Dostoevsky, a prophet of today's spiritual malaise across the West

 (To the right, a portrait of Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov) (

 

It was 34 years ago in 1992 that I stood in the St. Petersburg apartment where Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky lived and wrote. In his writing room were his desk, his last pack of cigarettes, the couch on which he died. Outside a window in the apartment was a church.

 

“He insisted that he be able to look out the window and see a church,” our tour guide told us.

 

I’ve had Dostoevsky on my mind in recent weeks. My son, a lawyer in New Orleans, sent me a copy of the writer’s 1873 novel Demons, and I’m making my way through the 714-page tome. Actually I’m reading it a second time. The first, when its title was The Possessed, was when my late wife Marilyn and I went to Russia in 1992.

 

(Photos by Joseph B. Atkins of Dostoevsky's apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia)
 

 

Besides being one of the world’s greatest novelists, Dostoevsky was also something of a prophet. The entire theme of Demons—and implied theme of his other works—is the incipient spiritual downfall of modern mankind, particularly his beloved Russia.

 

As a former socialist who spent eight years in a Siberian prison for his youthful radicalism, Dostoevsky saw the invasion of all the “isms” from Europe as indeed demonic, foreshadowing of Russia’s own descent into materialism and atheism, what indeed became of Russia after the 1917 revolution and its subsequent 70 years of Communist rule as the Soviet Union.

 

“Idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism,” writes translator Richard Pevear in his foreword to Demons describing Dostoevsky’s world view. “The assertion of human autonomy is finally a revolt against God; it is also the final lie.”

 

Does  Dostoevsky has something to say to the modern West, where war and greed and materialism rule not only our headlines but our lives. Isn’t Europe today deeply compromised by a materialist neoliberal agenda that pushes immigration on its citizens so that its capitalist warlords can have cheap labor, that pushes coup d’etats and war in Ukraine and elsewhere to serve the American Empire rather than its own economic and social interests? Aren’t the European Union and NATO the very symbols of this?

 

I lived in Germany for four years in the 1970s and never saw one of its magnificent cathedrals actually crowded with worshipers. I never met a strongly religious European.

 

“The spirit of the continent’s religion … drove people to war and stirred them to defense,” writes Charles Murray in his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe. “It also drove Europeans to the greatest heights of human creativity. It drove Europeans to build St. Peter’s in Rome, the Cathedral at Chartres, the Duomo of Florence and the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. It inspired the works of Bach, Beethoven and Messiaen, Grünewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim and Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.”

 

Certainly two world wars and a long Cold War left an exhausted, spiritually depleted Europe where even the philosophers had given up the search for truth in exchange for deconstructed word games. 

 

Today, in the face of massive numbers of Muslim immigrants, many of them highly religious, Europeans have little spiritually to offer in response.

 

In the United States, fundamentalist Christianity does wield at least a kind of superficial influence in the Trump Administration, but this version of the faith is grounded in a “ministry of success” that extols raw capitalism and ignores large chunks of Jesus’ teachings.

 

When I was in Russia, I remember walking past the Museum of Atheism in St. Petersburg. Much more impressive were the crowded Orthodox churches and monasteries, where priests and monks heard confessions and offered prayers that 70 years of official atheism couldn’t erase. Years later, I saw similarly crowded churches and cathedrals in Poland that gave testament to a faith forgotten or ignored farther to the west.

 

“God is good to us,” 20-year-old Arthur Smolyak told my wife and me in Russia in 1992. He was a seminarian from Moldavia studying in Zagorsk, an ancient center of the Orthodox faith 44 miles northeast of Moscow.  “It used to be easy to get in the seminary. Now it’s very hard because so many people want to get in.”

 

Dostoevsky didn’t allow his religious faith to blind him from the needs of the people. It only deepened his awareness of those needs. “I could never understand the notion that only one-tenth of people should attain higher development, and the remaining nine-tenths should only serve as a means and material to that goal while themselves remaining in darkness,” he wrote in Diary of a Writer in 1876.  

 

However, Dostoevsky saw that too many so-called saviors or champions of those nine-tenths are themselves so spiritually empty that they in their heart of hearts only “love money terribly … and value it to the extreme.” That is their god—money—and one could add power. In shedding a light onto this darkness, Dostoevsky stressed that ultimately man has the power to choose whether to allow the “demons” of the world to rule his life.

 

His hope was that man would make the right choice. His fear was that he would not.

Somehow Hollywood produced a pro-Castro film noir in 1959, something as unlikely in today's noirish landscape as it was then

  

For a while, I couldn’t believe what I was watching on television, a pro-Cuban Revolution, anti-Batista Hollywood film made shortly after the revolution and during the post-McCarthy-era’s continuing nationwide harassment of anything hinting at communism.

