Category Archives: Russia

An SOS

I sent this letter to my Senators. Feel free to use it how you can.

Dear Senator,

I am reaching out to share my growing dread with this current administration. Arbitrary cuts to government programs, gestapo-like assaults upon peaceable communities and the shrinking of America’s international role is chilling.

As a career history educator I know these actions are decidedly harmful to all of us and that he is attempting to gut the rule of law. It’s as if the United States is drifting into a new Dark Ages and few are standing up for tenets of the Constitution, a hard-won, and hard-defended blueprint of government.

Please restrain yourself from the temptation of pursuing unfettered power, and apply the oh-so-needed brakes on this administration; we are counting on you to hold him to account.

I am a child of the Cold War era and recall the fear of air raid sirens and Soviet attack. But today I am more afraid. What is good about the United States is bad to this administration, and quickly ransacked out of existence, criminals are pardoned, and the guilty go free.

This damage does not fully rest on the White House, he could not carry out his pillaging without the silence of Congress. I implore you to have courage and stand up to this feeding frenzy and let us go back to being America, which still is “the world’s last best hope.”

Gail Chumbley

SLC 

A Good Deal

A painting by Valeriy Franchuk, “Harvest of famine” (2000)

A Reblog.

NBC news recently ran a piece on Trump meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy. In a video clip Mr. Trump announced that he had spoken with Zelenskyy about opening talks with Vladimir Putin to end the conflict between the two countries. Trump stated to the cameras that Russian President Vladimir Putin would give Ukraine a “good deal.”

Mr. Trump does not know nor does he care about Ukrainian history. If he did, the president would understand that negotiating with the Russian leader is unthinkable, a non-starter. To understand why is to look not only into Ukraine’s recent past but back into the 1930’s.

Putin’s first attempted assassination targeted Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. In 2004 Yushchenko narrowly escaped death after surviving dioxin poisoning, a combination of toxic chemicals which left him weakened and permanently disfigured.

Putin, as a former KGB operative is a master of murder, and why the International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant for him.

An impulsive hustler by nature Trump shows little interest in the crimes of Vladimir Putin. After the recent meeting in Alaska, Trump again called on Zelenskyy to make a deal with Putin. That the Russian has targeted Zelenskyy in numerous assassination attempts on multiple occasions, including three failed hits in one week is of no consequence.

However this narrative reaches back further to the early Twentieth Century, when another strongman, Josef Stalin rose to power.

Following the 1924 death of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, Stalin coldly and efficiently murdered his own rivals consolidating his power as an absolute despot.

Launching his Five Year Plan, Stalin’s vision for economic prosperity, he ordered collectivization of Ukrainian farms, seizing land and harvests for Russia’s consumption. Calling farmers Kulaks, a pejorative name, Stalin justified his actions by fabricating enemies, complete with mass arrests, show trials, executions, and deporting thousands to Siberia. In that period alone thousands of Ukrainians perished in freezing rail cars, or worked to death in frigid Siberian work camps.

The total number of transportation deaths remains unknown.

However transport was not the worst weapon employed by Stalin. Ukrainian Communist party workers not only stole seasonal harvests but also the seed for future planting.

A genocide followed.

From 1930 through 1933 millions of Ukrainians starved to death or resorted to cannibalism due to Stalin’s disastrous Five Year Plan. Production dropped under the forced collective effort, and the Communist leader had to find scapegoats for the disaster, so he pinned blame on the farmers. Kulaks were dying in massive numbers on purpose to undermine the Kremin’s economic plan.

Stalin insisted he was the victim of treachery.

Called the Holodomor, (death by hunger) as it is remembered, cost the lives of somewhere between 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians. Adding that number to those deported to Siberian gulags it is safe to say that the Ukrainian people suffered a monstrous horror.

Ukrainian memories and justifiable outrage remain vivid.

As for that ‘good deal’ with Vladimir Putin, President Zelenskyy is not interested. The Ukrainian President has no faith in Russian promises, and is not impressed by Mr. Trump and his previous effort to shake Zelenskyy down for corrupt political ends.

