*
MALAGUEÑA
Jasmine like blossoming moonlight
has taken captive the blue dusk.
I am fourteen, fifteen, sixteen —
the radio sings Malagueña.
Years later at a wedding,
a middle-aged mariachio
sings Malagueña with such passion,
the guests fall silent as in a cathedral.
Few comprehend the lyrics,
but the meaning shines
through the arches of the vowels, held
so long they span constellations.
Maybe it never really ends —
life driven by desire
for a different life.
You never stop waiting,
never, a famous actress
said in her old age —
she who we thought possessed
all we ever wanted to have.
And those who come after us
will wait in the same twilight,
the boats rocking like cradles,
palms spreading their black fans.
The music cannot be undone:
it casts the human voice beyond
blue, into pure indigo —
not star jasmine, sparse petals,
but the full narcotic flower —
as the lights on the bay
sink shimmering shafts
into the ocean’s dark love.
~ Oriana
*
THE SUPPORTIVE MARRIAGE OF VIRGINIA AND LEONARD WOOLF
"Leonard, to Virginia, was a stabilizing force—a refuge, a sanctuary—to which, after the wide-eyed wilderness of forging something new, wrestling the beast, finding the word, she could return.”
~ Leonard was androgynous and Virginia preferred women, and yet they married. Leonard was a caretaker and Virginia was fragile, and so they stayed together, she stayed, for the longest time, alive. Leonard was controlling and Virginia felt caged, and yet Leonard allowed Virginia her love affair with Vita and Virginia never doubted that her marriage would go on. Virginia set type, and Leonard machined the pages, and the one of them plus the one of them equaled their famous Hogarth Press. They quarreled and they made up; they fretted and survived; they needed space from each other and missed each other; and when we see them in the pages of Virginia’s diaries, they are sitting together, walking together, reading together, printing together, enduring another war together, heading out for tea after a storm.
What passes for love, what happens between lovers—isn’t it all dandelion seeds brushed loose by a breeze and smoking a trail to the sun?
And yet—what happens between a writer and the other people in her life will leave its mark on the work itself. There will be more or fewer pages, greater or lesser risks, differing degrees of happiness, variant measures of self-worth. We may write alone, but we don’t live a writer’s life alone. Lovers, friends, workshops, teachers: How do we choose? What are the consequences?
*
When Virginia married Leonard she married her eventual editor, business partner, and legacy builder. He was a civil servant by trade, an accountant by disposition, management-minded. He was, as Virginia Woolf’s great biographer Hermione Lee describes him, “a tense looking young man, dark, thin, slight, long-faced, with a handsome sardonic mouth, strong blue eyes, and trembling hands.”
Virginia was, by all accounts and the photographs that support them, a slender beauty. She’d received proposals from other men before she met Leonard. She wasn’t precisely sure about saying yes to Leonard when (encouraged by his friend Lytton Strachey) he asked the marriage question. She had, as she expressed in a letter to Leonard, dated May 1, 1912, questions:
“You seem so foreign. And then I am fearfully unstable…. I sometimes feel that no one ever has or ever can share something—It’s the thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock. Again, I want everything—love, children, adventure, intimacy, work…. So I go from being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and know everything about me, to the extreme of wildness and aloofness. I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you.”
Historians and biographers will say what they will, but most of what passed between Leonard and Virginia over the course of their long marriage would only ever be known to them. What we do know, from the accounts both left behind, is how supportive Leonard was of Virginia’s writing. He was her first reader, her quasi-agent, her editor, her companion, her champion. His intelligence mattered, his opinions. She believed what he told her. He knew what to say.
His commitment to her work—to sharing his impressions, to easing her anxieties, to encouraging her radical departures, to fixing her spelling and adding adding apostrophes, to putting the Hogarth imprimatur upon the work that she created, to keeping her well—was substratum and substructure, the certain, solid ground to which she’d return after all the time she’d spend feeling dangerous with the thoughts inside her head.
Consider this progression from the pages of her diaries:
July 26, 1922
On Sunday L. read through Jacob’s Room. He thinks it my best work… He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange.
January 23, 1927
Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse and says it is much my best book and it is a “masterpiece.” He said this without my asking.
May 31, 1928
L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than the Lighthouse.
July 9, 1931
“It is a masterpiece,” said L. [about The Waves], coming out to my lodge this morning. “And the best of your books.”
November 3, 1936
Miracles will never cease — L. actually liked The Years! He thinks it so far—as far as the wind chapter—as good as any of my books.
I’m not suggesting that Leonard loved every line that Virginia wrote (they quarreled, for example, over her Roger Fry biography). I’m not even suggesting that Leonard always told the truth (he wasn’t so sure about The Years, but he told her what she needed to hear in the moment she needed to hear it). And certainly I’m not suggesting that Virginia would not have written without Leonard; she was writing before they met; she was a born writer. I’m also, finally, not writing into myth that the marriage of Leonard and Virginia was a study in extreme one-sidedness. She read his work, too. She listened when he spoke. She brought him her famous steaming bread.
Leonard, to Virginia, was a stabilizing force—a refuge, a sanctuary—to which, after the wide-eyed wilderness of forging something new, wrestling the beast, finding the word, she could return. He held her raw first drafts in his hands and held them still. He left his seat by the fire to enter the landscapes she wrote while she went outside to breathe real air. He eased the dervish of her anxieties, tamed her paranoia, helped silence the words that stormed through—her hunch that she was a fraud, her certainty she’d written her last book, her supposition that her reputation was dissipating.
What do we expect from the people with whom we trust our work in its in-progress stages? That best friend, that teacher, that lover, that neighbor, that student who is no longer a student, those who look up when we enter a room so that we might read from our blotted, ragged pages.
Will we be strengthened by the tendered proposition or silenced by it, engaged by the appraisal or enraged by it, feel exposed by the judgment, or seen? Will we want, more than words, the implied agency of the cup of tea, the blanket rearranged across our loose limbs, the gift of the dinner we didn’t make? And how will we repay the sympathetic and contributive attention we have, if we’ve been lucky, received?
What we write and how we write it will bear the watermarks of those we listen to, and how we listen, and what we do with what we’ve heard.
Choose well.
https://lithub.com/what-passes-for-love-on-the-marriage-of-leonard-and-virginia-woolf/?fbclid=IwAR1qe7Z5BvxpjROXXn9u9OrjBDisBgtiLdl7o0asNUvWteZhVPMHig_dYw8
Oriana:
Virginia’s suicide note is actually a heart-rending love letter to Leonard.
*
“RUSSIA IS DEPOLITICIZED”
~ The photos from Bucha are hard to ignore. In image after image, bodies line the streets and shallow graves, each one proof that Russian soldiers are committing atrocities on Ukrainian soil. While the evidence they offer appears to be incontrovertible, the Kremlin has called them a “monstrous forgery” designed to smear its soldiers. It is tempting to believe the photos could undermine Moscow’s propaganda and help turn Russian public opinion against the war.
The sociologist Greg Yudin believes that’s unlikely to happen. A professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Yudin said in an interview this week that most people under Vladimir Putin’s rule passively support his “special military operation” in Ukraine because Russian society has become thoroughly “depoliticized.” It’s been difficult to gauge how Russia’s war is playing at home after the country abolished the last of its free press and outlawed speech critical of the war, but Yudin — who is also an expert on public-opinion research — says two decades of authoritarian rule have made the Kremlin’s line easy to accept. If the war lasts for longer than a few months though, the mood may change, and Putin may be tempted to escalate.
The images out of Bucha have shocked the world, but how are they received in Russia? Is there any chance they will undermine the propaganda that’s coming out of the government?
I don’t think so. The dominant attitude is to preserve your everyday life. A Russian citizen might say, “What am I supposed to do?” It’s impossible to imagine what would be the response to that. And of course, the government gives them the story line and the talking points to reject it, and they’re willing to believe it, not because they believe the propaganda — Russians don’t believe anything and anyone — but because it reconciles them with the reality that helps you protect your everyday life. I haven’t seen anyone so far saying, “I was kind of supporting this war, but now there’s just too much.”
One thing that I’ve been curious about for a while is the Kremlin’s emphasis on the “denazification” of Ukraine. Does this line really resonate with the public?
That’s difficult to say. People are swallowing it, and they kind of buy this narrative. Are they really emotionally invested in denazifying Ukraine? I think that it might be true about the elderly generation.
What I find more disturbing is that this denazification narrative turns into an operational concept for the troops on the ground, and that’s very, very worrying. I mean, we already see what it leads to because once the troops perceive the situation as a battle against Nazis, they start doing what they were doing in Bucha. They were trying to purge, to purify, to clean the land from the Nazis. And since Ukrainians have resisted, it obviously implies that they, too, seem to be nazified. Therefore soldiers have to denazify them completely, meaning purges. And I don’t know if you had a chance to read it, but the main news agency, RIA Novosti, just published an article by Timofei Sergeitsev, who basically says precisely that, We were wrong about Ukrainians: They turned out to be much more nazified than we expected, and therefore they have to pay the price.
That is dangerous, once again, because it gets transferred into the operational concept on the ground. But it also infects Russian society because this kind of narrative becomes more and more acceptable. We heard about those crazy ideas, the ideas of the Nazis in Ukraine and Nazis in the government, but it never took such a terrible turn until now. It never was like, We have to purify the whole 40 million people near us. This is a Nazi vision of national purity, of attaining the purity of a whole nation through force.
What should Americans understand about the political climate in Russia right now?
The most important thing to keep in mind is that Russia is a completely depoliticized country. People generally don’t want to have anything in common with politics. There is an incredible contempt and disdain for all kinds of politics just because Russians are completely certain that there is no possible way to change anything through politics, that no change is possible in general. So for that reason, people prefer to lead their private lives. They have opportunities to do that because most of them are better off under Putin. Any kind of political activity is all just complete nonsense to a vast majority of Russians. If you believe in extraterrestrials, that’s at least interesting. If you are into politics, you’re silly. Particularly for people in business, that’s a complete no go. I always say the best way to spoil the party is to start talking about politics in Russia. You will never be invited again.
Against this background, I think it might become a little bit easier to understand the perception of what is going on. The vast majority is either in denial of what is going on in Ukraine or assume this attitude of passive support that the narrative produced by the state is enough for them to keep leading their everyday lives. This narrative tells them, This is not particularly serious, everything’s under control. It was necessary because it was a threat, and a threat means, of course, the destruction of everyday lives, and we don’t want that. You have people who are militarized and amplified by the state media. On the other hand, you have people who are vehemently against the war, protesting. But in the middle, you have the vast majority, which is still in denial and trying to stick to those stories because it brings reconciliation.
There’s what I call the “few months” theory. People keep believing that in two or three months, all the sanctions will be lifted, the war will be over, and Ukrainians will be, of course, happy with being part of Russia.
Depoliticization to this degree doesn’t happen overnight. Can you tell me a little bit more about its roots?
I think there are several factors to it. One of them is, of course, the late Soviet Union, where it was an endless swamp and there was a kind of specific atomization of life. The second factor was radical market reform in the 1990s. It was brutal. It completely destroyed the ways of life people were used to. It was very traumatic for many people because they kind of learned that there are no friends. You have to fight all the time. So that was like an unchained market where, basically, there’s a war of all against all.
And then comes Putin. There was already a lot of disenchantment by the end of the ’90s that was not used strategically, but he turned it into a strategic weapon. His media was constantly trying to depoliticize people even further. It is precisely under Putin that this disdain for politics took shape. This is how his system worked for quite a long time because everyone knows that Putin and his party always win the elections. But very few people know how they do it, technically. Turnout is very low because people are persuaded that it makes more sense to tune out at the elections.
Elections are a masquerade. They were flooded with all kinds of ideas just to create repulsion toward politics. You had all kinds of porn stars, like complete kooks. And that, of course, created the impression that you shouldn’t show up. Then you have like 20 percent turnout, with 15 percent of those mobilized for your party. And that gives you 75 percent of support. And then nobody, of course, cares about looking at the turnout numbers. You have this perception that there is a vast majority for the president or for the ruling party.
The TV show House was actually incredibly popular in Russia precisely because the motto is “Everyone lies.” This is so to the point with what Russians feel. Everyone lies. There’s no truth at all. It’s endless relativism. And the media was saying all the time that you should never trust anyone, including the media, of course. That destroys any kind of social bond between people.
Sociologists have this tool, asking, “Do you think that people, in general, can be trusted?” Russia has very high levels of distrust. I’ve seen it as a sociologist. Often people don’t even understand the question — “How on earth can you trust people?” You can trust dogs, cats, but with people, this is impossible. I’m sure it was strategic for Putin to depoliticize the country and to trade relative economic prosperity for complete civic disengagement.
What degree of repression do intellectuals, antiwar activists, and other dissenters experience now?
It’s definitely worse than what we have ever seen under Putin. We have criminal cases against people here who protest against the war. Otherwise, people are easily fired. Just yesterday, I was told that civil servants are asked by their employers if they have relatives in Ukraine, which means that, of course, you have to say no. If you say yes, you are suspicious. So basically, you’re told to sever ties with your family in Ukraine and your friends in Ukraine. So there’s this sort of pressure. People are fired from universities over their position, even if they didn’t make it explicit. Students are expelled.
Can you expand on what the situation is like in universities? Has there been, for example, a chilling effect on research?
Oh, I think academic life is over. First of all, there’s a lot of ideological stuff now in the universities. Students are made to attend school lectures that are basically promoting Putin’s crazy views of Ukrainian history. Many universities are doing that, many schools are doing that, and even kindergartens. They’re basically imposing this theory on children. They have to pass the tests on this, and if you have to pass a test, that means that you are not free to make up your mind.
As for scholars, well, obviously the vast majority of the international connections are now broken. International scholars really depend on access to academic articles and papers, and some of the journals are now severing their dealings with Russian universities, and it’s impossible to work meaningfully without them. Many international partners have pulled out of Russian journals. This transformed the whole orientation of academic science. For instance, in almost all universities, one of the key indicators for scholars was to publish articles in the leading international journals. So now it is, of course, no longer possible.
You’ve talked about how depoliticized the public is. With that in mind, I’m curious to know how worried people are about the threat of a nuclear conflict? Do they take it seriously?
In many respects, the attitude that Putin himself developed but also imposes on society is that nuclear blackmail is okay. And it was like that even before the war. But when the war started, I think it got even worse. Because there was just this deep belief that the more we’re bragging about the ability to start a nuclear war, the more concessions we will get. The belief is that the United States is weak and is not going to start a nuclear war over some country in Eastern Europe or Europe in general. And for that reason, we just have to be strong enough, and that will be enough for them to give us whatever we want.
There’s deep resentment in Russia. Putin has done everything to amplify this resentment about the loss of the Cold War. There is this deep revanchism, this longing for revenge. I mean, Putin at some point said that if there’s no Russia, there’s no point for the world to exist. And by Russia, he means himself. Make no mistake.
What do you think might happen if the war drags on longer than a few months?
Well, after the “few months” theory, there will be another “few months” theory. But still, it becomes more and more difficult for people to pretend that everything’s all right. And it is for that reason that I don’t really feel that Putin has so much time. I honestly think he will escalate once he understands he isn’t making progress. ~
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/sociologist-greg-yudin-how-russia-learned-to-deny-reality.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
THE NUCLEAR QUESTION
SIMON: Mr. Browder, I have to ask you almost an unfathomable question, but given the amount of time and perspective you've devoted to trying to figure out Vladimir Putin, do you worry about a nuclear attack?
BROWDER: I don't just worry about it. I think it's probable. Now, who he attacks and what he does with that is another question. But we have to understand that Vladimir Putin is a man who is a criminal. He knows no boundaries. He has no moral compass. He's effectively a person who will do anything for his own personal, financial and survival interests. And if he sees the use of a nuclear weapon - probably a tactical nuclear weapon - as something that will reframe this conflict for him, I think it's entirely likely and even probable that he uses one. And I'm not the only one who thinks this. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said the same thing.
SIMON: And how does the West respond?
BROWDER: Well, I think that we have to basically create a total, absolute barrier against this guy. We have to completely isolate him economically, and we have to provide the Ukrainians with every possibility of countering whatever is happening to them. And we haven't done enough yet. There's still more oligarchs to be sanctioned. There's still oil being bought by - I mean, the Europeans are sending a billion dollars a day to Putin every day to kill Ukrainians by buying their oil and gas. We've got to stop that. And we have to give the Ukrainians every bit of support they need militarily, and up to and including a no-fly zone. Many people don't like me saying that, but that's the truth.
SIMON: The concern is that would provoke a Russian military response, right?
