America's Winner's Complex

[monk222]

♠
“Americans have a severe disease — worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex. You want an American style-democracy here. That will not work.”

-- Mikhail Gorbachev

Yeah, well, Russians seem to have a fatal disease of their own: Totalitarianitis - the easy susceptibility to totalitarianism.

It is noted in this Claire Shipman report for ABC News that Mr. Gorbachev does criticize President Vladimir Putin as well, but one supposes that it behooves one to only do so very gingerly. At least Gorbachev is not trying to sell the line that Russia has achieved democratic self-governance, but he is not very convincing when he says:

"Vladimir Putin is walking on a razor's edge. Putin has used and he will continue to use authoritarian measures, but Russia will form a democracy. I know Vladimir Putin. He is a moral person."

It is a sweet thought, but I think they can use a little more of this American disease.

xXx

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

The thing with Russia is that they've had thousands of years of pretty much unremittingly awful history. Right from the start, they had to contend with the fact that the bits of the country with decent soil had terrible weather and vice versa. Then they were overrun by the Mongols, who were not exactly known for their gentleness or tolerance. Then the tsars gradually managed to gain enough power to take over from the Mongols, and they were no better; there was never any concept of the state in Russia, as there was elsewhere. The tsars ruled on a patrimonial basis, in exactly the same way as a head of household - everyone in the realm was under the tsar's personal jurisdiction, and the tsar ran the country for his (or her) own profit. Because that's how the tsars ruled, there was never a separate landed aristocracy who could become strong enough to challenge the tsar's excesses, as there was in, say, England; anything like the Magna Carta would have been unthinkable in Russia. I could go into more detail about exactly how the Russian aristocracy, such as it was, did work, but that would be too long for a comment here.

By the time the Revolution came along, there was very little real support for it among the peasants, basically because by that stage they'd nearly all become so cynical that they couldn't see it doing any good. The revolutionaries were trying to establish a communist state; I would argue that they never succeeded, because communism only ever works if everyone agrees to it, and that never happened. Of course they called it communism anyway, and that's what gave communism such a bad name. (For an instance of real communism in action, see the Acts of the Apostles!) But the peasants just took advantage of the mayhem to riot pretty much randomly and anarchically. They weren't interested in communism; they were just fed up with being pushed around by petty officials. Interestingly, many of them saw the tsar himself as a source of order, and thought that if he only knew how the officials were treating them, he would intervene on their behalf.

So the revolutionaries had to come down pretty hard on the peasants to prevent total chaos, because they hadn't realised what they would be unleashing. This was, of course, tough on the peasants, but then life had been tough on the peasants since times immemorial, and it hadn't exactly been a bunch of roses for anyone else either, except the tsar.

On the whole, I think they're not doing too badly these days, all things considered.

[antilapsarian.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure we Americans don't have an authoritarian streak in us these days either.

But again, I think there is the combination here of history and the fact that we maybe can't expect to "spread" democracy all over the world as, well, it isn't necessarily the thing for everyone. To each their own. As Churchill said, democracy is the worst govt. there is except for all the others.

There is a certain multiculturalism at play here, too. The US seems to have the mantra that apart from being a good example and passively encouraging democracy around the world we also have an active duty to go futher than promoting into the territory of meddling. People don't like others sticking their noses in business it doesn't belong in.

That comes, to the rest of the world, dangerously close to old-style imperialism where we've taken the White Man's Burden thing and adapted it to the 21st century postmodern world. Some of our issues to be worked out for the future include learning to respect that our way of being in the world is but one. Here is where the fundamentalism spills over...there are those who understand that peoples take a variety of paths in life and those who feel everyone should take the same or a similar one. The seems to be shaping into *the* sociopolitical drama.