A new Sputnik feature article worth reading on the attempted regime change operation in Belgrade these past several days
It is a pleasure to bring to your attention an article just published by Sputnik in which I was invited to contribute my thoughts on the attempted Maidan revolution in Belgrade that may have slipped beneath your personal radar screen but was very serious indeed. A couple of well established scholars also participated in this discussion.
To what I have said there about the importance of individuals in making history, I would like to add the following:
Most of our mainstream political scientists and commentators on international affairs deal in abstractions. They are unheroic themselves. They tend to be debunkers of people venerated in the past as heroes. They agree to tearing down statues to people from the past who were considered as great by their contemporaries, if those venerated personalities had some serious flaw in terms of today’s cultural values.
These commentators prefer to direct attention to economic and other ‘objective’ factors which they believe drive the world forward or wherever it is in fact going. It is GNP per capita that counts in measuring the strength of nations, as they see it.
I beg to differ, to differ fundamentally and radically from this view. There are heroes living among us and to deny that is to be hopelessly, unforgivingly small-minded. National leaders can be cowardly, as Ukrainian president Yanukovich was, or they can be brave and fight to the death for what matters to them, like President Lukashenko of Belarus.
Put on a broader footing, this failure to take into account the human dimension explains the failure of our leading political scientists like John Mearsheimer to understand what makes Russia tick, why it alone among the nations of the world stood up directly to the United States empire and why it is likely to win its war against NATO.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023