Olympics and Georgia
Posted on August 26, 2008
While the bourgeois press has been full of whining about irrelevances such as miming children and CGI fireworks, last week it was the sentencing of two old women by Beijing authorities which came to symbolise the true spirit of the Beijing Olympic Games. Wu Dianyuan and her neighbour Wang Xiuying applied for permission to protest at one of Beijing’s designated protest parks, having been evicted from their homes by officials in 2001 to make way for ‘development’. They were sentenced by bureaucratic fiat — ie extrajudicially — to one year of ‘re-education through labour’ for ‘disturbing public order’. Both women are in their late seventies and one is nearly blind, yet they strike fear in the hearts of the authorities; fear that two old ladies who walk on sticks will unleash a deluge of popular discontent to tear down the edifice of the party’s bureaucracy and patronage, privilege and wealth; fear that those who were once all powerful and unaccountable, will be powerless and called to account. Wu and Wang may be allowed to serve out these absurd and vicious sentences at home if they promise to shut up and cause no further trouble. The Beijing protest parks performed their function, with scores of dissidents and potential protesters already detained prior to the games, and yet others who applied to protest being denied or detained. The parks demonstrated China’s new forbearance of dissent: there were no protests — there is no dissent.
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Russian troops remain in Georgia — to maintain a ‘peacekeeping zone’ — with Russia/South Ossetia and Georgia accusing each other of genocide and war crimes. There has been adoption in the usual quarters of an ahistorical and philistine conspiracy theory ridden perspective in which Georgia is the tool of US imperialism — it’s all about oil pipelines — as if Georgia is not capable of getting itself into a jam just as well any other nation states, without US support and encouragement. Russia may be expelled from the G8, but with the ruling oligarchy’s hands firmly on the gas-tap, it will surely withstand any momentary sting of ‘humiliation’ such an outcome may cause.
For all the talk of ‘encirclement’ of Russia — an elephant surround by a handful of mice — examination of a tribal map of the Caucausus indicates that Georgia too may have reason to fear encirclement, or more accurately bifurcation and eventual annexation, by its vastly larger and more powerful neighbour. Today, Russia has formally recognised the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Self-determination as a principal is non-negotiable, however
On the basis of the general assumptions of historical materialism, the position of socialists with respect to nationality problems depends primarily on the concrete circumstances of each case, which differ significantly among countries, and also change in the course of time in each country.
Is the nation in question oppressed? Will independence give the people what they want or merely transpose their problems? And, to restate something few seem willing to hear, it is a grim irony that some of the Russian forces deployed in Georgia in support of South Ossetian independence have come from the killing fields of Chechnya where, in breech of protocols against ‘air-delivered incendiary weapons’, thermobaric terror weapons were used against civilian populations — as well as more traditional methods of mass rape, torture, murder and kidnappings — to smash Chechen aspirations for self-determination and independence from Russia.
While acknowledging the depth of economic and social pain resulting from precipitous adoption of cowboy capitalism, the headlong rush of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ to engagement with Europe, is a predictable reaction to centuries of Russian and Soviet domination as the newly independent republics seek to distance themselves from their one-time imperial masters. The decolonised states of Africa and Asia similarly sought alliances and partnerships of which their former colonisers did not approve.
Just as Marx remarked that ‘history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce‘, after a brief experiment with sham democracy, Russia has reverted to autocracy, which in this latest incarnation doesn’t even bother with pro forma slogans about ‘proletarian internationalism’, and is flexing its imperial muscles anew. During the Soviet period, outright racism (which authorities pretended did not exist) was suppressed or manifested in some bureaucratic form — through the distribution of power and privilege. Following the collapse of the USSR, the end of restrictions on internal movement and the rapacious advance of hyper capitalism and massive social dislocation, racism and nationalism have metastasised into increasing support for the far right and violent rhetoric and physical attacks against ‘blacks’ — ie Chechens, Georgians and other non-Slavs — ‘yids’, Muslims and Roma, often on the absurd pretext that these ‘outsiders’ are trying to ‘exterminate’ the ‘holy’ Russian people. The republics of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ have every reason to fear the return of Russian imperialism , accompanied as it is likely to be in this instance, by 21st Century Black Hundreds and Cossack Hosts.
