Report typos and corrections to: corrections@rawstory.com.
Stories Chosen For You
Although great empires rank among the most powerful engines of world history, they are also among the most dangerous, especially as they brood over their decline.
The Russian empire provides a striking illustration of this phenomenon. Traditionally referred to as the “prison of nations,” Russia, in its Czarist and Soviet phases, controlled a vast Eurasian land mass of subject peoples. But the implosion of the empire in 1991 left Russian leaders adrift, uncertain whether to steer their nation toward a more modest role in the world or to revive what they considered their country’s past imperial glory. Ultimately, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, they decided on the latter, employing Russian military power to attack neighboring Georgia, win a civil war in Syria, annex Crimea, and instigate a separatist revolt in Ukraine’s Donbas region. This February, Putin launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, with horrendous consequences.
Along the way, imperial nostalgia has pervaded Putin’s thinking. As early as 2005, he told the Russian parliament that the collapse of the Soviet empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and “a genuine tragedy” for “the Russian people.” In July 2021, he published a long historical article (“On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”) contending that there had never been a Ukraine independent of Russia. During a televised address on February 21, 2022, in which he recognized the two secessionist Donbas regions, Putin again invoked the past, claiming that Ukraine was “historically Russian land.”
This lament for a lost imperium, shared by many Russian leaders, not only showed little regard for people trapped under the yoke of empire, but for their actual history. A Ukrainian nation, with its own language and culture, had existed for many centuries, had been ruled by a variety of nations during that period, and, in 1991, had held a referendum in which 92 percent of the electorate voted for independence from the Soviet Union. Nor did it seem to trouble Putin that, in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the Russian government had formally pledged to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.
Disconsolate Russian officials have their counterparts in Britain. In the aftermath of World War II, as decolonization gathered momentum throughout the far-flung British Empire, the guardians of the Old Order worked to suppress independence struggles and bitterly lamented the decline of imperial grandeur. In 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, angered by the policies of Egypt’s revolutionary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched a British invasion, along with France and Israel, to retake control of the Suez Canal. Blocked in their reassertion of imperial power by the Soviet and U.S. governments, British officials were deeply humiliated and, thereafter, largely settled for a junior partnership with the United States in global operations. Even so, the fact that Britannia no longer ruled the waves continued to sting. In 2002, Boris Johnson―currently Britain’s prime minister―wrote contemptuously that Africa “may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”
The French government, too, grew increasingly dismayed in the postwar era as the Algerians revolted, the Vietnamese routed France’s armed forces, and the French Empire disintegrated. Desperate to fend off imperial collapse, French officials proposed retaining their colonial relationships through a French Union. In 1958, when the people of Guinea voted, instead, for independence, the embittered French government turned to sabotaging the ungrateful new nation by destroying government records, flooding the country with fake banknotes, diverting shipments of food and medicine, and even removing the lightbulbs from government buildings.
Meanwhile, French military officers, convinced that their own government would fail to subdue the Algerian rebels, seized power, toppled the Fourth Republic, and stepped up France’s counterinsurgency war. In 1961, when General Charles de Gaulle, installed in office thanks to the coup, negotiated a peace agreement, French military leaders, horrified, again revolted. Although de Gaulle proved able to outmaneuver them, many disgruntled French military veterans and staunch imperialists flocked to a new, far-right political party. Its descendent, the National Rally, is led by Marine Le Pen, who recently received 42 percent of the vote for the French presidency.
Though the United States, originally a thin string of colonies on the Atlantic coast, is less often regarded as an imperial nation, the reality is that, through wars and treaties, it dramatically expanded across the North American continent and beyond. By the end of World War II, it was one of the largest nations on earth, as well as the richest and most powerful. Even so, as other countries recovered from the conflict and began to assert themselves, fears arose among Americans that they were “losing” nations around the world to Communists, revolutionaries, and nationalists. This anxiety about declining control of global affairs inspired U.S. military intervention in numerous lands, including Vietnam, where, as Lyndon Johnson remarked, the United States could not allow itself to be defeated by a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country.” Although Donald Trump is best-known for promising to “Make America Great Again,” this backward-looking incantation was also employed by earlier presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, to rally Americans behind reviving the nation’s Golden Age.
China’s leaders―especially Xi Jinping―have reached deeper into the past to locate its era of imperial glory. Shortly after taking power in 2012 as Communist Party Secretary, Xi lauded his nation’s five thousand years of history and its “indelible contribution” to world civilization. Condemning China’s more recent years of humiliation at the hands of the colonial powers, he vowed “to achieve the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Xi amplified on this theme in 2018, when, in a speech to the 13th National People’s Congress, he declared that “we are resolved to fight the bloody battle against our enemies . . . to take our place in the world.” Listing China’s historic achievements, he again promised “the great restoration of the Chinese nation.” In the 38-minute speech, in fact, he used the word “great” 35 times. And Xi has managed to turn China into a major power, surpassed only by the United States in economic and military strength. He has also developed a much more assertive foreign policy, dubbed “wolf warrior diplomacy,” as well as a dangerous military confrontation with the United States and other nations in Asia.
Imperial nostalgia is rife in other lands, as well, among them Turkey, India, Hungary, Austria, and Israel, where it helps foster delusions of grandeur and the aggressive programs that accompany them.
The ubiquity and perils of this nostalgia highlight the need to create an international security system to replace today’s international anarchy. Fortunately, the United Nations presents a useful starting point for an international order no longer plagued by imperialism or other forms of international aggression. Although the nations of the world have given the world organization the responsibility to protect international security, they have failed to provide it with the power to do so. Therefore, as we cope with a planet riven by international conflict and war, let us consider how dreams of imperial grandeur might be discarded and how a strengthened United Nations might be used to fashion a more secure and cooperative world.