BROWDER: Well, we already have a Russian military response. I mean, we've been involved in Libya and in Bosnia with no-fly zones where Russia was nearby. This is - I mean, there's absolutely no justification for him invading Ukraine, and it's totally reasonable to do that. But that's a longer conversation. But I do believe that we have to show Putin strength, and this business of saying, you know, we don't want to have a military confrontation with you - we already have a military confrontation. We're already involved. We're already giving them huge amounts of weapons.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/16/1093189691/freezing-order-is-the-true-story-of-money-laundering-murder-and-putins-wrath
*
RUSSIA’S PROBLEMS GO FAR BEYOND PUTIN
~ There is something in Russian culture today making most Russians—even highly educated people—incapable of simple manifestations of human solidarity.
In a recent interview on Ukrainian television, Viktor Shenderovich, a Russian critic of Putin who escaped to Israel, urged us not to judge all Russians too harshly, as they are nothing but hostages. And it is not right to blame hostages.
If this is true, it is only partially so. The whole truth is that Russians surrendered and became hostages voluntarily. Before Putin came to power in 2000, opinion polls in Russia showed that most Russians were ready to trade freedom for order, were openly hostile to the West, and dreamed of a strong hand—primarily of a military force that would be respected and feared by the world.
In other words, behind the real Vladimir Putin stands the collective Putin of the Russian people. Moreover, Putin is not just collective—he is repetitive. Over the past two hundred years, Russia has gone through several periods of liberalization. Each of these periods was followed by another of repression. Suffice it to say that Putin came to power after the reforms of Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Historians call this phenomenon the Russian pendulum. Due to its swings, Russia never managed to form a society of citizens. Russians remain largely a community of subjects with low public trust and solidarity. If they lack these when it comes to their own relations, why should they show solidarity with their neighbors?
Ukrainians’ past and present give them a special insight into Russian history. Even during periods of democratization, the Russian authority view of the Ukrainian question was not amicable. The Ukrainian language was officially banned twice during the liberal reforms of Alexander II. Gorbachev claimed that Ukrainians themselves did not want their children to learn Ukrainian.
Russian oppositionists believe that the essence of Russia does not lie in its “brainless leaders” but in Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, Brodsky and other geniuses of Russian culture. Their legacy is everlasting, and in a way, they are the real Russia.
That might be so. It’s just that it doesn’t make much of a difference for Ukrainians, not then and especially not today. Many of Russia’s brightest minds seem to suffer from a Ukrainian complex as well.
Examples abound. Here is the most recent one: a poem by Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize winner, written on the occasion of Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991:
God rest ye merry [Ukrainian] Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards!
But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards
You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing,
Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin
(translated by Sergey Armeyskov; Taras Shevchenko (1814 – 1861) and Aleksandr Pushkin (1799 – 1837), were, respectively, the greatest Ukrainian and Russian national poets)
I can just see the inhabitants of Mariupol whispering the lines of Pushkin while dying under Russian bombardment!
At the heart of this attitude towards Ukrainians is the sense of “how wonderful it is to be Russian.” In the minds of many Russians, Russia is not just another country. It is a country with a great mission—namely, to save the world from the corrupting influence of the spoiled West. For this reason, all things Russian must be great: its territory, its army, even its language has to be (as one Russian genius put it) “great and mighty.” Neighboring nations who reject this great mission are, at best, silly children in need of education, at worst, scoundrels and traitors who must be decimated, deported, and so on. In either case, they cannot be left to their own devices to sort out their own happiness.
It seems that buried deep behind Russian megalomania is an inferiority complex. Russians cannot fathom how, after emerging victorious over Napoleon and Hitler, they are now living worse than the French and the Germans. Similar to Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes, the constant failure to “catch up and overtake the West” pushes many to conclude that “the West” is not for them. Russia is no country, but a separate Civilization, to which “Western rules” do not therefore apply. Accordingly, many Russians are prepared to suffer privations themselves or inflict equal suffering on their neighbors, if it proves Russia’s greatness to the world.
For all the talk of the mysterious Russian soul, the truth is quite simple. Russians can fight well (although their present war puts even that in serious question). They may achieve short-term economic breakthroughs as part of late Imperial or Stalinist modernization. However, they never managed to effect a political modernization, i. e., to limit central power, separate church and state, create independent courts, ensure safeguards for the opposition, protect the citizenry from violence.
The Russian question is hardly exceptional. It is parallel with German, Polish, Jewish, and other issues of European politics. All of them have been solved, often by bloody conflicts and untold suffering. But in the end these nations managed to create their own countries with functional democracy, and with relative economic well-being. Now it is the Ukrainians’ turn. After thirty years of wandering in circles, exhausted by the corruption of their elites, they’re as close as they’ve ever been to completing the political modernization of their country. They do not wish to be part of a passive community with delusions of grandeur—they are fighting for their right to live in a normal society.
It is just that, as the case of the Marshall Plan tells us, even postwar Europe, with its longstanding democratic traditions, had a hard time dealing with its problems. No country can “do their homework” without external assistance.
Ukraine, too, deserves a Marshall Plan, and will, hopefully, get one. But will a successful resolution of the Ukrainian question also resolve the Russian one? Even once Russia loses a war, and Putin steps down or dies, what’s to stop the Russian pendulum from swinging the other way again, following another liberalization.
In my humble opinion, the Russian question can be resolved by mirroring Putin’s plans toward Ukraine. He demanded “denazification” of Ukraine—well, Russia will have to undergo “de-Russification.” That is, it must abandon its ambitions of becoming a “Greater Russia” and become a normal country. But above all Russia has to do what Ukrainians are doing: hold political reforms, after which no Putin, individual, collective, or repetitive, is possible. Russia would have to do this by itself—but with outside support, or even outside supervision, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
If those who call for understanding Russia truly want this, they should look beyond superficial impressions. The Russian question is deeply rooted in the past. Therefore it requires strategic solutions, not tactical ones. Otherwise, we risk doing a great disservice not only to Russia and its neighbors, but to the entire world. ~ Yaroslav Hrytsak
https://time.com/6164291/russias-problems-beyond-putin/
*
THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AND THE HUNGER FOR IDEALISM (repost)
Soviet sculpture studio, 1953
Here is the Nobel Prize-winning Svetlana Alexievich writing about about a doctoral student who committed suicide — the memories of a friend of his:
“From the account of his friend, Vladimir Staniukevich, graduate student in the Philosophy Department:
I think that he was a sincere Marxist and saw Marxism as a humanitarian idea, where “we” means much more than “I.” Like some kind of unified planetary civilization in the future . . .
All the pages [of his dissertation on Marxism and religion ] were crossed out. Diagonally, in red pencil, he’d written furiously: “Nonsense!! Gibberish!! Lies!!” It was his handwriting… I recognized it…
His dissertation didn’t pan out. Well, to hell with it! You have to admit you’re a prisoner of utopia… Why jump from the twelfth floor on account of that? These days how many people are rewriting their master’s essay, their doctoral dissertation, and how many are afraid to admit what the title was? It’s embarrassing, uncomfortable…
He and I once talked about socialism not resolving the problem of death, or at least of old age. It just skirts it…
I saw him make the acquaintance of a crazy guy in a used bookstore. This guy, too, was rummaging around in old books on Marxism, like we were. Then he told me:
“You know what he said? ‘I’m the one who’s normal—but you’re suffering.’ And you know, he was right.”
“The phenomenon of Hitler will trouble many minds for a long time to come. Excite them. How, after all, is the mechanism of mass psychosis launched? Mothers held their children up crying: ‘Here, Führer, take them!’
“We are consumers of Marxism. Who can say he knows Marxism? Knows Lenin, knows Marx? There’s early Marx… And Marx at the end of his life… The halftones, shades, the whole blossoming complexity of it all, is unknowable to us. No one can increase our knowledge. We are all interpreters…
“At the moment we’re stuck in the past like we used to be stuck in the future. I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!
“I proposed a new dissertation topic to our professor: ‘Socialism as an Intellectual Mistake.’ His response was: ‘Nonsense.’ As if I could decipher the Bible or the Apocalypse with equal success. Well, nonsense is a form of creativity, too… The old man was bewildered. You know him yourself—he’s not one of those old farts, but everything that happened was a personal tragedy for him. I have to rewrite my dissertation, but how can he rewrite his life? Right now each of us has to rehabilitate himself. There’s a mental illness—multiple, or dissociated, personality disorder. People who have it forget their names, social positions, their friends and even their children, their lives. It’s a dissolution of personality… when a person can’t combine the official take or government belief, his own point of view, and his doubts… how true is what he thinks, and how true is what he says. The personality splits into two or three parts…
There are plenty of history teachers and professors in psychiatric hospitals… The better they were at instilling something, the more they were corrupted… At the very least three generations…and a few others are infected… How mysteriously everything eludes definition… The temptation of utopia…”
“At the moment we’re stuck in the past like we used to be stuck in the future. I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!
“I proposed a new dissertation topic to our professor: ‘Socialism as an Intellectual Mistake.’ His response was: ‘Nonsense.’ As if I could decipher the Bible or the Apocalypse with equal success. Well, nonsense is a form of creativity, too… The old man was bewildered. You know him yourself—he’s not one of those old farts, but everything that happened was a personal tragedy for him. I have to rewrite my dissertation, but how can he rewrite his life? Right now each of us has to rehabilitate himself. There’s a mental illness—multiple, or dissociated, personality disorder. People who have it forget their names, social positions, their friends and even their children, their lives. It’s a dissolution of personality… when a person can’t combine the official take or government belief, his own point of view, and his doubts… how true is what he thinks, and how true is what he says. The personality splits into two or three parts…
There are plenty of history teachers and professors in psychiatric hospitals… The better they were at instilling something, the more they were corrupted… At the very least three generations…and a few others are infected… How mysteriously everything eludes definition… The temptation of utopia…”
*
Oriana:
This is of course a truly tragic story, but it reminds me of a conversation I had at Yaddo Artist Colony in the early nineties, when the fall of the Berlin Wall was a relatively fresh event. I casually remarked (I forget the context) that “anything is possible. Look, who ever thought that Communism would fall?” A young woman looked up at me with tremendous resentment in her face, and exclaimed, “Yes, and now there are thousands of New York intellectuals with nothing to believe in!”
~ “My heart bleeds for them,” I replied. But my sarcasm wasn’t completely sincere. I did feel some empathy for those New York intellectuals. I knew the experience of shattered dreams, of idealism crudely destroyed.
Asked why she returned to China, a woman who once had a successful career in finance in New York and London replied, “I missed the idealism.”
But that idealism is all lies, I can imagine someone reply. That would not be incorrect either. The theory is mostly erroneous and it doesn’t work in practice; there is a lot of corruption. This woman was smart enough to know that. Yet she still missed the idealism, or at least the aura of it. Of having a “we” that’s greater than the “I.” Of hearing about how “we” are building a more just society, even if it’s not true.
Idealism. Ah, these humans, these prisoners of utopia . . .
We love what we grow up with. As the graduate student said, “I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!”
In terms of Marxism, this was only slightly true for me. But whatever you grow up with has a power. Some might say that it’s perverse that I grew to hate the Catholic church as a much worse totalitarian regime, while preserving a sentimental nostalgia for the International, the images of Marx, Lenin, and Engels on the walls of public buildings, carried in May First parades. And the nostalgia for inspiring, idealistic language: We are building a new world of justice and peace.
(Never mind the reality? On the contrary, the interference of reality was the most important factor in preventing me from developing any devotion to the government line. But the language of idealism was seductive nevertheless.)
But for the pre-revolutionary generation in Russia, the nostalgia was for their own childhood and youth — for the Tzarist splendor, the ladies in luxurious furs descending from sleighs to attend a ball at the Winter Palace . . .
In the current situation, it’s again this imagined pre-Soviet imperial splendor that slid into place with great ease alongside the Soviet era memory of power, of being feared. One way or another, not just another country, but an empire. We’re told that pride always goes before the fall . . . perhaps, perhaps . . . but it might take a while.
(please forgive the absence of a link to Svetlana Aleksievich’s work quoted here. Here is an interesting interview with her which states: "More recently, she published the doorstop-sized Second-Hand Time, which reads as a requiem for the Soviet era. It chronicles the shock and the existential void that characterized the 1990s after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and helps explain the appeal of Putin’s promises to bring pride back to a wounded, post-imperial nation.
‘Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse, it was a shock for everyone,” she says. Everyone had to adapt to a new and painful reality as the rules, behavioral codes and everyday language of the Soviet experience dissolved almost overnight. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/21/svetlana-alexievich-interviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/21/svetlana-alexievich-interview
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A NUMBER OF RUSSIAN PARATROOPERS ALLEGEDLY REFUSED TO FIGHT IN UKRAINE
~ Up to 60 Russian paratroopers from one unit in Pskov province refused to fight in Ukraine, according to independent Russian newspaper Pskovskaya Gubernia.
The troops were fired, and some were threatened with criminal prosecution for desertion or failure to comply with an order, the paper wrote on its Telegram channel.
Pskovskaya Gubernia is a Russian newspaper known for its independent reporting. Amid the country's crackdown on independent media, last month authorities raided the paper's offices and the homes of senior employees, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Local activist Nikolay Kuzmin, who is affiliated with the opposition Yabloko party in Russia, appeared to corroborate the report on Telegram.
Kuzmin said he spoke to a driver who transported some of the paratroopers from Belarus back to Pskov, an important base for Russia's airborne forces.
Russia's military's airborne force, the VDV, has suffered heavy losses in Ukraine, which has dented their previous "elite" status.
One unit within the VDV, the renowned 331st Guards Parachute Regiment, lost its commander, Col. Sergei Sukharev, and at least 39 other members.
Russian forces have suffered heavy losses since it began its invasion of Ukraine, and reports suggest that morale is deteriorating.
The Pskov paratroopers are not the only ones reported to have refused to fight.
At least 11 members of Russia's Rosgvardia National Guard in the Khakassia region similarly rebelled, Newsweek reported, citing Russian-language news outlet New Focus.
Human rights lawyer Pavel Chikhov said on Telegram that Captain Farid Chitav and 11 of his Rosgvardia subordinates refused to invade Ukraine on February 25 because the orders were "illegal," Newsweek said.
Some captured Russians have said that their leaders lied to them about the plan to invade Ukraine, which left them unprepared for the fierce resistance.
NATO estimated last month that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in action in Ukraine.
In a rare frank admission, a Kremlin spokesman admitted on Sky News on Thursday that Russia had "significant losses of troops and it's a huge tragedy for us.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-60-russian-paratroopers-refused-to-fight-in-invasion-report-2022-4
Also:
~ An earlier captive Russian soldier from Pskov, Vladimir Safronov, 23, told his Ukrainian interrogators about problems with rations, and how his officers were looting the civilian population.
"Things are bad with food, we are constantly saving it," he said.
"Very often we have a situation that a ration for one person is shared between two people.
"We are eating mostly what we find inside [civilian] houses [in occupied Ukraine].
Further reports of Russian soldiers rebelling against the invasion orders include elite OMON special forces troops from Khakassia refusing to fight and troops from unofficial state of South Ossetia going back to their homes on foot after refusing to participate in the war in Ukraine. ~
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/elite-russian-paratroopers-stage-mutiny-26659551?fbclid=IwAR1R_XbOsyK4-yIFJikAW48uViVaTWFddNVBwEJotaj4w9dKLPqxyDkT68c
Oriana:
One thing that stays in my memory is that the Russians soldiers in Ukraine don’t have adequate food provisions and are literally hungry. It brings to my mind my surprise when I learned that during the Soviet era, ordinary citizens also went hungry at times. Food was scarce even then. Imagine now (or in the near future), when sanctions have cut off all kinds of imported food.
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PUTIN AS A BULLY
~ Vladimir Putin was annoyed – or maybe just bored. The Russian leader had been patiently fielding questions from a small group of international journalists in the restaurant of a modest hotel in Davos. Then one of the queries seemed to irritate him. He stared back at the questioner, an American, and said slowly, through an interpreter: “I’ll answer that question in a minute. But first let me ask you about the extraordinary ring you have on your finger.”
All heads in the room swiveled. “Why is the stone so large?” Putin continued. A few of the audience began to giggle and the journalist looked uncomfortable. Putin took on a tone of mock sympathy and continued: “You surely don’t mind me asking, because you wouldn’t be wearing something like that unless you were trying to draw attention to yourself?” There was more laughter. By now, the original question had been forgotten. It was a masterclass in distraction and bullying.
The year was 2009, and Putin had already been in power for almost a decade. But this was my first encounter with him in the flesh, during his visit to the World Economic Forum. Putin’s ability to radiate menace, without raising his voice, was striking. But so was the laughter of his audience. Despite the violence of his Russian government – as demonstrated in Chechnya and Georgia – western opinion-formers were still inclined to treat him as a pantomime villain.
