Melos, Morals, Matryoshkas and Majorities: Of Sudetenland and South Ossetia

Chaos

Matryoshka images by Eileen Fontenot

Image #2: Humans seem so simple ....

Image #3: .... but there's a lot going on underneath that isn't always obvious.

Image #4: Large and Hollow

I was going to use this image to illustrate a certain Superpower's response to all this, but you can only push a metaphor like this so far, know what I mean?

Sudetenland and South Ossetia

One thing that the Russian crisis has done is convince me that "Godwin's Law," the general rule of internet discourse that discourages Hitler analogies, must be promoted to an International Treaty with Hitler analogies prohibited by convention, enforced by the stationing of U.N. peacekeepers in dominant media outlets and blogger cubicles--and it must be rigorously enforced in all offices of foreign affairs elites in Washington, official and semi-official. Osama bin Laden is not Hitler, despite President Bush's claim. Hugo Chavez is not Hitler, despite former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's claim. Saddam Hussein was not Hitler in 1991 despite the First President Bush's claim, and he was not Hitler in 2003 despite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's claim.

Robert Mugabe is not Hitler despite ... No, wait a minute. Okay, Mugabe really is Hitler, but you get the idea.

Turns out, I am not alone in this Godwin's Law as international law idea. After doing all this research, I discovered that Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had made a similar case just a couple of months ago. Fortunately for me though, just a little more research revealed that, wait for it, wait for it, Anne Applebaum had written earlier comparing Saddam to Hitler.

Unfortunately, even the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama is not immune to the temptation to invoke the reductio ad Hitlerum argument, as Zbigniew Brzezinski demonstrated earlier this week, claiming, according to the Guardian, that

Putin's "justification" for splitting up Georgia - because of the Russian citizens living in South Ossetia - could be compared to when Hitler used the alleged suffering of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as a pretext for annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938.

But the absolute killer is when two of the neoconniest of the neoconservatives took to the op-ed pages of two of the most influential newspapers in the country to compare Vladimir Putin to Adolph Hitler and the current crisis in South Ossetia to the historical crisis in the Sudetenland. Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times wrote seemingly without even a tickle of self-awareness or consistency when he wrote of the Russian government's rationale for entering Georgia:

There are echoes here of German spokesmen from the 1930s shedding crocodile tears over the supposed mistreatment of German minorities in nearby states. Those were the excuses that Hitler used to swallow Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Notwithstanding that he tries to qualify the analogy immediately by claiming that maybe Putin's not Hitler, just Mussolini and Tojo, he still got it out there. Robert Kagan of the Washington Post, at least, seemed to intuit the treacherous intellectual waters ahead, sensing his own approaching ridiculousness. So, he started off thus:

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

Yeah. Right. According to Kagan, if you forget about the facts, it all makes sense. The main reason Boot and Kagan bamboozle as they do is simply this: If the current crisis is Sudetenland revisited and Putin is Hitler and Georgia is Czechoslovakia, then, um, unless he is willing to push Russia back by force of arms rather than relying on diplomacy and other non-lethal instruments of state power, that means that in this little morality play, the part of the "appeaser" Neville Chamberlin is played by George W. Bush. Ooooopsy. What happened to the Winston Churchilly Bush of the last seven years worshipped by Kagan and Boot and the rest of the neoconservatives? Can you be all Winston Churchill one minute, all Neville Chamberlin the next while the presumed adversary is simultaneously Hitler and Stalin while invading Stalin's homeland? Things would get real stupid real fast, which is why these bellowing neoconservatives change the subject as quickly as possible after getting their Hitler analogy in.

But let me give Kagan some credit due and even a modicum of praise because although he rather buried the lede, he did say something important and intriguing and surprising in there: The Sudetenland Crisis was characterized by moral ambiguity. He does not go so far as to say "Hitler was right," but he allows for that possibility, or for the possibility that he was partially correct, anyway, or that the situation was too complex in real time to reduce it to a simple dualistic judgment on its own terms distinct from the events that followed.

