A Sixties revival -- without the flares
After Georgia, the world just became more dangerous, so trust not what people say, writes Gene Kerrigan
The world these past weeks has a familiar look to us children of the Sixties. Just like when I was a kid, the economy's in the toilet and the international scene is again dominated by a cold war hostility -- Russians and Americans -- that might at any time erupt into hot Armageddon.
Can it be long before we're all wearing wide lapels and flared jeans?
Back then, we kids were thrilled when "the most powerful man in the world" came to visit. John F Kennedy was young and handsome, articulate, cultured. He wore sharp suits and smiled a lot -- so unlike the dour, wrinkled politicians we were used to in 1963. We were thrilled that he was one of us. The visit, and the nation's response to it, represented a step across some kind of threshold into modernity. I didn't know then about such concepts, but I truly felt it. We all did.
Addressing the Oireachtas, broadcasting live, Kennedy said he came "clad in the armour of a righteous cause". He spoke much of freedom. He quoted Lloyd George: "The heroic deeds that thrill humanity through generations were the deeds of little nations fighting for their freedom." He praised our allegiance to democracy in the worldwide struggle against communism.
We didn't need to be told about Russian tyranny. It was seven years since the invasion of Hungary. The Berlin Wall was just two years old. We didn't have a 24-hour news cycle back then, we didn't have Google or Wikipedia, but we knew what was going on in the world. We knew the good guys and the bad guys. And JFK was the best and the brightest.
And all these years later, we know other things. For instance, two years earlier, in 1961, President Kennedy welcomed to the White House the leader of a small South American nation struggling for freedom -- Cheddi Jagan. Dr Jagan could be seen as Guyana's de Valera. A man-of-the-people nationalist who suffered jail under the British.
In the White House,Kennedy told Jagan: "National independence. This is the basic thing. As long as you do that, we don't care whether you are socialist, capitalist, pragmatist, or whatever. We regard ourselves as pragmatists." They issued a joint statement. Something about freedom.
According to a New York Times article in October 1994: "After Dr Jagan left Washington, Kennedy met in secret with his top national-security officers. A pragmatic plan took shape. Still-classified documents depict in unusual detail a direct order from the president to unseat Dr Jagan, say government officials familiar with the secret papers. Though many presidents have ordered the CIA to undermine foreign leaders, they say the Jagan papers are a rare smoking gun: a clear written record, without veiled words or plausible denials, of a president's command to depose a prime minister."
Kennedy had already authorised Operation Mongoose, a persistent series of attempts to murder Cuba's Fidel Castro. He saw Guyana as a potential second Cuba, another small nation in Washington's back yard, but beyond Washington's control. Not to be tolerated.
Phoney "free" radio stations sprang up, scare stories were planted, shipping and air blockades were organised by the CIA -- a devastating fire followed, strikes were instigated, and riots. More than 100 people died -- in a nation of just 600,000. Jagan was weakened and fell. A pliable racist demagogue was installed and ruled for the next 20 years, plunging Guyana into debt and rancour.
Repulsed by the totalitarianism of Moscow, gradually becoming aware of the duplicity and violence behind the smiles of those who too casually used words like freedom and democracy, some of us were confused.
We instinctively, in any conflict, know there's a good guy and a bad guy, and we try to figure out which is which. But it ain't necessarily so.
We live in a world where departments of war were renamed departments of defence. Where one of the most repressive areas in Europe was titled the German "Democratic" Republic. Where a Vietnamese town had to be destroyed "in order to save it". For some of us, it became almost axiomatic that anything with "democracy" or "freedom" in the title was a sham.
No doubt, that leads at times to a too-jaded scepticism. But the lessons are hard learned. Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
So it was that, in Beijing, George W Bush was staring goggle-eyed at the US women's beach volleyball team when someone told him Georgia had been invaded. At first, he thought it was that place north of Florida and west of South Carolina. He almost dropped his binoculars. Then he was informed there's another Georgia, tucked into Russia's underbelly.
Suddenly, we were all hearing about somewhere called South Ossetia, which made most of us feel as clueless as poor Mr Bush. We looked up our maps, we Googled it and Wikipedia-ed it. Meanwhile, the media was telling us what to think.
Apparently, Georgia is all about freedom and democracy. When it started getting physical with South Ossetia, that was okay, because South Ossetia is a tangle of ethnic animosity and it doesn't easily fit into anyone's notion of a cute little nation struggling for freedom.
And when the Russians said the Georgians killed a couple of thousand Ossetians, they were lying, it was closer to 150. Hardly worth worrying about.
In the Georgian conflict, the bad guys and the good guys are obvious, but it ain't necessarily so.
Georgia is a small country hustling for a future. It took US weapons and training, and it sent troops to occupy Iraq -- because it was choosing sides. NATO and the US isn't fond of Georgia because the Georgians are cute -- it's a way of getting in Russia's face.
The Russians had been waiting for an opportunity to start killing Georgians, to show there's a price to pay when you choose sides. And when Mr Bush took his eyes off the beach volleyball women, he looked at his options and shrugged. The hell with it. Stretched in Iraq, battered politically and financially -- screw Georgia and the promises it was made.
In a way, watching the Georgians take a beating is handy for both sides. The Russians get to scare the rest of their neighbours. The US and NATO get to tut-tut about Russian depravity.
A Russian general tossed a warning at Poland. They're accommodating a US weapons system, and that will be a nuclear target, in the event of a hot war. There was outrage.
Why so? Of course, Poland's a target. You take sides, you harbour military assets, you become a target. Shannon is a designated military asset for the US -- it would be very surprising if it isn't on a list of Russian targets, just in case.
It's fun -- in a warped way -- listening to the Americans, the blood of Iraq still on their boots, get all pious about the Russians daring to invade a sovereign nation. Amusing, but not very.
The world just got a bit more dangerous. Which makes it more important -- for what it's worth -- that we remember to watch what they do and trust not anything they say.
When Kennedy addressed the Oireachtas he quoted WB Yeats about the need to understand the past: "Let us not casually reduce that great past to a trouble of fools, for we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future."
Yes, the world of my childhood is back. Except for the weather. Back then, every summer was sunny, every Christmas, it snowed. Really.
