The Russians Are Coming!

Ever since Iran started making headlines in the aftermath of its controversial June 12 presidential elections, hearing to what leaders and most citizens there say about the West has reminded me of something long filed away in a dusty corner of my brain.

When I was a kid I was not afraid of monsters or ghosts hiding in the closet. As a matter of fact, I used to "talk to" a couple of somewhat friendly ghosts I imagined hung around me--one was "the joker" and the other was "the frightener." He tried, but he couldn't scare me.

Instead, I feared natural disasters--tornadoes, volcanoes and tidal waves in particular. I also feared the Russians.

The Russians were big, dark, strong, often long-haired men, dressed in strange uniforms or furs, who held torches and swords high above their heads as they rode horses through villages destroying everything in sight. They were the bad guys. Everybody knew that. I had never met any because they lived very far from where I was, but I had seen enough of them on TV and heard enough about the terrible things they did to know that they were pure evil.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (author unknown)

I used to ponder what the Russians wanted with us. The Spaniards had taken the last grain of gold from the island's rivers over a hundred years earlier, so we didn't have much to offer. Then I heard that the threat had something to do with Cuba, though years later I found out that it had more to do with the United States. Cuba was in the neighborhood and was supposed to be the worst place on Earth, even worse than Russia. At some point I found out that the Russians had stolen Cuba from the Cubans and imprisoned them in their own land. And that's the last thing I and many others wanted--to end up like the Cubans.

Stories of Cubans escaping on boats with nothing but the shirts on their backs were common, especially every four years during election time, when the words communism and socialism were used as weapons and when the outcome of the elections would allegedly determine whether or not the Russians would come. Fortunately, if they came, the Americans would come too--or so I heard.

Back then there was no cable TV, no CNN, no email, no faxes, no cellphones, no Internet. We knew what we knew because of what we heard at home and school and what the local media reported. I learned a lot about the world from movies and books, too. They were my only link to the outside.

I don't recall exactly why I thought the pyromaniac psycho horsemen were the Russians, but I suspect my older sister, who early in life demonstrated an extraordinary talent for lying, had something to do with it. As I got older, I lived through many moments of shock upon discovering that something I had thought as true my entire life was but a fantasy sparked by impressive images and fabricated explanations from my sister or oversimplified assumptions on my part.

I also don't recall exactly when I found out that the Russians were not Russian at all. They were warriors and soldiers from everywhere and nowhere, and they were acting. I still thought that whatever they did on screen had to be something that someone had done somewhere at some point.

By the time I got through high school I understood that the Russians and the Americans were in a political power struggle called The Cold War, a term I didn't quite understand but that apparently meant that the two were always fighting and that a nuclear war--World War III--was just around the corner. The new fear in vogue was the bomb. And this time I chose not to be afraid: "If we blow up, we blow up," I used to say. "We're all going to die anyway."

These days, when I see Iranians burning U.S. flags and chanting "death to the U.S." or "death to America" at demonstrations and Friday prayers, I stare in amazement because chanting "death to" anyone is inconceivable to me, not because I'm incapable of hate--given adequate inspiration or provocation, I can tap into it--but because wishing death on anyone isn't part of my reality. Even when I had my thing with the Russians, I didn't wish them dead. There was no hatred, just fear.

So when I see thousands of people shouting menacing chants, mechanically repeating what their leaders tell them to say, wishing death and calamity upon others while their president calls them "humanity-loving" people...well, I can't help but wonder if they do it because they have to or think they have to, or because they want to, or maybe because it has become a mindless habit by now.

And then the question becomes, could and would they outgrow such strongly reinforced anti-American, anti-West sentiments if given the chance and choices I had?



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