I was reminded of this just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a televised meeting at the Kremlin with his closest advisers, Putin toyed with Sergei Naryshkin, the head of his foreign intelligence service – making the feared securocrat look like a stuttering fool. The pleasure he took in humiliating somebody in front of an audience was once again on display. But this time, nobody was laughing. Putin was about to plunge Europe into its biggest land war since 1945. Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion on 24 February. Within a month, more than 10 million Ukrainians had fled their homes, thousands of troops and civilians had been killed and the coastal city of Mariupol had been destroyed.
Even though western intelligence services had warned for months that Russia was poised to attack, many experienced Putin-watchers, both in Russia and the west, refused to believe it. After more than 20 years of his leadership, they felt that they understood Putin. He was ruthless and violent, no doubt, but he was also believed to be rational, calculating and committed to Russia’s integration into the world economy. Few believed he was capable of such a reckless gamble.
Looking back, however, it is clear that the outside world has consistently misread him. From the moment he took power, outsiders too often saw what they wanted and played down the darkest sides of Putinism.
In fact, the outside world’s indulgence of Putin went much further than simply turning a blind eye to his excesses. For a rising generation of strongman leaders and cultural conservatives outside Russia, Putin became something of a hero and a role model. As his admirers saw it, the Russian leader had inherited a country humiliated by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Through strength and cunning, he had restored its status and global power, and even regained some of the territory lost when the USSR broke up. And he had delighted nationalists and populists the world over by successfully defying self-righteous American liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, was not simply spouting propaganda when he said in 2018: “There’s a demand in the world for special, sovereign leaders, for decisive ones … Putin’s Russia was the starting point.”
The Putin fanclub has had numerous members in the west over the years. Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s close adviser and lawyer, expressed admiration for Putin’s annexation of Crimea, remarking: “He makes a decision and he executes it, quickly. That’s what you call a leader.” Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip and the Brexit party, and a friend of Donald Trump, once named Putin the world leader he most admired, adding: “The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically.” Matteo Salvini, the leader of the populist right Northern League party and a former deputy prime minister of Italy, flaunted his admiration for the Russian leader by being photographed in a Putin T-shirt in Red Square.
Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, has said, “My favorite hero is Putin.”
Most important of all, Xi Jinping is also a confirmed admirer. A week after being appointed as president of China in early 2013, Xi made his first state visit overseas – choosing to visit Putin in Moscow. On 4 February 2022, just 20 days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin met Xi in Beijing for their 38th summit meeting. Shortly afterwards, Russia and China announced a “no limits” partnership. As the joint Russian-Chinese statement made clear, the two leaders are united in their hostility to American global power and to the pro-democracy “colour revolutions” they accuse Washington of stirring up around the world – from Ukraine to Hong Kong. Putin and Xi are both strongman rulers who have centralized power around themselves and encouraged a cult of personality. They are, as Alexander Gabuev, a Russian academic, puts it, “the tsar and the emperor”. Whether this partnership of strongmen will survive the Russian invasion of Ukraine is now one of the most important questions in international politics.
Putin was sworn into office as president of Russia on 31 December 1999. But at first it was not obvious that he would last very long in the job, let alone that he would emerge as the most aggressive challenger to the western liberal order and the pioneer of a new model of authoritarian leadership. As the chaotic Yeltsin era of the 1990s drew to a close, Putin’s ascent to the top job was eased by his former colleagues in the KGB. But he also had the approval of Russia’s richest and most powerful people, the oligarchs, who saw him as a capable administrator and “safe pair of hands” who would not threaten established interests.
Viewed from the west, Putin looked relatively reassuring. In his first televised speech from the Kremlin, given on New Year’s Eve 1999, just a few hours after taking over from Yeltsin, Putin promised to “protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, ownership rights, these fundamental elements of a civilized society”. In March 2000, he won his first presidential election and proudly asserted: “We have proved that Russia is becoming a modern democratic state.” When Bill Clinton met Putin in the Kremlin for the first time, in June 2000, he declared his Russian counterpart “fully capable of building a prosperous, strong Russia, while preserving freedom and pluralism and the rule of law”.
Yet while Putin may initially have found it convenient to use the rhetoric of liberal democracy, his early actions as president told a different story. In his first year in office, he moved immediately to rein in independent sources of power, to assert the central authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his own personal position – all actions that were to become hallmarks of Putinism. The escalation of the war in Chechnya made Putin seem like a nationalist hero, standing up for Russian interests and protecting the ordinary citizen from terrorism. In an early move that alarmed liberals, the new president reinstated the old Soviet national anthem. His promises to protect media freedom turned out to be empty: Russia’s few independent television networks were brought under government control.
As Putin established himself in office, the image-makers got to work crafting a strongman persona for him. Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Putin’s first spin doctors, later described him as a “quick learner” and a “talented actor”. Key images were placed in the Russian media and around the world: Putin on horseback, Putin practicing judo, Putin arm-wrestling or strolling bare-chested by a river in Siberia. These photographs attracted mockery from intellectuals and cynics. But the president’s handlers were clear-eyed. As Pavlovsky later told the Washington Post, the goal was to ensure that “Putin corresponds ideally to the Hollywood image of a savior-hero”.
In any case, Russians were more than ready for a strongman to ride to their rescue. The collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 had allowed for the emergence of democracy and freedom of speech. But as the economy atrophied and then fell apart, many experienced a severe drop in living standards and personal security. By 1999, life expectancy for Russian men had fallen by three and a half years to below 60. A UN report attributed this to a “rise in self-destructive behavior”, which it linked to “rising poverty rates, unemployment and financial insecurity”. Under those circumstances, a decisive leader who promised to turn back the clock had real appeal.
Long before Trump promised to “make America great again”, Putin was promising to bring back the stability and pride of the Soviet era to those Russians who had lost out in the 1990s. But his nostalgia was not restricted to the social cohesion of Soviet times. Putin also yearned to restore some of the USSR’s lost international clout. In a speech in 2005, Putin labelled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. As the years have passed, he has become increasingly preoccupied by Russian history. In the summer of 2021, he published a long essay entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians – which, even at the time, some saw as a manifesto for invasion. Delving through centuries of history, Putin attempted to prove that Ukraine was an artificial state and that “Russia was robbed, indeed” when Ukraine gained independence in 1991.
Fyodor Lukyanov, an academic who is close to the Russian leader, told me in 2019 that one of Putin’s enduring fears was the loss of Russia’s status as one of the world’s great powers for the first time in centuries. His resentment at what he regarded as American slights and betrayals set Putin on a collision course with the west. A landmark moment came with a speech he gave at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.
That speech was a direct challenge to the west and an expression of cold fury. He accused the US of an “almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts”. The Putin of 2000, who had expressed pride at Russia’s transformation into a modern democracy, had given way to a man who denounced western talk of freedom and democracy as a hypocritical front for power politics.
The Munich speech was not just an angry reflection on the past. It also pointed the way to the future. The Russian president had put the West on notice that he intended to fight back against the US-led world order. It foreshadowed a lot of what was to come: Russia’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014, its dispatch of troops to Syria in 2015, its meddling in the US presidential election of 2016. All of these actions burnished Putin’s reputation as a nationalist and a strong leader. They also made him an icon for strongmen throughout the world who rejected western leadership and the “liberal international order”.
This indictment of the west goes back to the 1990s. It is argued repeatedly in Moscow that the expansion of Nato to take in countries of the former Soviet empire (including Poland and the Baltic states) was a direct contradiction of promises made after the end of the cold war. Nato’s intervention in the Kosovo war of 1998‑9 added to the list of grievances proving, in the Kremlin’s eyes, both that Nato is an aggressor and that western talk of respecting sovereignty and state borders was nothing but hypocrisy. Russians were not reassured by the western riposte that NATO was acting in response to ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses by Serbia. As one liberal Russian politician put it to me in 2008, in a moment of frankness: “We know we have committed human rights abuses in Chechnya. If NATO can bomb Belgrade for that, why could they not bomb Moscow?”
Putin’s case against NATO also takes in the Iraq war launched by the US and many of its allies in 2003. For him, the massive bloodshed in Iraq was proof that the west’s self-proclaimed pursuit of “democracy and freedom” only brings instability and suffering in its wake. If you mention the brutal behavior of Russian forces in Chechnya or Syria in Moscow, you will always have the Iraq war thrown back in your face.
Crucially, the West’s promotion of democracy has posed a direct threat to Putin’s own political and personal survival. From 2003 to 2005, pro-democracy “color revolutions” broke out in many of the states of the former Soviet Union – including Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. If demonstrators in Independence Square in Kyiv could bring down an autocratic government in Ukraine, what was to stop the same happening in Red Square? In Russia, many believed it was a “fairytale” that these were spontaneous uprisings. As a former intelligence operative whose entire professional career had involved running “black operations”, Putin was particularly inclined to see the CIA as pulling the strings. The goal, as the Kremlin saw it, was to install pro-western puppet regimes. Russia itself could be next.
The shock of the Iraq war and the color revolutions were the recent experiences that informed Putin’s Munich speech in 2007. And, as the Kremlin saw it, this pattern of western misdeeds continued. Putin points to the western powers’ 2011 intervention in Libya that resulted in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi – something he believes they had promised they would not do.
That episode is a particularly sore spot for Putin, since it took place during the four years from 2008 to 2012 when he was serving in the lesser job of prime minister, having stepped aside as president in favor of his acolyte Dmitry Medvedev. As Putin’s supporters see it, a naive Medvedev was duped into supporting a UN resolution that allowed for a limited intervention, only for western powers to exceed their mandate in order to overthrow and kill Gaddafi. They have no time for the response that the Libyan intervention was made on human rights grounds, but that events then took on a life of their own, as the Libyan rebellion gained steam.
Medvedev’s alleged naivety in allowing the Libyan intervention proved useful for Putin, however: it established the idea that he was indispensable as Russia’s leader. Any substitute, even one chosen by Putin, would leave the country vulnerable to a scheming and ruthless west. In 2011, Putin announced that he intended to return as president, after the potential presidential term had been extended to two consecutive periods of six years.
This announcement provoked rare public demonstrations in Moscow and other cities, which again fanned Putin’s fears about western schemes to undermine his power. I was in Moscow in January 2012 and witnessed the marches and banners, some of which carried pointed references to Gaddafi’s fate. Putin understood the parallels. He commented publicly about how disgusted he had been by the footage of Gaddafi’s murder – which perhaps reflected a certain concern about his own potential fate. The fact that Hillary Clinton, then America’s Secretary of State, expressed public support for the 2012 demonstrations was deeply resented by Putin and may have justified, in his mind, Russia’s efforts to undermine Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016.
Putin secured his re-election, but his sense that the west remained a threat to Russia was further stoked by events in Ukraine in 2013-14. The prospect of that country signing an association agreement with the European Union was seen as a serious threat in the Kremlin, since it would pull Russia’s most important neighbor – once an integral part of the USSR – into the west’s sphere of influence. Under pressure from Moscow, the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych reversed course. But this provoked another popular uprising in Kyiv, forcing Yanukovych to flee. The loss of a compliant ally in Kyiv was a major geopolitical reverse for the Kremlin.
Putin’s response was to dramatically raise the stakes, by crossing the line into the use of military force. In February 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a region that was part of Ukraine but had belonged to Russia until 1954 and was populated largely by Russian-speakers. It was also, by agreement with the Ukrainians, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. In the west, the annexation of Crimea, along with Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, was seen as a flagrant violation of international law that many feared could be the prelude to further acts of aggression.
But in Russia, the annexation was widely greeted as a triumph – it represented the nation’s fightback. Putin’s approval ratings in independent opinion polls soared to over 80%. In the immediate afterglow, he came closer to achieving the ultimate goal of the strongman ruler: the complete identification of the nation with the leader. Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament, exulted: “If there’s Putin, there’s Russia. If there’s no Putin, there’s no Russia.” Putin himself crowed that Crimea had been taken without a shot being fired.
The west’s response was to slap economic sanctions on Russia. But western indignation did not last long. Four years later, Russia hosted a successful World Cup. At the final, Putin sat with the presidents of France and Croatia, two EU nations, in the VIP box in Moscow.
The ease with which Putin annexed Crimea – and the swiftness with which the west seemed prepared to forgive – may have laid the ground for an unjustified confidence that led to the invasion of Ukraine. His overreach is also a reminder of the flaws in the strongman model of leadership. Decades in office can cause a leader to succumb to megalomania or paranoia. The elimination of checks and balances, the centralization of power and the promotion of a cult of personality make it more likely that a leader will make a disastrous mistake. For all these reasons, strongman rule is an inherently flawed and dangerous model of government.
Tragically, that lesson is being learned all over again – in Russia and Ukraine. An invasion that was meant to secure Russia’s place as a great power and Putin’s place in history has clearly gone wrong. Putin is now involved in a brutal war of attrition. Western sanctions will see the Russian economy shrink dramatically this year, and the Russian middle-class is witnessing the disappearance of many of the consumer goods and travel opportunities that emerged with the end of the cold war.
The unofficial goal of western policy is clearly to force Putin from power. But the endgame may not come as swiftly as we would like. Deeply entrenched in his decades-long mission, Putin is now even less likely to give up power voluntarily, since his successors might repudiate his policies, or even put him on trial.
The prospects for popular uprising are equally poor, despite the many brave Russians who have indicated their disgust over the war. Any protests are likely to be swiftly crushed with violence and imprisonment, as they were in neighboring Belarus in 2020 and 2021.
A third scenario – the possibility of an enlightened group within the elite seizing power – seems out of reach, too. Organizing a palace coup against Putin will be very difficult: all dissenters were purged from the Kremlin long ago. Putin also takes his personal security very seriously: several of his former bodyguards have become rich in their own right. While there will be many within Russia who are dismayed by the course that events have taken, orchestrating that diffuse discontent into a coherent plot looks like a formidable challenge.
The difficult truth is that Putin’s strongman style has defined his rule over Russia – and despite his many crimes and misdemeanors, those same strongman tactics may preserve him in power for years to come. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/09/understanding-vladimir-putin-the-man-who-fooled-the-world
**
*
A HEART-BREAKING STORY FROM UKRAINE
~ Journalist Elena Kostyuchenko writes in a tweet about a young Russian-Ukrainian woman, born and raised in Kyiv, with a small child and old and physically infirm parents, too weak to be able to travel. When the war had started, she told her parents she would stay with and take care of them, despite their pleas for her to leave them and evacuate, saving both her and the child's lives.
In order to force her hand, both parents committed suicide. ~
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FROM COLD WAR TO HOT PEACE — SLAVOJ ZIZEK’S ON UKRAINE: “THERE IS NO ETHNIC CLEANSING WITHOUT POETRY”
In a world shaped by the iron logic of markets and national interests, Vladimir Putin's atavistic war of conquest has mystified the "deep" strategists of realpolitik. Their mistake was to forget that under global capitalism, cultural, ethnic, and religious conflicts are the only forms of political struggle left.
LJUBLJANA – With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are entering a new phase of warfare and global politics. Aside from a heightened risk of nuclear catastrophe, we are already in a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing global crises – the pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss, and food and water shortages. The situation exhibits a basic madness: at a time when humanity’s very survival is jeopardized by ecological (and other) factors, and when addressing those threats should be prioritized over everything else, our primary concern has suddenly shifted – again – to a new political crisis. Just when global cooperation is needed more than ever, the “clash of civilizations” returns with a vengeance.
Why does this happen? As is often the case, a little Hegel can go a long way toward answering such questions. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel famously describes the dialectic of master and servant, two “self-consciousnesses” locked in a life-or-death struggle. If each is ready to risk his own life to win, and if both persist in this, there is no winner: one dies, and the survivor no longer has anyone to recognize his own existence. The implication is that all of history and culture rest on a foundational compromise: in the eye-to-eye confrontation, one side (the future servant) “averts its eyes,” unwilling to go to the end.
But Hegel would hasten to note that there can be no final or lasting compromise between states. Relationships between sovereign nation-states are permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each epoch of peace being nothing more than a temporary armistice. Each state disciplines and educates its own members and guarantees civic peace among them, and this process produces an ethic that ultimately demands acts of heroism – a readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s country.
The wild, barbarian relations between states thus serve as the foundation of the ethical life within states. North Korea represents the clearest example of this logic, but there are also signs that China is moving in the same direction. According to friends in China (who must remain unnamed), many authors in Chinese military journals now complain that the Chinese army hasn’t had a real war to test its fighting ability. While the United States is permanently testing its army in places like Iraq, China hasn’t done so since its failed intervention in Vietnam in 1979.
