Giving the Ukrainians their due: language meets politics

 I mentioned the other day (my blog entry for March 29) that I've been interested for years in the many ways language and culture and politics (among other things) intersect.

I'm posting this for the two-and-a-half friends who might conceivably find this interesting. I realize I'm writing for myself here for the most part. But what can I say? I really do find it interesting how the world works and how just when you think you know what it's all about, it has more to teach you.

Putin thought he was riding a great white horse and bringing those pesky Ukrainians back into the fold. Instead he now has to watch his army get butchered because he so badly underestimated the morale of the Ukrainians to defend their homeland - not just the soldiers, but the babushkas with their Molotov cocktails, as well. He called it really really wrong.

Countless folk who had no interest at all in the Ukrainian language are now learning bits and pieces that never would have crossed their radar a month ago. They're learning that there's more to the story than the claim that Slavic languages are so close to each other as to be almost mutually intelligible. It's not so much that Ukrainian and Russian are so very close linguistically as it is that Russian was once the lingua franca of the Soviet world. And that meant that while few Russians learned Ukrainian, something like 98% of Ukrainians learned Russian and to this day many Ukrainians can and do use Russian on a daily basis, especially those who live East of the Dnieper River, which divides the country and runs through the capital, Kiev.

A certain number of these people of Eastern Ukraine are Russian people and would love to see their region become Russia. But Putin overestimated their number. A great many more folk, even Russian speakers, developed an attachment to Ukraine as their homeland and wanted to get out from under Russian influence, their native language notwithstanding. One of the ways this shift in political attitudes is being manifested, including into an ever-growing Ukrainian nationalism, is that people are saying they no longer want to be assumed to be speakers of Russian (even when they are!). Evidence is showing up in ways the Ukrainian language is being brought front and center, both formally, and sociolinguistically.

One of the first things I noticed is that the media were pronouncing the name of the capital differently. I had always heard it pronounced Kee-yev. Turns out that's the Russian version of the city. They write it КИ - ЕВ ( К + I + YE + V). The Ukrainians write it quite differently. They write it К + И + Ї + В.

The Ukrainian sound represented by И is similar to the Russian letter Ы, not the Russian letter И.  Russian Ы and Ukrainian И are pronounced like the short English i in "stick" except that it's more in the center of the mouth, not the front - halfway between short i and the u in "duh!"  Best to hear a native speaker pronounce it.

The next Ukrainian letter is Ї. That's an I with two dots on top of it. It's pronounced like the word "ye" in Hear ye, hear ye!

Finally, the last letter in Kiev is В. It's more like the Spanish b in that is sounds to English ears like a cross between a v and a w when it comes after a vowel. And in Ukrainian, it actually devolves into a w sound too, depending on the speaker and the dialect. 

So here's a summary. If you want to pronounce the Russian name for the city of KИЕВ (Еnglish spelling: Kiev), you say "Kee-yev." But if you want to pronounce the Ukrainian name for the city of КИЇВ (English spelling: Kiyiv or Kiyiw) you say...

Now here's where it gets weird. Instead of teaching English speakers to use the Ukrainian pronunciation of the name: K plus YU as in YUCK (kind of) plus YEE plus something between v and w, the powers that be have decided to simplify it and simply tell media people to pronounced it "KEEV."

Fine with me. I enjoy simplifying complexity. KEEV it is.

Turns out we in "the West" (speakers of languages like French, German, English, Spanish, Frisian, Corsican, Sardinian, etc.) are not the only ones learning a whole new political reality in solidarity with our new heroes, the Ukrainians. The Japanese have joined the pack. They are now explaining to the good people of Mikado-land that they should stop using the traditional Russian names for the cities in Ukraine and start using more-or-less Ukrainian pronunciations.

To wit, this screenshot from Terebi (as in "terebizhon) Asahi: "changes to the pronunciation according to the Ukrainian language"

Now, if you don't read katakana, let me transliterate for you. From left to right, three across the top, then two on the bottom, this graphic instructs you to

Stop saying (in black) ...                    and Start saying (in red)...

chi-e-ru-no-bu-i-ri                               chi-yo-ru-no-o-bi-ri

ki-e-hu                                                ki-i-u

ha-ri-ko-hu                                         ha-ru-ki-u

o-de-ssa                                              o-de-e-sa

ru-ga-n-su-ku                                     ru-ha-n-shi-ku  (n.b. Russian "g" is Ukrainian "h")

Slava Ukrayini, the world is finally giving you your due!

Culture as justification for wrongdoing

 Once upon a time, back in the day when I spent several hours on most days in front of a classroom, I taught a graduate seminar on "The Meaning of Culture." The way I went about it was to explore the range of meanings of a number of topics that intersected with culture: culture and religion, for example, or culture and society, culture and politics (i.e., power), and culture and civilization.

