Truth and consequences
by George Jonas
National Post
February 27, 2010
If Earth comprises the West and the Rest, to borrow Roger Scruton's title, the Rest is getting restless. Pessimistic pundits say the world is on the verge of war once again. Pakistan has the bomb and Iran is trying to acquire it. At the other end of Asia, China, far from being inscrutable, is virtually pawing the ground.
Optimistic pundits say the world is always on the verge of war and it's not necessarily a bad thing. As long as we're on the verge of war we can't be in the middle of it.
Like the blue bird of bliss, peace flies from those who chase it. Peace Now-type rallies attempt to snare a partridge with a drum: Not a smart move. Pacifism and appeasement invite war as surely as hedonism invites misery.
The observation that pleasure-seeking makes people miserable is commonplace enough to have found its way into the movies -- and not just Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Hollywood's old stand-by theme of hedonism leading to a shallow and joyless existence rarely stops their producers from pursuing la dolce vita themselves, of course. Few Hollywood-types live in monasteries. By the time a truth reaches the silver screen it's usually so shopworn that it's no longer true.
Henrik Ibsen believed all truths are short-lived. A 20-year-old truth is past retirement age. One paradox he brooded about in his classic "An Enemy of the People" was the masses contaminating the truth. By the time truth filters down to the hoi polloi it becomes so soiled and out-of-date that it obscures rather than illuminates. It did cross the Norwegian playwright's mind that keeping the truth from the masses would prevent them from tainting it, but he ended up dismissing the notion as unworthy.
The idea has probably crossed the mind of Yevgeny Primakov, too, for the onetime head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service is no slouch. He's no Ibsen either, though. Judging by his latest book, Russia and the Arabs, keeping the masses from soiling the truth by keeping the truth from the masses wouldn't necessarily strike Primakov, a one-time correspondent of Pravda (Truth), as an unworthy notion.
Believing everything the former correspondent of "Truth" writes would be a mistake, but when Primakov suggests that it wasn't the Arab and Israeli parties to the Middle East conflict that were in the "vise-like grip" of the superpowers; it was the Soviet Union and the United States that were in the grip of events, I believe him. Superpowers are only ships, however big; events are the ocean. Ultimately it's the waves that rule Britannia, not Britannia that rules the waves.
What Primakov -- who went on to become foreign minister, and later prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin -- puts in his Russia and the Arabs is telling, but what he leaves out is even more so. In Primakov's inside account of the Soviet Union's Mideast policy during the last 25 years of its existence, Marx and Lenin do not rate a footnote. They leave Soviet history -- never mind a bang -- without a whimper.
In 2001, Putin's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, conferred the A.M. Gorchakov Commemorative Medal on Primakov for helping to lead Russia's orderly retreat from Marxism-Leninism to Gorchakovism -- that is, from the ideological maelstrom of the 20th to the pragmatic haven of the 19th century.
As foreign minister to three Czars, Prince Alexander Gorchakov engineered Russia comeback on the world's stage after the disastrous Crimean War of 1853-1856. Following Sevastopol's fall to British and French expeditionary forces in 1855, Russia's stock sank almost as low as it did after the collapse of the Berlin Wall 135 years later.
It took Prince Gorchakov 15 years of cool, unhurried diplomacy to take his country from the humiliating Peace of Paris, which closed the Black Sea to Russia's warships, to the 1871 Convention of London, which compensated Russia for its losses in the Crimean War. For his patient pursuit of realpolitik, Gorchakov has been compared to Bismarck and Henry Kissinger. He became Putin's hero, as well as Primakov's.
Putin, Primakov, and their role model Gorchakov illustrate that the Russian ursine need not be Red to be dangerous. True, dangerous bears may also excel at averting danger. Would Prince Gorchakov have drawn a better Road Map to Peace in the Middle East than George W. Bush?
Primakov, a statesman even in retirement, probably wouldn't spend a second on such a frivolous hypothetical. Being a mere scribbler, I will.
I think Ibsen is right. Truths don't live long. But then, neither do lies. A twenty-year-old truth may have a grey beard but a 20-year-old lie is on a ventilator. This is what gives peace a chance.
I don't think Prince Gorchakov would have done better than U.S. presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush, but he may not have aggravated matters by trying. Paradoxically, the best chance for peace is the assumption that it cannot be achieved. Like happiness, peace comes if it does as a byproduct of other achievements: Jobs well done, lives well lived, countries well defended.