Gorbachev & Mandela
Sitting in friends’ closet up in the high desert, I have a great picture of Gorbachev and myself from 1998. It's from a Global Green event, the American contingent of Green Cross International, a global environmental organization Gorbachev founded. With this group, I worked with a lot of great people on California energy issues. We successfully pushed renewable energy generation like solar power, when solar was considered quite radical, even amongst environmentalists. In the last half-century, I can count on less than one hand the popularly known political figures of this planet I have any respect for, Gorbachev tops the list. The Russians don't like him too much, but you know, prophets in their homeland and all.
Growing up, I was one of that strange breed of Americans who paid attention to the world. I grew up fascinated with both the Soviet Union and China. When I was in grade school, Mistah Nixon's visits to China and the Soviet Union were all the news. Endlessly drilled in from birth, these dark, history drenched, commie places were our mortal enemies. From American media, imprinted in my young mind was all Russian women were old haggled faces with babushkas, who knew the true beauty?
Then in 1980 came Morning America, cold war mongering was turned up to eleven, endless military spending, and pollution causing trees. As the dread sun from this dawn burned further above the horizon, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the new Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appeared, talking about how the world needed to get rid of nuclear weapons. Gorbachev called for the essential need to focus on the environment, not just capitalist industrialism but communist industrialism wreaked ecological havoc, and the need for political reform in the Soviet Union and across the planet.
It was an amazingly invigorating breath of fresh air. “Don't believe him. Don't believe him,” came the endless chorus of America's National Security State through its corporate media organs. I should note here, Ted Turner was an honorable, notable and noble exception.
I continued following closely and hopefully. Getting rid of the nukes and environmental awareness were foundational to my politics. And after nearly a decade in American politics, it was becoming clear the United States was and very much still is in desperate need of our own glasnost and perestroika. Then, as the 90s began, Gorbachev transformed into the most important figure of the 20th century, a figure unique to history.
Gorbachev's reforms, as reforms can do, unleashed powerful forces beyond the control of the reformers. If not in the United States, Gorbachev's words and actions were taken seriously inside the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe. Centrifugal forces rose and gained momentum, the center could not hold, things fell apart. This is where Gorbachev became unique to history. He didn't resort to violence attempting to hold them together. Never before in history did an empire nonviolently, voluntarily dismantle.
The other day I watched Gorbachev's 1988 address to the United Nations. It is despairingly distressing, how after three decades of complete American dominance, all Gorbachev envisioned for Russia, the US, and the world has been lost. As Americans know so little of what's done in their name across the globe, it's far beyond this short piece to go into detail how completely atrocious every aspect of America' bipartisan policy toward Russia has been since the fall of the Soviet Union, including partial responsibility for criminal Putin's rise to power. Let's just say we've been intrinsically formative helping create the bloody mess of today, some would not wrongly claim it's what more than a few wanted.
In 2002, representing Global Green, I went to Johannesburg, South Africa for the United Nation's Sustainability Summit. One evening, myself and colleagues from Green Cross had dinner and drinks. Toward the end of the night, I was talking with Alexander Likhotal, who was head of Green Cross. He had been one of Gorbachev's guys when he was head of the Soviet Union. I was making the case for solar, too radical for Alexander at the time – too radical for one of Gorby's guys, I always found that greatly amusing.
We were sitting with a woman who worked with Likhotal. She was an Australian, then out of London, another one of the many young bright talented people in the organization from across the planet. Our conversation turned to the last days of the Soviet Union. At one point, I distinctly still remember, Alexander looked at me across the table, straight into my eyes saying, “We didn't want it to fall apart.”
I replied, “Yes, but you let it.”
He looked at me, then away, and said nothing more.
Later, as I walked out with the Australian, I asked her, “How come Alexander didn't reply to that?”
She responded, “I don't know. That was weird. He never doesn't say anything.”
No doubt that was the largest bone of contention amongst all at the top of the SU at the time. After all, in the end, the Soviet military attempted to coup Gorbachev over that very issue.
The next day, I luckily got to see another of my respected political figures, Nelson Mandela. He gave a short talk for a couple hundred people in the small court of a mall of all places. South Africa is a crazily eclectic place. Johannesburg was the only place in the world I've ever been that reminded me of Los Angeles. The story of America's influence on apartheid South Africa has yet to be fully told. Mandela was speaking on behalf of a South African conservation group. Across this planet, no politics are more radical than wildlife conservation.
Mandela jokingly started, “You've just come to see what an old man with no job looks like.” Then he briefly told how important the ecology of the Transkei and its wildlife had been for him in his youth. He emphasized there was no environmental imperative greater than saving what was left of the world's wild areas, Mandela radical to the end.
Just as with Gorbachev, Mandela's importance to history is confused. He is remembered mostly as an anti-apartheid symbol, and while that is certainly not wrong, it's also not right. Years ago in an interview commenting on his 30 years in prison, Mandela hauntingly stated, “It was wasted life.” – Asimbonanga
Most importantly, Mandela needs to be remembered for upon gaining power, there were no endless recriminations, no revenge, and no violence. The sides talked, witnessed, and moved forward. If any peoples in history could have rightfully swung the bloody sword of vengeance, it was black against white South Africa. Mandela stayed this awful hand.
Yet, Gorbachev's and Mandela's seminal lessons appear completely forgotten with the bloody idiocy in the Ukraine. Why is there no talk? Why is America not talking to the Russians, instead foolishly and gleefully supplying an endless cache of weaponry to a country five thousand miles from our coast? The only talk heard is generals before Congress advocating years of war.
Whatever end of this completely avoidable mess, it will be a victory for no one. Russia is going nowhere. Ukraine is going nowhere. In the future, they will be side by side just as they have been for the last thousand years. In the end, one way or other, there will be talk. Talk that should have avoided this criminal idiocy in the first place. The longer this war continues, the more everyone loses.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. - Tacitus