Diatribes of Jay: America’s Awakening

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Russia” by Nikolai Alekseyevich Nekrasov

Vladimir Putin probably doesn’t read much poetry. He’s busy presiding over a nation that kills journalists, assassinates promising liberal politicians on city streets, and brazenly murders dissidents abroad, while using “active measures” to subvert other nations.

But maybe he ought to. One of the greatest poems about patriotism ever written is Russian. Nikolai Alekseyevich Nekrasov penned it in the middle of the nineteenth century. Two of its key lines appear above.

The poem is well worth a read by Americans who want to understand Russians, and vice versa. In unforgettable language, it recites a glowing truth: for all the mistakes, manipulation and propaganda of tsars and demagogues, patriotism is a property of the people. It’s a poorly understood collective phenomenon. It’s like the collective motion of schools of fish that can swim in astonishing synchrony to escape a shark or other predator.

As such, patriotism can be unpredictable and unpredictably powerful. It can seem miraculous, and it can be dangerous. It’s what allowed the Soviet Russians to survive the Siege of Leningrad and the massive Nazi mechanized invasion of their nation. It’s what let them prevail over a fascist foe whose own patriotism had produced the most brutal and destructive warfare in human history. In the end, the tyrant Stalin had little to do with the victory: he decided not to flee besieged Moscow only after his commissars told him the Front would collapse if he did.

As a collective phenomenon, patriotism has what I call its “Nekrasov moment,” its awakening. That’s the moment when the “host” of the people arises, in unison, to protect the homeland and destroy the enemy. It’s the moment, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when we Americans—in single day—dropped our isolationism and our admiration for German “efficiency” and rose as one to fight the scourge of Nazism and imperial Japanese aggression. It’s what led our theretofore unemployed housewives to become “Rosie the Riveter,” working in factories to make our tanks, warplanes and ammo to supply our troops and allied forces abroad.

We Americans did not bear the brunt of the battle in World War II. Russia and Russians did, by far. But we Americans fought on two fronts, and our industrial might secured the victories on both. We also created atomic weapons, working from an obscure physics theory to terrible reality in four years, in the midst of the tumult and pressure of a two-front war. Despite us showing the way, no other society has ever duplicated that feat in so short a time.

So Russia’s leaders, if not its innocent people, ought to beware the rise of patriotism in the United States. We Americans are still the most creative, inventive, and resourceful people on the planet, not to mention the richest. We just haven’t awakened yet.

We haven’t yet awakened because we are innocent and naïve. We have trouble believing that a nation halfway around the globe, which fought with us in World War II and has no real reason to fear us, would use the Internet that we invented and gave the world (for free!) to subvert us and turn us against each other. We have even more trouble believing that such a nation could be so successful in its subversion as to foist on us a buffoon for a leader—a man so erratic, self-focused and incompetent as to require all the skill of his Cabinet and Congress just to keep him from pushing us over the precipice day by day.

But hard facts have their way of producing pain. And pain has a way of provoking patriotism in its only true source, the people. That’s the unmistakable message of Nekrasov’s host arising.

The host can arise in an instant of history, unexpectedly and decisively. It can resemble the host of peasantry that saved Nekrasov’s unnamed tsar. It can resemble the numberless Soviet cadres that rose up to save Soviet Russia from fascist invasion. Or it can resemble the Nazi fascists themselves, who rose up to fight the insult and injury to the German economy and German workers wrought by the unjust “peace” after World War I.

Sooner or later, the host of Americans will realize that African-Americans and Hispanics are not the enemy. They will think of “blacks” they love, like Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, and our most popular president since Ike: Barack Obama. They will remember salsa in food and dance, and they will think of all the Hispanic workers who make their lives easier by doing jobs they really don’t want to do.

Sooner or later, Americans will come to understand that David Nunes, who would work with the Russians (or the Devil) to keep his seat in the House and his party’s power, is our enemy. Sooner or later, they will come to understand that President Trump is not making America great again, but working at common purpose with the Russians to destroy us from within, whether or not he is legally “colluding.”

When that realization dawns, Trumpism will vanish in an instant, and the American host will rise as one. That instant will not be kind to Putin, to Russians who now gloat over our innocence and naïveté, or to any other casual adversary that seeks to do us harm for little reason, just because he can.

Like the Russian peasants in Nekrasov’s immortal poem, we Americans can be ignorant, superstitious, innocent and naïve. As always, our principal focus is prospering and living the good life. Unlike Russians, we have never experienced multiple invasions of our own land by foreigners; our greatest invasion and occupation was by our own selves, in our own South.

Yet like Russians and every other people, we can rise and face a threat unanimously, in an instant, once we begin to feel the pain. When that moment comes—and it will—the host arising may not be entirely rational. That’s the risk that Putin now so blithely takes, for himself, for his oligarchs and for the mostly unwitting Russian people.

In contemplating that moment, it would be well for Russians and others to recall who created the Internet that they are now using to steal our secrets and subvert us, and who invented the atomic weapons that now threaten our species’ self-extinction. An aroused patriotism of aggrieved Americans could summon demons that no rational leader in any land ought ever wish to see.

Footnote: The short poem, which you can read in Russian here, appears as a small “song,” part of a much larger epic work usually entitled in English “Who can be happy and free in Russia?” You can read the entire work, in this free-of-charge Gutenberg translation, and you can locate the short “song” by searching for the word “host.”

Yet in my view, this English translation sacrifices accuracy and nuance of meaning for poesy in English. Since the original nuances are both brilliant and vital to the short song’s political significance, I offer my own translation, as follows, which consciously sacrifices meter and poesy for meaning:

Rus’ [The ancient and affectionate name for the Russian nation]

* Here Nekrasov uses the Russian diminutive for “forces (силушки),” implying that, to the Tsar, the bloody battle that the peasants must fight is but a game. That’s precisely how the men who brought us World War I thought.

[For reasons to vote for the blue wave of female candidates, click here. For how Geezers can fight the oligarchs and win, click here. For the threat to our way of life posed by dark cryptocurrency transfers and untraceable and undetectable assault weapons, click here. For reasons why an economic or political crash is coming or imminent, click here. For a brief note on a rare “conservative” who can think, click here. For things corporate CEOs can do to help keep the United States from suffering a decline and fall like ancient Rome’s, click here. For a comparison of quality in pols and reasons to recall our recent past, click here. For reasons why Trump’s trade war is headed toward a disastrous defeat, click here. For a brief note on how corporate rule is encroaching on American cities, click here. For our desperate need for voters to focus on good character, click here. For an analysis of facts and Kim’s myth about North Korea, click here. For a second post on training new voters, click here. A list of links to popular recent posts follows:]
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Diatribes of Jay

15 August 2018

America’s Awakening

Rus’ [The ancient and affectionate name for the Russian nation]

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