Today thousands more Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have lost their lives fighting this Putin-engineered war, but with national memory to guide them Ukrainians will not back down. Ever.

Independence from Russian oppression is relatively new and very fragile, and that nation will never surrender on Trump’s assurances of a ‘good deal.’ The people of that battered nation know better.

So should we.

This is the web site of the Ukrainian Embassy in DC if you’d like to make a contribution.

https://www.ukrainehouse.us/

Gail Chumbley is a history educator and writer.

National Longevity

Titled the National Defense Education Act of 1958, this federal legislation aimed to set more rigorous standards for American public schools, and low rate loans for college students. Curricular revisions set out by the act focused primarily on math and science so America could maintain its technological preeminence across the globe.

Spurred by the launch of the Soviet-made satellite, Sputnik, panicked lawmakers believed American schools faced the danger of falling woefully behind our Russian adversaries, and the U.S. had to catch up.

Sputnik had followed a series of Cold War crises focusing on Communist threats at home and Communist aggression abroad.

Labor activist, Gene Dennis served five years in prison for his public association in the American Communist Party, while Josef Stalin kept the Red Army in East Germany, and blocked the Autobahn (freeway) into the free sector of West Berlin. Through Soviet agents the Russians had absconded with America’s hydrogen bomb secrets, and in 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as Soviet spies..

Perhaps today this lone Soviet satellite would alarm no one, nor trigger such alarm, but at that perilous moment the Russians were the first to launch a hostile electronic eye in the sky. Understandably when newspapers screamed “Do you want a Soviet moon orbiting America?” President Eisenhower, and the American public answered in unison a decisive no.

In my Spokane elementary school we practiced “duck and cover” drills to offer the veneer of protection in the event of a nuclear attack, and endured Wednesday noon air-raid tests that blared throughout the city’s neighborhoods, as they did in every American city in that era. Inside the lobby of my grandparents apartment building yellow and black Civil Defense signs pointed residents to a basement bomb shelter, to hopefully ride out a nuclear holocaust.

Though termed a Cold War, fear and anxiety simmered, permeating every aspect of national life.

Urgency filled the halls of Congress, members certain Soviet schools were producing higher level mathematicians and physicists. American schools, in the minds of legislators had to buckle down to compete in the Atomic Age. 

The crucial piece of this narrative concerning the launch of Sputnik? The United States came together as one and and met the challenge.

Our leaders wished to protect and preserve America for generations to come, and the best means of doing so centered on public schools. The United States would continue forward and American children educated so that one-day as adults, they would assume their places for a new generation..

To educate inherently implies a future–that learning is a vital investment and tomorrow will come. Education is an act of faith in America and continuity.

Sadly that period of purpose and unity is long gone.

The Department of Education is no more, universities are under siege, and public schools underfunded. No longer are students encouraged to buckle-down for their own personal, national, or existential longevity. There is no vision of a future for many of our kids.

Facts, understanding, and open inquiry is viewed as subversive.

Today’s blaring sound isn’t an air raid siren. A bellowing of conspiracists and deniers, plus the politicians who coddle them undermine our ability to effectively meet this generation’s challenges.

The dangerous years of the Cold War were scary. National defense colored every facet of our lives, especially in the classroom. JFK encouraged us to “do for our country,” and we were inspired by the challenge. Today is far less certain. Poverty, hunger, and the wealth gap smothers hope and squanders our greatest asset, our children, and that loss dims America’s longevity.

On a personal note New Math became the bane of my existence. Even today algebra and the like trigger stress and self doubt. That being said I did my best because I knew I had a future in a country that cared.

Gail Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir, River of January, and River of January: Figure Eight. In addition Chumbley has penned two plays: Clay regarding the life of Senator Henry Clay, Wolf By The Ears, an examination of racism and slavery, and Peer Review where 47 converses with four past presidents.

Lost Their Way

In spite of fascist aggression in Europe the Republican Party of the 1930’s opposed foreign intervention even in the face of world war.

