Russian Annexation? We Did the Same Thing, Way-Way Back

In a predicable stunt, Russian president Vladimir Putin has sent troops into the self-proclaimed provinces of Donetsk and Lutansk, which are technically part of Ukraine, after they asked him for recognition as part of Russia. This is part and parcel of his run-up to a total invasion of Ukraine, after claiming that it has always been part of Russia from way-way back, so he has a right to claim it as such still, or again, depending on how you look at it.

This is, of course, slimy and disingenuous. He has power and he's going to use it. He can't help himself, kind of like Tony Soprano, who just killed people because he couldn't stand them, as if there needed to be other reasons, which according to him never were necessary.

Pretty nasty stuff: vacantly depraved, much like the president we once had--who probably encouraged him or at least didn't discourage him, the notes from which meeting in Helsinki in 2018 have probably been literally flushed down the toilet. But the good old USA was also guilty of doing very much the same thing--sending soldiers into disputed territory and then daring the other side to do something about it. It was a while ago, but the history books--again, history, that old curmudgeon--make it very clear.

Granted, it was a while back. But the motivations weren't pure, either.

In 1836, Texas managed to win its war with Mexico. It proclaimed itself an independent republic--the vestiges of which we unfortunately carry with us today. More importantly, it proclaimed its "freedom" to do a number of things which its former attachment to Mexico wouldn't allow--most crucially for its economy, having slaves.

So the population grew, especially along the Gulf Coast, where the climate, still humid, encouraged the growth of cotton, which had grown in importance since the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney some fifty years before that, making slavery all the more profitable. But cotton wears out the land, and the need for more arable land becomes obsessive with dependence on that crop. 

The slaveocracy saw dollar signs, and it would not be denied. That, the ginned-up American contingent that had moved in, and a presidential campaign that promised U.S. expansion into Mexico, led to Congress annexing Texas officially in 1845. Mexico never recognized it, since the government had never recognized General Santa Anna's original treaty ending the Texas revolution in 1836. 

President James Polk, no shrinking violet and smelling blood in the water, sent troops into a disputed area between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River, in southern Texas, in 1846, then sent a diplomatic contingent to Mexico City to negotiate a treaty--which Mexico rejected. Meanwhile, Mexico took the bait--after all, it believed it to be their land, and no treaty had arranged for it otherwise--and skirmishes broke out which allowed us to justify declaring war.

With our white supremacy evident, we thought the war would be quick. It wasn't. (Putin should take note, though he clearly won't.) It took two years and cost lots of casualties and money. War is nearly always a bigger mess than the planners plan for. 

And the lands won immediately fell into dispute regarding the status of slavery within them. David Wilmot, a Congressman from Pennsylvania, made a proposal that none of the acquired lands be slave territory--which caused a very big brouhaha in Washington and nationally. Another Congressman from Illinois, fellow named Abe Lincoln, of whom more later, dared the Polk Administration to indicate where American blood had been spilled on American soil to justify the start of the war.

We won, of course, with sheer numbers. It gave off two potent results: One, that the soldiers and officers who fought were primarily from our South, giving them experiential advantages when our Civil War broke out a little more than a decade later; and two, we now had additional land through New Mexico, Arizona, and into California, which we had invaded and therefore claimed during the war. Those lands, and the political battles that emerged from them, would raise the bitterness between slave and non-slave factors. California's gold rush made it suddenly necessary to organize that area, too. Though temporarily headed off with the Great Compromise of 1850, the basic conflict could never be sufficiently quelled. 

With echoes of a bitter past, it also led to our entry into World War I, since we caught the Germans trying to lure Mexico into supporting them and potentially re-invading the U.S. in those very areas, diverting what it saw as an otherwise inevitable connection with the French and British on the Western Front. We were, of course, aghast that anybody would try that against us. But nothing, you see, is ever completely forgotten. Justification of past grievances is like a new car attached to the rest of the railroad; you can always do it.

None of this justifies what Putin is presently doing. Ukraine has every right to the integrity of its government and borders. Putin is smart to invade now, since Ukraine, which wants to be in NATO, hasn't yet joined, so that alliance can't, or thinks it can't, actually commit ground forces in support. It's just another way that Putin, who plays by no rules, takes advantage of an organization that believes it must, led by a country which has very recently gotten burned very badly in Afghanistan. So is our most recent ex-president, who continues to delay growing legal issues and gin-up people who want to believe alternative realities. They're branches of the same authoritarian tree.

Whatever economic sanctions we manage to extend in punishment for its gluttony, Russia will also try to respond in kind. Unquestionably, it will try to sabotage our power grid. And if it has anything to do with the mysterious cyber attacks upon individuals, stunning and disorientating them--if you watched "60 Minutes" Sunday, you know all about it--it will try to do that inside the White House, the West Wing steps of which have already been breached.

The Mexican War did not result in a wider war back then. This one might. Hang on tight.

Be well. Be careful. Get a booster. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Changing Language, and History: A Terror of the Mind

Forced into a corner by their extremism, Republicans are trying to do the only thing that's left: Changing the English language and thus trying to change reality--and history.

Their claim that January 6 was "legitimate political discourse," as the national committee voted to do the other day, was beyond ridiculous. When something is 'ridiculous,' it is still tethered, however tenuously, to reality.

