Back in the early 1960s, there was little doubt in my working class Detroit neighborhood that the Russians were evil brutes with no regard for human life who would, at the first opportunity, try to kill us all.
They were said to be fanatic communists so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they would cheerfully start a nuclear war to speed up the inevitable triumph of communism. This perception was helped by the poor PR skills of their leader, Nikita Khrushchev, a bald, fat guy who wore rumpled and ill-fitting suits. He was given to stunts like taking his shoe off at the United Nations, banging it on the table, and bellowing phrases like “We will bury you.”
But when I finally got to the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, I found out that the Cold War image of the Russians was nothing like the reality.
The Russian people were generally warm, expansive, friendly, fond of children, and wanted most of all to avoid another war.
They were more anti-war than any other people I ever met. That’s because they knew all about war. The entire eastern third of the country had been wrecked in World War II. More than twenty million people had been killed. There were very few men my father’s age. In Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, I saw where a million people who starved to death were buried in giant plots that held ten thousand bodies each. The survivors weren’t out to bury anyone else. That doesn’t mean that the Soviet people didn’t have some bad leaders. But the people did not want another war. And I think the Russians we met came away with a different perspective on Americans.
All that is why I think that so-called citizen diplomat programs like the one that just visited Iran are immensely valuable. No, common citizens can’t make foreign policy. But they can make connections. If you know someone personally, it is harder to see them as devils. It may even be harder to drop bombs on them. The fact is that both President Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been flaming each other for years.
We see them as fanatics; they see us as decadent. There may be some truth in both views, but putting things like that is hardly a prescription for better international relations. This country was turned on its head a generation ago when the pro-American government of the shah was overthrown.
We didn’t see it coming. Americans didn’t know many Iranians back then, and thought they virtually were all thoroughly westernized.
That was a mistake that we are still paying for. Thirty years later, we still don’t know many Iranians, and think they are all radical Islamic maniacs. Frankly, I would rather we didn’t make a second fatal mistake involving the same country twice in one lifetime.
And I am in favor of citizen ambassador programs or anything that makes it less likely that will occur.
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