At the same time, Chinese official media have begun to hint more openly that since the prospect of Taiwan’s peaceful integration into China is dwindling, a military “liberation” of the island will be needed. As ideological preparation for this, the Chinese propaganda machine has increasingly urged nationalist patriotism and suspicion toward everything foreign, with frequent accusations that the US is eager to go to war for Taiwan. Last fall, Chinese authorities advised the public to stock up on enough supplies to survive for two months “just in case.” It was a strange warning that many perceived as an announcement of imminent war. This tendency runs directly against the urgent need to civilize our civilizations and establish a new mode of relating to our environs.
We need universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, but this objective is made far more difficult by the rise of sectarian religious and ethnic “heroic” violence and a readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the world) for one’s specific cause. In 2017, the French philosopher Alain Badiou noted that the contours of a future war are already discernible. He foresaw “…the United States and their Western-Japanese group on the one side, China and Russia on the other side, atomic arms everywhere. We cannot but recall Lenin’s statement: ‘Either revolution will prevent the war or the war will trigger revolution.’ This is how we can define the maximal ambition of the political work to come: for the first time in history, the first hypothesis – revolution will prevent the war – should realize itself, and not the second one – a war will trigger revolution. It is effectively the second hypothesis which materialized itself in Russia in the context of the First World War, and in China in the context of the second. But at what price! And with what long-term consequences!”
THE LIMITS OF REALPOLITIC
Civilizing our civilizations will require radical social change – a revolution, in fact. But we cannot afford to hope that a new war will trigger it. The far more likely outcome is the end of civilization as we know it, with the survivors (if there are any) organized in small authoritarian groups. We should harbor no illusions: in some basic sense, World War III has already begun, though for now it is still being fought mostly through proxies. Abstract calls for peace are not enough. “Peace” is not a term that allows us to draw the key political distinction that we need. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Nazi Germany wanted peace in occupied France, Israel wants peace in the occupied West Bank, and Russian President Vladimir Putin wants peace in Ukraine. That is why, as the philosopher Étienne Balibar once put it, “pacifism is not an option.” The only way to prevent another Great War is by avoiding the kind of “peace” that requires constant local wars for its maintenance.
Whom can we rely on under these conditions? Should we place our confidence in artists and thinkers, or in pragmatic practitioners of realpolitik? The problem with artists and thinkers is that they, too, can lay the foundation for war. Recall William Butler Yeats’s apt verse: “I have spread my dreams under your feet, / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” We should apply these lines to poets themselves. When they spread their dreams under our feet, they should spread them carefully because actual people will read them and act upon them. Recall that the same Yeats continuously flirted with Fascism, going so far as to voice his approval of Germany’s anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws in August 1938. Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. Yet this is rather sensible advice, judging from the experience of recent decades, when the pretext for ethnic cleansing has been prepared by poets and “thinkers” like Putin’s house ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin. There is no longer ethnic cleansing without poetry, because we live in an era that is supposedly post-ideological. Since great secular causes no longer have the force to mobilize people for mass violence, a larger sacred motive is needed. Religion or ethnic belonging serve this role perfectly (pathological atheists who commit mass murder for pleasure are rare exceptions).
Realpolitik is no better guide. It has become a mere alibi for ideology, which often evokes some hidden dimension behind the veil of appearances in order to obscure the crime that is being committed openly. This double mystification is often announced by describing a situation as “complex.” An obvious fact – say, an instance of brutal military aggression – is relativized by evoking a “much more complex background.” The act of aggression is really an act of defense. This is exactly what is happening today. Russia obviously attacked Ukraine, and is obviously targeting civilians and displacing millions.
And yet commentators and pundits are eagerly searching for “complexity” behind it. There is complexity, of course. But that does not change the basic fact that Russia did it. Our mistake was that we did not interpret Putin’s threats literally enough; we thought he was just playing a game of strategic manipulation and brinkmanship. One is reminded of the famous joke that Sigmund Freud quotes: “Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asked one. ‘To Cracow,’ was the answer. ‘What a liar you are!’ broke out the other. ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg [Lviv]. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’”
When Putin announced a military intervention, we didn’t take him literally when he said he wanted to pacify and “denazify” Ukraine. Instead, the reproach from disappointed “deep” strategists amounts to: “Why did you tell me you are going to occupy Lviv when you really want to occupy Lviv?” This double mystification exposes the end of realpolitik. As a rule, realpolitik is opposed to the naivety of binding diplomacy and foreign policy to (one’s version of) moral or political principles. Yet in the current situation, it is realpolitik that is naive. It is naive to suppose that the other side, the enemy, is also aiming at a limited pragmatic deal.
FORCE AND FREEDOM
During the Cold War, the rules of superpower behavior were clearly delineated by the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Each superpower could be sure that if it decided to launch a nuclear attack, the other side would respond with full destructive force. As a result, neither side started a war with the other.
By contrast, when North Korea’s Kim Jong-un talks about dealing a devastating blow to the US, one cannot but wonder where he sees his own position. He talks as if he is unaware that his country, himself included, would be destroyed. It is as if he is playing an altogether different game called NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Target Selection), whereby the enemy’s nuclear capabilities can be surgically destroyed before it can counterstrike.
Over the past few decades, even the US has oscillated between MAD and NUTS. Though it acts as if it continues to trust the MAD logic in its relations with Russia and China, it has occasionally been tempted to pursue a NUTS strategy vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea. With his hints about possibly launching a tactical nuclear strike, Putin follows the same reasoning. The very fact that two directly contradictory strategies are mobilized simultaneously by the same superpower attests to the fantasy character of it all.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, MADness is passé. Superpowers are increasingly testing each other, experimenting with the use of proxies as they try to impose their own version of global rules. On March 5, Putin called the sanctions imposed on Russia the “equivalent of a declaration of war.” But he has repeatedly stated since then that economic exchange with the West should continue, emphasizing that Russia is keeping its financial commitments and continuing to deliver hydrocarbons to Western Europe.
Putin is trying to impose a new model of international relations. Rather than cold war, there should be hot peace: a state of permanent hybrid war in which military interventions are declared under the guise of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. Hence, on February 15, the Russian Duma (parliament) issued a declaration expressing “its unequivocal and consolidated support for the adequate humanitarian measures aimed at providing support to residents of certain areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine who have expressed a desire to speak and write in Russian language, who want freedom of religion to be respected, and who do not support the actions of the Ukrainian authorities violating their rights and freedoms.”
How often in the past have we heard similar arguments for US-led interventions in Latin America or the Middle East and North Africa? While Russia shells cities and bombs maternity wards in Ukraine, international commerce should continue. Outside of Ukraine, normal life should go on. That is what it means to have a permanent global peace sustained by never-ending peacekeeping interventions in isolated parts of the world.
THE NOT SO GREAT GAME
The rise of “irrational” violence follows from the depoliticization of our societies. Within this limited horizon, it is true that the only alternative to war is a peaceful coexistence of civilizations (of different “truths,” as Dugin put it, or, to use a more popular term today, of different “ways of life”). The implication is that forced marriages, homophobia, or the rape of women who dare to go out in public alone are tolerable if they happen in another country, so long as that country is fully integrated into the global market.
The new non-alignment must broaden the horizon by recognizing that our struggle should be global – and by counseling against Russophobia at all costs. We should offer our support to those within Russia who are protesting the invasion. They are not some abstract coterie of internationalists; they are the true Russian patriots – the people who truly love their country and have become deeply ashamed of it since February 24. There is no more morally repulsive and politically dangerous saying than, “My country, right or wrong.” Unfortunately, the first casualty of the Ukraine war has been universality. ~
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/hot-peace-putins-war-as-clash-of-civilization-by-slavoj-zizek-2022-03?fbclid=IwAR0cFqXIdsQhsl6Sqpwku4A397K94ZDYq_fZfytSF0rAkVB5hLCkrv1GlQ0
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STILL FIGHTING THE MONGOLS
Q: What does Russia want?
A: Why, to defeat the Mongols, of course.
~ What Putin wants is for Russia to expand to its Soviet-era borders, and for surrounding neighbors to become part of Russia’s “block”, that is, to be ruled by puppet governments beholden to Russia. In other words, he is trying to recreate more or less the Cold War structure of the world. He also possibly wants a direct confrontation with the West, in part because people who grew up steeped in Soviet culture were reared to believe such a confrontation is inevitable, anyway, and in part because of obvious vainglory. Soviet culture, which was superficially secular, heartily adopted the theological framework of Christian millenarianism, so that war with NATO and the US is seen as the ultimate contest between Good and Evil and a gateway to a radically transformed, and “better”, global future.
What “Russia” wants — as a cultural collective with a very specific and intricate awareness of its history and myths — is the background to what Putin wants, and is at once more complicated and (even) more terrifying.
Let me tell you a story. Not all of this story matches actual history, but it is the story that Russian children are raised on; and it’s one I was raised on.
There was once a magnificent place called Kievan Rus — not a country, really, more of a collection of statelets. These principalities were ruled by Scandinavian Rurikid princes, but were very Byzantine and Slavic in their religious and cultural outlook. The richest and most magnificent of these statelets was Kiev, a city-state which enjoyed its own “renaissance” half a millennium before that phenomenon would come to Italy.
Then, just as everything was going so well, the Mongols began raiding into Kievan Rus. They swept in like a force of nature, burning and pillaging everything. By the 13th century, they had conquered Kiev, killed its ruling family, massacred its people, carried off its riches, burned its churches, palaces, books and art and imposed upon Kievan Rus a ruinous tribute.
Meanwhile, about 1000 kilometers northeast of Kiev, there was a small village in a forest, called “Moscov”. Its lord was also a Rurikid, and a relative of the princes who ruled the sexier principalities down to the south, in what is today Ukraine. So as the Mongols were overrunning his cousins’ domains, the lord of Moskov built an earthen wall around his village, topped it with a palisade and started calling it a “town”; and the area around it a “duchy”, though, really, it was more like a garden-variety baronial estate. Then he refused to pay the Mongol tribute. The Mongols were, like, “Dude, are you high? Want us to come over there and break your face?” And he was, like, “Any free man who moves with his family to Moscov, gets a house. And any prince who joins me in the fight against the Tatar, he and his subjects don’t have to pay this dumb tribute either.” And thus began the slow and bloody, but steady and incredibly successful expansion of Moscow from one guy’s backyard to the largest country in the world.
The idea was always expansion. Building a buffer. Principalities glommed on to Moscow, and increasingly, those that were unwilling to do so (because the Mongols had made side deals with them) were absorbed by force. Gradually, military alliances became appendages, and appendages were later eliminated altogether by outright annexation to the Duchy of Moscow. Even statelets that were not under the sway of the Mongols were forced to submit to Moscow if they refused to do so willingly. Independent merchant republics such as Novgorod and Pskov had their republican governments massacred and their citizens decimated. Population transfer — taking over a place, marching its native population elsewhere and dispersing it, and planting your own people in the principality you just conquered — was practiced early and often. This is what Russian historiography terms romantically “the Gathering of the Russian Lands”. This “Gathering” was often involuntary; resistance was invariably crushed, and that with astonishing cruelty.
The Mongols were decisively defeated, and the Yoke ended, in 1480. But at this point, though its primary mission was accomplished, it’s not like “Moscov” could just lay down the sword and go fishing. Its consciousness had been formed and hardened. Its Manifest Destiny had been written. In blood, mind you. It was, and would forever remain, an aggressive, militaristic, expansionist ethno-nationalist entity that saw itself as the bulwark against an evil, destructive, alien force — the Mongols.
In part, the continued fight against the Mongols involved crushing and absorbing isolated enclaves left over from the disintegrated Mongol Empire; the khanates of Ryazan, Khazan, Astrakhan, Kasimov and Sibir fell and were swallowed up one by one. But in another part, the Hanseatic League and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth also became the “Mongols” when they made alliances designed to help some of those as yet ungathered Russian Lands retain their independence.
By the end of the 16th century, Russia was the largest country in Europe. A century later it was the largest in the world; and by this point, it possessed probably the world’s greatest wealth of natural resources, which later European colonial endeavors could scarcely match.
Through all this, the Russian consciousness retained an image of Russia as a small, trampled, perpetually threatened underdog bravely fighting for the “Russian Lands’” freedom from the much larger and more powerful Mongol Empire; that, plus a sense of entitlement that having freed its neighbors from the Mongols (or the “Mongols”), Muscovy was within its rights to rule those neighbors absolutely.
And so, it goes roughly like this: Russia creates a buffer between itself and whoever today’s “Mongols’” are (currently, it’s obviously the United States and more generally, “the West”), but then that buffer is absorbed as a “Russian Land”. Now need more “buffer”. And so forth, and so on, ad infinitum.
Russia’s history of aggressive, violent expansion is largely overlooked even by non-Russian historians (at least in popular historiography), and Russian historians — always tightly controlled by the state — certainly aren’t going to characterize their own country as a brutal hegemon. Its vast size and remarkable linguistic and cultural uniformity (compare with, say, Spain) are treated as just-so. Thus, Russia’s essential founding narrative — that of a scrappy underdog fighting for liberation — stands undisputed, no matter that it is absurd.
And it IS absurd: Russia has been a regional power, and an imperialist power, since at least the late 15th century, and then a superpower since the middle of the 20th century; and its history is marked by a series of violent conquests and repressions. That’s why I find it darkly comical when I see westerners, who evidently don’t bother researching Russian history prior to about 1880 — such as Alexander Finnegan, for instance — taking at face value Russia’s view of itself as a little plucky put-upon beacon of resistance to the evil US, an unfairly maligned country that deserves a break at last. (It’s one thing to be a Marxist-Leninist, it’s another to accept the patently ludicrous myth of Russia being a historical “victim” of a country that wasn’t even in the making when Russian tsars were drowning “Russian Lands” in blood by exterminating women and children wholesale, in order to, in part, cow them into submission and in part to destroy their sense of independent non-Muscovite identity. Also, on that note: I will delete any comment to the effect of “But America” or “But Europeans something something something genocide”. Like I said: Russian history of imperialism does not get nearly as much attention as it should.)
What makes something a “Russian land” that should be “gathered” and defended against “the Mongols”? There is no official definition, but generally speaking, as far as my own view of Russian history is concerned, it is territory that meets any (or just one) of the following criteria:
It’s strategically important to Russia;
It has a Russian-speaking minority;
It was once part of Russia;
It’s populated by a group, of which a minority lives, or once lived, in Russia (therefore, Finland is “Russian Land”, obviously, because of Karelia reasons);
It appears ripe for conquest.
In that vein, I should note parenthetically that Alaska is, of course, “Russian Land”. It seems to be a near-universal opinion in Russia that, whether Russia is entitled to get Alaska back, is at the very least a Serious Question.
Most of the analyses that I’ve seen of What Putin Wants treat him as a rational actor and a cold logician. However, I see no reason to assume that Putin is not moved by emotion. His actions of late seem geared towards provoking the United States and its allies; and from his perspective, it’s a win-win situation: either the Mongols back down, in which case he knows he can push the envelope further; or the Mongols enter the fight, in which case he gets his fateful, history-altering confrontation, one that will put his name in Russian history books alongside such giants of Russia’s eternal struggle against the Golden Horde as Dmitry Donskoy and Ivan III. He will have defeated the Mongols at last. (And also for the time being.)
Q: But will he use nukes?
A: I have little doubt Putin is willing to use weapons of mass destruction, including tactical nuclear weapons. But what preoccupies most people’s minds outside of Russia is whether he will use the “big” nukes, the kind that can obliterate the world’s major cities and kill millions of people in seconds.
On that second question, I very much want to say that it’s not going to happen because of Mutually Assured Destruction. But alas, we live in the LOL Nothing Matters Anymore world that Putin and Trump have forged, and it’s characterized by an inherent unpredictability of awfulness. Few people thought Putin would invade Ukraine (though I always believed that he would), yet here we are. He has shown an utter disregard for the lives of his own people, and a penchant for massively self-destructive behavior. ~ Kate Stoneman, Quora
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RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR AND THE ENERGY CRISIS
~ The war in Ukraine is, in many ways, an energy war. Europe in particular is becoming acutely aware of its dependence on Russian fossil fuels — a dependence that is literally fueling the conflict. The European Union, and to a lesser extent the UK and the US, buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil and gas from Russia every day (some of it transiting through pipelines that cross Ukraine), and it’s those millions that finance Russia’s regime and its army.
Europe relies on Russia for about 40 percent of its gas and about one-quarter of its oil imports. Cutting those flows is dual-edged — it would cripple Russia economically but could also trigger blackouts and chaos across the continent. That helps explain why EU sanctions currently do not extend to Russia’s fossil fuels (The US and the UK import far less and moved to ban oil imports).