 

Pier 5, Havana, a 1959 thriller starring Cameron Mitchell and Allison Hayes, tells the story of the American Steve Daggett (Mitchell) coming to Cuba to find a missing friend and encountering a pro-Batista counterrevolutionary group that has kidnapped his friend to use him to convert airplanes into bombers. Steve finds himself helping to frustrate those efforts and support Fidel Castro’s new government.

 

It’s amazing such a film wasn’t verboten in an America still reeling from U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Commie witchhunt. In the immediate years ahead lay Castro’s conversion to communism, JFK’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 that threatened the nuclear destruction of the world.

 

Today, after decades of economic sanctions that have kept Cuba stuck in a kind of 1950s time warp, U.S. President Trump is threatening another Cuban invasion and takeover. Given his criminal bombing war against Iran, kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and his wife, and killing of boat crews off the coast of Venezuela, Trump’s threats need to be taken seriously.

 

What Pier 5, Havana reminded me, however, is the interesting role of film noir—Pier 5, Havana is considered a “neo-noir”—in exposing the dirty underside of American capitalism. Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s ties to Big Capital and the mafia in the United States were key to his hold on power. He was a handpicked puppet of the U.S. whose domestic support came from sugar plantation owners and the super wealthy in a country that, then as now, suffered from great poverty.

 

Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir, Kiss Me Deadly, is a classic example. Leftwing screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides took the crypto-fascist plot of crime writer Mickey Spillane’s novel and turned it into a fierce cry against the threat of nuclear Armageddon. “This is lousy. Let me see what I can do with it,” Bezzerides told Aldrich after reading Spillane’s novel. Then later: “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it.”

 

 

Noir is full of working class sympathies and righteous indignation against the abuses and exploitation by the 1 percent. The French identified film noir and named it, but it could only have taken root in American soil, where hyper individualism and its offshoots of greed and selfishness are championed. It’s as American as Apple pie and baseball.

 

Hardboiled writer Jim Thompson, whose books led to several great noirs, was a former Industrial Workers of the World/IWW Wobbly. Dashiell Hammett spent time in prison because of his radical political views and allegiances.

 

Noir grew out of the hardboiled school of writing in the 1920s and the gangland films of the 1930s. G.I. disillusionment after World War II helped set the stage for the dark films that followed. Those soldiers had fought fascism in Europe and Asia only to return to a nation held captive by the U.S. House for Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy.

 

Trump was an understudy of McCarthy crony Roy Cohn. In many ways, he’s a blast from a not-so-good past. Trump’s world provides dark and fertile soil for a new wave of noir, and I hate it as much as I love those old black-and-white movies.

 

Jesse Jackson in 1988: "I do intend to be a part of the conscience of the nation"

(Jesse Jackson in 2013)
  

I watched Jesse Jackson from a few rows behind him on the yellow school bus in Houston’s crime-and-poverty-ridden 3^rd District as someone in the rear shouted, “We’ve got the president on the bus!”

 

It was late fall 1988, and Jackson was no longer a presidential candidate. He was a campaigner for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. Jackson would never be president, and he probably knew it after two unsuccessful runs to become the nation’s first black president.

 

“I will continue working, fighting for justice at home,” the 47-year-old minister and civil rights leader would say soon after that supporter shouted his school bus endorsement. “I will continue to study and grow.”

 

I was a reporter for Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C., at the time, and my assignment was to follow Jackson around the nation as he campaigned for Dukakis. For weeks, we traveled together—from the Texas-Mexico border to Wisconsin’s border with Canada. At each stop, he told the crowds—from domestic workers in Texas to the destitute poor in New Orleans’ Desire Housing Projects to farmers in Wisconsin—to “keep hope alive”, that they are “somebody”, that they need to keep reaching for “higher ground.”

 

Jackson, who died Feb. 17 at the age of 84, kept his promise. He did indeed spend the rest of his life studying and growing and certainly fighting for justice. He was a tireless supporter of black people, yes, but also of all people regardless of race. I remember well his familiar reminder to the huge media presence among his multi-racial audiences that they should consider the hard-working folks who rose early in the morning to come and clean their hotel rooms and make sure they had clean sheets.

 

“I always seek to establish a moral foundation to any speech,” he said to us later on the small plane that flew us to many stops. “There is no greater moral authority than the Bible. Jesus was a master teacher.”

 

In 1988, Jackson’s mission included keeping the national Democratic Party tied to its roots in the working class, and it put him at odds with members of the Democratic Leadership Council, a largely Southern organization led by the likes of Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. John Breaux, D-La. The DLC wanted the party to shift to the center-right to blunt the hemorrhaging of white males to the Republican Party.

 

Jackson “fits in like a big thorn,” Atlanta-based political analyst Clairbourne Darden told me in 1988.

 

Jackson lost that fight as today’s Democratic Party is largely fixed in a Clintonian center-right mode with little real interest in the party that once put Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the White House.

 

In his first bid for the presidency in 1984, Jackson received 3.3 million votes in the Democratic Party primaries. He more than doubled that in his 1988 bid with 6.9 million votes. He was never to win the big prize, but he did set the stage for Barack Obama to become the first black president a couple decades later.

