Friday, February 17, 2006

I Founded: The Sheila Variations

"This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am."
-- James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

« Georgia: Part III - Shevardnadze Main Georgia - Part V - Georgia's Breakaway Regions »
December 03, 2003
Georgia Part IV - The Georgians
In one of the posts below I describe my old "Country of the Week" thing I used to do on my old blog. Go read it for an introduction to what I am doing here right now. Then scroll up - I am posting these in chronological order, which, unfortunately, means that you all will see them backwards. I also credit the authors who have written about Georgia and from whom I got this information. (I have never been to Georgia - so after all, what the hell do I know?)

1. So the first thing I posted was in regards to Georgia's long long history.

2. My second post was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

3. The third post is about Shevardnadze - the return of Shevardnadze to rescue the former Soviet republic from civil war. (The reason I have unearthed these posts is because of the recent chaos in Georgia ... I had gone back to read through them myself and thought I would bring them over from my old blog to share.)

4. And the following post is a compilation of quotes, basically, from various books, about the Georgians themselves.


GEORGIANS

I marked a bunch of passages in a couple of books and articles as I was preparing for this morning, and then thought that I would compile them and list them out, index-style. It's an interesting thing, to scan over these "snippets", and see what you might pick up about the Georgians: who they are, what drives them. It may be a bit disjointed. However, taken as a whole, a picture begins to emerge.

From The Making of the Georgian Nation by Ronald Grigor Suny:

"Georgian society has its own networks and codes. It is a society dominated by men."


From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:

"Corruption here was less a moral shortcoming than a survival mechanism by a people living in poverty and dominated for centuries by outsiders."

Quote from Lawrence Sheets, Reuters bureau chief who lived in Tbilisi throughout the civil war:

"Every night downtown, macho men with grenade launchers fired into the air at nothing in particular. The road between Batumi and Tbilisi was blocked for months at a time by battles that had no military or political purpose. Mini-rebellions broke out based on nothing really except male testosterone."


From Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? Scholarly Debate and the Realities of Eastern Europe in "The National Interest", Fall 1997, by Anatol Leven:

"The Georgians, with strong cultural traditions of individualism, machismo, and the cult of weapons, differ a great deal from the peaceable, gloomy, and obedient inhabitants of the cities of eastern and southern Ukraine. National character is not a concept much liked by contemporary political scientists, but it is necessary to explain why, all other things being equal, an ethnic dispute in Azerbaijan or Georgia would be much more likely to turn extreme and violent than would be one in Estonia or Ukraine."
From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan: Kaplan interviews Professor Alexidze, a former adviser to the nationalist wacko Gamsakhurdia.

" 'Georgians were passionate against the Soviets and passionate against each other,' said Professor Alexidze. 'Gamsakhurdia destroyed the Soviet spirit more than anyone, but in Georgia, a civil war was necessary because of the kind of people we are. The real cause of the war is our medievalness: our knights of the round table simply quarreled and fought each other.' "


From Among the Russians by Colin Thubron:

"I was in Georgia. The name defines a land whose inhabitants are ancient to it, a people of the black-eyed Armenoid kind, the self-styled offspring of biblical giants. For at least three thousand years they have held their mountain kingdom through disunion, invasion and prodigious bursts of independence, becoming Christian early in the fourth century and surviving conquest with a native glitter and resource ..."


From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:

"Another Georgian intellectual described the Russians to me 'as Scythians, still unformed, unsettled, who in the 20th century rediscovered the art of laying waste whole tracts of territory.' Along with the hatred of communism that often spilled over into hatred of Russians went a dislike of Armenians, 'usurers who ruined Georgian families, who are now allied with Russia against Georgia and Azerbaijan.' 'The Armenians are always claiming that they are the best, that they are fighting with nothing, even while Russia supports them.' 'I don't like Armenians. The Azeris are nicer people.' 'The only good-looking Armenian is Cher.' Listening to Georgians talk about Armenians gave me the chilling sensation of what Old World anti-Semitism must have been like."


