Friends or Enemies who can tell?

Now I know I raised my head above the parapet a little bit when I wrote ‘I Hate American’s’ and I think I was fortunate not to have my Davy Crockett hat blown off! But I have been thinking about this a bit more over the last week or so. I mean I am a sociologist I should have some insight into this stuff, shouldn’t I?

I do really, despite my blogs and comments on other people’s sites see myself as an internationalist. A socialist even, I’d even go as far as a Marxist, in the sense that some of the French Post Modernists were once all unreconstructed Marxists, I have moved with the times and the times have moved me.

I have recently married a Ukrainian Woman. (This dear friend is one of the dangers of the internet, so many women, so little time!) And of course I have visited her home in Ukraine (not ‘The’ Ukraine notice) many times and of course I have met her family.

My first visit there was over the Christmas 2002. This is the orthodox Christmas that happens on January 7th. So there I was in Tonya’s flat awaiting my first meeting with mum and dad. I was scared. I knew very little Russian, apart from ‘Hello, I’ll have a beer’ and I knew they had no English.

So they turn up and immediately Ukrainian mum, Maria, does exactly what my mum would do and that’s dive into the kitchen and start cleaning up and cooking. I and Genady were shoved together alone in the sitting room. He and I didn’t have a common language, but we, as you do in these circumstances, had a conversation.

During this ‘conversation’ Genady told me he had been a Major in the Soviet Air Force and that he had been a pilot flying MIGs. He also told me that during the 1950’s he was shot down by the Americans over the Black Sea. He had ejected safely and then spent two days floating in the Black Sea before being picked up by an American Submarine, taken to Turkey and repatriated.

I thought this was amazing. I mean, I know about the Cold War and all that but the USSR and USA actually shooting down one another wasn’t that almost WW3? It makes you think!

So fast forward Twenty Years and here I am in a Bad Marriage, having returned from South Africa, having emigrated there ( I was Young, Foolish and politically naive, nobody had told me about apartheid, the first I knew of it was seeing the gun toting Nazis policing Jan Smuts Airport when I arrived). It’s the late 1970’s I was unemployed, still only about 23 so what did I do, I joined the British Army – why? I don’t know.

Anyway for the three months I served my country I learnt how to kill people, admittedly it was with a SLR and various other weapons not my hands, (that sounds like a regret but it isn’t, that’s why I left) but the crux of the thing which I have only just realized is that the people they were training me to kill were the Russians!

Yes the Soviets. My new family! They were my enemy, and yours too if you grew up in that era. My wife would have been a child. (She’s nearly 10 yrs younger than me) She was in the pioneers. My sister in law was a member of the Party. My brother in law was in the Soviet Army! My Dad in Law a MIG pilot. These people who I have just spent a wonderful month with in the Crimea and I love were all, 30 years ago and less, our enemy!

Now isn’t that ridiculous!

I am so glad I was a member of CND and other peace organisations. And I guess it’s this sort of realisation that connects with what’s happening in the world today. Lets forget all this WMD bullshit in Iraq and remember that those ‘terrorists’ we are bombing and shooting, may one day be part of your family. It’s worth thinking about. And personally I like the way Michael Moore thinks about it too. I wish we had an English Version of him. Political Satire in England is just too tame.