Watch the Balkans

         Three news stories appeared today, none of them related in their reporting but taken together hint at simmering unrest in a region that a century ago served as the kindling that sparked the First World War.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does haunt. Many of the economic, diplomatic, military and communication structures – not to mention the well-documented history of the war-torn 20^th century – did not exist when the Europeans went sleepwalking into World War I, as historian Christopher Clark so compellingly described in his book, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europeans Went to War in 1914.”
 

                Sarajevo following anti-Serb riots in the aftermath

                                 of the archduke's assassination in June 1914.
 

Nonetheless, history shows passion and delusion has conquered reason, and that is no different today. War is often the risk that ambitious political leaders will pursue to secure power – see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – and corporate leaders will welcome to increase wealth.

Here are excerpts from the three news stories, starting with the Balkan nation of Serbia, which 100 years ago this year Austria-Hungary went to war against after Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, entered the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina and assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. A crisscross of alliances quickly brought the rest of Europe into war.   

From the Associated Press:

               Fears of Serbia return to iron rule of nationalism

Hate speech is on the rise. Anti-Western propaganda fills the airwaves. Liberal journalists are pulled off air. Nationalists talk up redrawing Balkan borders. Mafia-style hits, a hallmark of the Milosevic years, are returning. And as Russia and the West collide over Ukraine, Serbia is falling firmly into the camp of traditional mentor Moscow, even as it tries to advance its case for EU membership.

"Somebody wants to remind us of the 1990s," said government ombudsman Anika Muskinja-Hajnrih. "That is worrisome."

Serbia, whose stability is crucial for peace in the still-volatile Balkans, has been simmering with ethnic and social tensions that exploded after fans brawled during a European Championship qualifying match between Serbia and Albania. The fight, which involved players and fans over an Albanian flag that was flown over the stadium, stirred the most strife in the multi-ethnic north of Serbia where Ballaj is from.

             From Public Radio International:

            American and Russian energy giants battle over a small Romanian town

           Like many areas of Eastern Europea, the rural town of Pungesti is dependent on Russian energy delivered by Gazprom, the oil and gas behemoth based in Moscow. So the town's mayor, Vlasa Mircia, invited Chevron to drill for natural gas in the area, hoping to end Gazprom's monopoly.

But Mircia's idea didn't go as planned: Some of the town's residents staged violent protests, driving both Chevron and Mircia out of town — or did they?

"It depends who you listen to," says New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins.

Protesters say they were fighting back against a big, rapacious multinational. But Romanian officials, including the country's prime minister, accuse Gazprom of orchestrating the protests.

Those officials believe the Russian government, which is the majority owner of Gazprom, is trying to keep Romania in line and in Moscow's pocket. It's also concerned about Romania's smaller and poorer neighbor, Moldova, which is considering closer ties with the European Union.

There's also simple bad blood: Romanians have a long history of tension with Russia, especially under Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

           Fromthe Washington Post:

           As oil prices plunge, wide-ranging effects for consumers and the global economy

The 40 percent drop in the price of the international benchmark Brent-grade crude oil over the past five months will reduce annual revenue to oil producers worldwide by a whopping $1.5 trillion.

“Those losses are staggering,” Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, wrote to investors Monday.

The losers include Russia, where the value of the ruble has been crumbling, inflation has crept up to more than an 8 percent rate and oil prices have done more to hurt the economy than Western sanctions.

Under The Gun

             The shooting by a police officer of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Mo. may have less to do with racism and more to do with what appears to have become the American way of handling things – “shoot first, ask questions later.”

 Just one of many examples: A 47-year-old Florida man shoots and kills a 17-year-old black youth because the teenager was playing his car radio too loud. The shooter later told police he felt threatened. A jury recently decided he was the threat and he was given life in prison. Two lives destroyed, needlessly. Why?  In another Florida incident in which a whole series of peaceable actions could have been taken to resolve a traffic dispute, a gun was used. Although no one was killed, a man went to jail, and lives were disrupted.

In Ferguson, after the St. Louis grand jury decided not to file charges against the police officer, protestors responded by shooting police officers. Meanwhile, a group of “volunteers” armed with guns and led by a weapons engineer took to the rooftops in Ferguson to protect businesses from looting by the protestors.