Staunchly isolationist, Republican members of Congress, particularly Senators William Borah of Idaho and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, carefully crafted legislation to block aid to democracies under Nazi threat. When World War Two did erupt in 1939 and blitzkrieg shrouded Europe isolationists refused to act. While England stood alone and fearfully vulnerable Franklin Roosevelt sent Churchill what he legally could, but certainly not enough.

Not until December, 1941 did Congress approve a declaration of war, however, not against Germany. The warlords of Japan had launched a direct air assault upon US bases on the island of Oahu, and only then did America rise to the moment.

Ironically, one week after Pearl Harbor it was Hitler who declared war against the US, and that freed FDR to channel significant aid to Great Britain, and to new ally, the Soviet Union.

Four long years of bloody trial and sacrifice finally ceased with the detonation of the Fat Man Bomb over Nagasaki. Hitler was dead, Mussolini was dead, and the Japanese islands quelled.

The war years left in its wake massive changes reshaping America. In point, no group emerged more transformed than the Republican Party. The postwar GOP fully embraced internationalism, no longer obstructing foreign aid, either military or humanitarian.

A fateful change in the aftermath of war was America’s important wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. In an ominous move Josef Stalin did not, and would not withdraw his Red Army dominating Eastern Europe. Any hope of a peaceful postwar world quickly faded. A paranoid despot, Stalin flatly refused aid from the United States for Russia and Eastern Europe, though the entire region had been shattered.

In place of the alliance a perilous atomic arms race, a Cold War, commenced between the two nations.

However, this time around a bipartisan Congress took action.

When Russian expansion threatened Greece and Turkey, President Truman quickly dispatched money and matériels, as did later President Eisenhower, who extended US support to Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

In Congress no group took the fight against Russian aggression more seriously than the Grand Old Party. Chastened Republicans had learned well the lessons of prewar isolation and stepped up aggressively to check Soviet expansion around the globe.

Influenced by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and red baiter, Senator Joe McCarthy, the Republican Party pursued a dogged response to Russian aggression at home and around the globe. Risking a nuclear showdown America went toe to toe with the Soviets from the 1948 Berlin Airlift to Korea, to Vietnam.

American presidents and leaders in Congress kept up the pressure until Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush aided the 1989 fall of Russian and Eastern European Communism, ending the Cold War.

Through all of these episodes and so many others, the GOP stood tall in the fight against all foreign foes threatening the United States.

Where once Dwight Eisenhower faced down the Russians, and Nixon defended America directly with Beijing and the Kremlin, Republicans now kneel before a man who, in Helsinki, privately had unrecorded talks with the current despot of Russia, and publicly took sides with Putin at the cost of American security. Moreover, this same man, a grifter, attempted to extort Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy in order to smear his own stateside political rival. After the end of his first term the freeloader stole thousands of sensitive intelligence documents from Washington, wedging American secrets among toilet paper, plungers, and plumbing fixtures.

It’s a bit of a gob smack that older hands, men who lived through the Cold War years, Senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham and Chuck Grassley, among others, excuse and downplay 47’s outrageous, dangerous, and treasonous conduct.

So it’s easy to understand mainstream America’s distress over today’s Republican stances. (Especially Putin’s aggression into the Crimea and the war in Ukraine.)

Welcomed by the GOP, cyber interference from Russia continues to spread misinformation to undermine our elective democratic process. This party and its messiah has opened the inner sanctum of national security inviting thugs into the Capitol, and outsiders to destabilize the United States.

Where once Republicans defended America from all foreign threats they are today passively holding open the door. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan is filled with cold opportunists coddling an overgrown toddler with neofascist leanings.

The Kremlin has not changed, nor have the Chinese. And though symbolized by an elephant this Republican Party has clearly forgotten who they are.

They have lost their way.

Gail Chumbley is the author of River of January, and River of January: Figure Eight. Chumbley has also penned two historical plays, Clay and Wolf By The Ears. A third play, Peer Review.

The Long Haul

After the 1929 Market Crash the world fell into regional, nearly feudal isolation, and international trade quickly dried up. America, too, focused inward largely due to the nation’s earlier participation in the Great War in Europe.

