John Pepper - Pepperspectives

AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTON OF MY CONCERN ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP –

ANATOLY CHERNYAEV

Anatoly Chernyaev was perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev’s closest confident from 1986 onward.  He was his principal foreign policy advisor.  

In what follows, I want to make it clear.  I am not equating President Trump to Stalin, in the way he thinks let alone what he did.

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In reading William Taubman’s excellent new biography of Gorbachev:  His Life and Times, one reads this on Page 260:

Chernyaev’s family was particularly cultivated; he received music lessons, learned French and German from private teachers and fell in love with Gogol and Shakespeare in school.  He studied history at Moscow University in the late ‘30s, fought heroically in World War II (part of the time on skis in an Alpine battalion), then got a Candidate’s Degree (roughly equivalent to an American PhD), writing his dissertation on the topic, “Britain’s Role During the First Years After World War I.”  Unlike so many of his generation, he never worshipped Stalin.  It wasn’t the repressions, he said, “about which we didn’t know much and which we thought might have been mistakes or even justified” or “the terrible losses early in World War II” or “in a revulsion against policies like the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.”  For Chernyaev, it was the sense that “a crude, ignorant, completely alien force” was ruling over a culture that cherished Tolstoy and Chekhov and admired foreign writers like Shakespeare and Anatole France.”

So it is for me:  My revulsion against Trump rests on his lack of values and his disrespect for other people, his lack of kindness, empathy and his disregard for the truth. He stands in opposition to the very values which, using his own term, have made America great. 

These are the qualities of this man which have repelled me from the start.  We should not stop calling them out, but nor can we afford to wallow in them with a sense of superiority.  Worse yet, we cannot fall into the trap of believing that our denunciation of Trump’s behaviors is sufficient to carry out our responsibility. We must also act proactively and positively in our own world, in our own way to live those values we hold dear and improve the lives of those whom we can touch.