Just days before the protests began in Ferguson, two Cleveland police officers arrived at a park, where someone reported a youth wielding a gun. They were warned the weapon might be a fake. Two seconds on the scene and one of the officers shot a 12-year-old-boy whose pellet gun was missing the orange tab that indicates it’s not a real gun.

            It appears we are substituting a civil society built on enlightenment and justice to a land where the individual is the law unto himself. A Pennsylvania state lawmaker recently took that approach during a holdup near the state Capitol. (See Harrisburg lawmaker exchanges gunfire with would-be robbers). The governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, seems to endorse the idea. He recently signed a law that allows gun owners to sue cities that adopt laws to protect the public from gun violence.

America is a culture of guns. Fear mongering is used to fight any effort to regulate guns for safe communities. There are those of us who still believe in the preamble of the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln’s consecration of the words “We the People” in his Gettysburg Address: “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” Funny, the words almost sound fanciful. 

 

                                           Photo by Oleg Volk

The Declaration of Independence, the foundation on which the Constitution was drafted, establishes that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People do have a right to own guns, but should that right infringe on those who don’t own guns or on the right of the society at large to live without fear of firearms? The challenge is finding a balance, which today is clearly lacking. Gun carnage appears to be unfolding across the land.

Allowing people to carry guns as weapons for protection seems to have opened a Pandora’s Box for anarchy. Last June, two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian were killed by a young couple whose motive was they hated the government. The couple took their own lives, but not before shouting “this is a revolution!” and covering the bodies of the officers in a Gadsden flag, the traditional American flag with the coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”

            Gun violence has long been out of control in America. How can we not say something is wrong when 20 elementary school children are shot dead sitting at their desks because an emotionally disturbed young man was allowed easy access to an array of powerful firearms? The irony is we do say something is wrong, but we do nothing to address it. 

            Gun violence is so pervasive that it has become matter-of-fact in our lives. We are numb. We do nothing. We choose to live under the gun.  

Re-arranging the Deck Chairs

            The nation’s mid-term elections have swept Republicans into power in the Senate, added to their already significant majority in the House, and chastened President Obama to announce that he has heard the voters and will work with the GOP to break the years of gridlock in Washington.

            Outgoing Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has, as the presumptive new majority leader, pledged to work with Obama. The president said he’d “enjoy a Kentucky bourbon” with the man who has spent 30 years in Congress. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), 31 years in Congress and the presumptive new minority leader, has promised to work with McConnell.

            Hopeful as it all sounds – and hope appears at the moment to be the only thing to hold onto – the reality is that the same people that created the gridlock are still in Washington, only their seats have changed.

            So, will the Republican Congress and the Democratic president finally get down to such pressing issues as immigration reform, tax code overhaul, foreign policy in the Middle East, Ebola, energy, transportation, climate change, agriculture, education funding, banking reform?

One day after the election GOP House Speaker John Boehner fired a shot across the presidential bow, warning Obama not to take unilateral action on immigration reform. He and McConnell have promised to repeal Obamacare, but the Republicans don’t have veto-proof majorities in either congressional chamber. The votes, if they occur, will largely be symbolic and counter-productive. None of these sounds like a good start, but they could be, and may actually lead to the negotiating and compromising that can produce good legislation.

 

The S.S. United States

The real test of bipartisan cooperation will come when a vacancy occurs on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nothing brings out partisan fighting like a nominee for the highest court in the land. Will they still work together then?

                It used to be, and perhaps this is wishful thinking, that politics ended when it came time to hammer out agreements on policy.  Politics now seems to always trump policy. Our system of government is set up in such a way that the majority and minority have to deal with one another, but in recent years the two parties have seen ways around this by either not holding legislative sessions or shutting down the government. Neither tactic has proven constructive or productive.

                We have a tendency in this country to exaggerate the policies of the party we oppose as destructive to the country. Certainly, some of those policies are, but that’s why we have a deliberative process, publically and legislatively, to determine whether a policy is good or bad. Democracy is supposed to be about finding common ground on issues that everyone can agree, though not necessarily like. That ideal seems to have been lost.

                It’s not that the nation doesn’t have good leaders. It does, and in both parties. What the nation needs is a different approach to leadership; an approach that is innovative and inclusive, not combative and exclusive. Maybe now that will occur. We have three test cases to see whether divided government can work in our democracy: Washington, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

                Obama et al, and McConnell and Boehner et al, may have to re-think strategies that move the country forward while keeping their members and voters, well, if not happy, at least grateful the country isn’t going to hell in a hand basket.

 Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov.-elect Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled general assembly, and Maryland’s Republican Gov.-elect Larry Hogan and the Democratic-controlled state legislature, must craft  creative ways to move their agendas, if they, and their states, are to succeed.

Six months should tell us whether the election heralded in a new era of substantive cooperation and robust leadership or just re-arranged the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

The World at War

Science fiction writer H.G. Wells opened his seminal novel, “War of the Worlds,” with this passage: “No one would have believed in the last years’ of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.”

Released in 1898, the novel (and still popular today with the latest Steven Spielberg film iteration made in 2005), is about an invasion from Mars. It stood out among a British genre of “invasion literature” that began around 1870. Stories about enemies invading the United Kingdom, crown of a British Empire that reached its zenith in 1922 with one-fifth of the world’s population under its rule, gripped readers until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

In one respect, Well’s novel was prophetic about the global conflagration. The clash of empires and cultures (worlds), the feverish bent to destroy, the disregard for human life, and the delusion that firepower and machines would lead to conquest were themes reflected in the novel. Wells would continue to write fiction and non-fiction books prophetic about the progress of mankind.

The most stunning similarity between “War of the Worlds” and World War I is what actually defeated the Martians and what could have defeated the armies engaged in fighting, if peace had not been reached on Nov. 11, 1918 – germs, microorganisms that causes viruses and disease.

Wells’ Martians had not accounted for the Earth germs that humans, through the evolutionary process, had become immune but which Martians had no such biological defenses. Despite the awesomeness of Martian technology – the British Maxim gun was no match against the incinerating “heat ray” – the invaders could not stop the unseen germs, which do not discriminate when they attack and kill.

Wells thinking was influenced by his early training in biology. He viewed life through the Darwinian lens that only the strongest of species, human, plant or animal, survive. As a writer, his “War of the Worlds” plot device that saved mankind was not only clever but prescient. Despite man’s awesome military power that left 17 million dead at the end of World War I, the influenza virus the followed the fighting demonstrated it was more powerful than men at killing people.

The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted until 1920, infected 500 million people worldwide, and killed an estimated 50 to 100 million, according to historical records compiled and reported by the Center for Disease and Control. Ninety-six years later, scientists and historians still study the outbreak in their effort to determine exactly what caused it, where it originated, and whether there was one strain or multiple strains of influenza in the pandemic. 

As for the outbreak’s origin, one theory points to a major military hospital and troop staging area in France. Modern transportation’s easy movement of sailors, soldiers and civilians around and between continents is believed to have contributed to the speed at which the virus spread around the globe. A recent National Geographic article cites a Canadian historian who believes the flu originated in China.

“Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic,” the magazine reported.

Wherever the virus originated, the evidence that it likely spread because of war mobilization is a deadly irony.  In the United States, isolated from the ravages of World War I, the virus ripped across the nation with a vengeance, killing an estimated 675,000 people, six times the number of Americans killed on Europe’s battlefields, according to historical accounts.

The influenza pandemic reportedly started in Kansas, then spread east to New York and then west, as Atlantic coast cities telegraphed Pacific coast cities to warn them of a virus that in some cases struck people down as they walked along the street.

Desperation and fear mounted. Things got ugly. In downtown San Francisco, before a crowd of pedestrians outside a drug store, a municipal health officer shot a blacksmith for refusing to wear an “influenza mask.” The wounded man was taken to a hospital and placed under arrest, according to the Oct. 28, 1918, Bellingham Herald in Bellingham, Washington.

Headlines in the Oct. 4, 1918 edition of the New York Times read:

 

The virus came in three waves; it went from Europe to America and back to America. It raged around the globe. It was a terror unlike the terror of war.

Today, the world is at war. Wars rage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa -- Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Sudan. Low-level conflicts percolate in Asia, Africa, South America and North America (the drug wars in Mexico that spill over the U.S. border). Mobilizations, though, are in the tens of thousands, not tens of millions as in World War I. War, it seems, is a perpetual state for mankind.