Olaf Scholz, the recently elected German Chancellor who with a single, historic speech reversed decades of non-military foreign and security policy, has had to acknowledge that Europe’s supply of energy “can’t be secured otherwise at the moment.” His economic and energy minister Robert Habeck from the Green party warned of “mass unemployment and poverty.”
Hence, the flows keep flowing — and the fueling of Europeans’ cars and the heating of their homes funds the war. Columnist Javier Blas calls it “the commodities market version of the Cold War doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD.” It’s that madness that threatens to derail the efforts to decarbonize the global economy.
Europe’s energy predicament is largely self-inflicted. But that doesn’t alter the fact that weaning the continent off Russian gas and oil — a need that has been spoken between the lines in European discussions for years — has suddenly become an urgent security imperative. The European Commission has presented a plan to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels before 2030, starting with reducing gas imports by two-thirds by year’s end. (It includes increased imports of liquified gas, deploying renewables faster, conserving energy, developing hydrogen and taking measures to respond to rising energy prices.) The International Energy Agency (IEA) has added its own thinking towards reducing that reliance.
This has definite positives when it comes to dealing with climate change, and there are plenty who see the instability provoked by the war as a fork-in-the-road moment, a renewed incentive to accelerate the adoption of clean energy.
Getting rid of the dependence on Russian fossil fuels means getting rid of fossil fuels — and once that shift to cleaner sources is achieved, there would be no way back. That is, for now, the position of Europe, which has found new unity and political vigor in response to the war. (It’s worth noting that this shared goal isn’t matched by a consensus on method yet: while Germany is phasing out nuclear plants, France is planning a vast expansion of nuclear power, for instance.)
Others, however, think that we cannot confront both energy security and decarbonization at the same time. In this view, the instability provoked by the war creates disruptions in energy supplies and price increases with significant economic and social repercussions. We should therefore tackle this crisis first, and worry about climate change later, by giving priority to securing energy supplies, increasing oil and gas production and delaying the phasing out of coal. This seems to be the position of the US (which is even trying to convince Venezuela and Iran to increase oil production), and to some extent, also the UK and China.
Which brings me to the second major challenge now facing climate action: deglobalization. Fighting climate change needs global collaboration. However, after decades of global integration, accelerated in 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organization, the world is now becoming less integrated. This deglobalizing trend isn’t new, it can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis, and has been hastened over the last few years by the growing economic and strategic rivalry between the United States and China and by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has added to global inequality and provided new rationales for more protectionist policies.
For this trend, too, the war in Ukraine is a dramatic accelerating factor. To avoid a confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia that could escalate into a generalized conflict — a third World War — the West has elected not to engage militarily in Ukraine but to offer external support. By itself, that’s a prudent and rational decision: no one wants NATO and Russian jet fighters getting too close to each other.
In parallel, however, Western countries have initiated severe economic sanctions on everything from Russian banks to technology imports to the assets of oligarchs. As a consequence of the sanctions (and of popular outrage at the war), hundreds of companies have withdrawn from Russia or suspended their operations. Many think that the country has become “un-investable” for a long time. This is putting huge pressure on Russia, but it has also transferred the theater of the conflict to the global economic sphere.
For instance, in a recent TED conversation Ian Bremmer, the founder of Eurasia Group, told me that the Chinese ambassador to Moscow gathered Chinese investors in Russia to suggest that the Western withdrawal represents a unique opportunity to “go in and do more because Russia is going to be relying on us.” Most of the sanctions, Bremmer suggested, are potentially functionally permanent (at least as long as President Putin is in power, and especially if he acts on his threat to seize the assets of Western companies), and their ripple effects will ignite a repatterning of the global economy. ~
https://ideas.ted.com/why-the-war-in-ukraine-is-also-a-make-or-break-moment-for-climate-change/
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A new joke from Moscow:
This is our war against NATO.
- And how is it going?
We lost eight generals.
What about NATO?
They haven't come yet.
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Mary: THE NEED TO CIVILIZE OUR CIVILIZATIONS
The urgent need to "civilize our civilizations" may be the crux of all the dangers, all the challenges coming down now like a perfect storm. The threats of pandemic, climate change, rising fascism, ethnic, racial and cultural divisions, war and the threat of nuclear annihilation all present in crisis mode. And there is universal undermining of truth in favor of propaganda and manipulation...going on everywhere, not just on FOX news. Words mean their opposite, just as in Orwell's 1984, the fostering of division and hatred one of the main tools of politicians and tyrants.
This undermining of belief/trust in a shared factual reality is dangerous...if everything must be mistrusted, if all statements are cast in the framework of one or another particular set of lies, all that's left is choosing which lies suit you best, and wholeheartedly making that the hill you will die on. The facts mean little here, and there's no arguing with or convincing anyone out of their chosen narrative.
Lies are a political tool, but the real core of the barbarism that makes civilizing our civilizations so difficult is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. So the Russian story is their fight against the Mongols, the American story is the Wild West, Turkey is fighting the Crusades, etc. These are all old, old stories, that have become the mythologies of nations — inspiring and deluding at the same time. Each story contains the limits of its own relevance, but as national mythologies those limits are unrecognized or denied. These national mythologies inspire and re enforce the barbarism of their origins, distorting the present and dictating the dreams of the future.
In order to overcome the spells of division, to become a world united in cooperation, we have to step out of these old, primitive stories, see how they no longer fit, how they have become dangerous and ugly, how they work against us. A painful process — I don’t see happening soon.
The same thing applies to the idea of being a parent, the problems of whether or not to have children, and the social threat of population collapse. The "revolution" we need is a new story about these choices, about what parenthood means.
All these new stories, these re imaginings of ourselves and our futures, are still to be designed...we are still entombed in the old narratives. What is hopeful is that we are becoming more aware that these stories are only that, "stories," mythologies we can rewrite to overcome our "barbarisms" and find hope for a better, or even, any future, before it's too late
Oriana:
Right on, as usual! We have by no means outgrown the barbarism of our civilization, whether we speak of the West or the East. It’s an ongoing struggle — and just as we thought we’ve made a lot of progress, the threat of nuclear war is again on the horizon.
Yes, above all we need to civilize our civilizations. This of course includes the West as well. Plenty of reckoning needs to be done. Many old myths are due for the proverbial "garbage bin of history."
Seeing through the lies of Putin's imperialist propaganda means a moral re-evaluation of various US invasions. Now it will be much, much harder for any country to play an international bully.
If we survive, that is. Yes, I too wish we lived in boring times. Above all, in times when the survival of the human species wouldn’t be on the line. Who knew that the specter of nuclear holocaust would haunt us again, in a much more immediate manner than anything since the Cuban missile crisis.
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THE COST OF WAR
Statistics indicate that 4/5 German soldiers on the Eastern Front were killed, and the Soviet number is not much better (in fact worse.) Entire Russian villages lost all of their young men; in fact I believe there is another statistic where 80% or so of all Russian males that were 20 in 1941 were killed. As many of you may know, the Eastern Front was one the most vast and attritional fronts of the war.
This reminds me of a poem of mine:
FOREST WALKS IN POMERANIA
A bomb crater was too ordinary.
We passed coils of barbed wire,
heaped acorns of bullet husks.
The roadside mounds
that roofed many in narrow ranks
were leveling to nameless grass.
But a bunker always thrilled,
thick hulk in the underbrush,
the eyepits of machine guns
invaded by saplings and ferns,
torn concrete menacing the air
with stumps of rusted iron.
Once near a bunker we found
a helmet, emptied of its skull.
My father held it, touched
the lips of the bullet hole,
made some remarks
I did not listen to, a child
running among mass graves,
picking the flowers of bones.
~ Oriana
Pomerania was a site of heavy fighting during the last months of WWII.
But it's high time to detox from all these brutalities of history, past and present.
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WHY WE STILL YEARN FOR “THE ONE” EVEN WHEN HAPPILY PARTNERED
~ In 2016, Swiss-born writer-philosopher Alain de Botton published an essay in The New York Times called “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.” It was the most widely read op-ed of the year, and it argued that we would be better off if we’d renounce the Romantic idea that, as De Botton put it, “a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.”
De Botton followed this with seminars offered by his organization, the School of Life, which operates across the world, from Sydney to Los Angeles, where I sit now at the Ebell Theater alongside 300 classmates. De Botton’s class is grounded in the idea that “one of the gravest errors we make around relationships is to imagine that they aren’t things we can get wiser or better at.”
Alain believes it’s the fantasy of the missing half that prevents us from appreciating the partners we do have. We’re forever comparing their flawed selves to “the amazing things we imagine about strangers, especially in libraries and trains.” In his class, he demonstrates this with an exercise called “The Anti-Romantic Daydream.” We’re shown four images of potential mates, two men and two women.
“Pick the person of the four who most appeals to you,” instructs Alain. “Imagine in detail five ways in which they might turn out to be very challenging after three years together.”
One audience member picks a photo of a woman in a red headscarf with a wistful expression. “She has exactly the same look my dog has when I leave him, so she may be quite needy.”
A woman chooses a photo of a slender young woman in a library. “She might be a book reader,” she offers. “But whatever she reads, you have to also. And you have to validate all her choices.”
Alain is brilliant: a droll and insightful author and speaker. But even as we apply his insights to our love lives, there remains the question of longing — of our longing.
So, what should we do about it?
When you feel these longings arising in your own love life, you’re going to think there’s something wrong. The most confusing aspect of romantic love is that most enduring relationships start with the conviction that your longing has now been satisfied. The work is done, the dream is realized. But that was the courtship phase.
Over the course of love, real life will intervene, in the daily negotiations of managing a partnership and possibly a household, and in the limitations of human psychology. You might find that he instinctively avoids intimacy, while you anxiously chase it. You might discover that you’re a neat freak and she’s a slob, or that you’re a bully and he’s a doormat, or that you run late and she’s punctual to a fault.
Most likely, your relationship will be an asymptote of the thing you long for — that is, bringing you close but never touching that dream you once glimpsed. As Sufi teacher Dr. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee says, “Those who search for intimacy with others are reacting to this longing. They think another human will fulfill them. But how many of us have actually ever been totally fulfilled by another person? … We want something more fulfilling, more intimate. We want God. But not everyone dares to go into this abyss of pain, this longing, that can take you there.”
If you’re an atheist or agnostic, such talk of “wanting God” probably makes you uncomfortable or impatient. And if you’re devout, it might seem obvious.
As for me, I believe that the bittersweet tradition extinguishes these distinctions between atheists and believers. The longing comes through Christ or Krishna, no more and no less than it comes through the books and the music; they are equally the divine, or none of them are the divine, and the distinction makes no difference; they are all it.
When you went to your favorite concert and heard your favorite musician singing the body electric, that was it; when you met your love and gazed at each other with shining eyes, that was it; when you kissed your five-year-old good night and she turned to you solemnly and said, “Thank you for loving me so much,” that was it: all of them facets of the same jewel.
And yes, at 11PM the concert will end, and you’ll have to find your car in a crowded parking lot; and your relationship won’t be perfect because no relationship is; and one day your daughter will fail 11th grade and announce that she hates you.
But this is to be expected. The Bridges of Madison County was a story about the moments when you glimpse your Eden. It was never just a story about a marriage and an affair; it was about the transience of these sightings, and why they mean more than anything else that might ever happen to you. ~
https://ideas.ted.com/heres-why-we-long-for-that-perfect-love-to-arrive-bittersweet-excerpt/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social&utm_content=2022-4-14&fbclid=IwAR0kquDRLpYG8u23rvxGD-D-tTN4qLZElrvoVdxcGeTIRfyj1T4vvMePgQY
CODA: PREDICTABLE, BUT STILL A SATISFYING FEEL-GOOD MOVIE
~ CODA is a good-natured drama, a remake of a French film about Ruby (Emilia Jones), a teenage girl who can hear but whose parents and brother are deaf – CODA stands for “children of deaf adults.” Troy Kotsur, a deaf actor who managed against all odds to carve out a career for himself in theater and film, won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as the father, an emotional and often profane fisherman in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
MARLEE MATLIN, who blazed a trail for deaf performers by winning a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Children of a Lesser God (1986), is perfectly cast as her sexy, impulsive mother. Matlin mostly appeared on television following her Oscar win and was a regular on such series as Switched at Birth, The West Wing and The L Word. But, the strength of their performances cannot overcome the mediocrity of the movie, the plot of which creates a conflict: Her parents need her hearing skills to help her run their fishing business and fight the predatory businessmen who keep prices for fish too low, while she wants to go to music college to become a singer, a pursuit her parents see as unimportant, even rebellious.
Although her singing voice does not sound all that extraordinary, her eccentric and demanding choir teacher (Eugenio Derbez) insists she is talented enough to obtain a scholarship if she works hard enough. But, in the pursuit of a feel-good finale, every obstacle that the script (for which writer/director Sian Heder won an Oscar that reflected the good will for the film more than its actual quality) set up as critical suddenly disappears so people can clap and hug at the end.
There’s a really interesting movie struggling to get out of this clichéd script, about what it’s like to be the only one in your family who can hear – which inspires both guilt, resentment and occasionally, feelings of superiority in Ruby. When she first came to school, she was teased mercilessly by the other kids because she spoke like a deaf person, we are told, but much about her experiences are left unsaid and undeveloped. In spite of this, does it make for entertaining viewing? Yes, for most of its running time, but had it not won Best Picture, you would likely never think of it as a movie of the year. ~
https://www.jpost.com/j-spot/article-702658
~ The story, which was based on the French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, revolves around Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), a high school senior living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant). Like many families living in the seaside town, the Rossis depend on their fishing boat to make a living. Unlike the other fisherfolk, the Rossis are deaf — all except Ruby, who, since childhood, has translated between her family and the hearing world.
As she works on the boat, Ruby sings along with the radio, unbeknownst to her family. A painfully shy outcast at school, Ruby surprises her best friend Gertie (Amy Forsyth) when she signs up for choir instead of film club (“otherwise known as ‘put your backpack down and smoke a bowl’”). Her first audition is a disaster, but choir master Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez) hears potential in her voice. Bernardo is an alumni of the prestigious Berklee School of Music in nearby Boston, and he thinks Ruby has what it takes to get accepted, providing she works hard. One motivating factor for Ruby is Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a cute boy she is assigned to duet with in the upcoming school concert.
Meanwhile, the family’s fishing business is in crisis. Market prices are low, and regulations to protect the fisheries are hitting the trawlers with new expenses. Frank comes up with a scheme to create a co-op and increase the anglers’ profits by cutting out the middleman. But that will require communicating and cooperating with hearing folks, and after years of abuse and neglect, the Rossis have grown insular and distrustful. They need Ruby’s experience and charm to navigate the new business environment.
Ruby is trapped in a no-win situation. If she pursues the dream her parents can’t understand by leaving for music school, the family will falter. But if she passes up her opportunity to go to Berklee, she could end up embittered and wasted in this small town.
CODA is a classic story of intergenerational conflict spiced up with a culture clash narrative between the deaf and hearing communities. The execution is nearly flawless. The core cast is terrific, particularly the chemistry between Kotsur and Matlin (who happens to be the other deaf actor who has won an Oscar, for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God). Jones pulls off an extremely difficult role, in which she both has to sing and use ASL like a native signer. The characterization of the Rossis as authentically rough and rude working class people instead of saintly martyrs to their disability feels like a big leap forward in representation. This story is told from their perspective, and the hearing world are the outsiders. The disconnect between the two worlds is driven home in a masterful sequence at the school concert, where Ruby’s triumphal performance plays in silence, as the family tries to suss out how she’s doing by watching the faces of the audience.
Meanwhile, the family’s fishing business is in crisis. Market prices are low, and regulations to protect the fisheries are hitting the trawlers with new expenses. Frank comes up with a scheme to create a co-op and increase the anglers’ profits by cutting out the middleman. But that will require communicating and cooperating with hearing folks, and after years of abuse and neglect, the Rossis have grown insular and distrustful. They need Ruby’s experience and charm to navigate the new business environment.
Ruby is trapped in a no-win situation. If she pursues the dream her parents can’t understand by leaving for music school, the family will falter. But if she passes up her opportunity to go to Berklee, she could end up embittered and wasted in this small town.
