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.