No. This was another bald-faced lie, in open air, like the 'hoax' of the 2020 presidential election. Hey, if you can lie about one thing outwardly, why not something else? Why not everything?

Count on Republicans, too, to repeat that phrase, "legitimate political discourse" as often as they have to, to freeze it in the minds of their pathetic patrons. It's a way of getting past that day and refusing to accept accountability for it.

"Legitimate political discourse" means that any two people could have engaged in it, that it fits into the mainstream. No film taken of that assault on the Capitol could possibly coincide with such a conclusion, or ratified the judgment of those who came to it. 

Smearing feces upon any wall, anywhere, under any circumstances, represents barbarity, not legitimate political discourse. Not "oh, well, things get a little rough sometimes," when a self-professed hillbilly from Arkansas breaks into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, puts his feet up on her desk and writes her nasty notes. Not breaking windows to get inside. Not killing guards. Not spraying them with bear repellant. Not squeezing them in doorways to render them helpless.

I lobbied many times in the Capitol, and approached several politicians with whom I had almost nothing in common and did not agree on a thing. They drove me crazy. But I did not think of putting my feet on their desks. And I certainly knew where to go to the bathroom after lunch and how to operate the toilets.

But once you gain power, you can change what's written about it. That's why some textbooks used to blame the outbreak of the Civil War on "states rights," as some presidential candidates have never been shamed away from doing. That dodges the responsibility of everyone who promoted slavery in those days--which, by the way, included plenty in the North who were making money off of it in textile mills. We got past that era without really drilling down and discussing it. The closest to do that was, again, Lincoln, who referred to God's wrath plaguing both sides, bringing on the war. Maybe he would have been able to lead a conversation that would have shed the light of perspective for both sides.

But millions of kids, mostly in Southern states, were taught that the "noble cause" of the South was about claiming their constitutional rights, granted by the Tenth Amendment but not guaranteed in perpetuity, and not their enormous role in the moral depravity of forced labor for two and a half centuries. Had slavery not existed or been phased out gradually, that discussion didn't need to happen, much less the deaths of more than 600,000 people by battle and disease. But if you repeat the message often enough, it becomes unquestioned bedrock.

That's also partly why right-wing ideologues are being encouraged to take over school boards right now: To not only dispense with whatever remains of 'critical race theory,' as if it was ever absorbed by public middle and high schools as an organized train of thinking at all--please show me where--but to drill down farther and eliminate any reference to gay and transsexual people in school libraries, to consign them back to the closet where they're acknowledged but their existence need not be seriously entertained.

Where that happens, someone wants the Bible to take over. And that, as above, goes far deeper than to violate any separation between church and state. It doesn't mean that anyone really cares about the education kids get; in fact, it means quite the opposite. Reliance on any holy book is a vehicle to close minds, not open them. "the Bible is a good book," says the Darrowesque character in "Inherit the Wind," "but it's not the only book."

What's behind it is an effort to dismiss all arguments, all challenges, all attempts to open or re-open minds to find the truth. That's what ex- will attack if he becomes president again, not because it makes any sense, but because it will create a pretext for him to be followed into whatever blind alley he guides his very naive followers--and then leave them there without help, suckers all. He will turn them into dullards, gathering in a lobby and waiting for announcements. I am reminded of the scene in the old film "The Time Machine," where people are just milling around with no goals, nothing to do, until a siren goes off and they're all inexorably drawn to this temple where anything could happen to them. H.G. Wells had a point.

Under such mindlessness, history can be turned into anything powerful people can allow. I had an exchange student from Japan in my class during the '90s. She was an eager, engaging, very studious girl who knew some English but not a lot; her test essays would begin in English but in frustration, she would revert to her native language (I often think of how difficult it would be for me had the tables been turned). At the end of her stay, she informed me of something I found quite interesting: That her world history book in Japan had excluded both the attack on Pearl Harbor and the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Think about that. It means that the bad parts of a country's history are intentionally ignored. Maybe kids might hear about it elsewhere--if you live in Hiroshima (she was from Osaka), for instance, it's probably quite impossible to look past it--but that the government won't take responsibility for stating it, for printing it, and hopefully, tell teachers not to discuss it. And even if knowledge of the bad things gets to kids, the very idea that it's ignored in textbooks is a message of prioritizing and minimizing importance.

So yes, it can happen. Relevant history can be intentionally ignored. And when it is, any history can be intentionally ignored, including all history. The National Archives just picked up a whole bunch of 'official' papers from Mar-A-Lago, papers which ex- was supposed to have left behind when he was booted out of DC. That the Archives were finally allowed to access them, again, means only one thing: that ex- had gone through them and thrown out anything he may be been criminally responsible for--and that he will obviously dodge at any future time, any other reports being merely hearsay.

It's a lie, plain and simple. And it's a try at rewriting history, as if nobody else will do any later discovery and find him criminally responsible for more than one offense--but which he might get away with, at least until death. Hiding, in other words, in plain sight. It's because he wants us to ignore whatever he did before and render it irrelevant--which is what all dictators do to dodge responsibility.

That's what's at hand. It is a serious psychological disease, born of anxiety, misinformation, and lies. About 40 percent of the country is in the grips of it. Those of us left over must vow to continue the conversation and confront this slow-moving terror of the mind. It has seeped into our official processes, too. I clench at the possible results.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark