by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; published June 1, 2004
[translated from the original Russian into English, by Stephan Solzhenitsyn; source: Daily Yomiuri, August 7, 1997.]
Front Note by Sachi Sri Kantha
If sycophancy is an art of civilizations boasting 2,500 year-old heritage (India, China and Sri Lanka), its closest kin – hypocrisy – is the ornament of civilizations [British, American and other certified colonial powers] which began to make waves globally 250 years ago, and the 20th century wannabe colonial imitationists like the now-vanished Soviet Union and its client India. While I presented an essay on sycophancy by Indian author R.K.Narayan previously, here I present an essay on hypocrisy by an equally distinguished Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (born 1918 Dec.11), who was awarded the 1970 Nobel Literature prize for his defiance against the then moribund Soviet mandarins.
This particular essay by Solzhenitsyn was specially written for the Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan) in 1997, when President Bill Clinton and his policy side-kick Madam Madeline Albright were dictating the hypocritical terms to other global nations, which included tagging frivolous labels such as ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ to separatist groups such as the LTTE. Though nearly seven years have passed, the events of the late 1990s in America (such as Clinton’s nauseating personal pecadilloes and the dubious selection of George W.Bush as the president in 2000) and the first four years of the 21st century (including the enduring headaches of America in Iraq and Russia in Chechnya) make Solzhenitysyn’s observations highly relevant even today, and for anytime.
Though he didn’t mention the political problem faced by the Eelam Tamils, Solzhenitsyn’s darts thrown at the hypocrisy of superpowers – especially on the issue of ‘self proclamation of independence’ – puncture the unsound American policy [as currently espoused by the likes of Richard Armitage] with pin-point accuracy. Solzhenitsyn’s candid thoughts are refreshing to read, as opposed to pusillanimous punditry which pollute the pages of many newspapers these days. It may even be helpful to newly anointed national security advisors, like Indian pundit J.N.Dixit, if they bother to study. When Dixit dreamt of asserting ‘Indian muscle’ in the South Asian region in 1970s and 1980s [as he has reminisced in his Assignment Colombo (1998) memoirs], the Soviet Union existed. Now, the same Soviet Union has vanished from the geographical map. Thus, for his new job, Dixit needs to revise all the formulas and assumptions under which he functioned previously. Presented below is the complete text of Solzhenitsyn’s thoughts on hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy Today – the double standards of victors by Solzhenitsyn
In the Computer Age we still live by the law of the Stone Age: the man with the bigger club is right. But we pretend this isn’t so. We don’t notice or even suspect it – why, surely our morality progresses together with our civilization. Professional politicians, meanwhile, have deftly covered certain vices with a civilized veneer.
Nobel Prize winner Solzhenitsyn and President Putin, Sept. 2000
In the 20th century, we have enriched ourselves with innovations in the field of hypocrisy. We find ever more ingenious ways to apply double (triple? quadruple?) standards.
The bloody Yugoslav tragedy has unfolded before our eyes (and is it over yet?). To be sure, blame for it lies with the Communist coterie of Josip Broz Tito, which imposed an arbitrary pattern of internal borders upon the country, trampling on ethnic common sense, and even relocating ethnic masses by force. Yet blame lies also with the venerable community of Western leaders who – with an angelic naivete – took those false borders seriously, and then hastened at a moment’s notice, in a day or two, to recognize the independence of several breakaway republics whose political formation they apparently found to be advantageous. It was these leaders then who nudged Yugoslavia toward many grueling years of civil war; and their position declared as neutral was by no means such.
Yugoslavia, with its seven estranged peoples, was told to fall apart as soon as possible. But Bosnia, with its three estranged peoples and vivid memories of Hitlerite Croatians slaughtering up to a million Serbs, had to remain united at all costs – the particular insistence of the U.S. government. Who can explain the disparity of such an approach?
Another example: the Trans-Dnestr Republic and Abkhazia were deemed illegitimate simply because they were ‘self-proclaimed.’ But which of the CIS countries was not ‘self-proclaimed’? Kazakhstan? Ukraine? They were immediately and unconditionally recognized as legitimate, even democratic (and the ‘Ukrainian Popular Self-Defense’ brown-shirts continue to march about freely, torches and all).
Did not the United States also ‘self-proclaim’ its independence? Meanwhile, the Kurds are not allowed even to self-proclaim. When they are not being squashed by Iraq, with the tacit consent of the United States, then they are being smashed by North Atlantic Treaty Organization member Turkey even on non-Turkish territory while the whole civilized world looks on with utter indifference. Are the Kurds a ‘superfluous nation’ on this earth?[emphasis added]
Or take the Crimea and the port city of Sevastopol. Any sober mind on either side would at least agree that the Crimean question is very complex whereas Ukraine’s claim to Sevastopol has no legal base. Yet the U.S. State Department, choosing not to trouble itself with the history of the matter, has continued to assert authoritatively, for six years running, that both the Crimea and Sevastopol are unequivocally the property of Ukraine, end of discussion. Would it presume to speak so categorically, on say, the future of Northern Ireland?
