Georgia Archives - MICHAEL O. ALLEN

The Civil-Rights Issue of Our Time

By michael o. allenHomepageNo Comments

While much of the country is rightly focused on the presidential election, there’s no contest more important to me this year than an initiative on the ballot in California. If it passes with a simple majority, Proposition 8 will take away the fundamental right to marry for same-sex couples in that state. The measure has the heavy financial backing of the Mormon church, and recent polls suggest that the outcome could be very close.

I strongly oppose Proposition 8 because it’s unfair and wrong. Please join me in donating here. There’s still time to have an impact, and no amount is too small. And if you vote in California, please vote No on Prop 8.

You might wonder why I care at all about Prop 8. I live in Georgia. I’m straight. And I’m already married. What’s in it for me?

Well, you see, this issue is personal for me. My wife and I are an interracial couple. She’s black. I’m white. We’re both mindful that, not so long ago, interracial marriage was illegal in our home state. We believe very strongly that loving couples should have the right to marry without fear of discrimination. Our own marriage was only possible because the United States Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, and I shudder to think what my life would be like today if the right to marry someone of a different race or color had been put to a majority vote.

Yet that’s precisely what thousands of same-sex couples in California face right now. A referendum on human dignity and equality.

We can’t let Prop 8 pass. This is too important. This is the civil rights issue of our time, and we must rise to the challenge. Do something — please.

Go to www.noonprop8.com to help, or make a donation here.

Cross-posted from Facebook.

October 31, 2008

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Georgian Nights and Days

By michael o. allenHomepage3 Comments

A friend elsewhere (on Facebook) criticized my post yesterday about the Caucasus crisis.

He said, in part:

“with due respect, I’m a bit worried that even avowedly progressive people like you in America seem to hold rather one-sided view of the current South Ossetia crisis: without apparently/admittedly realising that a mirror-image history of our action over Kosovo is repeating itself!”

I don’t deny that my reaction to the crisis has been knee-jerk:

Russia, a nation with 142 million people on the world’s largest land mass, stomps Georgia (Pop. 4.6 million), one of the world’s smallest nation.

That was and still is my reaction to this crisis.

I should say that I do not have any romantic notions of the light of democracy being extinguished in Georgia. My progressive leanings does not blind me to the flawed character at the center of this drama.

Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili is a thug and a con man. He was at the head of a mob of drunken louts (I would not know this but he allegedly, clad in jeans and a leather jacket, held a single rose on his way to parliament that day–hence, the ‘rose revolution’) who used the excuse of a disputed election in November 2003 to storm the parliament and literally drive then president Eduard Shevardnadze out of office.

I don’t doubt that the United States, tired of Shevardnadze’s halting steps toward full alliance with the West, put Saakashvili up to that bit of political adventure.

My interlocutor’s Kosovo comparison is actually more than a bit flawed.

The ethnic Ossetians do not really have much of an argument with Georgia. What discord exists in the region is usually fomented by Russia and the puppet regime (made up of Russian officials and intelligence agents) it set up there in the early 1990’s after it invaded. There is no history of ethnic violence, no threat of Georgia, despite Vladimir Putin’s claim, ethnically cleansing the Ossetians.

It is a sort of pretend breakaway region in that it is Russia trying to gouge it out of Georgia. The region is an internationally recognized region of Georgia. But Russia sees it fit to cause mischief just to let Georgia know it is there.

As president, Saakasvhili has been extremely foolish, taunting Russia by making cooing noises at NATO, asking for membership and parading its military, equipped by the West and the U.S., provocatively. You should not be flirting with nations and institutions that one of the worlds major powers (and still very dangerous because it is wounded and has an inferiority complex) considers hostile to all its interests and aspirations when you share a long border with that power.

As I said yesterday, Brother Putin (Vlad the Impaler) don’t play that. He will squash you like a bug. I am actually surprised he did not just kill Saakasvhili and be done with it. That’s what he did with most enemies inside and outside Russia.

When Putin set up that recent provocation in South Ossetia, Saakashvili’s response was not wise, not at all, the opposite of what a statesman would do.

In fact, he responded like a drunk would when challenged to a bar fight. Not having the judgment that he was in no condition to fight, he waded in and, in the process, hurt his nation.

Saakashvili, if he’s not killed, will have no country left to run (Putin might even take his beautiful wife, Sandra Elisabeth Roelofs, for his own). Saakashvili will end up pumping gas out of “that lone gas pump in a desert” that his country, Georgia, is about to become.

August 12, 2008

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A Clear Voice

By michael o. allenHomepageNo Comments

The United States is not speaking with a forked tongue about Russian atrocities in Georgia before the United Nations Security Council.

Russia and the U.S. traded hot accusations at the Security Council over Moscow’s aggressive handling of its military operation in Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia and the bombing of Georgia proper.

Georgian diplomats at the U.N. asked for “immediate diplomatic and humanitarian intervention to protect georgian from russian ongoing aggression.” A U.S.-European resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire is pending but Russia is certain to veto it.

I am not sure how much U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad was freelancing before the Security Council on Sunday and how much administration policy he was voicing:

“We must condemn Russia’s military assault on the sovereign state of Georgia, the violation of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the targeting of civilians and the campaign of terror against the georgian population,” Khalilzad told the council.

Which brought an angry retort from Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin:

“This statement, ambassador, is absolutely unacceptable, particularly from the lips of the permanent representative of a country whose actions we’re aware of, including with regards to civilian populations . . .”

Churkin was obviously about to discuss U.S. atrocities in Iraq, including indiscriminate bombing of civilian population in that country over the course of the last several years. But, as we know that American ears are too delicate for truth about their own country, CNN U.N. Correnspondent Richard Roth broke in at this point, speaking over Churkin’s voice, with a useless observation about this being the most heated confrontation between the two superpowers since the cold war.

It is a useless observation because it sought to obscure how the Iraq war has degraded America’s moral standing the in the world. In the past, America could speak with moral authority on an issue such as this, and have the world pay attention. No more. Russian laughed in our face and told us to butt out.

It did not stop Khalilzad, of course, from speaking out forcefully. Khalilzad was famously reprimanded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for appearing on a panel alongside the Iranian foreign minister at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland at a time when the Bush administration was not talking to Iran.

Rice has contented herself with working in the background on the Russian-Georgian crisis. George W. Bush, meanwhile, has been strangely mealy-mouthed in public statements about the crisis.

Khalilzad told the Security Council on Sunday that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had told Sec. of State Rice in a phone conversation that Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, must go. He then turned to ambassador Churkin and, dramatically, asked:

“Is the goal of the Russian Federation to change the leadership of Georgia?”

Churkin waved away the question inside the council but told journalists outside the chamber that some leaders, meaning Saakashvili, should contemplate how useful they’ve become to their people.

“Regime change is purely an american invention, purely an American invention,” Churkin, nevertheless, insisted. “We never apply this terminology in our political thinking.”

Khalilzad persisted that Russia’s overreach in Georgia could undermine the relationship of the two powers

“We want to make sure our Russian counterparts to understand that the days of overthrowing leaders by military means in europe, those days are gone,” he said.

Churkin, sly and charming, told reporters the truth:

“I don’t think we’re in danger of somehow jeopardizing our relationship with the United States.”

He is right.

No one, not the U.S., not the Europeans, will do a damn thing to help Georgia. Georgia is dead and gone, hors d’oeuvre, to Russia’s insatiable appetite for territory. In a time not too far in the future, all that will remain of the nation we now know as Georgia will be comprised of a desert, a couple of gas pumps, and oil pipelines leading out to the Black Sea.

Who will stop Russia?

August 11, 2008

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