Again from Among the Russians by Colin Thubron:

"The high places of its pagan idols -- moon-god and fertility goddess -- were exorcised by Christian churches on the encircling hills and the foundation of its great cathedral is suffused with fables. Clenched in battlement walls, the building is typically Georgian ... It is strong, handsome. It belongs to a tradition grown from the far marches of the ancient Christian world, like the churches of Armenia. Its people show a peasant attachment to it and circumambulate its walls piously in the drenching sun, fondling its blond masonry and leaving flowers at its doors. For the Georgians the Church is the expression of the nation ... Everybody seems at home with God.

From Imperium, by my main man: Ryszard Kapuscinski:

"The splendour and excellence of Georgia's ancient art are overwhelming ... The most glorious period of this work spans the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The faces of the saints, dark, but radiant in the light, dwell immobile in extremely rich gold frames studded with precious stones. There are icons that open, like the altar of Vit Stoss. Their dimensions are immense, almost monumental. There is an icon here on which several generations of masters worked for three centuries ... Then there are the frescoes in the Georgian churches. Such marvels, and yet so little is known about them outside of Georgia. Virtually nothing. The best frescoes, unfortunately, were destroyed. They covered the interior of the largest church in Georgia -- Sven Tschoveli, built in 1010 in Georgia's former capital, Meht ... They were a marvel of the Middle Ages on a par with the stained glass at Chartres. They were painted over on the order of the czar's governor, who wanted the church whitewashed 'like our peasant women whitewash stones.' No restoration efforts can return these frescoes to the world. Their brilliance is extinguished forever."


Again, from Robert Kaplan's interview with the Professor:

"Professor Alexidze told me: 'Our society is rotten, the mafiosi are strong, and while the West worships laws, we worship power. We leapt from the darkness in the late 1980s. We did not have the kind of social and economic development as in Central Europe. So our dissidents were never enlightened.' "


Robert Kaplan interviews a group of intellectuals in Tbilisi (this is in the late 1990s). Here are some of the quotes:

Kikodze: "The Russians built up Tbilisi in the nineteenth century as the capital of Transcaucasia. On this street, where I have lived since 1958, there used to be Kurds, Armenians, Jews, Russians, and others. It was a golden age. We thought nationalism did not exist. Then it destroyed us. The Jews left for Israel; the Armenians, for Armenia; the Russians for Russia; and so on. And now we are losing the Russian language which is a disaster for us. English is still only for a rarefied elite, while the loss of Russian cuts the average Georgian off from the outside world. All our books of learning, our encyclopedias on art, literature, history, science, are in Russian. Young Georgians can no longer communicate with Armenians and Ossetians. There is a new illiteracy promoting ethnic separation."

Rondeli: "Georgians are a very old tribal entity, but we have no identity as a modern state. We are a quasi-state. All nations get what they deserve, so to see what kind of government Georgia will have in the future, it is merely a matter of dissecting our national character. We are nominally Christian, but really we are superstitious atheists. We know how to survive but not how to improve. Our church is pagan, politicized, part of the national resistance, and thus unable to move forward."

Again from Rondeli: "Remember, we had seventy-four years of political-cultural-economic emasculation under the Soviet Union; three generations of Georgians were destroyed. The West concentrates on the crimes of Hitler, but the Nazis ruled for only twelve years."

Saakashvili: "Sometimes very little is needed to survive. We don't need thirty thousand NATO troops or weeks of bombing -- just small, highly specialized security forces from the West to protect our president from assassination, to monitor our borders, to protect the new oil pipeline. If Washington pays attention and gives us advance warning and technical help, we may manage. Unemployment and other statistics are meaningless, because a huge black market helps Georgia survive ... because Georgians have always been corrupt and cynical, with mafias an old tradition, there is not a strong Communist opposition in parliament as in Russia."


From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:

"NATO's air war against the Serbs in Kosovo coincided with my journey through the Caucasus. People here seemed to have two related reactions to it. They were much too impressed with the bold, naked display of Western power to be concerned over the Clinton administration's clumsy diplomacy and planning for the operation. But they also felt that the ten weeks of NATO bombing would never be replicated in the Caucasus, no matter what atrocities the Russians or anyone else perpetrated here."

Robert Kaplan approaches Zaal Kikodze, an archaeologist, living in Tbilisi, to see if he can get some answers about Georgia. Here is how the exchange went:


Kaplan: I was wondering if you could tell me what Georgian history says about Georgia's future.

Kikodze: Such questions are best discussed over cheese and wine.


Kind of says it all, don't it?

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