I let go of any serious academic pursuits when I retired, but my interest in those areas has not diminished. And, like Paul Krugman, who regrets he has only thirteen hours a day to devote to reading about Ukraine, I sit in frustration at our powerlessness to do anything to help the Ukrainians drive the Russians out of their country, and I try to channel that frustration into exploring the extent of the problem, as well as all sorts of ancillary issues such as the fact that Ukrainian и is pronounced like Russian ы аnd Ukrainian doesn't have the letter ы, that Russian и is pronounced like Ukrainian і and Russian doesn't have the letter і, that Ukrainian ґ is pronounced like Russian г, which Ukrainian also has, but it's pronounced like an English h, and a whole bunch of other stuff - Ukrainian geography, the history of Kievan Rus, and where to get a Ukrainian ribbon/flag to pin to my chest.

There is a wonderful Swiss television program which I watch regularly called Sternstunde Philosophie. It translates to something like "Great moments in philosophy," and the other day I happened upon a program from September 2015 entitled "Putin, Russia and the Crimea" which featured a Russian philosopher/writer born in France talking about the difference between Russian civilization and civilization in the West. His name is Victor Yerofeev [sometimes written Erofe(y)ev] (Ви́ктор Ерофе́ев in Russian,  Віктор Єрофєєв in Ukrainian) - he's unknown here and although he has written for the New York Review of Books, none of his work that I know of has been translated into English.

Yerofeev's contention is that while the West is grounded in Enlightenment values, including respect for reason and the the rule of law, Russia went its own way, and retained more traditional authoritarian values, whether tsarist control backed by the Russian Orthodox Church or Soviet Marxism-Leninism.  To Yerofeev, these are merely two sides of the same coin, both reflections of the conviction that the meaning of life, the natural way of things, involves the submission of the self to authority.

From this starting point, he argues that the West gets Russia fundamentally wrong. They are not, he implies, "duped" by the likes of Putin; their thinking may indeed be channeled by his control over Russian media, but they are naturally inclined not to question his authority in the first place. If you stick a microphone in their faces and ask them what they think of the war (read: "special military operation") or politics in general, they are inclined to say, "That's not for me to speak about." The West likes to think that shows Russians live in fear. Yerofeev maintains they are merely reflecting what they consider to be the natural order of things.

What came to mind when I heard Yerofeev hold forth on this wildly simplistic generalization about civilizational difference was something one of my Chinese students said to me when I asked her why there wasn't more opposition to the crackdown at Tiаnаnmеn Square back in 1989 - you remember, when that guy stood up and faced the tank? Her answer blew me away. She said, apparently in all seriousness, "Because they are our leaders." Those who like to run with cultural generalizations will claim this shows that Russia and China both share an Asian value system.

I used to struggle, in Japan, over the regularity with which I would have to listen to somebody explain culture difference with lines like "we Japanese think collectively, you Americans think individualistically." And I remember being lectured by an uncle back in 1960 who had lived through the Hitler years in Germany and had come up with a neat shortcut way of distinguishing between American and German values. "We Germans" he told me, "write you with a capital D (Du) and I with a small i (ich); you Americans do the opposite, always representing yourself with a capital letter. His conclusion: there was something off about a culture like ours which made us all into self-serving narcissists. 

Yerofeev's main argument is worth taking into consideration, that we each, Russians and Westerners, tend to misjudge the other by looking through the wrong lens and seeing the other as inadequate versions of ourselves.  That's hardly an original idea; the entire field of anthropology is based on the assumption that each culture can only properly be judged by its own cultural standards - and that's the purpose of ethnography, the chief method of doing anthropology. Yet at the same time I think Yerofeev misses the boat. He fails to account for the fact that culture is not static, but dynamic. It evolves. And it embraces more than a single set of attitudes, beliefs and practices. Modern national cultures, especially, are inclined to be umbrella categories containing a wide variety of contradictory values resting side by side.

This becomes relevant when one tries to answer the question of whether Putin has a point in arguing that Ukraine, like Belarus, is actually part and parcel of the same East Slavic civilization as Russia - and is therefore essentially authoritarian in nature. And he may be right that Ukraine is made up of two distinct national cultures, or "mindsets," one more "European" on the western side of the Dnieper River and a more "Russian" mindset east of the Dnieper, confirmed by the fact that Western Ukraine is essentially Ukrainian-speaking and Eastern Ukraine is to a large degree Russian speaking, or at least composed of people who code-switch between the two languages. Never mind that Putin is factually incorrect in arguing that Russia is under threat by Ukrainian Nazis - there are some, as there are in every European (and American) country, but they represent a very tiny number of folk. Putin wants us not to miss the point (and Yerofeev implies something quite similar, if I read him correctly) that Ukraine as a whole is a part of the East Slavic (i.e., "Russian") civilization, and that the years it spent living as a Soviet republic only solidified that tendency.