The world also is threatened by a virus that, like influenza in 1918, can only be fought with precaution and quarantine as scientists search for a vaccine: Ebola. It’s a disease that has a high fatality rate that leads to bleeding inside and outside the body. Unlike influenza, though, Ebola is not airborne spread (coughing or sneezing) but through contact with an infected person’s blood or bodily fluids. It was discovered in Africa in 1976.

Though it rages in Western Africa, where ignorance and superstition is aiding its spread, Ebola poses minimal risk to the rest of the world – at least for now. Dr. Jefferson Sibley, who runs a hospital in central Liberia where a 14-year civil war that ended in 2003 killed more than 250,000 people, recently told Time magazine that Ebola is worse than war.

“The good thing about the war was you heard the gun sounds, you could run and take cover,” Sibley said, in the magazine’s Aug. 25, 2014 issue. “Ebola is not like that. You never know where it is coming from or who is bringing it to you.”

Nature can always best us when it comes to killing, but we have achieved the means to destroy ourselves and the planet with nuclear weapons, another Wellsian prophecy. In “War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells warns us not about invaders or Martians, but about ourselves. We can be our own worst enemy, clinging to our self-interest, failing to heed the past or to consider the impossible as possible, thinking wishfully instead of realistically.

“War of the Worlds” opens with the words “No one would have believed,” but Wells expects his readers to consider believing the unbelievable. As he writes in the novel’s epilogue: “The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the [Martian]cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further.”

Wells died August 13, 1946 at his home in London. He was 79. At the time, post-World War II Europe and Asia lay in ruin from the airplanes and weapons of mass destruction that Wells prophetically wrote about in his 1907 novel, “The War in the Air,” which, in Wells' view, readers refused to seriously consider. When a new edition of the novel appeared in 1941, the third year of World War II, Wells penned in the preface that his epitaph should be: “I told you so. You damned fools.” The italics are his.  

(Images and photos: Painting of Martians in "War of the Worlds" by Henrique Alvin Coreat; a young H.G. Wells; policemen masked against the influenza virus in Seattle, Washington, 1919; London in World War II)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Fight in the Dog

When he was president and met Vladmir Putin for the first time, George W. Bush said he looked into the Russian leader’s eyes and saw his soul.

Last week, in an interview with his daughter, Jenna Bush Hager on NBC’s Today Show, Bush recalled that Putin later “dissed” the First Dog, Barney, a Scottish terrier, who died last year at age 12.

Barney in happy days

“As you know, our dear dog Barney, who had a special place in my heart – Putin dissed him and said, ‘You call it a dog?’’’ the former president recalled.

Finding ways into the hearts and minds of foreign leaders is always the task of presidents and their secretaries of state, but Bush’s story about Putin and his visceral reaction to one man’s cute little black dog seems telling about Russia’s president.

Bush told his daughter in the Today interview that a year after the “dissing” of Barney, he and First Lady Laura Bush visited Putin “and Vladimir says, ‘Would you like to meet my dog?’ Out bounds this huge hound, obviously much bigger than a Scottish terrier, and Putin looks at me and says, ‘Bigger, stronger and faster than Barney.’ I just took it in. I didn’t react. I just said, ‘Wow. Anybody who thinks ‘my dog is bigger than your dog’ is an interesting character.’”

Putin was either kidding Bush, or he really views the relationship with the United States and its leader not as cooperative, but as competitive, like two boxers in a ring. Putin’s dog is Koni, a 14-year-old Labrador retriever

I would have been skeptical of this story, but when you consider it with the “Putin, The Man” photos of him trying to look manly, adventuresome and dapper, it begins to draw another picture of the man, one of a Russian leader pining for a Soviet past that is never going to return and that wasn’t as good as ex-KGB officer Putin romanticizes it to be.

In the Today interview, Bush told his daughter that he had a good relationship with Putin, though it “became more tense as time went on.” The reason Bush gives for this tension is, again, telling about the Russian leader.

Koni and his master

“Vladimir is a person who, in many ways, views the U.S. as an enemy,” Bush said. “Although he wouldn’t say that, I felt he viewed the world as either U.S. benefits and Russia loses, or vice versa. I tried to, of course, dispel him of that notion.”

Putin has taken Crimea and is stirring up trouble in Ukraine, but he faces many problems in his country that are not getting addressed and that are forming the pillars of unrest that cross-border incursions will soon no longer serve to distract from his country ills.

