One of the unexpected results of living in Moscow has been a slight - how to say - realignment of certain ideas. Don't worry - I'm not talking about a creeping cosmopolitanism, no jejune cultural epiphany that has liberated me from my mental encumbrances and opened me to the wisdom of other cultures. In fact, if anything, it's just the opposite. Let me explain.
Russia has a holiday regimen similar to ours, if a bit strange. Our Christmas is divided into their New Year and Christmas. Their New Year's is when all the festivities happen, all the secular folderol that we celebrate on Dec 25, while their Christmas retains a strictly religious import. Then there is International Woman's Day - Soviet in origin, it is still a relatively important day in which all the men give gifts to the women in their lives. Its parallel is Defenders of the Fatherland Day, which has become equivalent to a 'Men's Day.' (I suppose given Russia's universal male service requirement, this is a reasonable extrapolation, however, the day was originally intended as a type of veterans day). Russia has an Independence Day (June 12) that, while a federal holiday requiring the day off, passes unremarkably. The big day, the biggest day of the year, the holiday to end all holidays comes on May 9. Victory Day.
It is impossible to overemphasize the shear scope of the 'Great Patriotic War' in the Russian imagination. If you sometimes balk at invocations of 'The Greatest Generation,' and sundry other forms of WWII mythologizing in the US... you ain't seen nothing.
'Is it true that Americans think that they won the war?' I've had this conversation a couple of times, and don't even bother asking which war.
'Well, yes, it's true that most Americans overestimate our role in the conflict, forgetting that we didn't even deal with the lion's share of the axis forces, nor were we the ones to sack Berlin. At the same time, it's not at all clear that the Soviet Union could have won the war by itself.'
'But we lost 11,000,000 soldiers, the U.S. only lost 11,000. [Yes, they really have casualty statistics memorized] You see, we beat the Fascists!'
Of course, were I a less diplomatic person, I would take issue with the invocation of military deaths as a measure of military strength, but at this point I usually defer, and leave my interlocutor confident in the superiority of their educational system.
Nor has the myth-making changed in the new Russia. When Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," it was hard for us to understand how this could be anything other than naked Soviet revanchism. That's true to an extent, but only in the sense that the Soviet era is to many just one manifestation of a more foundational, epochal, Russian empire.
For these reasons and others, I've grown to a sort of loathing of national triumphalism. And it is in this context that I read one of the more odious statements of the U.S. presidential campaign so far.
Right says Fred:
Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together.
Now, the falseness of this statement should be apparent to someone with even the most casual acquaintance with history. On this account, Larison supplies the necessary figures. But almost worse, in my estimation, is the sentiment.
What if it were
true? Would it, then, give us the right to be proud? Could we swagger into the bar of nations, aura of martyrdom shining around us, and expect all our nation friends to quail in the shadow of our magnanimity?
Again, its difficult to say what's worse about national myth-making: its fraudulence, or the supercilious Christ-complex it promotes.
"If it weren't for us, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys the French would all be speaking German," is a refrain I've heard more than once.
Nevermind the fact that France and the Low Countries shared a long, unobstructed border with the greatest martial power ever to exist at that point; nor pay heed to the fact that Naziism was never linguistically imperialistic, preferring the German tongue only be used by pure-blooded Germans. Nor, finally, that we fought to save half of Europe from a maniac who slaughtered people for their race, only to give the other half to a maniac who slaughtered indiscriminately.
We're practically Christ: We died to save the world from
harsh gutturals.
