Baltimore-i Értesítő, 1979 (15. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1979-06-01 / 6. szám

8. oldal

I can’t figure out why the Russians get a free ride on their colonial empire, the last great imperialist regime in the world. Let us leave aside the Russian colonies in Central Europe: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany. Let us also not consider the 50 million Uk- ranians and White Russians and the six million in the Baltic states — nations brought under Russian domination by the czarist regimes and as much imperial colonies as was Ireland under English rule.

There are still more than 50 million people in the Soviet Union who have never had a chance in this century at self-determination. Most of these people are not “white" (though in Central Asia and the Caucasus regions, historic crossroads of migrating peoples, race is an even more illusive concept than it is elsewhere); most of them are i Moslem, and most of them are inhabitants of regions which were taken over by Russia at about the same time that we were occupying Cuba and the Philippine islands, and ; England, Germany and France were splitting up black Africa.

In the Caucasus region, for example, Russian domination of such peoples as the Georgians, the Azerbaijani and the Armenians dates oniy to the beginning years of the last century; and in Asia the Kazakhs, the Turkmen, Uzbeks, the Kirgiz and the Tadzhik were brought firmly under Russian colonial control only at the end of the century, but two decades before the Revolution.

You may not have heard about the Turkmen or the Uzbeks or the Kirgiz, but 20 years ago you’d never heard of Tanzania, either. And the latter is an artificial nation put together from Tanzanyika (itself an artificial relic of British colonialism) and the island of Zanzibar. The Russian colonies in the Caucasus and Central Asia consist, like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and the Ukraine, of historic peoples with their own history, cultural heritage, language and national self-consciousness.

If the people of Burma and Sri lanka and Uganda have the right to be free of British imperialism, and the people of Algeria and Morocco and Senegal have the right to be free of French imperialism, why does no one care about the Georgians, the Uzbeks and the Tadzhiks?

Even more pertrinent, if one rejoices — as do all good liberals — that the Islamic people of Iran may now chart their own course, free from the de facto control of American imperialism, why does one remain silent about the Iranian-speaking Islamic peoples who have been dominated by Soviet imperialism for three-quarters of a century — peoples who live just across the border from the new Islamic republic in

ERTESITO

Iran.

Let us grant that the United Nations is, as Pat Moynihan has told us, a place of total hypocrisy. Let us admit that the Third World enthusiasts in the United States are ignorant romantics. Let us even concede that there is a valid double standard and that Russia should not be judged by the same moral canons applied to other colonial powers because the Russians are “socialists” and hence “good” colonialists.

Still, why is the existence of this nonwhite empire in Russia such a closely guarded secret? How many Americans know about it? How many indeed realize that the Russians dominate an empire in

I hate to think of the presidential campaign that is going to start in six months. I am a lifelong Democrat, and as a supporter of the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Karry Truman, John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, I am appalled at the choices we are going to have to face in the next year.

First there is Jimmy Carter, the most incompetent president since Calvin Coo- lidge, a man who simply cannot cope — either with Congress or the federal bureaucracy or inflation or energy problems or the Russians or anybody eise — not even, it would seem, his poor brother Billy.

Then there is Edward M. Kennedy, the heir to the Camelot heritage. Sen. Kennedy apparently is convinced that what the United States needs is more government, more spending, more taxation, more bureaucracy, more quotas, more busing, more discrimination against white people, more harebrained soda! programs, more of everything that the people have made clear they don’t want.

Far to the left of his two brothers and with much less political sensitivity for ordinary folk, Sen. Kennedy is in effect the senator from Harvard and not the senator from Massachusetts. Some of the liberal left wing of the Democratic Party hope to use the Kennedy charisma and the Camelot myth to attract support for a man whose policies would not get. móré than 10 percent of the Democratic vote if his name -were anything but Kennedy.

Then there is California’s Gov. Jerry Brown. Where Brown stands on anything is impossible to know because he shifts like a weathervane — opposing Proposition 13, for instance, and then going to the opposite exwhich more than 45 percent of the people are not Russian (and that does not include the eastern European slave states)?

Why do our U.N. delegates never mention the Russian coionia! empire? Why do we give the Russians a free hand in Africa to do whatever they want, and not lift a finger to destabilize their colonial regimes — especially since many of those colonies border on China? Why don't we make a deal that we’ll leave their colonies aione if they leave our former colonies alone — Angola and Uzbekistan, for example.

I don’t know what the answers to these, questions are. I know even less why the questions are not asked. Surely there are people in the State Department, the CIA and the national press who know about the persistence of Russian colonialism in Asia.

But then again, given the ignorance of these three segments of our national elite on Iran, maybe they don’t even know where Central Asia is.

1979. június hó

treme and advocating a constitutional amendment to limit spending. One can presume that if elected president, the White House also vjould be graced with Gov. Brown’s roc'k singer companion.

Is there no one'else in the Democratic ■ Party? Are we to be presented with a choice among three men about whose personal character there is substantial doubt and whose policies are bunched together at the far left end of the political spectrum?

Cannot we find someone of intelligence, courage, taste, integrity? Somebody who,

; for example, could knock the dunderheads in the Department of Energy into promoting - oil shale development? Somebody who could persuade the cowards at the State De- ] partment that America is not washed up as a world power? Somebody who could convince Mr. Califano or his successor to cease and desist from his empty public relations crusades?

Is there no one who represents the feelings and convictions of the overwhelming moderate majority of the Democratic Party?’^ one who would appeal to union membership, to big-city ethnics, to Southern moderates, to young people still lacking political affiliation but searching for someone who could command their confidence without falling back-on Kennedy-style demagoguery?

Groom: “When you. told Kelen I was married, did she seem sorry?”

Best friend: “Yes, she said' she was sorry — even though she didn’t know your wife.”