If They Want Security They Should Ask Klaus

A friend who saw my last blog (School of Lies) said this was ethnic humour that could not reach the masses. I told him that my blog page is not written for the masses. I don't care about the masses. The idea of the masses stands and falls with the assumption that stupidity is a contagious disease.

So what’s with Klaus anyhow; the guy is a twit. He worships Milton Friedman. He is a smokers’ rights advocate even though he never smoked himself. He went to the UN to argue that global warming is a loony-left conspiracy. He comes across like a regular David Warren(a local pundit who holds similar views, but advocated in the past – half-jokingly - also the levelling of Fallujah, and rebuilding it as a giant parking lot to a Wal-Mart). Well, yeah, I said, but I was not talking about the guy’s passions; les goûts et les coulers on ne discute pas.

So what was I talking about ?

Well, for all his colourful provocations (the Czech president) Vaclav Klaus, happens to have had a fairly decent record as a prime minister, actually some would say a stellar record, compared with what followed after him. But above all, and what relates to his dislike of Saakashvili directly, Klaus happens to be the architect of the Velvet Divorce. He let the Slovaks go ! He conceived a plan for the breakup of Czechoslovakia and negotiated it with the Slovak former heavyweight boxer (Meciar). If memory serves, it is still the only template available for a bloodless, civilized breakup of a country.

So,.....

it should come as no surprise that Klaus sees the Georgian president as a bully of Abdul Nasser's shoe-size, and his actions on par with the follies of the Pan-arabic fanatic in 1956 and 1967 that started both times with closing the Straits of Tiran to Israel. Klaus does not concern himself much with who fired the first shot in the night of 8/8/8. He understands the problem, and knows instinctively what it is about. The posturing of Georgia toward the two enclaves is all too familiar to a president of a nation which, but for a few intellectuals, would have been itself extinct two hundred years ago. By the early 19.century, the Czech language had no literature. It was a patois of peasants. The towns had very few Czech speakers and even fewer who had any education. There was nothing to read. The co-founder of modern Czech linguistics, Josef Jungmann, wrote his History of the Czech Language in German, the language of the oppressor.

The Western media are mostly clueless about the plight of the Abkhaz and the Ossetians.

There is no such thing as South Ossetia for the Georgian integrists. To them, the Ossetians (a tribe of the ancient Alans) were pushed south to Caucasus from the nothern plains and eventually wandered into the medieval district of Samachablo in the region of Shida Kartli. Georgian propaganda does not even acknowledge there is a distinct ethnic group of Ossetians who are a large majority in the “Tskhinvali region” . The offical line is that the land was taken over by Kokoity separatists. One of the first acts of Zviadist Georgia in 1991 was to make Georgian the only official language in the Thskhinvali administration offices. As that was not ok with the locals who for the most part either did not speak Georgian or knew it only as a third language (after Ossetian and Russian), Zviadist paramilitaries were dispatched to restore order. The shooting began. It is a matter of some irony that those who, like Christopher Hitchens, disclaim any resemblance to Kosovo, overlook that Georgians claim Samachablo as part of the historical kernel of the Georgian state.

Abkhazia, on the other hand, was never a part of the ancient Kartli kingdom, but it is the view of patriotic Georgian historians that it always belonged to Georgia anyways, whatever Georgia actually was at the time. The Georgians were there first. The Abkhaz wandered in afterwards. (Actually, in case you did not know, the Georgians were the first homo erectus human prototype to walk out of Africa. I kid you not !) It is true that the Abkhaz from time to time in the past were dominated by the Mingrelian west-Georgian kingdom of Imereti, but a sober second look would see the land as a Caucasian region very distinct from Georgia, historically and demographically. Its integration into the Czarist Russia followed a different path than Georgia’s and came later. But no sober looks will be forthcoming and the reason is simple. As professor Hobsbawm once put it aptly, “historians are to nationalism, what poppy is to heroin addicts”. Even the human rights people in Georgia, who are asking forgiveness from the Abkhaz, do not find it prudent to mention the causes of their contrition. It is just one of those things you don’t say in Tbilisi: many of the Georgians expelled from Abkhazia (and some who were brutally murdered after Sukhumi was retaken by the Abkhaz forces from Shevardandze in 1993) were the grandsons and granddaughters of the immigrants into Abkhazia brought there by Lavrentii Beria. Beria (a Mingrelian by birth) was Stalin’s most prolific killer and his first lieutenant in the region after it was assigned to Tbilisi in 1931, as part of the Transcaucasian SFSR. He was a notorious madman, and I mean notorious. The 1984 Soviet film classic by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze, “Monanienba” (Repentance), is known to every Georgian who finished high school. Abuladze could only hint at Beria, because one could not make a historical movie about Beria in the Soviet Union. Not even in the eighties.