The reason I found the Yerofeev interview salient is that he seems to be making a cultural argument to strengthen Putin's argument that Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are essentially part of the same civilization, the implication being that they somehow belong together. And this takes us directly to the discussion  of whether the West is pushing NATO on Ukraine or whether Ukraine, like the Baltic States, Poland, and the other formerly Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO actively sought out NATO membership as a means of getting out from under Russia's sphere of influence. If Putin and Yerofeev are correct, to want to join Europe is to bark up the wrong tree. 

My reading of current events considers this a crude simplification. I think Putin (and Yerofeev, if I'm reading him right) are dead wrong. The evidence is everywhere and plain to see that the former Soviet republics on Russia's periphery wanted out. It is not the case that the West seduced them away from Mother Russia. In fact, Ukraine and Georgia would have joined NATO in 2008 if France and Germany had not kept them out because their governments were simply too corrupt to make them eligible. And now, with the reformed Zelenskyy at the helm, that argument no longer holds water for Ukraine.

I don't want to dismiss Yerofeev out of hand. I haven't read any of his books, and I don't claim to know him on the basis of a single interview on Swiss television. And I am intrigued, as somebody given to contrarianism, by his attempt to make a more nuanced analysis of Stalinism - his latest book, entitled Der Gute Stalin (The Good Stalin), is an autobiographical novel (not available in English) of his life as a kid growing up as the son of Molotov's French translator, and thus a child of Stalinist privilege. I know he goes a lot deeper than I'm portraying him here.

 [As an aside here, Molotov is remembered as the man responsible for the holodomor, the genocidal agricultural policy in Ukraine in which millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the 1930s. I also note in passing that he broke with his father at some point, and that, whatever his political history, it's his cultural analysis of Russian culture I'm dealing with here, and his personal political history is largely irrelevant.]

I leave it to others to determine whether my insistence on seeing life in both/and terms rather than either/or wherever possible is an ideological bias that leads me to reject culture as a static, rather than a dynamic, phenomenon.  And whether I'm making a mistake and looking too much through a Western European lens when I see the desire of Ukraine and Georgia to follow Poland, the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe in seeking closer association with NATO and the EU and seeing this as an issue worth fighting for.

I don't buy the argument would-be realists who eschew moral arguments are making, that the West is at fault for encroaching on the Russian sphere of influence and the point of reference should be the Monroe Doctrine. That's what-about-ism, the illogical argument that my wrong cancels out your wrong.  Imperialists from Country A who trash their way around the world do not entitle imperialists from Country B to do the same. Two wrongs do not make a right. The death of four million Ukrainians from starvation in the 1930s did not entitle Pinochet to drop political opponents from helicopters into the ocean. And because the United States of America made attempts at regime change in Vietnam and Iraq, and before that several countries in Central and South America, that doesn't mean Ukrainians can't complain when Russia grabs whole areas of their country. Nor does it follow that American or European realists should tell Ukrainians to give in to Putin's bullying because bullying is just the way things are. As Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy have demonstrated, a fascist government in one century does not mean those countries cannot fight fascism in the next.

It bothers me no end to read (and I beg your forgiveness, Mr. Yerofeev, if I have read you wrong) that since Ukraine was once a part of the closed-minded world of Marxist-Leninist thought and before that it shared a czarist and orthodox world view with Russians, it must necessarily stay that way. 

Today it is fighting to be free and democratic, and that, in my view, is an effort we should all want to get behind.

On advising heroes

Somebody posted on Facebook post the other day the three steps she takes every morning to start the day:

1. Open my eyes;
2. Check to see if Zelenskyy is still alive;
3. Drink coffee.

My days usually begin with toast and tea, but my first two steps are the same.

And today, I'm out in the street, walking the dogs and singing, "я люблю свою страгну, люблю свою жену, люблю свою собаку..." (I love my country, love my wife, love my dog..."), the theme song from that satire series Zelenskyy starred in, called Servant of the People, that made him famous and ultimately opened the door to his becoming actual president.  I watched the first five episodes on YouTube - a bitch of a job, since the English subtitles pooped out in Episode 3. But I'm happy to note Netflix has now made it available, hopefully this time with adequate translation.

Try typing "Ukrainian National Anthem" into YouTube. You'll find dozens of versions. Ditto for an absolutely gorgeous Ukrainian love song called A Moonlight Night.   I just took a wonderful online tour of the churches of Kiev.  The world is having a love affair with Zelenskyy, with Ukrainian culture, with practically everything to do with Ukraine these days. And I just received a notice about a former Peace Corps volunteer group meeting to collect clothes and medicine for Ukraine.

