Yes there are, ridiculously enough. We shouldn’t have any of these parades because it is not the way London lives, unlike New York, but we have had the wretched St Patrick’s one for years with people complaining about St George’s Day not being recognized. So now we have some stupid thing going on for St George’s Day as well. All very dumb. It should be left to individuals or various groups not the Mayor of London or anyone like that.

What I noticed about Irish/English and Irish/American relations is the opposite to what you say. I’m not touching the terrorism topic, that’s a red herring. I’m talking about underlying ethnic tension, a fruit of centuries of grievances between two neighbors in former case – just or unjust, versions vary. The fact that I personally noticed, was a St.Patrick day’s celebrations: there is no parades and green carnations in London on March 17, are there? No leprechauns on the streets, the Mayor of London and catholic Church figures at the head of the parade, are there? In New York they are. Whole city celebrates, not just the Irish.
I was on a train going to NY 10 days before the holiday, and at one of the stops along the way, in a small town called Winter Park, saw their own St. Paddy’s parade, complete with vintage green cars, local beauty queen float and school orchestra. Do small English towns put on festivities like that?

Again, my point is: when the country’s own territory is affected by fighting, it has a tendency not to forget and not to forgive so “fast”. Western Europe included; Britain included.

No money after WWII, not least because of the amount owed to the Americans, which they extracted in full. Marshall Plan was for all Europeans, not just the defeated enemy, for various reasons: create a market, help defeat Communism as well as help people in need.

As for the Irish Question – it’s the Irish that go on and on about it. We don’t like terrorists planting bombs or murdering police officers and soldiers and, indeed, many civilians, especially in Northern Ireland during the last thirty years but I don’t call that historical obsession. It’s the reality of terrorism. Even with the Irish, there is more whingeing from Americans of Irish descent than people in Ireland itself.

There were civil wars, bloody peasant uprisings and inter-regional fighting in Russian history – very possible, in hard numbers more devastating, over the centuries, than the American total. So this kind of bonding, be it class/regional/race is known to Russians, too. Still, the South was not devastated by hordes of aliens with incomprehensible language and mentality.

The American southeast experienced defeat and occupation in the aftermath of the civil war and the resentment over lingered for three generations. Even today, it exist as a kind of cultural bonding joke.

Even during the civil right movement, a lot of whites who previously supported integration switch to opposing it after it became seen as not an internal reform but reform imposed on by others.

There is a genuine problem about Russia’s identity, which is different from Putin’s narrative that he has used to bolster his power. Tatyana is right – there was the Soviet upbringing, which merged with a Russian pride, though in some ways the Soviet ideology also worked agaisnt that. When you think about it, the collapse of the Soviet Union hit the other republics harder as, by no stretch of the imagination, could they now be said to be part of a world power.

The problem is that Russia as a country with a definable sense of national identity developed as the Russian empire grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In that she was very different from the usual imperial powers like France, Britain, Portugal, Netherlands and even Spain who had created a certain identity for themselves before they set out to conquer other lands. When the Soviet Union broke up Russia found herself with borders that she had never had before in history and that was understandably confusing.

-Russia thought itself a world power because, well, it was. Otherwise who America was fighting the cold war with, a “specter of communism”? Half a world was influenced by Russia, half of countries had pro-Soviet socialist/communist governments and policies. The pride you talk about doesn’t come directly from that fact, but what was behind that fact: that 3 generations of Soviet people were born and raised in confident belief that “our cause is the most righteous and true. Our victory over the world is inevitable because the victory of truth and righteousness is inevitable”. Ideology is the source of the pride. National pride without ideology degenerates into ethnographic festivals with costumed reenactment toy battles.

-”West” doesn’t forgive fast (see Helen’ example of French occupation of Ruhr – hell, all history of Franco-German wars. History of ALL regional unrest in Western Europe). America does. There are many reasons for it; the main one – I think – is that USA never in its history experienced mass foreign occupation of its territory. Yes, our guys died overseas, but nobody’s wife was raped by foreign soldiers in her hometown in rural Missouri. Excepting American Indians, of course.

Russia, on the contrary, was not only allowed but encouraged to believe that it had not been defeated. Vast amounts of Western money (mostly American so you ought to know about it) was poured into the country to provide help in various ways, such as ensuring the safety of various rather unsteady nuclear devices and structures (much of the money disappeared to no good purpose). Yes, there were Western businessmen who moved in to make a fast buck but that is nothing compared to Russian and other post-Soviet businessmen who were asset-stripping their own country. Despite her economic and political shortcomings, Russia was taken into organizations it had no business to be, such as the G7 that became the G8 to accommodate her. NATO set up all sorts of special committees and relationships to include Russia in all sorts of deliberations and we all saw how successful it was.

Russia was humilated in the nineties and can now stand up straight (give or take an economic crisis because the price of gas and oil has fallen and a complete destruction of any form of democracy inside the country) is the Putinite narrative. We must not fall for it.

The Germans felt cheated of their “place in the sun”. Hitler could sell his “the jews betrayed us” bit because so many Germans believed that there was no way they could have been defeated by honest force of arms. The Palestinians have the same sense of being cheated at every turn. The entire Arabic/Muslim world feels the very existence of Israel is an insult to their collective pride and just status of the political rulers of their lands. Their rulers exploit this to hide their own brutality and incompetence.

Russians to have a fierce sense of their “place in the sun”. Russians have always believed themselves a special people. The Orthodox church and the nobility have for centuries pushed the idea that Russia and Slavs in general held a special rough and earthy morality the rest of Europe lacked. The Communist played this cultural belief up even higher. Even Solzhenitsyn argued for this view in his later years.

Due to several centuries of massive invasions form both the west and east, Russian feel they have an innate right to interfere with and occupy any country they border. They do view any attempt to prevent their domination of their neighbors as form of attack. Combined with their sense of moral superiority they readily fall into not only aggrieved entitlement but also paranoia. Anyone who does not submit is seeking to actively subvert them and deny them their rightful place.

Given that Russia does not seem able to function without an authoritarian government, they do present a danger for the future.

James