But since he wants us to forget the details, allow me to refresh your memory. Following the Great War, the victorious allies dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire and constructed a series of nation-states in Central Europe and the Balkans. One such nation-state cobbled together a bunch of Czechs and a bunch of Slovaks in a country they decided to call Czechoslovakia. But included within that state was a minority set off regionally, linguistically and ethnically: The Germans of the Sudetenland. The state itself had little sense of national identity, having been artificially created (Czechs not being Slovaks and Slovaks not being Czechs), but there was a least a chance of national identity growing there because each group had a stake in the polity. The German minority, on the other hand, had little emotional investment in the new state and little chance of full engagement in the polity; they, in fact, identified themselves far more strongly with their countrymen beyond the artificial border than with the state wherein they were situated.

Morals and Matryoshkas

One need not accept the claims of minority oppression advanced by the Third Reich on behalf of the German Minority in Czechoslovakia to look at that situation and conclude: Trouble ahead. And it's not Good versus Evil or some grand idea in search of a war to vindicate it. It's human nature. People always everywhere feel the pull of a variety of identities: As individuals, as family members, as congregants, as patriots ... even as sports fans. And we articulate those identities through a variety of institutions--family law, church dogma, nation-states and sold-out stadiums like Lambeau Field.

We usually barely even acknowledge the separate existence of these various identities, thinking of ourselves like the matryoshka in Image #2--fully self-contained and apparently whole. When pressed by circumstances, we usually think of these identities as neat and concentric, all lined up and orderly, as in image #3. And that's fine. To think otherwise as individuals would be to draw our individual self-conception into a maelstrom of contradiction, paradox and the torment of divided loyalties. But at every level of social organization above the strictly individualistic, the world looks more like the Chaos of Image #1, with the tension and compression of varying elements of group identity creating strong--and yes, sometimes explosively violent--social conflicts.

Morals and Majorities

Those violent conflicts invariably erupt most intensely when these levels of group identity are cast in terms of Moral First Principle--as if to say that to be German in the Sudetenland was morally inferior than to be a Czech or Slovak in Czechoslovakia, or that to be Irish in the United Kingdom was morally inferior than to be British. Or, as in the current crisis, that to be Ossetian is morally inferior than to be Georgian. While Hitler himself was a moral monster, the Germans of the Sudetenland were not morally inferior to the Czechoslovakians merely by reason of their Germaness. The Irish were never morally inferior to the English simply by virtue of their Irishness.

And those conflicts are especially pernicious when an attempt is made to either apply a group identity (in some instances) or extinguish a group identity (in other instances) by force of arms. There is literally nothing Georgia President Saakashvili could do or can do to make the Ossetians feel Georgian against their will and despite their pre-existing sense of identity. Nothing except bloodshed or centuries can accomplish that. One people cannot vote for another people to surrender their sense of self. Artificially invented imaginary lines on a geo-political map do not create identities--shared experience does--language, religion, geography, history. There's nothing especially moral or immoral about any of those aspects of the human condition. We all speak one language or another, we're all churched or un-churched to one degree or another, we all live someplace and we all situate ourselves in a history of one sort or another.

I do not know why the Ossetians have the sense of identity they do, and I don't really care why. I just know that they do. Same for the Georgians, same for the Russians. Evidently, the Ossetians draw their sense of self in part in contradistinction to their neighboring Georgians (not, by the way, an especially unusual phenomena in human history). Thus, twice given the choice in plebiscites in the last 16 years, both times the South Ossetians voted overwhelming for separation from Georgia. They prefer Russia to Georgia. Again, don't ask me why, I don't know because I'm not Ossetian.

When Senator John McCain started commenting earlier this week, one head-scratcher for me was his "accusation" that there was a billboard in South Ossetia proclaiming "Putin is Our Leader." McCain seemed to think that this was somehow nefarious while overlooking the most obvious reason for the billboard: Ossetians like Putin better than Saakashvili. Again, don't ask me why. But I do know one thing: It's their call, not mine and certainly not John McCain's. If they determine for themselves ("determine," and "self," get it?) that they like Putin better than Saakashvili --or that they fear Georgia more than Russia, then that is up to them.

