The Russians Aren't Coming

"What exactly is our strategy for the Malthusian predicament?"

 

In his autobiography, Hollywood director, Norman Jewison describes meeting John Wayne at a party.

“Have you met Norman Jewison? The film director?” I looked down the long flight of stairs, shirtless and clutching my pants. John Wayne stared back, swaying slightly and holding a large glass of whiskey. Before I could say anything, David said, “Norman has just directed The Russians Are Coming. He and Dixie are our guests for the weekend.”

Wayne continued to stare at me, his face expressionless. I managed to murmur, “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Wayne.”

“What are ya?” he suddenly shouted. “One of those goddamn pinkos?”

Speechless, I smiled weakly and scampered into the bedroom to finish changing. I could hear him bellowing about commies taking over Hollywood. When I slunk downstairs to join the party, I realized I was the only guy with a beard. This was foreign territory, politically speaking. Every time I saw the six-foot-four Mr. Wayne headed my way, I managed to hide. Remember True Grit? That’s what he looked like that night, and I’d heard that the drunker he got, the meaner he was.

He scared the hell out of me.

This week marks the third week I’m patiently waiting for my passport to return from the Russian Embassy, stamped with a fresh entry visa. No doubt the recent kerfuffle over false flags, spying and gassings have slowed such things down. I plan to go in July so hopefully there is enough time to get my papers in order.

Some of the questions on the form were impossible for me to answer, like “give the dates of every previous visit.” My memories of travel there extend more than a quarter century back, when I went to St. Petersburg as part of a citizen diplomacy program organized by Diane Gilman at the Context Institute. I have watched in the intervening years as the country went through its dramatic changes from communism to gangster-ism to consumerist multiculturalism. “Cosmopolitan” is a word that aptly describes a country spanning 11 time zones.

Why would Adolf Hitler make such a bonehead strategic blunder as to attack the Soviet Union? In Chapter four of Mein Kampf he explained:

The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000 souls. The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and hunger.

Hitler considered birth control, but says it would never work, and besides,

vengeance will follow sooner or later. A stronger race will oust that which has grown weak….

Then he considered the Wizards’ argument — that science will find the means to supply exponential growth —  but rejected it on Malthusian grounds.

It would, therefore, be a mistaken view that every increase in the productive powers of the soil will supply the requisite conditions for an increase in the population.

Hitler said that boosting farm output while increasing exports of industrial goods to buy food were temporary solutions at best. He called that strategy “pacifist nonsense.”

Acknowledging that it was too late and too expensive to acquire colonies outside Europe, he concluded that the only solution to the imbalance between people and land would be to acquire new territory inside Europe (and, along the way, exterminate as many other races as could be easily arranged).

We can look back on this now and heap scorn on the insanity and ruthlessness of Lebensraum but it was no more insane and ruthless than Europe’s genocidal march to the sea across North America or Israel’s march to the sea through Gaza.

Jewison’s book also tells the story of his Moscow premier screening of The Russians Are Coming:

The theater was bigger than Radio City Music Hall in New York. To sit in that enormous theater, jammed with over two thousand Russians, and watch their reaction to my movie was an amazing experience.

As the film ran, a Russian interpreter gave a simultaneous translation over the sound system. I had been told that if a Russian audience didn’t like something, they would make a “chuh-chuh-chuh” sound, so throughout the screening, I prayed I wouldn’t hear it. They laughed at the jokes in Russian that the Americans didn’t get, and everything was fine until Theo Bikel, the Russian sub captain, threatens to blow up the town. You could feel the tension in the theater, then the “chuh-chuhing” began. I thought, “Oh God, they think they’re going to be made to look like the villains again.” But when the stand-off is broken by the little boy falling from the church belfry and the Russians help save him, the audience began a rhythmic clapping and many burst into tears. Directors Sergei Bondarchuk and Grigory Chukhrai were on their feet clapping and crying.

I was sitting next to Vladimir Posner, the Brooklyn-born editor of Soviet Life. “Why are they crying?” I asked.

“Because they didn’t make it first,” he replied.

I realized then that the film, although made primarily for an American audience, expressed the hopes and fears felt by people in both countries at that period in the Cold War. What the Russians of course couldn’t believe, and were blown away by, was the fact that I had been allowed to make the film at all.

My dad was the John Wayne of my family. He built a career bashing reds, even during the years our countries were allied fighting Hitler. When I foresook everything he stood for to join a Tennessee hippy commune (I am there still), he could barely purse his lips to spit. He came to visit, all the way from California, but refused to get out of the rental car. He never understood that it was neither him nor capitalism I was rejecting. It was the whole Orwellian mind control bit.

I get that we tribe from genetic imperative. We adopted that social animal chunk of our DNA millions of years ago as a defensive strategy against predators, the same as zebras banding together to cross a river full of crocodiles. We have to deal with extreme football rivalries, religious intolerance, political dynasties and Ford owners as a consequence.

But, please. Why can’t I watch RT without my ISP slowing down the feed? Why can’t I link to a Caitlin Johnstone or George Galloway story without Facebook trolls ridiculing me as a Russian pawn? How is it that so many otherwise intelligent journals like the Washington Post or The New York Times un-inquisitively parrot Cold War rhetoric coming from K-street think tanks and party apparatchiks?

Does National Security Advisor Bolton imagine that we will have an atomic showdown with Russia that will settle the matter once and for all? And if Bolton and the other neo-cons think climate change is a hoax, does that mean they think nuclear winter is, too?

A better question would be, what exactly is our strategy for the Malthusian predicament? Is it the UN Sustainable Development Goals? Famine? The Border Wall? Glyphosate? Colonies on Mars? What exactly is the agenda here?

In the end those whose systems of economics and governance are best equipped to confront the biophysical limits of the real world will be those best prepared to make it through the death-defying rollercoaster ride now just cresting for launch. The track is out ahead and I frankly don't see anyone seriously planning to repair it.

Tick tock.