Collective Humiliation?

newsreel footage of signing Versailles Treaty

Can countries collectively experience humiliation? Did the onerous conditions of Versailles make for the rise of Hitler? Did the inviting of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia into NATO in 2004 following the period of Perestroika and Glasnost set the stage for Putin’s brand of nationalism? Santayana’s old saw, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” should be signposted in history classrooms around the world. In the exhilaration at the end of the Cold War, the United States engaged in its own form of millenarianism. Democracy and technology would be the beacons; it was the heyday of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of Ideology and the Last Man. Fukuyama’s mentor Samuel Huntington thought differently, correctly predicting the tribalism which characterizes the current age. Still in all, Putin’s gamble is bound to fail; NATO will be back where they left off in the 90s. Can a moderate, less vindictive peace, a Marshall Plan with religious overtones, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the examples of Tunisia and South Africa be negotiated? Will Navalny, Zelensky, and Pussy Riot be the troika presiding over a new peace?

read "Pornosophy: Secession" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Tell It Like It Is" by Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville and Gregg Allman