If this is happening around the world, and I suspect it is, we're winning the propaganda war and Putin's war on Ukraine is turning Russia into an ever more despicable pariah with every passing day. We go on constantly about how the world is divided, between right-wingers and bleeding-heart liberals, between the pro-life folk and the pro-choice, between gun control advocates and those who point out how unusual we are as one of the few nations in the world willing to put the rights of gun owners over the safety of children in school, and on and on. But we're united over Ukraine. Putin's war has made the Germans throw away their fear of what the neighbors would say if they picked up a gun, and has persuaded even Sweden and Switzerland to throw out their longstanding neutrality, and get behind the push to arm Ukraine. I don't remember a single cause in which I felt this certain I'm on the right side of history.

And I've been wondering how I'd be reacting if instead of being a distant observer from the other side of the world, I were Zelenskyy's mother. The answer came back immediately. "Get the hell out of there. Live to fight another day. Don't be a hero!"

Which leads me to wonder where the hell do heroes come from? 

There's something obscene about rooting for heroes, don't you think? Especially when it involves their giving up their lives. You can't not be inspired when you run across them. If you're lucky enough to find a real one, that is.  How long has it been since there was a hero like Zelenskyy to root for? 

But don't you think the only moral thing to do is act as you think Zelenskyy's mother would?  Are we doing the right thing climbing on this bandwagon, hoping the Ukrainians will hold out against such depressingly large odds? Getting our jollies rooting for a movie with a happy ending and forgetting this is not a movie?  Shouldn't we be among those urging them to throw in the towel, convince them to surrender to Putin and not risk nuclear war and not fight a war almost nobody believes the Ukrainians can win?  As I heard Richard David Precht, one of Germany's most respected public intellectuals, say the other day, "It's certain they're going to lose to the superior Russian forces. The only choice they have is to stop fighting now and save countless Ukrainian lives, or fight until millions die and the country is bombed to smithereens. That's a loose recollection of Precht's words, but it's what he said.

And he's not alone. Sahra Wagenknecht is another German intellectual I'm a great admirer of and follow regularly.  Smart lady, amazingly articulate.  She goes on German talk shows as often as most people go to the refrigerator. She's known as a friend of Russia and she's not alone. There are lots of Germans who fit into that category. Some, like Sahra, got to know Russians during their time as citizens of the GDR, and while the harsh realities of the Soviet Union made many enemies, it also provided opportunities for wonderful person-to-person connections here and there. Many learned the language and many held out hope that the Stalinists and others they saw as responsible for ruining a wonderful socialist dream (think of what so many Christians have done to the message of Christ, while you're at it) would not prevent those ideals from finding their way as an antidote to vulture capitalism. Not all Russian sympathizers were monsters. Sahra is a leading spokesperson for Die Linke, Germany's leftmost party, the one that is derived from the party that ran the GDR. She is no proponent of  the Ukrainian invasion. What she worries about is the same thing I worry about: the dangers of black-and-white thinking going on full bore at the moment, where many of us see Russia and Russians as the problem.  It pains me to see how much Sahra has lost credibility these days. There is simply too much sympathy for the Ukrainians and too little for the Russians. Woe to those calling for nuanced thinking.

And these advocates of balanced thinking are not the only folks now facing derision and worse. Consider the young Russian boys conscripted into this war. Putin is killing them too, along with Ukrainian women and babies in maternity hospitals, to mention only two groups of countless victims of this cruel folly.

And the bitter bitter irony in all this is that Putin is right about one thing: The Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belorussians are arguably one ethnic group and somehow "belong" together. The joke is going around that the Russian boys are being sent into Ukraine to find their grandmothers and kill them. Like other really dark jokes, this one works through the cynicism and irony because there's so much truth to it.

And I thought I acquired some pretty decent background knowledge on language in the Soviet Union from my days studying Russian at the Army Language School. Turns out the gaps in my knowledge are huge.

When I first tuned in to Servant of the People, my first reaction was, "My God, I knew Ukrainian was close to Russian, but I had no idea it was this close!  It took me some time to realize it was in fact Russian, that they had done the show in Russian because it would get a larger audience. Almost all Ukrainians understand Russian anyway and until this war there was no real reason not to do the show in Russian. What irony!  About all that Putin has accomplished is to make virtually an entire nation of people who took their Russian affiliation for granted into a nation of anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom want nothing to do with the Russian language ever again. Is there any way Putin could have botched this effort to "reunite the Slavic peoples" more dramatically!

More need for nuanced thinking, in other words.

Speaking of which, Michael Moore's latest podcast reminds us that war is not the answer, despite the overpowering temptations. Just heard him make the no-war pitch this morning. Everything in me wants to give him an argument. But there you are. Welcome to the world of perfect dilemmas, one where there are absolutely no good answers.