CODA is a classic story of intergenerational conflict spiced up with a culture clash narrative between the deaf and hearing communities. The execution is nearly flawless. The core cast is terrific, particularly the chemistry between Kotsur and Matlin (who happens to be the other deaf actor who has won an Oscar, for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God). Jones pulls off an extremely difficult role, in which she both has to sing and use ASL like a native signer. The characterization of the Rossis as authentically rough and rude working class people instead of saintly martyrs to their disability feels like a big leap forward in representation. This story is told from their perspective, and the hearing world are the outsiders. The disconnect between the two worlds is driven home in a masterful sequence at the school concert, where Ruby’s triumphal performance plays in silence, as the family tries to suss out how she’s doing by watching the faces of the audience. ~
https://www.memphisflyer.com/coda
Strangely or perhaps not strangely, the review in the New Yorker has a negative tone:
~ The convenient lineup of plot details extends beyond the foregrounded action into its psychological loam and its real-world implications. Can’t afford college? There are scholarships. Ruby is bullied? Suck it up, use it, and move on. The wholesaler is taking advantage of the Rossis? They start their own co-op. The other fishermen either ignore or mock Frank and Leo for their deafness? See what happens when the Rossis make them some money. “CODA” is a tale of the boundless bounty of personal initiative. The movie’s main villains are “the Feds,” federal maritime inspectors who intrusively impose on the entire fleet of fishing boats and bring charges against the Rossis for not having a hearing person aboard ship.
The tale of work rewarded is also one of virtue rewarded, and its protagonists are defined by nothing but their virtues, of overtly calculated and oddly old-fashioned sorts. Frank and Jackie have an openly randy marriage (their loud afternoon sex turns into an absurd plot point), and the family gleefully talks dirty in A.S.L.; whereas Ruby, disdaining the sexual freedom of her best friend, Gertie (Amy Forsyth), all but proclaims her chastity. The discussions never go beyond the immediate practicalities of the family’s business (and, as for those practicalities, there’s precious little of them). Ruby’s amiable blankness is a template for grownup viewers to fill in with their own projections of what constitutes a good kid. Besides their tight family bonds and their narrowly defined social ones, the Rossis remain undefined.
On the other hand, the movie itself displays an authentic and significant merit, which is to offer large and dramatically vigorous roles to three deaf actors of extraordinary talent, and their performances give the movie a semblance of vitality and of presence that leaps beyond the confines of the script. What their performances reveal is the poverty of the commercial cinema at large (and, truth be told, of independent filmmaking, too) in the casting of deaf actors, of actors with disabilities. Yet, in “CODA,” the burden of labor falls entirely on these actors to suggest that their characters are anything but stick figures of goodness and honor and have a three-dimensional inner life. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/coda-is-a-feel-bad-feel-good-movie
Oriana:
This movie made me more interested in the condition of congenital deafness. Most cases are due to genetics, but some can be traced to viral infections during pregnancy. It’s the usual suspects: measles, rubella, herpes, cytomegalovirus, and syphilis — and the micro-parasite that causes toxoplasmosis. Deafness can also be caused by anoxia (lack of oxygen) during birth.
A child can also become completely deaf due to infections such as measles. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children against measles don’t seem to realize the price their child could potentially pay.
Thanks to the movie I now know that two deaf parents can have a hearing children — in fact 90% of children of deaf parents or parent are born able to hear. This means that there really are daughters like Ruby out there — I say daughters because it’s usually a daughter who’s expect to act as a translator for the deaf parents. If the daughter happens to have ambitions of her own, and needs time to develop her talents, she faces the choice between saying no to her needy parents and her own needs.
While Ruby’s loyalty to her parents is touching, and the amount of family warmth in this movie is very satisfying, a time comes when she needs to put herself and her own future first. Ruby has a beautiful voice and just the right music teacher. And this is my quibble with the movie: just how many girls are both gifted enough and lucky enough (in a small finishing town at that) to meet an inspiring teacher whose encouragement changes their life? (Again I say girls because girls are trained from early on to put the needs of others ahead of their own, and not to aim too high.)
Likewise, how many scholarships to an expensive private music school are actually available, no matter how many gifted applicants apply? And how many of those applicants had received tutoring for free? Given that Ruby’s parents are both working-class and handicapped, how many miracles can we expect to keep happening?
But then a movie need not be realistic. It can indeed be a feel-good miracle story. Not that it’s saccharine. It doesn’t soften the mother-daughter tension. “If I were blind, I suppose you’d choose painting?” the mother asks — as if Ruby’s talent for singing was somehow a personal insult to her deaf mother. The mother also confesses that when Ruby was born, she was given a hearing test. The nurse happily announced that the newborn could hear, “and my heart sank,” the mother says. It turns out that she was afraid that she and the baby would not be able to connect. But since there is an obvious connection, all is quickly well again. Still, I couldn’t overcome the sense that the mother would have preferred a deaf daughter who’d belong to the same world.
Ruby’s relationship with her father seems to be closer and devoid of friction. This may be due to the bravura performance by Troy Kotsur, who steals every scene he’s in. As a father, he is pure supportive love, and that’s a big reason why this is such a feel-good movie. It helps a movie to have a loving father in it — and here we have a loving father-figure as well, in the person of Ruby’s extraordinary music teacher.
There is also an unexpected extraordinary moment in the movie — a couple of minutes of total lack of sound. The hearing actors are still talking, and there must be other ambient sounds — it’s just that we, the audience, can’t hear anything. We get a taste of what it’s like to be deaf.
By all means go see this movie. The amount of positive emotions it delivers makes it worth it right there.
*
THE CHILD-FREE GENERATION
~ The biggest contribution anyone can make to the climate crisis is not to have children. So why do we still treat parenthood as the default?
When I think that it won’t hurt too much, I imagine the children I will not have. Would they be more like me or my partner? Would they have inherited my thatch of hair, our terrible eyesight? Mostly, a child is so abstract to me, living with high rent, student debt, no property and no room, that the absence barely registers. But sometimes I suddenly want a daughter with the same staggering intensity my father felt when he first cradled my tiny body in his big hands. I want to feel that reassuring weight, a reminder of the persistence of life.
Then I remember the numbers. If my baby were to be born today, they would be 10 years old when a quarter of the world’s insects could be gone, when 100 million children are expected to be suffering extreme food scarcity. My child would be 23 when 99% of coral reefs are set to experience severe bleaching. They would be 30 – my age now – when 200 million climate refugees will be roaming the world, when half of all species on Earth are predicted to be extinct in the wild. They would be 80 in 2100, when parts of Australia, Africa and the United States could be uninhabitable.
We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the first caused by a single species. There are 7.8 billion of us, on a planet that scientists estimate can support 1.5 billion humans living as the average US citizen does today. And we know that the biggest contribution any individual living in affluent nations can make is to not have children. According to one study, having one fewer child prevents 58.6 tonnes of carbon emissions every year; compare that with living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding a transatlantic return flight (1.6), or eating a plant-based diet (0.82). Another study said it was almost 20 times more important than any other choice an environmentally minded individual could make. Such claims have been questioned. After all, does a parent really bear the burden of their child’s emissions? Won’t our individual emissions fall as technologies and lifestyles change? Isn’t measuring our individual carbon footprint – a concept popularized by oil and gas multinational BP – giving a free pass to the handful of corporate powers responsible for almost all carbon emissions? The only thing that isn’t up for debate is that we all know that we are living in ways that can’t continue.
The generations that are currently of childbearing age were on the brink of adulthood during the 2008 global financial crisis; a decade later, they find themselves facing another. In the US, the birth rate is at a historic 35-year low (having fallen by 20% after 2008) and is well below the “replacement level” that keeps the population steady. And these are just a few of the 183 countries, from a total of 195, that are set to see huge population crashes by 2100. Twenty-three, including Spain and Japan, may see their populations halve.
Scientists have called this “jaw-dropping”, but others see it as an understandable consequence of the deepening, existential malaise so many of us currently feel; a growing sense that accountability has been eroded, inequality is rampant, and that the profound structural changes we need to feel better about the future are out of our reach. So while governments focus on pronatalist policies, groups including Population Matters and Optimum Population Trust have reported a sharp uptick in interest in their advice, which is to only have one or two children, or none at all. More extreme groups like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (motto: “May we live long and die out”) have entered mainstream conversation. New terms have been minted: “birthstrikers” refuse to procreate in the face of the existential threat of climate change.
Antinatalists argue that bringing sentient life into the world is inherently cruel, as it is doomed to suffer; some make headlines for suing their parents over their own existence. In the darker corners of the internet, ecofascists write screeds about issuing birth licences to those they deem worthy. But the most universally applicable term now is “child-free”: those who have voluntarily decided to not have kids (and so, are not child-“less”).
Coronavirus isn’t likely to give us coronababies – but a pandemic isn’t the reason that having children has shifted from an inevitability to a choice, and now, a moral question. A long time ago, “Do we have children?” became “Should we?”
In A Children’s Bible, a new novel by Lydia Millet, kids are contemptuous of adults for their lack of action before the collapse of society. “It was so sudden, they said. They’d all been told there was more time. Way more. It was someone else’s fault for sure.” One of the children, Jack, finds a decaying Bible, and in it, a way of making sense of his disintegrating world. When an apocalyptic storm hits the US, the book tells him what to do: build an ark.
Few novels have attempted to tell us what to do in the face of climate catastrophe. Amitav Ghosh has called this “a crisis of imagination”. As Richard Powers writes in his 2018 novel The Overstory, “The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
But even when the future seems like no place for a child, there is always room for them in fiction set at the end of the world: they are emotional ammunition, a reminder of bigger stakes to come. In Lauren Beukes’s upcoming Afterland, a global pandemic that kills only men has lead to a “global reprohibition”; Cole, a mother on the run with her mysteriously still-living teenage son, thinks: “When there aren’t going to be any more kids, you want to hold on to their childhood for as long as you can. There must be a German word for that. Nostalgenfreude. Kindersucht.”
*
Perhaps it is kindersucht we feel when we read novels like The Children of Men by PD James, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, or JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, in which children are conspicuous by their presence or absence. In Ballard’s 1962 novel, set in a submerged London, “the birth of a child had become a comparative rarity, and only one marriage in 10 yielded any offspring … the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself.” In Margaret Atwood’s 1977 short story “When It Happens”, a middle-aged woman makes preparations to flee her family home due to an unnamed threat, and her gaze falls on a family photo: “The children when they were babies. She thinks of her girls now and hopes they will not have babies; it is no longer the right time for it.” In Jenny Offill’s Weather, the narrator watches her son play and recalls a past conversation with an environmentalist friend: “I asked her once what I could do, how I could get him ready. It would be good if he had some skills, she said. And of course, no children.”
Children become resigned to not having the future they should have had; in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, when the father says: “You are not the one who has to worry about everything”, his son counters, “I am the one.” And in Season Butler’s Cygnet, a teenager mopes around an island populated only by pensioners waiting out the end as their homes slowly crumble into the sea: “I think about the kids that people my age are having, or will start having soon. Life is going to be so boring for them. Not just because the world will have gone completely to shit by then and there won’t be much of anything left, but because their parents are going to talk constantly about how the world used to be.”
In the real world too, children play a leading role: think of all the kids we’ve seen skipping school to hold signs on the news, or addressing world leaders for us at UN climate summits. It is tragic and effective, and why every book about the environment right now is written by parents. Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything starts with her realisation that her toddler may never see a moose. Notes from an Apocalypse opens as Mark O’Connell sees a video of a starving polar bear and mourns for his son, who is happily watching a cartoon bear nearby. Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are the Weather looks forward to the lives his children will inherit. In David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, he confesses to the “delusion” and “wilful blindness” involved in his decision to have his first child while writing it. And the title of James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren says it all.
All these books are well argued, emotive and interesting, but it is remarkable how many of these authors suggest that having a child is a hopeful gesture, a sign of one’s investment in the future. Wallace-Wells has said having children “is a reason to fight now”. O’Connell writes that his son’s birth is a dilemma because “the last thing the world needed, after all, was more people in it, and the last thing my hitherto nonexistent person needed was to be in the world”; by the end, he has a second child, and a “radically increased stake in the future”. Klein writes that, before having her son, she “couldn’t help feeling shut out” by activists talking about their children and grandchildren, and wonders: “Was it even possible to be a real environmentalist if you didn’t have kids?” (Yes.) If you don’t, it is seen as fatalism. “Are we then expected to hasten the end, to succumb at last to the logic of oblivion, by renouncing the biological imperative?” asks O’Connell. (No.)
So, we continue to place our hopes in children, even the ones that don’t yet exist, to save us. Lee Edelman calls this “reproductive futurism” in his book No Future; it is that child, “the fantasmic beneficiary of every political intervention”, that people feel inspired to fight for, the one people mean when they say to women like me: “But what if your child was the one to solve climate change?”
As Sheila Heti writes in Motherhood: “I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning away from the living – an insufficient love for the rest of us, we billions of orphans already living.” And as Greta Thunberg told us all last year: “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you.”
When asked why I do not have children, I have given various explanations over the years. “It is a complex situation” is vague enough to make most interrogators look ashamed for having asked. If I say, “I am worried about the environment”, parents often tell me in hushed tones that they have wondered whether their children will be able to have children too. (In my meanest moments, I think: “Really? How hard did you think about that?” And then I feel a deep, sour sense of shame, because I have a choice in the matter and rightfully, so do they.) But “I don’t want to” is the only answer that provokes a flinch.
Countless studies have found that people consider child-free adults unnatural and cold. Women bear this burden particularly hard; Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon have been forced to share miscarriages and infertility; the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard was once criticized for being “deliberately barren”.
Last year, I wrote a news story about Paul Dolan’s book Happy Ever After, which contained some research about child-free people being just as happy as parents. Subsequently, complete strangers called me a “stupid bitch”, a “feminist cancer”. One Instagram account uploaded a picture of me where thousands of men discussed how unfuckable I was; more than one messaged to tell me that my mother wished I had never been born. When I read this, I thought of my mother, who had me as a teenager and could give them a brisk, pitiless history of all the people like them who treated her terribly for having had a child. (If you still don’t think this is a gendered debate, I ran into Dolan a day later, and asked him how he was coping. “What abuse?” he asked.)
Still, my generation continues desperately to hunt for things to do in the face of the greatest catastrophe some of us (or our children) may live to see. We give up meat and take holidays closer to home, even when we know that if the super-rich cut their emissions to that of the average EU citizen, global emissions would drop by a third. But we can’t make anyone else do anything, so we do what we can, and we justify our choices as being meaningful, bigger than us.
Ever since my partner and I concluded that we wanted to be child-free, I have looked to books for positive examples of fulfilling and rewarding lives lived without children. The closest I have found have been eccentric spinsters and ambivalent parents, in a long line from Doris Lessing and DH Lawrence, Barbara Pym and Rachel Cusk. There are countless mothers who find their intellectual pursuits strangled by their children and absent husbands (most recently, Fleishmann Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet).
But recently, as millennials are coming of age as both prospective parents and as authors, characters are questioning the status quo. “Fuck all those childbearers and their ‘fulfilling’ lives, never getting to have adventures like mine,” thinks the 38-year-old narrator of Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, for whom the prospect of children is “like something mildly distasteful: a piece of onion I would prefer not to put on my plate”. “Why bother having a kid when the world’s going to hell anyway?” wonders one character in Ottessa Moshfegh’s A Year of Rest and Relaxation. “Why do you want children?” the narrator of Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar asks her boyfriend. “He shrugs. ‘So we can be like everybody else.’” In Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, a woman objects to her husband’s expectation that they will someday have children. “Why is it necessary for everyone to think of it, as if there were no other choice?” she rages at a friend.
The climate crisis has presented an opportunity to rebrand being child-free, once the greatest taboo, into the ultimate altruistic act. At the same time, parenthood is framed as the ultimate investment in a better future. But choosing to have children is neither inherently good nor selfish, and the same goes for being child-free. We must challenge the orthodoxy that says choosing to live one way is a criticism of another. Just this week comes a new novel by Emma Gannon, Olive, which centers on a woman in her 30s who has chosen to be child-free; Gannon herself has spoken about being made to feel guilty for her choice.
What we need instead is a quiet revolution, a complete reappraisal of what we deem to be a meaningful life. I, for one, will continue to turn to books, where I find reassurance in the strangest of places. In one tiny strand of The Overstory, Ray and Dorothy, a couple who have spent thousands on fertility treatments, finally decided to move on. “In place of children, then, books,” Powers writes. “Ray likes to glimpse the grand project of civilization ascending to its still-obscure destiny. He wants only to read on, late into the night, about the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/25/why-a-generation-is-choosing-to-be-child-free
Oriana:
When I was in college, “population explosion” was one of the most common phrases — the equivalent of what “climate catastrophe” is now. “I’d be ashamed to have a kid,” one of my biology teachers stated. I remember a somewhat older student in one of my English classes admitting that she had four children. She was immediately shamed for it. “But my children are superior,” she insisted (possibly meaning IQ) — you can imagine the reaction to that incredibly politically incorrect statement (even though the term PC wasn’t yet born, nor was overpopulation linked to climate catastrophe as yet).