Across the Pacific the Japanese Empire aimed to take advantage of global disinterest promoting its own national interests. Sold to other Asian countries as the “Co-prosperity Sphere,” hyper-nationalistic Japan intended to expand across the region, especially toward vulnerable, resource rich China.

Great Britain as well, struggled alone in a financial malaise, as did the French across the channel; both nations saddled with debt to American banks from the previous war. Germany, the defeated nation struggled with their own war debt demanded by the British and French.

The shroud of economic depression hung like a millstone over Europe and the rest of the world.

As the financial, and political fallout grew wildly unstable, regimes hunkered down and hoped for better times. However the climate instead became chaotic, bringing anti-democratic demagogues to power.

The Italians were first, producing a Fascist strongman, Benito Mussolini. El Duce, as he was known suppressed political diversity, harnessed economic efficiency, and soon, like the Japanese, pursued colonial inroads into Libya, and later the conquest of Ethiopia.

Germany soon flirted with its own style of fascism, with a meaner, violent credo. In a reaction to impossible debts, and national pride, Adolf Hitler, a feckless dreamer, stood on beer hall tables, and passionately spoke of national betrayal. Hitler revealed his malicious intentions by blaming Bolsheviks, Capitalists, and Jews for the hated Armistice of 1918, and war debt owed to the Allies.

Yet America, unlike the rest of the world, clung with all their might to the national system of Constitutional norms. At the same time Germany elected Hitler in 1932, the U.S. found their champion in Franklin Roosevelt. 

A popular Roosevelt Coalition steered the country through those hard years holding America together. FDR’s New Deal and Fireside Chats broadcasts kept at bay the fears of a nation. That’s not to say there weren’t kooks, to borrow Lindsay Graham’s phrase, but Americans faced the long haul together, believing better days had to be ahead.

The current President is no Franklin Roosevelt. And his autocratic tendencies, strongly echo those in the 1930’s.

In Project 2025 Trump aims to raise tariffs, shut down borders, all done to economically and politically isolate America. Using the same playbook of past despots specific groups are targeted as the problem. The guilty include immigrants, the LGBTQ community, liberals, educators, women, and the rule of law all in the crosshairs. All done to divert and distract while he lines his pockets.

And his tactics, so far have succeeded making half of the electorate real mean.

So, here is the question. Can America survive?

Can Americans remain bound to the framework of our 238 year old republic as it did in the Great Depression? Or will this nation forsake our financial, social, and political traditions and turn to petty retribution and scapegoating?

Will we, as a nation withdraw from the world and exchange our democracy for a strong man who insists he has all the answers?

The signs are clear. When this national crisis has passed will there be enough of us left who stood resolute for our democracy? That is the question of this historic moment. 

Gail Chumbley is a writer and history educator.

Without Justice

So many students had dropped the class, the professor had us meet in his office. The course, (a 300 level?) concerned the history of Eastern Europe, and though challenging, I sucked it up and remained.

Exotic names such as Moldova, Herzegovina, and Macedonia evoked mystical places barely touched by the Renaissance or Enlightenment. The prof tossed around these names as an American would with Oklahoma or Nevada. 

He spent a great deal of time lecturing on the Balkan region. This mountainous peninsula is situated south of both Slavic Ukraine, and the Magyars of Hungary. This area, I learned, suffered an especially turbulent past, and for that matter still does today. One book on the course list, “Land Without Justice,” by Montenegrin, Milovan Djilas starkly described and reiterated that point. 

Seated around a small table, our teacher introduced the Slavic folk who embraced the Orthodox faith of Byzantium. while the Croats to the northwest remained Catholic. For good measure, the Ottoman Turks rode hard northward, flashing scimitars of enforced conversion or butchery through remote pockets of alpine settlement. 

Violence tinted the region red, scarring the inhabitants through generations of fierce reprisals.

The people of South-Central Europe appeared to have been dragged pillar to post in the religious chaos of competing Kings and Sultans.