Still another accomplishment of political hypocrisy is apparent in the way in which we conduct ‘war crimes tribunals.’ Wars for thousands of years have always been aggravated on both sides by crimes and injustices. In hopes that a just reason might prevail in order to make sense of war and to punish evil passions and evil deeds, Russia proposed the Hague Convention of 1899. Yet no sooner did the first war crimes trial take place – the Nazis at Nuremberg – then we saw, elevated high upon the judges’ bench, the unblemished administrators of a justice system that, during those same years handed over to torture, execution and untimely death tens of millions of innocent lives in its own country.
And if we continue to differentiate between the always inevitable deaths of soldiers at war and the mass killings of undoubtedly peaceful citizens, then by what name shall we call those who, in a matter of minutes burned to death 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima alone – justifying the act with the astounding words, ‘to save the lives of our soldiers’?
That president and his entourage were never subjected to trial and they are remembered as worthy victors. And now shall we name those who, with victory fully in hand, dispatched a two-day wave of fighter bombers to reduce to ashes beautiful Dresden, a civilian city teeming with refugees? The death toll was not far below Hiroshima and two orders of magnitude greater than at Coventry. The Coventry bombing, however, was condemned in the trial while the air marshal who directed the bombing of Dresden was not only spared the brand of ‘war criminal,’ but towers over the British capital in a monument as a national hero.
In an age marked by such a flourishing of jurisprudence we ought to see clearly that a well-considered international law is a law that justly punishes criminals – irrespective of their side’s victory or defeat. No such law has yet been created, found a firm footing, or been universally recognized. It follows, then that the Hague tribunal still lacks sufficient legal authority with respect to its accused and might on occasion lack impartiality. If so, its verdicts would constitute reprisal, not justice. For all the numerous corpses of civilians uncovered in Bosnia, from all of the warring parties, no suspects seem to have been found from the safeguarded Muslim side. Finally, we might mention this remarkable tactic; the Hague tribunal now hands down indictments in secret, not announcing them publicly. Somewhere, the accused is summoned on a civil matter, and immediately captured – a method beyond even the Inquisition, more worthy of barbarians, circa 3000 B.C.
Perusing the world map, we find many examples of today’s hypocritical double standard. Here is but one more. In the Euro-American expanse, all sorts of integration and partnership are cultivated and nurtured, stretching over lands on the periphery of this space, like Ukraine; willing even to incorporate faraway Central Asia. At the same time, all sorts of political interference and economic pressure are vigilantly applied in order to derail the very plan of rapprochement between Belarus and Russia.
And what of NATO expansion? – which, by the way, adds allies who surely will remain apathetic and useless vis-à-vis the alliance’s global, non-European aims. It is either the traditional Cold War hypnosis, impairing one’s ability to see the powerlessness of Russia, beset by internal troubles.
Or, on the contrary, it is extreme farsightedness on the part of NATO’s leaders. Should the high-tariff strangling of Russian exports (except for coercively cheap natural resource exports) prove insufficient; should the implacable diktat of Russian internal policy (bundled with loans that only enfeeble) prove insufficient as well; there will now be in reserve the ‘neutralization’ of Russia into a comatose state.
I have not the means to guess whether Russia’s current leaders understand this. Most likely they do not; witness their own clumsy participation in that elegant new phenomenon of the ‘peacekeeping forces,’ in Bosnia or Tajikistan; or their confused, lost policies regarding the CIS countries; or their doomed attempts to hold on to Chechnya with reckless disregard for the human cost; witness finally their blind inability to find a reasonable and just solution to the controversy over the Kuril Islands. They see themselves at the helm of the ship of Russian history, but they are not. They do not direct the course of events. As for those who do, their plans to establish a ‘final worldwide security’ are ephemeral as well.
Given human nature, we ought never to attain such security. It would be futile, at the very least, to march toward this goal armed with hypocrisy and scheming short-term calculations, as practiced by a revolving door of officials and by the powerful financial circles that back them. Nor can security be bought with any new technical ‘superinvention’ – for no secret lasts. Only if the creative and active forces of mankind dedicate themselves to finding gradual and effective restraints against the evil facets of human nature to an elevation of our moral consciousness – only then will a faint, distant hope exist.
To embark upon this path and to walk it requires a penitent, pure heart and the wisdom and willingness to place constraints on one’s own side to limit oneself even before limiting others. But today that path only elicits an ironic chuckle if not open ridicule. If so, don’t bother calling for ‘world security.’ [translated from the original Russian into English, by Stephan Solzhenitsyn; source: Daily Yomiuri, August 7, 1997.]