By Wayne Allensworth
For context and background, see Trump Prepares for War (BRICS Challenges US Hegemony)
The Russian patriot Sergey Bulgakov once wrote that “only suffering love gives one the right to chastise one’s own nation.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, hated the Soviet system, but deeply loved his homeland, Russia, and its people. Forced into exile by Soviet authorities, the great writer — whose work did so much to undermine and discredit the Soviets — lived quietly at his home in Vermont, working on unfinished manuscripts, and thinking of the future when the communist regime would fall.
He lived to see that day and returned to his homeland to share its fate, for good or ill. At the time, following the Soviet collapse, Russia was in chaos, bankrupt, and seemingly falling into an abyss. But Solzhenitsyn went back to the only place he could really call home. He was not universally loved in post-Soviet Russia. Some thought his sharp attacks on the Soviet Union had gone too far, that he had become an enemy of Russia. Unlike the prophetic writer, they had a difficult time separating the Soviet Union as a polity from Russia as a place, people, and culture. They considered him a traitor. The Russian writer Valentin Rasputin, no lackey of the Soviet regime, once attacked Solzhenitsyn for having crossed the line where “war against communism became war against … Russia.” In Rasputin’s eyes, the prophetic exile had stained Russia’s reputation — not merely that of the communist regime — in his relentless assaults on Soviet power. The line can be a thin one. Solzhenitsyn’s great sin in the eyes of his opponents was to criticize the people he loved, to call on them to repent, to acknowledge their cooperation with a corrupt and murderous system. His admonishments raised troubling questions about the past and the role of the Russian people in the moral catastrophe of the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalinism.
It’s strange, or maybe a foreshadowing of things to come, how some of us who hate the Washington globalist empire but love our America as a people and a place, might feel like patriotic dissidents living in a country blind to what is taking place. So many of our people can’t or won’t see the precipice for which we are heading. I understand how Soviet-era Russian dissidents must have felt when they attacked communism (“Then you favor unjust capitalism!?” screeched their inquisitors) and criticized the war in Afghanistan (“Support the troops!”). No real patriot ever intends to aid and comfort his homeland’s enemies in either peace or war. But no patriot can stand idly by while his country, her body violated and possessed by the modernist demon (in either its neoliberal or neoconservative guise), is made vile and aggressive, as disfigured and offensive to the patriot himself as to the world she now threatens. Yet in the island of the patriotic imagination America, like occupied Russia before her, still lives because a memory of her persists. No real life in a foreign land is possible for us, even if the America we have exists only in the soil we stand on and in the piercingly painful memories we possess. For those who can see clearly what we have become, the revulsion felt and the desire to explain to any foreigner — or fellow American, for that matter — who will listen that this is not America but a nameless something else is almost overwhelming.
The historian John Lukacs once differentiated between what he called “nationalism” and genuine patriotism. Words have varying meanings depending on context, but for Lukacs, nationalism was a modern phenomenon, an ideology that grew out of the expansion of the administrative state. “Patriotism,” he wrote, “grows from a sense of belonging to a particular country; it is confident rather than self-conscious; it is essentially defensive. Nationalism is self-conscious rather than confident; it is aggressive and suspicious of all” those who do not agree with the ideology. “Patriotism is rooted to the land; nationalism to the mythic image of a people,” of a group identity that is so often “not a real community.” Referring to the ideological nature of nationalism, Lukacs wrote that patriotism is not “a substitute for religion,” but that nationalism often is, as it fills “the emotional needs of insufficiently rooted people.” Nationalism unites via hatred and jingoism. Patriotism is the natural love of anyone for that which is his own. It does not need external enemies to shore it up, as it is as normal as breathing to grounded people.
Paradoxically, in postmodern America, right and left profess allegiance to an oxymoronic “universal nation” that is based primarily on ideology. But my concern is with what passes for the right in this country, and its abstract, ideological, and aggressive attachment to a US superpower that is in steep decline — an identity that needs enemies to fuel the great game, an identity that is something like that of a sports fanatic rooting for “our team,” no matter who takes the field in the right color jersey. Many of the same people who voted for neocon war monger President George W. Bush now profess to be “MAGA.” The MAGA that President Trump professed not so long ago directly opposed what he is pursuing now, strengthening rather than dismantling the deep state, militarizing foreign policy, suppressing speech he does not like, waving the flag like the old “bloody shirt” to fan the flames of war propaganda. It appears that for a subset of Trump’s voters “America First” is all about the U.S.’s acting as the Alpha Male in a primitive band of cave men who are fighting, in a zero sum fight, to dominate water holes on the primordial savannah. Apparently, we were fooled. MAGA was never about taking care of our own problems of focusing on domestic issues or dismantling the managerial state. Trump’s recklessness is discrediting any genuine America First sentiment.
Trump’s declaration that he recognizes no limits on his power beyond his own “morality” should appall and terrify us. To be sure, Trump was saying out loud what our elites actually think. We have a surreal political stage filled by Democrat radicals and freaks and Republican Yosemite Sam cartoon characters. This week, Trump admonished Norway for not awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize and asserted that Denmark had no legitimate claim on Greenland. This is the rant of a man who has lost touch with reality every bit as much as Joe “Auto Pen” Biden had. And his mercurial, unfocused multi-front attacks and threats against Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, and frighteningly, Iran, along with this newfound belligerence toward Russia make his administration a danger to us and the world.
The spectacle is depressing. I don’t think this will go on for the long term. The empire is headed for insolvency and breakup. I remind myself that Russia eventually climbed out from under the rubble of the Soviet collapse. Perhaps we can, too, in some new form. I hope my misguided countrymen will see that and come to their senses.
Pray for peace.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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