The denial of the two peoples’ existence, and oppression which in both regions outlawed the native scripts, and replaced them with Georgian alphabet, would be enough for me, a Czech by birth. I would say to Saakashvili, bud, you will have to live in a smaller Georgia. You have no idea how to run a federation, and after fifteen years of these people seeing an unstable, immature, violent Georgia, it is time to let them go. There has been enough bloodshed and rancour and it is sound and fury about nothing. Let the Abkhazians and Ossetians go ! Let them go ! In the name of decency, let them go, and find a different role to play than a U.S-financed resurrection of Queen Tamar! Of course, I am a blogging nobody. So please refer to the sitting Czech President, if you want your people to live in a smaller Georgia but one way more comfortable with its neighbours, with Russia, and ultimately - with itself.

Yes, we are all Georgians, and we are all Caucasians out of Africa, just like senator McCain and the archaeologists say. So what's the big deal letting the Georgian separatists in Sukhum and Tkshinvali govern themselves as once the Georgian separatists in the American colonies demanded as their God-given right to liberty ?

Oh Say Can You See ?

But I have no illusions about how far anyone would get with Mikheil. He argues even with the sane half of himself. Take a look at a most revealing interview of him. It comes at the end of Kira Kay’s excellent report made for the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting. Watch how he answers the question whether Georgia would use force to retake Abkhazia the night before he launched the assault on South Ossetia. Then ask yourself: If I was Putin or Medvedev, would I want to be dealing with Saakashvili ?
……

School of Lies Handy in Understanding Georgia

As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in a period of History’s relentless push to communism, I learned early to detect when the official sources lied to me and how to deal with it. The ability to understand the meaning, and to plumb the depth, of a lie was every intelligent man’s or woman’s basic survival skill. If you as a pioneer (communist boy scout) could not find a way to a red-star badge of a Young Builder, that was awarded for 100 hours of community work by putting in 10 hours, then you were a born sucker. No twelve-year-old could possibly spare two and a half weeks of precious life cliping shrubs, painting school-yard fences, and picking up back-alley garbage for a stupid badge. But everyone had to have one. Not having one meant you did not know how to work the system, or, God forbid, you engaged in sabotaging the inevitable victory of communism in the world.

As I grew up, I learned to distinguish among different types of official lies. The Young-Builder-red-star-badge lie would be an example of Harmless Bullshit, of the Bonding Lie class. It prepared you for the rock bottom rule of the socialist economy: you pretend to work; the state pretends to pay you. Then there was the necessary Noble Lie. An example of a Noble Lie would be: “the Red Army liberated Prague on 9th May 1945”. Everyone knew that the Vlasov Army chased the Nazis out of the city the day before. But you could not say that because Vlasov’s men were double traitors: first they betrayed the Great Stalin, then the Nazis, to save their own skin in both cases. So, it was only fair to lie and give the credit to the Great Stalin.

Which brings us to the Dialectical Synthesis. The Dialectical Synthesis was technically not a lie. It was a process whereby something that used to be true, no longer was true based on the historical practice of socialism. So e.g. the Party determined at the XX. Congress, that Stalin was not Great at all and removed his corpse from the Red Square mausoleum. What the Party discovered was that Stalin had a cult of personality, which meant that Stalin made many serious mistakes because he did not believe in the collective leadership of the Party, like Nikita Sergeevich. Which of course was a couple of Noble Lies: one, Stalin did not make any mistakes - he murdered millions, which you could not say because that could sabotage the inevitable victory of communism in the world, and two, Khruschev himself liked to throw his weight around, which would be unfair to say considering he was not engaging in gross violations of socialist legality (which meant he did not kill Bulganin after he removed him from the Poliburo).