Dr. Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
This article was originally published at History News Network
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Median pay of top CEOs hits record $14.7 million as workers strike over starvation wages
May 16, 2022
As workers across the U.S. attempt to unionize and walk off the job over brutal conditions and starvation wages, an analysis released Sunday found that the median pay package of top U.S. CEOs jumped to $14.7 million in 2021—the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for executive compensation.
According to the Wall Street Journal's review of data from more than 400 U.S. corporations, total CEO compensation "rose by at least 12% for most of the executives, and most companies recorded annual shareholder returns of nearly 30%." Nine CEOs made $50 million or more in total compensation in 2021, up from just one in 2016 and seven in 2020.
"Much of the pay consisted of equity awards that could ultimately prove to be worth more or less than initially reported," the Journal noted. "In 2020, the median pay package was $13.4 million for the same companies, with median cash compensation of $3.1 million."
The Journal's analysis showed that Expedia CEO Peter Kern brought in the highest total compensation—$294.57 million—among top CEOs last year. Other CEOs on the list include Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav ($216.06 million), ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott ($162.23 million), Apple CEO Tim Cook ($82.35 million), and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon ($77.62 million).
Rising CEO pay stands in stark contrast to the grim economic realities that ordinary workers are facing nationwide as inflation—driven in large part by corporate profits—erodes modest wage gains and expiring pandemic aid leaves vulnerable families without a safety net.
"While most of America struggles to put gas in the tank and pay the grocery bills, price-gouging, excessive-profit-taking CEOs used their captive boards to award themselves record pay," Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law and an expert on corporate governance, tweeted in response to the Journal's findings.
As CEOs rake in huge compensation packages, workers at prominent U.S. companies with ultra-wealthy chief executives—including Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple—are trying to unionize in the face of relentless opposition from management.
In recent months, employees at more than 60 Starbucks locations in the U.S. have voted to form a union, winning a remarkable 90% of elections held thus far.
Additionally, as labor journalist Michael Sainato reported for The Guardian on Monday, "workers in America's fast-food and retail sectors who worked on the frontlines through the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic are continuing a trend of strikes and protests over low wages, safety concerns, and sexual harassment issues on the job."
"My weekly paycheck is no more than $200, $260 at the max," Ashley Sierra, a Dollar General employee who makes $11 an hour, told The Guardian. "I have three children, I cannot survive on $260 a week, it's just not working. It needs to get upped to at least $15 an hour, the bottom is $15, because we work so hard for so little."
Todd Vasos, Dollar General's CEO, made $16.45 million in total compensation last year.
CONTINUE READING
Show less
The racist mass shooting at a supermarket in upstate New York dominated a bloody weekend of gun violence across the United States, a scourge that has increased since the pandemic began.
While the murder of ten Black people by a white supremacist teenager in Buffalo captured news headlines, smaller incidents elsewhere embodied how common public shootings have become in America.
One person was killed and four others wounded after a shooting at a church near Los Angeles on Sunday while the Milwaukee Bucks canceled a party after 20 people were wounded in shootings outside their arena Friday.
More than 45,000 Americans died from guns -- slightly over half by suicide -- in 2021, up from just over 39,000 in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.
As of May 16, some 7,000 people have already died from homicide shootings or unintentional gunshots in the United States this year, with shootings in public places an almost daily occurrence.
There have been 202 mass shootings, defined as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed, already in 2022, according to the archive.
Experts say the rise in gun crime is being fueled by social dislocation caused by the pandemic and the proliferation of so-called "ghost guns" which can be assembled at home and are virtually impossible to trace.
"Unless the United States really works on getting a consistent process in place to regulate, license and monitor gun ownership, you're going to continue to have these types of incidents and they will increase," Keith Taylor, a gun violence expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told AFP.
Also this past weekend, two people were killed and three injured when a gunfight broke out at a flea market in Houston, Texas, on Sunday.
"One weekend in America," tweeted New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, before listing the weekend's spate of shootings.
"It is well past time for outrage and action. It is well past time for Congress to step up and pass real nationwide gun safety legislation," he wrote.
'Hate crime'
But facing a powerful pro-gun lobby, past congressional efforts at tightening the nation's gun laws have generally fallen short -- even after horrific shootings.
Under pressure to clamp down on the violence, President Joe Biden will visit Buffalo on Tuesday to "grieve with the community that lost ten lives in a senseless and horrific mass shooting."
Residents in the city have been holding vigils and laying flowers honoring the dead since Sunday.
Eighteen-year-old suspect Payton Gendron drove more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) from his home to the predominantly Black area surrounding Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo with the "express purpose of taking as many Black lives as he possibly could," officials say.
Wearing heavy body armor and wielding an AR-15 assault rifle, he livestreamed the shooting on Twitch before the site removed it within two minutes.
Media reports linked the shooter to a 180-page manifesto that described a white supremacist ideology and laid out a plan to target a mainly Black neighborhood.
Gendron was charged late Saturday on a single count of first-degree murder and held without bail.
"The killings are being investigated as a racist hate crime," said the Erie County district attorney, John Flynn.
The incident evoked memories of recent US history's most devastating attacks, including a white man's 2015 massacre of nine worshippers in a predominantly Black South Carolina church, and the 2019 attack by a white man in Texas that claimed 23 lives, most of them Latino.
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Copyright © 2022 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com.
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}