what's the point?

The House of Representatives has voted unanimously to provide retroactive pay to furloughed federal employees when they return to work. This is a fairly clear sign they all expect the shutdown to end soon. So what's the point of the shutdown other than to provide sound bites and toss some red meat to the extreme right wing base back in the hollers and swamps of the deep South? I speak figuratively of the hollers and swamps, of course. After all, there must be a few Tea Baggers who live in perfectly respectable trailer parks or have family trees that actually fork. 

The government shutdown has now gone on for five days (counting today). What has it accomplished? U.S. prestige is plummeting globally. We're looking more and more like a banana republic, a third world nation that's going to end up about as influential on the world stage as the Maldives or East Timor if the extreme right wing keeps its posturing up much longer. The U.S. is really keen on telling other countries how to run their governments, but after this debacle why should anyone listen? 

The shutdown is also damaging the economy: in addition to the federal employees placed on indefinite furlough, contractors and concessioners are shut down, and businesses that rely indirectly on the government are also hurting. How many days can a guy who operates a hot dog cart in front of an office building go with no customers before he's forced out of business? Whatever the economic cost ultimately is, it's probably going to be more than the current estimates of approximately $300 million a day. 

Given that the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 and has been rolling out incrementally ever since, it truly baffles me as to what the Tea Party minority within the Republican Party hoped to accomplish with their last minute grandstanding. Their posturing is the metaphorical equivalent of standing right in front of a 1,000-car BNSF coal train that's already moving at a good clip and hoping to stop it on a dime. Not going to happen. At this point, all one can do is hope the clown car that's parked on the tracks gets flattened, but, unfortunately for the country, its occupants are probably going to emerge unscathed. 

The New Normal?

Lately every time I venture out of the woods, most of the flags I see are at half-mast. Between remembering victims of mass shootings and American personnel (military and diplomatic) dying overseas, I'm beginning to wonder if there are ever any days when all the flags are fully raised.