Decades after first reading books like The Population Bomb, we’re experiencing a curious reversal. Now population experts are telling us that the greatest danger to humanity is “population collapse” and “downward demographic spiral” (these days Russia seems to be a favorite example). Without enough young people, a country cannot thrive. And all of the West and the more affluent Asian countries have fertility rates significantly below replacement.
I think one huge problem is that parenthood is generally presented in terms of the huge sacrifices: it’s very expensive to raise children, and the problems that come with having even one child are numerous and sometimes unsolvable (imagine having an autistic child). Once in a while you hear the word “joy,” but it gets lost in the noise of all the negatives of having children. “It’s constant stress,” one of my friends, a mother of three, once said. “It is a nightmare,” another friend admitted — even though she was affluent enough to hire a nanny (but a nanny need a day off). “Children were mostly a nightmare, though I loved them too,” another friend said.
Affordable child care, I keep saying. Payments to mothers would help, but not as much as being able to drop off your small child at a quality child-care center.
*
GENTLE PARENTING
~ Kristen Hernandez wants her children to be better parents than she was. After growing up in a family that struggled with “a generational curse of child abuse,” she says she tried to do things differently. But without much guidance, Hernandez was left to “wing it,” and admits she’d made mistakes along the way. “A lot of times, I was hypercritical of my kids—I felt like if I didn’t correct them immediately, it would become a habit,” she remembers. Now, Hernandez worries she’s “misprogrammed” those parenting ideas into her children, who’ve since gone on to have their own.
But three years ago, while working at a childcare referral agency in North Carolina, Hernandez read an article about “gentle parenting”—a discipline embodying everything she believed, but had never known existed. “The basic idea is that parents should be aware of their child’s developmental stage, and divorce [their] own ego from what’s happening,” she explains. “It’s about not taking behaviors personally, and nurturing children to become who they want to be, instead of how we’d like to see them.”
The term comes from British childcare expert Sarah Ockwell-Smith, author of the “The Gentle Parenting Book,” who defines the discipline as“be[ing] responsive to children’s needs” and “recogniz[ing] that all children are individuals.”
As opposed to authoritarian parenting that focuses on controlling and punishing a child’s behavior (a discipline since proven to be largely ineffective), or parenting that uses praise and rewards to “palliate” the problem (which can also, in some cases, harm a child’s self-esteem by making them expect unrealistic levels of positive feedback), Ockwell-Smith says gentle parenting is based on a simple premise: “understanding why children behave in the way they do, looking for unmet needs, and resolving them.”
In practice, she says, that might mean looking out for child’s tiredness signs instead of keeping them on a strict sleep schedule, “feeding them on cue” instead of adhering to set dining times, or talking them through a tantrum instead of punishing them. And despite a misconception that gentle parenting is “lazy” or “permissive,” Ockwell-Smith notes how gentle parenting often involves more discipline from the parents, since it requires them to “focus on making mindful decisions” and “role model” their own communication with patience, clarity, and self-control. Plus, she cautions, it can take years if not decades to show results.
“We have such a quick fix mentality in our society, largely due to the sensationalized parenting programs we see on TV where a nanny comes in and turns the difficult behavior around overnight, but real life isn’t like that,” Ockwell-Smith says. Instead, she says, gentle parenting is about helping kids become well-adjusted over time.
With the pandemic prompting schools and childcare to shut down, hundreds of ‘gentle parenting’ Facebook groups, Instagram pages, and TikTok accounts have emerged to help people support and advise one another as they learn the ‘gentle’ approach. One viral clip showed parents how and why to replace “time-outs” with “time-ins,” which Nikki Cruz, a TikTok-er and self-proclaimed “recovering tiger mama,” defines as “a super comfy, safe space [for her son] to reflect and center his mind, process his thoughts, and regulate his emotions.” Instead of sending a child to sit alone as a form of punishment, a parent might instead focus on removing them, physically or psychologically, from the situation causingt hem distress—not to coddle them, but to help them process and articulate why they’re throwing a tantrum. Other hits include an Instagram tips-guide encouraging parents to playfully but honestly acknowledge (and reverse) their behavior when they catch themselves yelling, as a way to model the emotional regulation they’d like their kids to show. And then there’s Hernandez, who created the “Gentle Parenting” Facebook group—a place where she could help other parents find the guidance she’d once lacked.
“It feels like the start of a cultural shift,” says Melissa Stadler, a licensed social worker with The Gentle Parenting Institute (GPI), a nonprofit offering parents online and offline coaching and therapy. “So many families want to learn more positive, evidence-based practices, but they need information and support to practically sustain them.”
Because the approach is so new, Ockwell-Smith cautions that research specific to ‘gentle parenting’ is scarce. But she notes how similar disciplines like positive parenting—also premised on “nurturance, responsivity, age-appropriate expectations and mindfully set-and-reinforced boundaries”—boasts ample evidence, and could help justify the “gentle” concept’s growing popularity.
A VERY DIVERSE RANGE OF DEVELOPMENTAL OUTCOMES
The search for evidence-based parenting began several decades ago, when an Australian graduate student named Matthew Sanders had a hunch that such a field, then largely unheard of, was sorely needed; if poor parenting, he reasoned, was linked with negative public health outcomes, could good parenting produce positive public health outcomes?
Sanders would spend 40 years studying thousands of families to find out. His first attempt came in the early 1980s, when he piloted a home coaching model for parents of preschool-age children with oppositional behavior issues, using the early tenets of positive parenting. Even then, the results were promising; children of trained families showed reductions in deviant behavior.
“Parenting has been shown to influence a very diverse range of developmental outcomes in children—their language, social skills, peer relationships, academic accomplishments, avoidance of crime and substance abuse,” says Sanders, who now serves as Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Queensland. “Yet we give nowhere near the degree of emphasis that’s required to equip parents well to do this task.”
To counter that imbalance, Sanders expanded the home-based model into Triple P:a population-level, public health intervention led by schools, clinics, and governments around the world. When designing the program in 2001, Sanders knew he had to be careful not to “preach” about what parents had been doing wrong, and instead empower them with better strategies.
He grouped those strategies into five key principles, supporting parents to create a safe and engaging environment—a home where kids have their basic nutrition, sleep, and hygiene needs met; promote a positive learning environment—reinforcing a tone of encouragement over harshness; use assertive discipline—shifting from coercive strategies to ones that help children understand appropriate (and inappropriate) behavior; maintain reasonable expectations—establishing what children should (and should not) be able to do, based on their level of development; and take care of themselves, too.
“Sometimes parents don’t realize that their own attention is very powerful, and that if they have to yell to get their kid to do something, it rewards the parent’s escalation,” Sanders explains. “So we try to teach parents how to self-regulate so they can then teach their children those skills.”
In 20 years of conducting Triple P in nearly forty countries, the 500-plus studies— including more than 175 randomized controlled trials—show great success; parents who have taken Triple P display increased competence, reduced dysfunction, and improved self-esteem, while children exhibit less misbehavior, greater positive affect, and a lower likelihood of externalizing problems. Randomized trials, too, find statistically significant reductions in child maltreatment and improvements in parental wellbeing, among other outcomes.
Despite Triple P’s robust evidence base, Sanders acknowledges its imperfections; he says the quality of any parenting intervention naturally depends on the quality of the person leading it, not to mention the attention level of the parents taking it.
Despite Triple P’s robust evidence base, Sanders acknowledges its imperfections; he says the quality of any parenting intervention naturally depends on the quality of the person leading it, not to mention the attention level of the parents taking it.
But then there’s the bigger question of access: making sure that families most in-need of support can actually get it. As social media swoops in to help—amplifying tidbits of these tried-and-true theories to new audiences in new formats—Sanders worries that “popular opinion” may overshadow the science underlying them. And while he appreciates the similarities positive parenting and gentle parenting share, he says it’s crucial for the latter to develop its own unique evidence base if it’s to become widely accepted.
PARENTS ARE TALKING TO EACH OTHER THE WAY THEY NEVER DID BEFORE
Triple P has tried to eliminate access barriers by offering free or very low-cost programming through government sponsorships. More recently, they’ve also created a take-anytime-online version for $80. But a growing number of parents seem to seek advice from the networks where they’re already active; a recent Pew Survey of 2,000 mothers and fathers, for instance, found a majority get parenting advice from social media, and that less affluent caregivers are even more likely to do so. A small qualitative study of mothers further found that parents especially appreciate getting guidance through Facebook in order to crowdsource multiple viewpoints, and to feel immediate support.
“Over the last 10 years, parents have started to talk to each other in a way they never really did before, and in doing so, they’re starting to realize that the ‘traditional parenting practices’ being suggested to them are creating power struggles, tantrums, and a sense that they have to constantly be imposing some infinitely escalating consequences,” says Melissa Stadler, the therapist with GPI.
Stadler knows from personal experience; she remembers feeling a “visceral disconnect” between what felt right to her as a new mother and the traditional advice she’d been told: “let your baby cry it out” or “spanking is okay,” for example.
But when she heard about gentle parenting in a book, she immediately loved its emphasis on “maximizing connection between parent and child,” and started a Facebook group with other psychology professionals to help spread the gentle approach. “All of these parents are finally saying to each other, ‘well, if [our child] conflicts are arising from an unmet need, what if we just met that need?”
Still, Stadler says, while GPI doesn’t turn people with financial barriers away from their services, it’s not lost on her that privilege plays a tremendous role in determining which families can actually follow the gentle parenting strategies, which often take more time and patience than “traditional” ones.
“When you’re working three jobs and you’re exhausted and don’t know if you’re gonna be able to pay your rent this month, it’s harder to keep your cool when your toddler is melting down,” she says. “Not everyone has equal access to the support that it takes to parent gently, and as long as that’s the case, it means certain kids don’t have equal access to the kinds of outcomes gentle parenting produces.”
But Stadler says “having this free Facebook group, where any parent can come and post a question and get advice from board-certified behavioral analysts” is a step in the right direction.
The same is true for Hernandez, now a grandmother, who started a “Gentle Parenting” Facebook group four years ago. What started as a humble resources forum intended mainly for her daughter and work clients has evolved into an active online community, where, nearly every hour, parents ask questions, share tips, and affirm one another through doubts and frustrations.
But when she thinks about her childhood, and how her father—a survivor of extreme child abuse—fought to pass laws ending parental violence, she’s proud, too, of the gentle parenting successes that hit closer to home.
“I’ll see my daughter ask her daughter if she wants to take a nap or a bath, and if her daughter says no, she just says ‘Okay,” Hernandez says. “”It’s just really nice to see them developing that relationship through trust and confidence, and how being open to new ways of raising our kids has made a difference through the generations.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-gentle-parenting-can-teach-us-about-care-relationships-and-communication?utm_source=pocket-new
Oriana:
I see it as an expansion of basic human rights -- the rights of the child need to be taken as seriously as we take the rights of adults. It's part of the "dignitarian revolution," that includes animal rights as well. As the culture in general becomes less hierarchical and more egalitarian, it's only natural that we'd start treating children as individuals -- appropriate to their developmental level, of course, and with child-care resources available so that parents can have their own lives, too.
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THE ORIGINS OF THE EASTER BUNNY
The Easter bunny is a much-celebrated character in American Easter celebrations. On Easter Sunday, children look for hidden special treats, often chocolate Easter eggs, that the Easter bunny might have left behind.
As a folklorist, I’m aware of the origins of the long and interesting journey this mythical figure has taken from European prehistory to today.
Religious role of the hare
Easter is a celebration of spring and new life. Eggs and flowers are rather obvious symbols of female fertility, but in European traditions, the bunny, with its amazing reproductive potential, is not far behind.
In European traditions, the Easter bunny is known as the Easter hare. The symbolism of the hare has had many tantalizing ritual and religious roles down through the years.
Hares were given ritual burials alongside humans during the Neolithic age in Europe.
Archaeologists have interpreted this as a religious ritual, with hares representing rebirth.
Over a thousand years later, during the Iron Age, ritual burials for hares were common, and in 51 B.C.E., Julius Caesar mentioned that in Britain, hares were not eaten due to their religious significance.
venus, mars and cupid; Piero di Cosimo circa 1490
Caesar would likely have known that in the classical Greek tradition, hares were sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Meanwhile, Aphrodite’s son Eros was often depicted carrying a hare as a symbol of unquenchable desire.
From the Greek world through the Renaissance, hares often appear as symbols of sexuality in literature and art. For example, the Virgin Mary is often shown with a white hare or rabbit, symbolizing that she overcame sexual temptation.
But it is in the folk traditions of England and Germany that the figure of the hare is specifically connected to Easter. Accounts from the 1600s in Germany describe children hunting for Easter eggs hidden by the Easter hare, much as in the United States today.
Written accounts from England around the same time also mention the Easter hare,
particularly in terms of traditional Easter hare hunts and the eating of hare meat at Easter.
One tradition, known as the “Hare Pie Scramble,” was held at Hallaton, a village in Leicestershire, England. It involved eating a pie made with hare meat and people “scrambling” for a slice. In 1790, the local parson tried to stop the custom due to its pagan associations, but he was unsuccessful, and the custom continues in that village until this day.
The eating of the hare may have been associated with various longstanding folk traditions of scaring away witches at Easter. Throughout northern Europe, folk traditions record a strong belief that witches would often take the form of a hare, usually for causing mischief such as stealing milk from neighbors’ cows. Witches in medieval Europe were said to be able to suck out the life energy of others, making them ill.
The idea that the witches of winter should be banished at Easter is a common European folk motif appearing in several festivities and rituals. The spring equinox, with its promise of new life, was held symbolically in opposition to the life-draining activities of witches and winter.
This idea provides the underlying rationale behind various festivities and rituals, such as the Osterfeuer, or Easter Fire, a celebration in Germany involving large outdoor bonfires meant to scare away witches. In Sweden, popular folklore states that at Easter, the witches all fly away on their broomsticks to feast and dance with the devil on the legendary island of Blåkulla, in the Baltic Sea.
In 1835, the folklorist Jacob Grimm, one of the famous team of the fairy tale Brothers Grimm, argued that the Easter hare was connected to a goddess he imagined would have been called “Ostara” in ancient German. He derived this name from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, who Bede, an early medieval monk considered to be the father of English history, mentioned in 731 C.E.
Bede noted that in eighth-century England, the month of April was called Eosturmonath, or Eostre Month, after the goddess Eostre. He wrote that a pagan festival of spring in the name of the goddess had become assimilated into the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Christ.
While most European languages refer to the Christian holiday with names that come from the Jewish holiday of Passover, such as Pâques in French or Påsk in Swedish, German and English languages retain this older, non-biblical word: Easter.
Recent archaeological research appears to confirm the worship of Eostre in parts of England and Germany, with the hare as her main symbol. The Easter bunny therefore seems to recall these pre-Christian celebrations of spring, heralded by the vernal equinox and personified by the goddess Eostre.
After a long, cold, northern winter, it seems natural enough for people to celebrate themes of resurrection and rebirth. The flowers are blooming, birds are laying eggs and baby bunnies are hopping about.
As new life emerges in spring, the Easter bunny hops back once again, providing a longstanding cultural symbol to remind us of the cycles and stages of our own lives.
There used to be plenty of bunnies in my areas -- in fact after dusk they'd come out to munch on the suburban lawns. Now the lawns are mostly gravel (or fake plastic grass), and it seems like at least a year since I last saw a rabbit. The drought has done its damage.
Dürer: Hare
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THREE DECADES AGO, AMERICA LOST ITS RELIGION. WHY?
~ The idea of American exceptionalism has become so dubious that much of its modern usage is merely sarcastic. But when it comes to religion, Americans really are exceptional. No rich country prays nearly as much as the U.S, and no country that prays as much as the U.S. is nearly as rich.
America’s unique synthesis of wealth and worship has puzzled international observers and foiled their grandest theories of a global secular takeover. In the late 19th century, an array of celebrity philosophers—the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud—proclaimed the death of God, and predicted that atheism would follow scientific discovery and modernity in the West, sure as smoke follows fire.
Stubbornly pious Americans threw a wrench in the secularization thesis. Deep into the 20th century, more than nine in 10 Americans said they believed in God and belonged to an organized religion, with the great majority of them calling themselves Christian. That number held steady—through the sexual-revolution ’60s, through the rootless and anxious ’70s, and through the “greed is good” ’80s.
But in the early 1990s, the historical tether between American identity and faith snapped. Religious non-affiliation in the U.S. started to rise—and rise, and rise. By the early 2000s, the share of Americans who said they didn’t associate with any established religion (also known as “nones”) had doubled. By the 2010s, this grab bag of atheists, agnostics, and spiritual dabblers had tripled in size.
