CRIMEA VIS-À-VIS
TEXAS
IT’S A MATTER OF
CULTURE!
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
Ph.D.
© March 19, 2014
Like many others of the United States and Europe, I have
watched developments in the Ukraine relating to Crimea. The saber rattling of the West and Russia
seem redundant as well as disturbing against the inconclusive wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Today, it appears the Ukraine has decided to accede Crimea
to Russia, after the referendum in Crimea, and so momentarily we have
détente.
In the end, it’s a matter of culture.
People, wherever they are, whoever they are, don’t want to
be other than what they are, and what they are has much to do with history and culture.
Despite the truth of this people are often caught in the
crossfire and become collateral damage when ideologies and geopolitical
interests clash like warring children.
That is happening in Syria.
It could still happen in the Ukraine, and for what purpose? One day Syria will again be a peaceful place,
the cradle of civilization, but not before hundreds of thousand, even millions
are driven from their homes or killed, and they have done nothing wrong.
Journalists chase hard facts with entertaining fictions,
which gravitate to infomercials, 24/7, tiring our minds and sensitivities to
the point we neither trust cable nor network news despite all the pretty faces
and serious minds that claim to be in the know.
Media have become extensions of corporate speak, which measures
value in terms of profit not prudence. We
have media all-the-time or too much too many too soon. So, what choice do we have? We can relate to people as persons, connect
with them, and rely on the hard lessons learned in life that come to us out of
the blue. This is one of mine.
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“Don’t judge our culture
by your culture for what is true of yours is not true of ours, and what is true
of ours is not true of yours.”
This statement was provoked when I was traveling for my
company about the globe in my capacity as an executive problem solver of
customers’ complaints. My internship had
been as a bench chemist, chemical sales engineer, and field manager, where I
developed the reputation as a listener to ferret out “people problems” relating
to customer concerns. At the time, I had
no formal training in industrial and organizational psychology, but learned
later I was practicing the art without portfolio when I returned to university
to take my Ph.D. in that field.
The referenced statement to culture came about while visiting
bauxite refineries in Jamaica, traveling with my aide, in the company of the
chief chemist of our customer, who was driving.
My aide remarked to the chemist sometime after we had left Kingston to
travel into the interior of this island country, “I’ve never seen so many
disadvantaged people in my life. It’s
pathetic the way they are forced to live, isn’t it?”
The chemist, black, a Ph.D. graduate of the University of
California at Berkeley, slowed the car down and looked to the back seat where
my aide was sitting. “Now how am I meant
to interpret that remark?”
“Well, isn’t it obvious, these people are wretchedly poor, living
in ghetto like conditions, aren’t they?”
“Define poor for me, young man.”
Now nervous, knowing he had put his foot in his mouth, he
retreated into silence.
“I suppose you are referring to the shabby huts, the
disabled vehicles in their gardens, the debris that seems everywhere on the
streets, am I right?” My aide still
remained quiet. “Do you think them
unhappy, do you think they would prefer living in a penthouse on Park Avenue in
New York City?”
“I didn’t mean anything, sir.”
“Of course not, you were simply expressing your American ignorance. I am quite familiar with American
ignorance. I spent eight years in your
country submerged in it while attending university. You perceive we Jamaicans, what was your
word, yes, ‘disadvantaged,’ because we don’t live tidy lives like you Americans
do.
“Let me tell you something, young man, don’t judge another
man’s culture by your own. What he
values is not likely to be valued by you, or understood in terms familiar to
you. But make no mistake. What he values goes back millenniums.
“What is true of his is culture is not likely true of yours;
what is true of yours is not likely true of his,” he repeated. “Hard as it may be for you to see this, but I
can tell you these Jamaicans don’t envy you, or anything you are or have. They might however feel contempt for your
arrogance.”
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This came to mind as the headlines in print, television and
the Internet continued to bombard my psyche, always painting Vladimir Putin’s
actions in Crimea in terms of Adolf Hitler’s march into the Sudetenland of
Czechoslovakia in 1938. Simplistic as these
scare tactics, I am appalled how quickly people I respect echo these sentiments
as if they are puppets on a string.
Sixty years ago Crimea was part of Russia’s USSR. This was so until Nikita Khrushchev summarily
transferred it to the Soviet’s Ukraine.
Putin is no saint in this affair, but the wind seems to be
at his back, as over 60 percent of Crimea’s population is Russian speaking and
do not appear unhappy with how last Sunday’s referendum turned out.
Historians trace many of the problems of today in terms of a
“clash of cultures.” These clashes have
often been aggravated in no small way by how the victors of wars in the
twentieth century divided the spoils of war, creating permanent geopolitical
messes. Peoples gravitate to their
cultures expressed in language, religion, values, beliefs, and histories. Europe and the Middle East were remapped after
WWI and WWII. Syria today is no
exception. The natural was thus
perverted by unnatural partitioning and such wombs never heal.
Historian David Lee McMullen says, with regards to Crimea,
it goes back much further than the twentieth century. His column is titled, “Crimea War echo heard
160 years later” (Tampa Bay Times, March 10, 2014) to illustrate this fact.
The Crimea War of the 1850s was a culture war fought between
Imperial Russia and the forces of Great Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire. While on the one hand, it was fought to
protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, on the other, it was also a
dispute between Russia and France over the rights of Russian Orthodox versus
Roman Catholics in the Holy Land. Seven
hundred years before it was the Holy Crusades fought for similar reasons.
Professor McMullen gets under the headlines of a “clash of
cultures” that drives such clashes.
After the nineteenth century Crimean War, which lasted only two years, Imperial
Russia was economically spent and abandoned Sevastopol, losing its warm water
port on the Black Sea.
The Soviet Union got it back after WWII, due to the cunning
of Joseph Stalin, to become part of the “Iron Curtain” between the West and the
USSR made famous in a speech by Sir Winston Churchill at Westminster College,
Missouri, in 1946, announcing the “Cold War.”
Forty-three years later, the Soviet Union unable to remain
competitive with the economic West collapsed in 1989 to end the Cold War. The Ukraine won its independence 1991, which
included Crimea, and now has lost it, again, in 2014.
McMullen writes, “While the Crimea may be an obscure corner
of the world, and the Crimean War a forgotten folly of European imperialism,
the nobility of these men and women, and the example they offer, are worth
remembering. Let us hope the current
crisis in Crimea will be resolved without another bloody war.” Amen to that.
Russia is inheriting the Crimean peninsula, which is sinking
in debt, and corruption, something that McMullen infers Sevastopol is famous
for, especially organized crime. But on
the plus side it is a warm water port for Russia.
It would seem, at the moment that the corporate world has
put away its childish ways, and is acting adult. What saber rattling that continues is limited
to rhetoric. I have not been to Crimea,
but I have been to Russia, and was delighted with the Russian people. Granted, it was only a visit and this is a
personal and subjective view of one with no expertise in Russian geopolitics.
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What prompted me to write this missive was remembering that
Jamaican chemist and his remarks on culture.
It may seem a leap for the reader, but I remember earlier
when Texas, once again, wanted to secede from the United States. It is almost an annual affair.
Imagine if Congress ratified that, and then subsequently a
succeeding President of the United States asked for a referendum of Texas to rejoin
the United States. And imagine further
that other nations of the world were ready to threaten the United States with
sanctions and to boycott the buying of American products, when all Texans
wanted was to be reconnected to their common heritage and common culture. And there was a cunning crafty person who was
the commander in chief of the nation, who was set on making it so. Farfetched?
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