The biggest argument of the day is not a new one. It's this eternal struggle between the two do-or-die political ideologies, between the "realists," on the one hand, who dance to the tune of the folks who insist we have to work with power, who insist we must not be misled by moral arguments; and the "idealists," on the other, who believe life can and should be whatever you make it. The idealists create narratives like the one about the French and American revolutions being example of human progress toward enlightenment, and see American democracy as a "light unto the nations," a beacon for others to follow. The realists, the Kissingers, the Dick Cheneys and other Americans behind America-first policies like the Wolfowitz Doctrine that took hold under the Bush Administration and got us into war in Iraq, the folks on the other side who insist the only way to deal with opponents is to outgun them, to use capitalism to generate wealth. Not to spread it equally, but channel it into such things as building bigger scarier armed forces to keep the socialists at bay.

Realists, oriented as they are to power, seek out political office, where they can make policy that will throw support behind wealth generation (corporate control of the wealth, for example) as opposed to equitable wealth distribution. Idealists fill spots in academia, where they get to look at problems from every possible angle, substitute thought for going out and doing something, maybe feeling guilty about it, maybe waiting to see if time proves they took the right path. They become teachers, caretakers of children, nurses to the sick, artists, writers, film makers, satirists, and others who depend on good will to keep them employed. An especially talented athlete or actor can make millions the way a corporate CEO can, but most of us don't rise to that level of wealth-generating power. 

Idealists, however, have one thing going for them.  Under the right circumstances, people will sacrifice themselves for their children and other loved ones, their dreams, and their notions of their better selves. This may be one of those moments. We know that Zelenskyy may be fighting a losing battle, but we're cheering him on nonetheless. We can't help it. The realists tell us we're fools. We're only going to get him killed and he's going to lose in the end. Or maybe the good guys will win somewhere far down the line, but in the meantime we're going to have to look ourselves in the mirror and admit we've only illustrated, once again, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We're going to get our hero, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, killed. And potentially millions of his countrymen along with him.

And if we pull our heads out of the sand, we will realize that we're also pushing this zealot Putin into a corner and he will jump out at us with nuclear weapons and maybe kill us all and make the planet unlivable for centuries. Go ahead with your Zelenskyy fascination, the realists are telling us. But don't say we didn't warn you that Armageddon was just around the corner.

Listen to the views of John J. Mearsheimer, for example. On the one hand, he's a lefty. A supporter of Bernie Sanders. But he's also a realist. 

And yet... 

I find myself among those who can't turn away from what's going on in Ukraine. Lots of friends - not just a few, but lots - tell me to worry about my own mental health and avoid obsessing about things over which I have no control, but I ignore them. I'm glued to the news, fill my days reading background information, and wonder how it came to be that I care so much about what happens in Ukraine. 

I've done this before. I had a similar obsession with Pinochet. I have no connection with Chile. Why did I care when I discovered what a bastard Pinochet was? Why did I obsess over the fact that the U.S. participated in the overthrow of Allende and I got to watch Jean Kirkpatrick describe Pinochet as "muy amable" when asked for her impressions of him. Made my blood run cold. Hated that woman till her dying day. 

There's no end, of course, to all the things you can get fired up about. The ones that do get through the fog of war and information overload would seem to be pretty arbitrary. But I have to admit it: Putin's war has gotten under my skin.

What is setting off alarm bells is the realization that we're facing yet another black-and-white issue. I believe Putin is another bastard, another Pinochet, another Trump, someone who appears to have no moral compass. What he's doing is wrong.  Isn't that obvious? How can you defend what he's doing when it involves bombing maternity hospitals? And how can you be wrong when you're on the side of practically the entire world? And look who's on Putin's side: his lackeys in Belarus; the madman running North Korea; Assad, who is in debt to Putin for his savage but effective shut-down of the Aleppo resistance to his rule in 2012; and the Eritreans, also totally dependent on Russia for their military. That's about it. A fine crowd of deplorables (Hillary was right to use that word, by the way.)  Even if you seriously wanted to remain neutral in this fight, you'd have to explain why Sweden, Finland, and - are you ready for this? - Switzerland - have all joined the rest of Europe in condemning Putin's war as an attack not just on its European neighbor, but on democracy itself.

The problem is, this degree of certainty sets off alarm bells in my head. I know from experience that when I get this confident I'm on the right side, I need to up my ration of skepticism, to try harder not to  turn out to be a fool somewhere down the line. But how do I do that, exactly?

Much of the argument coming from those trying to see Russia's (not just Putin's) point of view starts with their insistence that the U.S. failed to keep its promise that NATO would not expand, once the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanys were reunited, a point contested by even Gorbachev, apparently. We have been faced with a number of cases lately which illustrate that when people on two opposing sides of an issue argue, the truth doesn't always lie in the middle. Sometimes one side is right and the other is wrong. Hitler said the Jews needed to die; the Jews said they didn't. The truth did not lie in the middle. Republicans are trying to stop African-Americans from voting because they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats; Democrats are trying to keep Republicans from making that happen.

