CRIMEA VIS-A-VIS TEXAS! IT'S A MATTER OF CULTURE!

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?