To bring it back to the matryoshka for a moment. There was Russia, There was the Soviet Union. Inside that was Georgia until Georgia broke away. Inside Georgia was South Ossetia until South Ossetia broke away. Who is to say which of those breakings away are morally superior to the other? On the principle of self-determination (for which the Great War was supposedly fought in the first damn place), the answer is: Nobody.

And that is why McCain's statement that he speaks for "all Americans" when he says "We are all Georgians now" is so dissonant. To begin with, no one ever speaks for "all Americans." But also, the McCain-for-President website features the slogan "Country First" as the dominating graphic. So okay. Country first.

However, if Americans are all Georgians now, that means America is Georgia. So which country is really "first?" And if Georgia is first, is South Ossetia last? And if so, on what grounds do "we" deny the South Ossetians their sense of country while elevating the Georgians' patriotism to be exactly confluent with American patriotism?

While it is true that on the highest level of abstraction that we are "all Georgians now," in the sense that we are all human, it is just as true that we are also "all South Ossetians now," trapped in a swirl of group loyalties and enmities trying to make our way in a world not set up to our exact specifications, not all neat and concentric.

Morals and Melos and Might Makes Right

Because there is no real moral distinction between the various foundations for group identity and because group identity is extremely difficult to impose or extinguish absent bloodshed or centuries, we end up in a terrible situation when we try to impute a definitive moral dimension to such identities when they collide. To be blunt: Hitler may have been Hitler, but that doesn't change the fact that the Germans of the Sudetenland were an isolated minority within the borders of a nation-state they had no say in creating and had little interest in sustaining.

Thus, the very fact that we have to concede that Hitler's position was at the least morally ambiguous should teach us something. If you have to say, "Yeah, well, maybe Hitler kind of had a point about that" then you need to think it through again. But rather than taking the so-called "moral" lesson of South Ossetia as offered by Brzezinski, Boot and Kagan, we need to re-think it from the ground up. Literally from the ground, perhaps (since strong affection for a particular land is a very common binding agent for group identity). Unlike the supposed "elite" foreign policy advisors, though, I don't have to concede even an inch of moral ground to Hitler, and I can do so by recourse to a very simple expedient: There is no moral principle at stake. Only group identity and power, neither of which in themselves constitute moral First Principles.

And it's not as if we humans haven't been through this before. Funny how these events all seem to be occurring in roughly the same part of the world, albeit millennia apart, but the issues I raise here were addressed 2,500 years ago in the Dialogue between Athens and Melos. It is from that dialogue documented by Thucydides that we have generally drawn the idea that "Might Makes Right," although that exact phrase wasn't used.

Rather, faced with an offer they couldn't refuse (although they did) from the powerful City-State of Athens, the small and independent island of Melos tried to deflect the Athenian insistence of alliance by the assertion of moral right. To which the Athenian envoys famously replied:

[S]ince you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Things actually went pretty well for the plucky and righteous Melians in the subsequent battles--until they got to the part where all their men were massacred, the women raped and the children enslaved.

So. Am I arguing that Might Makes Right? Actually, No. One of the reasons I say No is that a shared set of moral principles is one of the elements of the human condition that allows for and strengthens group identity. Might does not make Right. However:

Might makes Nations.

To put it another way, if you have an army but no moral right, you will win the contest of colliding group identities every single time over an adversary who has no army but all the moral right conceivable. Thus has gone every war in recorded human history from Melos thousands of years ago to Tblisi today. So either we believe in a miraculously changed human nature, or, "we" have not the slightest business in the world deciding on the moral "rightness" of the competing claims of group identity as among Ossetians, Georgians and Russians.

Now pardon me, I must go. Michael Phelps is going for another gold. U - S - A! U - S - A!

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