This is not simply a question of two conflicting narratives. One is right, the other is wrong. You can't claim to be furthering democracy if you're engaged in keeping people from voting.  But what about the NATO issue? Did America and the West promise Russia it would not expand NATO? Is NATO all about the destruction of Russia? Or is NATO still a defensive force to keep Russians from using its neighboring states as part of their larger imperial sphere of influence? Are the Balkans buffer states for Europe to keep Russia contained? Or are they buffer states to keep NATO from destroying Russia? 

Is the truth in the middle? So much of the eyes-at-half-mast academic discussions on background to the war in Ukraine involves articulate political analysts explaining from one perspective that Russia is paranoid and imperialistic, and from another perspective that its fears are legitimate, that it doesn't matter whether America is really out to conquer the world, only that Russian concerns cannot be dismissed out of hand. When you're not sure about the facts, you make perceptions the determining factor.

One voice in my head tells me to keep my mouth shut and let the politicians and political scientists work this out and not add more uninformed opinion to the public debate. But another voice can't help asking what Poland, Czechia and Hungary had in mind when they joined NATO on March 12, 1999. And then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia on March 29, 2004. Then Albania and Croatia on April 1, 2009. And then Montenegro on March 27, 2020. Did they all want to get in on the chance to invade Russia? Or did they want to join the democratic nations of Europe and join the obvious prosperity those nations were enjoying? Whether it was for economic well-being or the increased benefits of becoming a modern democracy (or both), shouldn't this question be answered not by the two imperial superpowers (or by talking heads on American and European television) but by each of these nations in turn?

It's not a stretch to say that it makes a lot of sense that the Russians fear that if Ukraine and Georgia joined NATO they would be completely surrounded by people they think of as enemies, especially if the U.S. were to be invited to park its navy in Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. I understand the reasoning for grabbing the Crimea before that could happen. And I understand, given the very clear evidence that much of U.S. foreign policy has entailed efforts at regime change over the years. But is the only way out of it is to tell Ukraine to sit down, shut up, and let "realism" prevail, let a Russian bully who insists Ukraine is not even a nation but a fiction created by Russia dictate their future? 

If we are "realistic," so the argument goes, we will recognize that Ukraine is a little guy who because he's only a little guy doesn't get to dictate his future. Remember that wonderful illustration of Mexican dark humor: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States." This suggests that we should be listening to the Richard David Prechts, the Sahra Wagenknechts, the John J. Mersheimers of the world and advising Ukrainians to wait another while, maybe even a generation or two, not bring destruction down on their heads by waving that blue and yellow flag in everybody's face, and dying by the thousands. Wait to fight another day. That's not just realism. It's the wiser course for anybody who wants to go on living.

But what do the realists have to say in the face of the fact that Putin has managed to unite practically the whole world against him, that political scientists everywhere are making the argument that the Ukrainians are defending not only themselves, but democracy in a world where it is being threatened. Even Hungary's Orban, only yesterday considered one of modern democracy's greatest threats, has taken the side of the Ukrainians in their struggle. What do we do with the fact that people wake up every morning praying that Zelenskyy is still alive, that the Ukrainians are still holding out, and will continue to hold out long enough for the sanctions to take effect?

How are we supposed to tell the Ukrainians to throw in the towel when they're holding out so magnificently, when there are reports that they are actually gaining back territory once ceded to the Russians. How do you look yourself in the mirror after telling a hero to stop being a hero?

This is a moment when I'm glad I'm not in a position of power. That I don't have a button to push to solve the problems of international conflict.  If it was a button that would stop the war and send the Russians home, I'd push it in a heartbeat. But if it was a button to make the Ukrainians keep fighting, what then? Would I sacrifice Zelenskyy for the cause? If it would free Ukraine from Russian domination?

I'll tell you what I would do, if I could. I'd get the siloviki to get off their asses and do something. In the end, they're the people with the power to turn Putin around.

It's a new Russian word for me, siloviki. Translates into English as "security forces" and refers to the power structure in Russia surrounding Putin, the people who make the power decisions.

Skip this indented paragraph if Russian things are not your shtick but I want to put it down someplace where I can find it again:

Silovik, singular; siloviki, plural. Refers to:

Сотрудник силового министерства, ведомства (МО, МВД, ФСБ, прокуратуры и др.).

If you put that into the Latin alphabet, it's:

sotrudnik -  silovovo - ministerstva - vedomstva

employee - of power - ministries - departments

An employee of a power ministry, department (MO, MVD, FSB, prosecutor's office, etc.).

MO - MO -  Ministerstvo Oboroni - Ministry of Defence

МВД - MVD - Министерство внутренних дел - Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Dyel - Ministry of Internal Affairs

ФСБ - FSB - Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti - Federal Security Service - what was once known as the KGB

прокуратуры - prokuraturi - prosecutor's office

и др - etc.