In the wake of Turkish conquest, the youngest boys were systematically abducted from Orthodox villages up and down the rugged terrain. Raised in the Islamic faith, these children grew into fearsome warriors, eventually unleashed back on their former homes. These Janissaries coldly delivered Ottoman violence upon their own kinsmen. 

Mired in blood, rulers like Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula eliminated his many enemies by impaling victims on wooden stakes. Most were Muslim.

I don’t recall my grade in that course, but I was mesmerized. Enough remained with me to pass on to my history students. For example, as America fought their Civil War, a Medieval system still restrained Eastern European society. Blood feuds raged through the mountain terrain pitting Croats against Serbs, against Albanians, against Bulgars, and on and on. By the end of the 19th Century the Balkans acquired a new moniker, “the powder keg of Europe.”

The ignition of World War One began in Sarajevo, the center of Bosnia Herzegovina. As the Ottoman Empire eventually receded southward, the Austro-Hungarian Empire aimed to absorb Bosnia as their own. Hapsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph sent his nephew on a good will mission to picturesque Sarajevo. For the nephew, Franz Ferdinand, this would be his last royal duty. A Serb teenager waiting on the processional route shot the Hapsburg heir, and his wife, too. From that incident came “The War to End All Wars.”

This essay barely scratches the full history of Eastern Europe. Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Kosovo, all hold eons of collective history, enough to study a lifetime. 

Still much like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle with scattered and missing pieces, an incomplete picture of the region remains. World War Two, the frigid tension of the Cold War, and the Balkan Wars of the mid-1990’s all continue to pull the world in, as if a black hole.  

I stuck with that college class, in that professor’s office, and as a result understand why NATO, including US peace-keeping forces, still must remain in the “Land Without Justice.”  

Gail Chumbley is an author, and history educator. Her two books, “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight,” both available on Kindle. In addition Gail has composed two plays, “Clay” and “Wolf By The Ears.”

King of the Hill

General Washington had not yet been appointed commander of the Continental Army. Nonetheless, the conflict against Great Britain, though running hot after Lexington and Concord, remained an informal, isolated brushfire in the eyes of the Crown. Still, the very presence of soldiers grated Bostonians, enough that outraged patriots plotted retaliation.

June 16th, after dark, these Sons of Liberty acted, digging in on Breeds Hill located near Bunker Hill, north of the city in Charles Town. All that night these newly minted Minutemen stacked preloaded-muskets, entrenched, and waited for sunrise. At first light, the startled Redcoats scrambled to form lines and launch an offensive against the rebels. Though holding the line through three assaults, the Bostonians, low on gunpowder, were forced to melt away into the surrounding area. The shocked Brits decided to call the contest a victory.

But as one royal officer candidly admitted, “if we win anymore like this, we’ll lose this war.”

That is the lesson of Bunker Hill, hold the high ground, and draw the fight uphill to a well-defended position.

General George Washington arrived in Boston the next month, taking command of the motley Continental Army. Positioning his inexperienced troops on the heights surrounding the city, Washington bluffed his military strengths. When actual heavy guns finally reached Washington, the Redcoats had had enough, and on March 17, 1776, all the King’s men evacuated to Canada.

Two philosophers on warfare, China’s Sun Tzu, and Prussian, Carl von Clauswitz had committed to paper their respective views on the value of the high ground. Sun Tzu in the 6th Century, and Clausewitz in the early 19th Century argued its significance. Much like that game, “King of the Hill,” we played as kids, the advantage belongs to the person on top. That essentially defines both tacticians principles.

Yet, physically holding a hill doesn’t go far enough. Both philosophers argued that a moral high ground is equally essential, an armed force must be clad with a virtuous cause. 

A higher moral purpose fills the sails to victory.

In 1860, Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, becoming America’s 16th President. That moment weighed with foreboding, as Southern States, one by one, chose to secede from the United States. The new President viewed this idea as impossible–statehood was not a revolving door. In his inaugural address. Lincoln spoke plainly, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”

Then Lincoln, and the the rest of the nation watched and waited. On April 12, 1861 guns thundered from Charleston, South Carolina, smashing into Fort Sumter, a federal installation in the harbor.