Another important type was a Lie for the Protection of the establishment of socialism in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. A classical example of that would be in president Novotny's favourite saying: “we have not promised you a rose garden”. That actually was a Silly Lie because he was promising that all the time, and usually in the very sentence that followed. No, the “Protection Lie” was that president Novotny had brains. Now, if you ask why is that not a Noble Lie, you don’t understand. The guy was an execrable idiot and everybody knew that ! It was necessary to protect him because most people bought into socialism knowing full-well it was a shameless racket. And from there it follows that we had all sorts of Cheap Automatic Lies like the one that said ‘99.9% voters endorsed the candidates of the National Front’ in an election. It’s not that there never were any Florida-style recounts. It went well beyond hanging chads. Everyone clued in on what the bosses wanted, so no counting was necessary in the first place . The containers were sealed and delivered with the prescribed quota of approved candidates. No sweat, no Michael Moore bitching !

So, what do I think of the Saakashvili account of the night of 8. August ? I knew you were going to ask (harmless bullshit) and I was going to get to that (fake).

Well, to someone like the current president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, it would not be a mystery. He had the same schooling in Lies as I did. Vaclav Klaus was in Tokyo on urgent business (diplomatic lie) when Saakashvili’s Flying Circus arrived in Prague. From Japan, Klaus took a solemn moment to embarrass the Czech government, its NATO allies and EU partners by telling it like it is. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances calling for a “Protection Lie” (described above) applied in the western media, the wire was picked up only by ITAR-TASS .

So what do we know about the night of 8/8/8 ? Saakashvili now says he dispatched one third of his army to the ‘Tskhinvali (in case you ever wondered, it is pronounced: '[hiccup]' + ‘invali’) region’ to intercept the invading neo-bolshevik hordes that just emerged out of the Roki tunnel. Under normal circumstances this would be a Big Fat Bold-Face Lie. If he was so concerned about the Russians coming through the tunnel, why would he be wasting time for hours reducing the only city in the province to a Vukovar ? A city that had only a few hundred Russian peacekeepers ? But things are never that simple in politics. We are not dealing here with a person who cares for convention , even in the basics of presidential protocol. So it is not clear whether he actually remembers what his top peacekeeper said on TV just before the battery of GRAD rockets opened up on the sleepers in Hiccup- (don’t say ‘hiccup’, do a hiccup!)in-valley. He said that he was going in to restore ‘constitutional order’ in the region. It was a police action ! (Actually that was a Half-Truth; the shelling and assault of the army were coordinated by the Interior Ministry). You would have never guessed from the way Mikheil spoke about Hiccup-in-valley (I knew you could do it !) that the bombarded sleepers were ethnics who mostly do not speak Georgian, or speak it as third language (after Ossetian and Russian) . But the wording had a special significance in the Caucasus. Putin used the same words ('restore constitutional order') as Russia’s prime minister in 1999 to send armour to Chechnya. There was of course a slight difference, lost on a man who does not know that wearing a tie does not imply chewing it. Putin walked in on a Chechen warlord by the name of Basayev and his ally, the Wahhabi warlord al-Khattab (an old pal of the Devil himself), who invaded the neighbouring Dagestan to recreate imam Shamil's islamic confederacy in North Caucasus, defeated by imperial Russia in 1859. Putin wiped out the Chechnya-based marauders in short order, and the FSB eventually hunted down and killed both mujehadin (,actually all the big Chechen islamic warlords). Obviously, there would be a lesson there somewhere to a reasonable leader of a nation of 4 million trying to negotiate a new territorial arrangement with Russia (140 million people) led by a smart judo black belt. Well, evidently not Mikheil.

So I would say, yes it looks closest to a Protection Lie for the Eventual Establishment of NATO in the Caucasus. My guess is that most of those who have no interest in that racket would not see Saakashvili any different than the Czechs and Slovaks saw their president Novotny in the 1960’s.

.............