Where do you make your bed - with those who tell you they are Realists? Or with dreamers? Those who are seeking to expand democracy, even at the cost of their lives, the Idealists?

I'm hiding now behind the luxury of not having to decide who wins and who loses. I get to watch this war rage on, root for the Ukrainians, wish I were the praying sort so I'd have a place to put my energy in wishing for the heroic Zelenskyy to come out on top.

And singing:

Я люблю свою страну. (Ya liubliu svoyu stranu)

Люблю свою жену. (Liubliu svoyu zhenu.)

Люблю свою собаку. (Liubliu svoyu sobaku.)

I love my country

Love my wife

Love my dog.

photo: The Zelenskyys - Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, Ukrainian politician, former actor and comedian, sixth and current president of Ukraine; Olena, his wife; Oleksandra, their daughter, 16; and Kyrylo, their son, 9.

How 'bout them Cossacks!

We've been watching in horror the bombing and brutalization of Ukrainian civilians for twelve days now. And following in frustration the arguments for why the NATO nations cannot impose a no-fly zone, something Zelenskyy has been begging for repeatedly. If Ukraine were in NATO, Putin would likely not have invaded, because Article 5 of the NATO treaty is a promise that all NATO countries will come to the aid of any fellow NATO member who is attacked. Ukraine and Georgia tried and failed to get into NATO years ago but were rejected. There was too much corruption at the top and those countries simply didn't have their shit together. At least that's how I understand it. The tragedy is, with Zelenskyy being seen as a hero around the world, and a no-doubt-about-it inspirational hero to the Ukrainians themselves, Ukraine now has a virtual Mr. Clean at the helm. There's a terrible irony in the fact that if Putin gets his way he'll kill this heroic man and substitute one of the old corrupt guys. It's like something out of 1984, where the clean guys have to suffer the aftereffects of the dirty guys they're now fighting with their grandmothers' Molotov cocktails.

We once watched in despair how innocents went off to join ISIS. These days people are lining up to get to Ukraine to help the Ukrainians fight off invaders and we cheer them on. It's been a long time since even people inclined to pacifism have been cheering for the good guys to go to battle. Not since World War II, arguably. There were the wars in Yugoslavia, but they involved the breakup of a patched-together multi-ethnic nation that had to sort out decades of internal rivalries and grudges. Outsiders, most of us, had a hard time distinguishing really good good guys from really bad bad guys, even when we did take sides. This Ukrainian war is a different story. This is an invasion by a would-be czar who has created a version of history to justify his power-grab. Just read a small portion of that twisted narrative and you'll see the arbitrariness of Putin's version of the story of Kievan Rus and the complex interactions of the Poles and the Lithuanians and the Russians and the Ruthenians and the Swedes and the Germans, the Jews and the Cossacks, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Uniate Church, the holodomor - the Stalinist genocide inflicted on the Ukrainians, the fictive Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine in needs of saving from neo-Nazis and the actual Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine who are Ukraine loyalists - work your way through that history, I dare you.

I've been reading that history for the past ten days now and the only thing I can tell you for sure is that my grasp of the history of Ukraine was abysmal. I can't believe how much I didn't know. Ukrainian history did not loom large in the public schools of Winsted, Connecticut. That's no surprise. What does surprise me is how little I learned about the Ukrainians in Russian history courses. During the year I was at the Russian language school, I did a lot of Russian history. In one skull orifice and out another, evidently.

Nor did I get a lot of non-Russian Slavic linguistics, which I'm now trying to catch up on. I have managed to get a better grasp on the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian after all these years, and that's been satisfying.

Enough to be able to handle the Ukrainian national anthem, for example, which I've heard now several dozen times. Imagine my surprise that there's a line in there where the Ukrainians celebrate their Cossack history. Again, who knew?  Most of my knowledge of the Tartars came from our Russian teachers at Monterey. "Oh, how we suffered under the Tartars!" they would repeat, as if "the Tartar yoke" was imposed only yesterday. And the Cossacks I learned about through the lens of my Ashkenazi Jewish friends and such sources as Fiddler on the Roof. Not good guys by a long shot.  

"I didn't know your father was Ukrainian," I said to a friend the other day. "I thought he was Polish." 

"He wasn't either of those things," she responded. "He was Jewish."

Goes to show you, when you read history, you've got to keep in mind who's telling the story.

If anybody out there is, like me, caught up in the current desire to show solidarity with the Ukrainians, I thought you might like to learn the Ukrainian national anthem, so I've transcribed it. The first line is the groups of three lines below is the Ukrainian original, the second a rough gloss for pronunciation purposes for English speakers, and the third line an English translation.

The link is to the version done by the Veryovka Ukrainian Folk Choir under the direction of Anatoly Avdievsky.  He died in 2016, so it's been a while, but I think it's still an impressive performance for the ages. If you put it on a separate tab and follow the words on this tab, you can do a sing-along...