 

Born in 1941 in a three-room house with no running water and an outhouse in the back in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson played football in college and gravitated quickly toward the burgeoning civil rights movement. He became a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was with Martin Luther King Jr. when King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968.

 

Jackson would go to make his Rainbow Coalition and Operation Push major forces for social justice (the organizations would later combine). His work reached beyond the United States and made him a voice heard and listened to across the world.

 

“I do intend to be a part of the conscience of the nation,” he told black graduate business students in Houston back in 1988.

 

He was right about that, and his success is one reason why he will be remembered long after his death.

 

 

Trump better hope his gambit in Venezuela doesn't turn into another Vietnam

 (To the right, the author in Vietnam in 1971)

I was an anti-war protester in college who ended up getting drafted and serving as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam. Burned out with protesting and not wanting to flee to Canada, I was a guy from a blue-collar family without a deferment, like so many of the soldiers who ended up in Vietnam.

 

As a former political activist, however, I couldn’t help from appreciating the irony in a poster I spotted on or near my base in Plantation, South Vietnam, a handful of miles north of Saigon. It was 1971, and Nguyen Van Thieu was running for re-election as president of the “Republic” of Vietnam. The poster encouraged voters to cast their ballots for a man who’d been in charge since 1965.

 

Only problem was he had no opposition. It was a one-man race. Thieu was the only choice South Vietnamese voters had.

 

The point today is that the United States had no problem sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers like me to fight for an authoritarian regime that was anything but a republic or a democracy. Thieu had been a turncoat supporter of the French colonialists before he became a puppet for the Americans.

 

This is important in light of the recent U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife on unproven claims that they are tyrannical drug lords. The U.S. government has no problem with dictators or even drug lords so long as they don’t interfere with the flow of U.S. capital or nationalize industries that once belonged to powerful U.S. corporations.

 

In fact, on December 1, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker.

 

Like his predecessors, President Donald Trump, who campaigned as a “peace” candidate sick of endless wars such as those fought by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become enthralled in the chess game that is international politics. He has threatened another war against Iran and a takeover of Greenland, proposed building a money-making seaside resort in bombed-out Gaza in league with his ethnic cleanser friends in Israel, and rattled his sword at China and occasionally even Russia despite his amateurish efforts to end the war in Ukraine. He has ordered bombing in Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Syria.

 

Trump won re-election because voters thought he was going to save them from the “Bidenomics” that had failed to quell inflation or resolve the growing housing issue. A year into his new term he seems to have lost interest in domestic economic issues, and yet, like his predecessor Joe Biden, claims life is so much better in today’s America.

 

The housing crisis? Price of eggs and inflation in general? Health care? Who cares?

 

What’s different about Trump from his predecessors is that he doesn’t sugarcoat his imperialistic motives. He blatantly says he’ll “run” Venezuela in the wake of Maduro’s kidnapping. He claims Venezuelan oil reserves as U.S. oil reserves. He says Greenland should be under U.S. control regardless of Denmark’s claims or what that means to the basic premises or future of NATO’s existence. He lies about why he kidnapped Maduro but he doesn’t couch his motives in talk of “democracy” or “human rights” like so many previous U.S. leaders.

 

His disregard—actually contempt—of his allies in Europe and the rest of the Western world is on full display. As seen in Trump’s year-long struggle to find peace in Ukraine, European leaders themselves have proven they care little about peace or even democracy. They give their blind support to war in Ukraine even though its leader, Volodymir Zelensky, runs an authoritarian regime that allows no opposition. They actually care little about Ukraine. Their sole aim is to keep the United States on board as their protector and benefactor.

 

Europe’s decline as a Western model of democracy and good government is painful for this writer, a former resident of Germany and son of a German mother and an American father who fought for Europe’s freedom against tyranny in World War II. Today’s Europe veers toward being unrecognizable under its incompetent leadership and with the growing presence of migrants who are as autocratic and anti-democracy as the countries they fled.

 

From far away, Russia and China watch as Trump bullies his way across the continents and as Europe falls ever deeper into irrelevance. They are powers that bullies like Trump are wary to confront directly, and they are led by seasoned leaders who understand the chess game Trump treats as checkers. When will they say, “Enough is enough”?

 

I left Vietnam a year or two before the ultimate disaster, when U.S. helicopters full of fleeing Vietnamese and Americans scrambled to lift themselves from Saigon’s rooftops to escape the ignominy of utter defeat.

 

Maybe Trump should have not avoided the draft and spent a little time in Vietnam himself. Already in Venezuela, militias and underground forces are gathering to oppose Trump’s plans for their country. The Bolivarian Revolution led by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro is alive and well. Like Vietnam, Venezuela has plenty of jungles and mountains where its revolutionaries can hide and launch attacks and mount a potentially long, disastrous war, the kind of war Trump campaigned against.