Boom, done and done.

The Rebs drew first blood, and Lincoln, by default, seized the moral high ground. After a duration of four long, bloody years, the rebellion collapsed, and slavery ended.

Both the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, elevated America’s retaliation as morally justified, drawing the nation into both World War Two, and the War on Terror.

Everyone around the world is watching the Ukrainian people standing tall against a mystifying invasion by Russia. Ukrainian President Zelensky has brilliantly executed the lessons of Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz. His articulate, moral leadership, and courage has more than won the moral high ground test. In contrast, Vladimir Putin has proven his lack of preparation, and barbarity, assuring the Russian President an international pariah.

These principles are timeless and universal, not only in America, but in past conflicts like Thermopylae in the 5th Century, and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1940.

Whether the Ukrainian President, is aware or not, he has benefitted from the teachings of Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz, and this is Ukraine’s finest hour.

The possession of high ground may decide a battle, war or the fate of a nation.

Carl von Clausewitz

Gail Chumbley is a history educator, and writer.

gailchumbley@chumbleg

Pull of the Past

The Ukraine is located north of the Black Sea

Three monarchies ruled Central and Eastern Europe in the years leading to World War One. The Hohenzollern of roughly present day Germany, the Hapsburgs of nearly all the lands between Germany and Russia, where the Romanov dynasty ruled for hundreds of years. Modern republics carved from these three long ago kingdoms still feel a dynastic pull, as if prisoners of the past.

After WWI, and the forthcoming Treaty of Versailles the major kingdoms disappeared, replaced by new countries drawn by the hands of the victors. The objective of those redrawing the face of Europe was to give each language group the dignity of self rule. With few exceptions monarchies were gone, replaced by self-governing democracies.

1919 produced a validating moment for ethnic-language groups, resurrecting national flags and reveling in their distinctive cultures. But historically speaking independence lasted only a twinkling. 

Throughout the 1930’s the Germans tried democracy, only to discard the system in favor of autocracy under Adolf Hitler. The last Hohenzollern, Wilhelm II had been deposed and lived in exile, clearing Hitler’s path of impediments. Engaged in revitalizing Germany, the Fuhrer proceeded to annex nearby lands, reversing that moment of democratic freedom. 

The German Fuhrer set his sights on reoccupying the Rhineland, a resource, and industrially rich region to the west. That the German’s were not, by treaty, permitted to seize that area, Hitler waited for the protests, but the western allies did nothing. Later Hitler sent forces to Austria, the site of his birth, and absorbed that country into his Third Reich. Crickets. Then after a pause, he made a play for the Czech region of the Sudetenland. These acquisitions were German-speaking populations, and to Hitler a part of Germany’s destiny.

This time the West did take notice.

In September, 1938, the German Fuhrer hosted England’s Neville Chamberlain, and France’s Edouard Daladier to discuss the fate of the Sudeten. The conference was a cynical sham. As the political leaders admired the Berchtesgaden view of the Tyrolian Alps, German troops amassed on the Czech border. A secret “incident” was in the works as a pretext to invade as soon as possible. Part of Hitler’s scheme included informing his guests that German nationals in western Czechoslovakia were persecuted, and his duty lay in rescuing them.

Both Chamberlain and Daladier, fearful of a new war, agreed to Hitler’s aggression, as he assured them after the Sudetenland, Nazi expansion would conclude. But of course he was lying. World War Two erupted the following year.

At this writing Vladimir Putin is playing the same game as Herr Hitler. In 2014 Putin sent forces into the Crimea, with one eye on the Western democracies. There were protests, and economic sanctions, but no ultimatums. 

As Russian soldiers amass at the border of the Ukraine, President Putin pretends none of the aggression means anything. But this Russian autocrat means plenty, and is implementing a play to return the Ukraine back to where he believes it belongs-Russia. 

 Does the west have the will or consensus to allow this modern-day dictator to lie to the world and invade Ukraine? Will the Americans, and other European Allies look the other way, as did Chamberlain and Daladier? 