Ще не вмерла України, ні слава, ні воля,

Shche ne vmerla Ukrayini, ni slava, ni volya,

Ukraine is not dead yet, neither glory nor freedom,

 

Ще нам, браття молодії, усміхнеться доля!

Shche nam brattya molodiyi, usmikhnetsa dolya!

Fate will smile on us, young brothers!

 

Згинуть наші воріженьки, як роса на сонці,

Zhinut nashi vorizhen'ki, yak rosa na sontsi,

Our enemies will perish like dew in the sun,

 

Запануєм і ми, браття, у своїй сторонці!

Zapanuyem i mi brattya, u svoyii storontsi!

Let us, brothers, reign on our side!

Refrain (sung twice):

Душу й тіло ми положим за нашу свободу

Dush’i tilo mi polozhim za nashu svobodu

We will lay down our souls and bodies for our freedom

 

І — покажем, що ми, браття, козацького роду!

I pokazhem, shcho mi brattya, kozats'koho rodu!

And - let's show (them) that we are brothers of the Cossack family!

For the sake of comparison, here's a Russian translation. If you're comfortable reading Cyrillic, you'll see the remarkable similarity.

Еще не умерла Украина, ни слава, ни воля,
Еще нам, братия молодежи, улыбнется судьба!
Погибнут наши враги, как роса на солнце,
Воцаримся и мы, братья, в своей сторонке!
Душу и тело мы положим за нашу свободу
И покажем, что мы, братия, казацкого рода!
Душу и тело мы положим за нашу свободу
И покажем, что мы, братия, казацкого рода!

Which makes me wonder how Russians feel these days when they hear the Ukrainians singing the line: Душу й тіло ми положим за нашу свободу...

which is, in Russian: Душу и тело мы положим за нашу свободу, i.e., almost identical. 

(We will lay down our souls and bodies for our freedom.)

photo credit: https://www.123rf.com/photo_124912419_khortytsia-ukraine--july-03-2018-young-boy-ukrainian-cossack-with-saber-in-zaporozhian-sich-it-was-i.html - not used for commercial purposes; do not reproduce.

Interesting times

You know that Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times!"

Who would have thought just a short time ago that people would be greeting each other with "Slava Ukraini!" - "Glory to Ukraine" in Ukrainian?  Or that people would be wearing blue and yellow ribbons, the colors of Ukraine, in their lapels, like the red ones we wore during the AIDS crisis. Or that interpreters would be breaking down, like a German interpreter did this morning, or choking up, like the English interpreter did during the EU session this morning, both overcome by the words of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Or that Sweden and Finland would be talking openly of joining NATO and the European Union. And Switzerland!  Listen to Stephen Colbert go on and on (minute 3 onwards): "Switzerland! Switzerland! Switzerland! Switzerland! Switzerland! (Yes, five times) Switzerland has a knife out for Russia!... This is like the Dalai Lama grabbin' a buck knife and an AK and screaming, 'Let the Buddha sort'em out.'"

The horror facing us includes the possibility that Putin will succeed in subduing Ukraine, maybe even killing their new hero, Zelenskyy. If he does, though, I think he will only strengthen the resolve of the world to try him as a war criminal. Despite Russia's savvy at using the instruments of the new computer age, I'm convinced Putin missed the boat in not realizing the significance of a war carried live, minute by minute. The whole world is watching Ukrainian men taking their children to the Polish border to become refugees and then returning to fight against the Russian invasion. Doctors are in tears trying in vain to save the lives of Ukrainian children mowed down by rockets in the street, all being carried live for all the world to see.

Zelenskyy, in addressing the United Nations by satellite - or the European Union - gets a standing ovation. Russian foreign minister Lavrov addresses the same groups and the ambassadors stand up and walk out. I can't remember a time when the entire world was this united in agreement: Putin is a war criminal and he's casting Russia down into a hole which it may take another generation for them to dig themselves out of.

Putin has one ally, his puppet Lukashenko in Belarus. He is likely to fall as Putin falls. China is trying to play it cool, by urging everybody to seek a diplomatic solution, something few have any faith in anymore. We know they are watching closely. If Putin gets away with snatching Ukraine back into the Russian fold, China will be encouraged to do the same in Taiwan.

I don't know how many people around the world are glued to their computer or television screens. I imagine it is no small number.

Gil Scott-Heron, one of the originators of hip hop, once rapped The Revolution Will Not be Televised back in the 70s. What he meant by that was that the revolution would not be fiction, like you see on television; it would be real. We now live in a post-television era. It's still true that what we see on the internet is not fiction. But if you, like me, use your television set as a computer monitor, the revolution is being televised. It's real, and it's happening all over the world right up in your face.

Interesting times.