Bush called Putin “an interesting character” because of this competition over their dogs, but what’s more interesting is how the Ukraine, who Putin has been unable to intimidate into capitulation, reminds me of Bush’s dog Barney.

To quote the great American writer Mark Twain: “It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.”

 

 

 

       

  

Vlad the Impresser

Since taking Crimea this winter, Vladimir Putin has been compared to Adolf Hitler by former Secretary of State, and possible Democratic presidential candidate, Hilary Clinton while Russia has been described as “America’s number one geopolitical foe” by former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney

Neither depiction is remotely accurate, nor is the national media’s handwringing about the United States and Russia returning to their old Cold War crouch.

Even President Obama’s description of Russia as “a regional power” isn’t entirely accurate. Russia has a role as a great power on the world stage, but it needs to get its house in order.

At the moment, Russia only aspires as it grapples with economic troubles, official corruption that hobbles effective governing, and political struggles that have frustrated Putin to the point of imprisoning members of the Moscow punk rock group Pussy Riot, whose offense are songs such as “Punk Prayer - Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!”

Pussy Riot on Red Square

Russia is a massive country, the largest in the world with 143 million people living in nine time zones spread across 6.5 million square miles that stretch from Eastern Europe to the western Pacific Rim. Its culture is a rich tapestry that has brought the world great literature, music, art, science and thought.

America stands alone as the world power with the largest economy and the most powerful and highly technical military the planet has ever seen with bases, troops, ships and aircraft strategically situated around the globe.

Both nations do have enough nuclear weaponry to snuff life on Earth, but they also have – one can really only hope and pray – leaders who clearly understand such an engagement is pointless. In truth, Russia and America need each other on a range of domestic matters, from economics and energy to security and arms control.   

How the Crimea crisis ends is anyone’s guess, though it seems likely to be less spectacular than how it started. The last century has shown change comes to Russia not gradually, but in shock waves – from imperial dynasty to communism; from communism to federal republic – that leave no time to assemble real social and political structures that establish stability for growth and progress.

Stalin walking on a Moscow sidewalk in the late 1920s.

If there was a Russian leader who compared to Hitler it was the mid-20^th century communist leader Joseph Stalin, ruthless to the bone. He ruled Russia, or what was then the Soviet Union, from 1922 until his death in 1952. Hitler ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 when his plan for world conquest crumbled above him while he hunkered down in the Führerbunker in Berlin to end it with a bullet.


Neither man was born in the country they led – Hitler was an Austrian; Stalin was a Georgian. Their native countries straddled the divide between east and west. Both men were blood-thirsty dictators who brokered no dissent. They ordered thousands of people murdered and were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions more.

Putin, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, doesn’t even pale in comparison, but he understands that power is perception; that unless people perceive you or your country as having power or being powerful you got nothing.

"Putin, The Man" aboard the Pyotr Velikiy battlecruiser.

Until a few years ago, Putin projected power not by mobilizing troops along the Russian frontier or invading Poland, but by widely distributing what I call “Putin, The Man” photos – there’s Putin handing out big hunting knives to the soldiers fighting in Chechnya; Putin sitting bare-chested next to a tiger; Putin the sea captain; Putin the fighter jet pilot.


The Russia leader seems to have an outfit for every “Putin, The Man,” photo op, from a white judo robe with black belt to black biker gear for rides on his Harley-Davidson. Would Putin really risk access to the parts he needs for his Hog, if he was “America’s geopolitical foe?”



Top Gun in a SU-27 jet fighter.

While Hitler and Stalin dressed to resemble military leaders of awesome power, Putin dresses like he’s bucking for the role in the “The Most Interesting Man in the World” Dos Equis beer commercial. He dresses to impress not just the world, but the Russian electorate.


After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, ending 69 years of communism, Russia was in political and social turmoil. It struggled to establish stabilizing political and social structures, but was led by the unpopular Boris Yeltsin, an overweight, white-haired man who often appeared drunk and who Russians viewed as a weak leader compared to then American President Bill Clinton.
 

"The Man" riding his Hog.

The “Putin, The Man” photos helped Putin’s popularity, and has given Russians and the world the perception of a powerful leader. But images can’t overcome the reality that despite the incursion in Crimea, Russia and Putin still have many social, political and economic issues to address in their own country.