I’m no expert on European History, but finding patterns has become second nature. The pull of the past is strong, and would-be dictators care nothing about national boundaries. For a tyrant like Putin entitlement to the Ukraine is much the same as breathing. So the onus falls on the NATO Alliance to hold the line. A line that President Putin is doing his best to challenge.

Gail Chumbley is the author of River of January, and River of January: Figure Eight. Both books are available on Kindle.

gailchumbley@gmail.com

Idle Observations

Foreign oppression has, more than once, moved American policy makers at home to react with oppression. From the French Revolution to today, overseas upheavals frighten those in power enough, to prompt the same repression at home.

For example:

Immediately after World War One, the US endured a period of destabilizing fear–America’s first Red Scare. The U.S., bitter over entering the Great War, grew intolerant of unorthodox political views and worked to silence dissent. Radicals, both homegrown and immigrants from Europe, felt the wrath of political crackdowns. Anarchists, such as emigres, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman, found themselves on trial, then deported back to Russia, while a home grown Socialist, Eugene V. Debs ended up in prison. Scores of other political agitators were targeted by the Justice Department for printing radical views, and voicing public opposition.

Why the oppression?

The reaction began following the bloody 1917 Revolution in Russia. The murder of the last Romanov Tsar, with his family, paved the way for the world’s first Marxist-Leninist government, the USSR. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, (Lenin) seized the reins of the Bolshevik Party, and abolished all political opposition, outlining the aims of this new workers utopia, to overturn Capitalism worldwide.

The response in the U.S. came quick and harsh. Labor organizers, the leftest union, The Wobblies, and any other radical group deemed un-American was quashed. The U.S. government viewed dissent as treason, and Congress shaped specific legislation to silence protest. First passed and signed into law came The Espionage Act, in 1917, shortly followed by the Sedition Act the next year. No public speech, publications, nor use of the U.S. Mail to criticize government policy would be tolerated. Period.

In two test cases, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of both laws. The majority ruled in the first case that nonconformists and draft-resistors presented a “clear and present danger” to the US. In the second opinion the Court ruled much the same, but this time with an important dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote, ” . . . the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas . . .”

Still, non-conformists and dissidents endured government suppression.

The courts, the government, and public opinion merged to outlaw what they feared–an all-powerful, biased social/economic system, much like the restraint simultaneously underway in the Soviet Union.

This was not over.

After Hitler’s death in April, 1945, and the ending of WWII in Europe, Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin kept his Red Army in East Germany and Eastern Europe, nixing a promised democratic Polish government in favor of his puppet Communist regime in Warsaw. And that was just for starters. A frightening Cold War ensued between the Soviets and the West, that by 1963 witnessed the construction of an actual partition, aka, an Iron Curtain. 

In America a political fever seethed, and Congress responded. Establishing HUAC, the House Un-American Activity Committee, to sniff out citizens who leaned to the left, ruining careers and lives in the process. This second Red Scare elevated the careers of Senator Joe McCarthy, and Congressman Richard Nixon.

This post originally intended to discuss the War on Terror. The objective to cast light on the American Taliban; those promoting God, Guns, and Gasoline. But now, with Russia up to its old tricks, all of us again, have a decision to make. Will Americans excuse Putin, grow complacent and emulate his corrupt oligarchy? That path is wide open, visited upon us via the former guy. He proudly rubbed shoulders with that murderer, and publicly praised Putin’s integrity. 

But, at this very moment, another, clearer choice stands before the American public. President Zelensky has conducted a master class on the real cost of freedom.  The Ukrainian people have lain down their lives to remind us we, are the original heirs of freedom.

In that spirit, this upheaval in the Ukraine is one we must emulate here at home. When Putin attacks Ukraine, he attacks us all. We are Americans, it’s time to take a stand for our liberty. This is not a drill.

Gail Chumbley is the author of “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight.” Both titles are available on Kindle. Gail has authored two historic plays, “Clay,” concerning the life of Senator Henry Clay, and “Wolf By The Ears,” examining the foundation of American Slavery.

gailchumbley@gmail.com