A Display of Oversimplified “Thinking” Regarding Georgia

After my last words on the R.P. diversion, I took a long break from LRC. The only exceptions had been Butler Shaffer, and one of the columnists who focused on health issues; but, as the latter recently leveled “intellectual” property violation charges against some excerpts posted in my area at The Boondocks, I’ve stopped reading him. Then—silly me—I heeded the urgings of several people and started browsing the blog, primarily because Butler Shaffer posts there. However, after reading several posts like these, I’m done with the entire site. It’s one thing to encounter nationalistic, grossly oversimplified perspectives in political and media propaganda, but to find it permeating an allegedly pro-freedom web site is too much for me.

It appears to me that, in his ongoing crusade against neocons and related enemies, Rockwell has lost whatever perspective and critical thinking skills he might have had. I really don’t have another explanation for these jibes at Georgia, which ignore a lot of readily available history on the region. Worse, his reactionary posts, to the degree they reflect his thinking on the subject, stop at the national level—completely ignoring the fact that once again, because of the equivalent of schoolyard bullies spatting over imaginary lines, innocent individuals’ lives are being destroyed. I strongly suspect that whatever Rockwell knows of the region comes primarily from recent media reports and commentary—hardly deep or unbiased resources. I know that my own perspective is quite biased and fairly shallow, having been there for only a week last year, and hearing Lobo talk about his week there this year, teaching at another liberty camp. Even so, I know that my understanding of the long history of the region is woefully inadequate.

For example, although “Georgia” is now the official name of the country as decreed by their constitution, it isn’t the name most locals use. Our friends told us that the term originated from Soviet and American usage—and that it may come from the legends of St. George, or perhaps a modification of ancient Persian names for the area. Anyway, they refer to their homeland as Sakartvelo, or in their language, საკართველო. The area has been inhabited for a very long time, and is so thick with ancient sites—castles of varying sorts, and even an ancient Roman fort said to house the remains of the apostle Matthew—that history suffuses the place. Much of that history focuses on conquest—failed and successful, initiated and endured. Sharing a long border with Russia, it should come as no surprise that much of Georgian history focuses on the bear’s attempted domination of the smaller area over the centuries ... and that a great deal of enmity remains. Also, as is typical of such areas, much is made of bravery and resisting would-be oppressors.

Our students were somewhat disappointed, yet not too surprised, when they discovered that like most Americans, we did not know much about the country’s long history or deep-seated culture. They were happy to teach us, and answer our questions, and tolerate our pathetic attempts to offer the simplest of phrases in their native language. But I’m digressing, telling things I should have shared last year ...

As so often happens, cultural pride has melded with state identity to the degree that it’s hard to separate them today. And, as also happens when areas rife with ethnic rivalry are forcibly merged into a nation-state, the union is really nothing more than a lid on a seething cauldron, with areas continuing to hold diverging desires and goals. In the Georgia we experienced, the dislike of Russian interference was nothing if not ramped up during the Soviet takeover of the country. On our travels across the country we saw many “monuments” of the Soviet regime: sections of highway to nowhere and from nowhere, complete with overpasses left hanging in space; unfinished, thick concrete buildings being consumed by dense foliage or worn by sea spray and time; and abandoned technology and infrastructure stuck in time because no one has the means or desire to try to upgrade them.

We were nowhere near South Ossetia, which is the current powder keg, yet there is no reason to doubt that both Russian and Georgian political forces have been muddying whatever the real local sentiment might be. (And there’s surely more than one.) Given the long history of troubles in this area, there’s no real way of trying to identify “who started it” either. But all this really highlights a fundamental problem of today’s nation-statism: issues and ideologies get so conflated and combined that historical grievances are compounded rather than relieved; and shot through all this is the messy truth that underneath all the political posturing and firing, there are individuals on all sides who just want to be left alone, to try to eke out whatever living they can, and who are being killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Last year, we held a panel discussion on American foreign policy, as that issue surfaced repeatedly in classes as well as general conversation; and somehow, I found myself part of the panel. The panel consisted of three Americans and a Ukrainian [I believe]; I was the last to give an opening statement, and this is a fair summation of what I said (I don’t think anyone recorded the panel):

My comments will be short, because I disagree with all of the others on this panel. I am an anarchist, and in my view all of the problems mentioned by them came about because of the existence of states. Such violence is only possible because of the concentrated power states have. No matter what color the flag, no matter what language is spoken, all states get that power by stealing from individuals. They steal life—the lives of the individuals they take to fight their silly battles, whether they go by choice or by force; they steal money, in taxes and fees; they steal time and energy, by their bureaucracies and rules that keep us from living our lives and peacefully supporting ourselves the way we choose.

To the degree that we believe our home state’s propaganda, the stuff we read in their news and learn in their schools, we believe that people in other countries are somehow our enemies, or are dangerous to our way of life. And to the degree that we accept those beliefs, we start thinking in terms of “us versus them”. That view keeps individuals from reaching across those imaginary lines called borders, from meeting and interacting with other individuals for themselves; it keeps us from discovering that mostly, people are like us—they just want to live their lives peacefully and raise their children. It keeps us from exchanging value amongst ourselves, from learning and growing. States create and maintain barriers between individuals, which limits our possibilities in many ways, both known and unknown.

At the time, my comments were very positively received; I recall seeing many heads nodding in agreement and even tears in some eyes. Lobo reported that he spoke on the broader subject of war this year, and exhorted his students not to be blinded by nationalism.

Lobo’s received many updates from some of his students over the past few days: one had a bomb go off right behind his car on a road in or near Tbilisi Gori [edited to correct mistake]; another’s apartment building in Gori was bombed and some of his neighbors were killed. As these gruesome events have unfolded, it appears that our words were largely in vain. The conflation of cultural and national pride has supplanted reason and misdirected energy—just as we have seen happen in the USSA. That has been exceedingly difficult for Lobo and me to see, even as we understand that it is not surprising. The devastation of ordinary Georgians’ lives throughout it all—an already tenuous existence for most of them outside the capital and other cities—has been very painful.

And to see an ostensibly freedom oriented web site offering such state-focused, banal bilge when individuals—some of whom understand and value liberty themselves—are being hurt was just too much. When I worked at FMN, I had a lot of respect for Lew Rockwell and what he was doing with his web site. That has ebbed since then; and between the R.P. inanity and this shrill claptrap over Georgia, it is completely gone. There appears to be no thinking going on—just knee-jerk response after response. It is very sad to see something once so good become such a caricature.