History does not often give the satisfaction of a sudden and lasting turning point. History tends to unfold in messy cycles—actions and reactions, revolutions and counterrevolutions—and even semipermanent changes are subtle and glacial. But the rise of religious non-affiliation in America looks like one of those rare historical moments that is neither slow, nor subtle, nor cyclical. You might call it exceptional.
According to Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at the University of Notre Dame, America’s nonreligious lurch has mostly been the result of three historical events: the association of the Republican Party with the Christian right, the end of the Cold War, and 9/11.
This story begins with the rise of the religious right in the 1970s. Alarmed by the spread of secular culture—including but not limited to the sexual revolution, the Roe v. Wade decision, the nationalization of no-fault divorce laws, and Bob Jones University losing its tax-exempt status over its ban on interracial dating—Christians became more politically active. The GOP welcomed them with open arms. The party, which was becoming more dependent on its exurban-white base, needed a grassroots strategy and a policy platform. Within the next decade, the religious right—including Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority—had become fundraising and organizing juggernauts for the Republican Party. In 1980, the GOP social platform was a facsimile of conservative Christian views on sexuality, abortion, and school prayer.
The marriage between the religious and political right delivered Reagan, Bush, and countless state and local victories. But it disgusted liberal Democrats, especially those with weak connections to the Church. It also shocked the conscience of moderates, who preferred a wide berth between their faith and their politics. Smith said it’s possible that young liberals and loosely affiliated Christians first registered their aversion to the Christian right in the early 1990s, after a decade of observing its powerful role in conservative politics.
Second, it may have felt unpatriotic to confess one’s ambivalence toward God while the U.S. was locked in a geopolitical showdown with a godless Evil Empire. In 1991, however, the Cold War ended. As the U.S.S.R. dissolved, so did atheism’s association with America’s nemesis. After that, “nones” could be forthright about their religious indifference, without worrying that it made them sound like Soviet apologists.
Third, America’s next geopolitical foe wasn’t a godless state. It was a God-fearing, stateless movement: radical Islamic terrorism. A series of bombings and attempted bombings in the 1990s by fundamentalist organizations such as al-Qaeda culminated in the 9/11 attacks. It would be a terrible oversimplification to suggest that the fall of the Twin Towers encouraged millions to leave their church, Smith said. But over time, al-Qaeda became a useful referent for atheists who wanted to argue that all religions were inherently destructive.
Meanwhile, during George W. Bush’s presidency, Christianity’s association with unpopular Republican policies drove more young liberals and moderates away from both the party and the Church. New Atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, became intellectual celebrities; the 2006 best seller American Theocracy argued that evangelicals in the Republican coalition were staging a quiet coup that would plunge the country into disarray and financial ruin. Throughout the Bush presidency, liberal voters—especially white liberal voters— detached from organized religion in ever-higher numbers.
Religion has lost its halo effect in the past three decades, not because science drove God from the public square, but rather because politics did. In the 21st century, “not religious” has become a specific American identity—one that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, evangelical right.
*
The Church is just one of many social institutions—including banks, Congress, and the police—that have lost public trust in an age of elite failure. But scandals in the Catholic Church have accelerated its particularly rapid loss of moral stature. According to Pew research, 13 percent of Americans today self-identify as “former Catholics,” and many of them leave organized religion altogether. And as the ranks of the nones have swelled, it’s become more socially acceptable for casual or rare churchgoers to tell pollsters that they don’t particularly identify with any faith. It’s also become easier for nones to meet, marry, and raise children who grow up without any real religious attachment.
Nor does Smith rule out the familiar antagonists of capitalism and the internet in explaining the popularity of non-affiliation. “The former has made life more precarious, and the latter has made it easier for anxious individuals to build their own spiritualities from ideas and practices they find online,” he said, such as Buddhist meditation guides and atheist Reddit boards.
Most important has been the dramatic changes in the American family. The past half century has dealt a series of body blows to American marriage. Divorce rates spiked in the ’70s through the ’90s, following the state-by-state spread of no-fault divorce laws. Just as divorce rates stabilized, the marriage rate started to plummet in the ’80s, due to both the decline of marriage within the working class and delayed marriage among college-educated couples.
“There’s historically been this package: Get married, go to church or temple, have kids, send them to Sunday school,” Smith said. But just as stable families make stable congregations, family instability can destabilize the Church. Divorced individuals, single parents, and children of divorce or single-parent households are all more likely to detach over time from their congregations.
Finally, the phenomenon of “delayed adulthood” might be another subtle contributor. More Americans, especially college graduates in big metro areas, are putting off marriage and childbearing until their 30s, and are using their 20s to establish a career, date around, and enjoy being young and single in a city. By the time they settle down, they have established a routine—work, brunch, gym, date, drink, football—that leaves little room for weekly Mass. “They know who they are by 30, and they don’t feel like they need a church to tell them,” Smith said.
The rise of the nones shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the religious identity that seems to be doing the best job at both retaining old members and attracting new ones is the newfangled American religion of Nothing Much at All.
Does the rise of the nones matter?
Let’s first consider the possibility that it doesn’t. As America’s youth have slipped away from organized religion, they haven’t quite fallen into wickedness. If anything, today’s young people are uniquely conscientious—less likely to fight, drink, use hard drugs, or have premarital sex than previous generations. They might not be able to quote from the Book of Matthew, but their economic and social politics—which insist on protections for the politically meek and the historically persecuted—aren’t so far from a certain reading of the beatitudes.
But the liberal politics of young people brings us to the first big reason to care about rising non-affiliation. A gap has opened up between America’s two political parties. In a twist of fate, the Christian right entered politics to save religion, only to make the Christian-Republican nexus unacceptable to millions of young people—thus accelerating the country’s turn against religion.
Although it would be wrong to call Democrats a secular party (older black voters are highly religious and dependably vote Democratic), the left today has a higher share of religiously unaffiliated voters than anytime in modern history.
At the same time, the average religiosity of white Christian Republicans has gone up, according to Robert P. Jones, the CEO of the polling firm PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America. Evangelicals feel so embattled that they’ve turned to a deeply immoral and authoritarian champion to protect them—even if it means rendering unto an American Caesar whatever the hell he wants. American politics is at risk of becoming a war of religiosity versus secularism by proxy, where both sides see the other as a catastrophic political force that must be destroyed at all costs.
The deeper question is whether the sudden loss of religion has social consequences for Americans who opt out. Secular Americans, who are familiar with the ways that traditional faiths have betrayed modern liberalism, may not have examined how organized religion has historically offered solutions to their modern existential anxieties.
Making friends as an adult without a weekly congregation is hard. Establishing a weekend routine to soothe Sunday-afternoon nerves is hard. Reconciling the overwhelming sense of life’s importance with the universe’s ostensible indifference to human suffering is hard.
Although belief in God is no panacea for these problems, religion is more than a theism. It is a bundle: a theory of the world, a community, a social identity, a means of finding peace and purpose, and a weekly routine. Those, like me, who have largely rejected this package deal, often find themselves shopping à la carte for meaning, community, and routine to fill a faith-shaped void. Their politics is a religion. Their work is a religion. Their spin class is a church. And not looking at their phone for several consecutive hours is a Sabbath.
American nones may well build successful secular systems of belief, purpose, and community. But imagine what a devout believer might think: Millions of Americans have abandoned religion, only to re-create it everywhere they look.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/atheism-fastest-growing-religion-us/598843/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2z7yuJRnpLk0gQjn3I6qDcpZ4oehbvMtJSV_HRkfLF5cCIxxOGIAODa0s
Oriana:
I suspect the iPhone and the Internet have played a huge role in secularization. It's not easy for preachers to compete with the constant stream of on-screen entertainment.
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RICH INNER LIFE = LESS NEED FOR RELIGION
"He who possesses science and art also has religion;
but he who possesses neither, let him have religion."
~ Goethe
I think the broader underlying concept here is having a rich mental life. Rich mental life = no need for religion.
I could never understand the phrase "poor in spirit" — I haven't come across a single translation that makes sense. When I first heard the phrase, I thought it meant "the uneducated." Those who have an impoverished mental life? If a rich mental life means less or no need for religion, I can see how education would be seen with suspicion, especially by the literalist Evangelicals and cults such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Likewise, those who have a rich love life don’t need an imaginary lover and/or father. Or those who have a life filled with satisfying friendships.
A real lover brings so many gifts and challenges, the full emotional spectrum including ecstasy and pain -- and the dignity of being there for each other. Being of service to real people versus living in a hermitage, flagellating and praying to various saints — is there any doubt which mode represents mental health and contributes to building a better world?
I know I'm preaching to myself since I have a tendency to prefer mental life to dealing with the world. It’s not just that I am an introvert; I love to mull over ideas, and I love art and music (the most voluptuous pleasure, its own eros). And I love the beauty of nature. It’s an embarrassment of riches.
Having left the church at 14, I sometimes wondered if later I’d discover a religion that would not violate my deepest values (which include a need for at least partial evidence) and provide some special fulfillment. Given that some people turn to religion as they grow older, I thought there was some possibility of this happening to me.
Now I know better. My mental life and my relationships with real people are so rich, there is simply no room for religion. I observe the Sabbath by going to my favorite library. Every Saturday around noon, off I go to that amazing temple, its lobby filled with orchids — the head librarian loves orchids. I never knew I’d be so lucky. Every day I feel an astonished gratitude for the gifts of life. ~
(An update: Alas, I had to give up the long commute to my favorite library. But my Sundays are still filled with the contentment of reading and learning.)
(And yes, I enjoy visiting beautiful old churches. Their quiet dusk has always been very special to me. But I mean churches between the services, empty churches except for a dim figure in a pew somewhere, also soaking in the peace.)
MUTATIONS ARE THE KEY TO AGING
~ How long animals live is linked to how quickly their genetic code mutates, a study suggests.
Researchers discovered that mammals - from tigers to humans - have roughly the same number of mutations by the time they die of old age.
But short-lived animals tend to burn through their allowance more rapidly, the analysis of 16 species indicates.
The researchers say it helps explain why we age and sheds light on one of cancer's most perplexing mysteries.
Experts said the findings, by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, were "staggering" and “thought-provoking".
Mutations are changes that creep into the instruction manual for building and running our bodies - our DNA.
Those mutations have long been known to be at the root of cancer, but whether they were important for aging has been debated for decades. Researchers at Sanger say they have produced "the first experimental evidence" suggesting they are.
They analyzed how quickly mutations occur in species with different life expectancies. They looked at DNA from a cat, black and white colobus, dog, ferret, giraffe, horse, human, lion, mouse, naked mole rat, rabbit, rat, ring-tailed lemur and a tiger.
The study, published in the journal Nature, showed mice rattle through nearly 800 mutations a year during their short lives, which last just under four years.
And the longer animals live, the fewer mutations they pick up each year.
Dogs have around 249 annual mutations, a lion 160 and a giraffe 99. Humans averaged 47.
One of the researchers, Dr Alex Cagan, said the pattern was "striking" and it was "really surprising and exciting" that all the animals in the study converged on "about 3,200" mutations across their lifetime.
If people's DNA mutated at the same rate as that of mice, we would die with more than 50,000 genetic alterations.
"Despite having different lifespans, at the end of life the mammals had the same number of mutations," Dr Cagan told the BBC.
"This is the number, but what does it mean? It's a mystery to us," he said.
It could be the cells in the body reach a critical number of mutations and then conk out. There are also ideas that "a few [cells] behaving badly" start to take over critical tissue, such as in the heart, as we age, so organs do not function properly.
Aging, however, is unlikely to be down to a single process inside our bodies' cells.
Telomere shortening and epigenetic changes are also thought to play a role. However, if mutations are involved, then it poses the question whether there are ways of slowing the genetic damage or even repairing it.
The researchers want to see whether this pattern holds true for all life or just for mammals. They are aiming to add fish to the analysis, including a Greenland shark, which can live to over 400 years old and is the longest-living vertebrate in the world.
CANCER PARADOX
~ In cancer science there is a conundrum known as "Peto's paradox" - why don't big, long-living animals have sky-high rates of cancer?
The more cells there are in your body and the longer you live, the greater the chance that one of them becomes cancerous. This should be terrible news for elephant and whales.
"Whales have trillions more cells [than us]. They shouldn't exist as they'd have cancer before adulthood," says Dr Cagan.
Big animals tend to live longer, so their slower mutation rate could help explain the paradox, but the researchers say this is far from the whole story.
Naked mole rats and giraffes both live to broadly the same age, with similar mutation rates, despite giraffes being thousands of times larger.
"You'd expect the giraffe's mutation rate to be even lower, but it's like body size doesn't matter," said Dr Cagan.
Instead, the researchers argue that other methods of suppressing cancer must have evolved - which could inspire new cancer therapies. For example, elephants have more copies of a chunk of DNA that suppresses tumors.
Dr Alexander Gorelick and Dr Kamila Naxerova, from Harvard Medical School, said the gulf between a human's 47 mutations a year and a mouse's 800 was huge.
"This difference is staggering, given the large overall similarities between human and mouse genomes.
"These results are thought-provoking.”
Dr Simon Spiro, a wildlife veterinary pathologist at the Zoological Society of London, said: "Animals often live much longer in zoos than they do in the wild, so our vets' time is often spent dealing with conditions related to old age.
"The genetic changes identified in this study suggest that diseases of old age will be similar across a wide range of mammals, whether old age begins at seven months or 70 years.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61045950
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A VIRUS THAT MAY CAUSE MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS
~ Nearly three million people around the world have multiple sclerosis. Scientists think they have now uncovered a mystery cause of this incurable disease. It is a virus that nearly every one of us can expect to catch. So what does it mean for treating and even preventing MS?
Our brains are an orchestra of electrical activity. Billions of individual players, called neurons, produce precise electrical signals. When they come together, the resulting symphony is who we are, our thoughts, our emotions, our control over our body and how we experience the world around us.
But in multiple sclerosis, there is a saboteur at work. Our own immune system turns against the neurons and they can no longer play in tune. The impact can be devastating.
What leads the immune system astray has been a long and hotly debated mystery, but studies published this year have convincingly pointed the finger at the Epstein-Barr virus.
"It is very, very strong evidence that this virus is likely to be the cause of multiple sclerosis," Prof Gavin Giovannoni, from Queen Mary University of London, told me.
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is so common that nearly all of us can expect to catch it during our lives. Most of us won't even notice, but the virus is famous for "the kissing disease", which is also known as either glandular fever or mononucleosis. EBV has been on the list of suspects for MS for decades, but definitive proof has been hard to gather because the virus is so common and multiple sclerosis is so rare.
The crucial piece of evidence has come from the US military, which takes blood samples from soldiers every two years. These are kept in the freezers of the Department of Defense Serum Repository and have proven to be a goldmine for research.
A team at Harvard University went looking through samples from 10 million people to establish the connection between EBV and multiple sclerosis.
Their study, published in the journal Science, found 955 people who were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, using the regular blood samples, they were able to chart the course of the disease.
"Individuals who were not infected with the Epstein-Barr virus virtually never get multiple sclerosis," Prof Alberto Ascherio, from Harvard, told me.
"It's only after Epstein-Barr virus infection that the risk of multiple sclerosis jumps up by over 30-fold.”
The team checked for other infections, such as cytomegalovirus, but only EBV had a crystal clear connection with the neurodegenerative disease.
The soldiers caught the virus. Then signs of injury to the brain - called neurofilament light polypeptide, which is essentially the rubble from damaged brain cells - started to appear in the blood. Then they were diagnosed with MS around five years after the infection.
Prof Ascherio says the study is the "first" compelling evidence that EBV is causing the disease. He said it was "quite common" for viruses to infect lots of people, but only cause severe complications in a few. For example in the world before vaccines, "virtually all children" would catch polio but one in 400 would develop paralysis.
It will take a study that is able to prevent people catching EBV - and see if that also prevents multiple sclerosis - to definitively prove the virus has a critical role in the disease.
But there is ongoing research unpacking what the virus is doing inside the body.
If we focus on a single neuron - one instrument in the brain's orchestra - it is coated in a fatty layer of insulation called the myelin sheath. It is this layer of fat that allows electrical signals to hurtle down neurons at speeds of 100 meters per second. But in multiple sclerosis, the immune system attacks the myelin, disrupts the electrical messages and eventually damages the neuron.
Depending
on which part of the brain or spinal cord is affected, multiple
sclerosis can lead to numbness, blurred vision, difficulty walking,
slurred speech and some people find their memory or emotions are affected.
Prof Bill Robinson, an immunologist at Stanford University in California, was an EBV sceptic until a couple of years ago. "I was dismissive, everybody has EBV so there's no way it can really cause MS.”
Now he's not only a fully convinced convert, he thinks he can join the dots between the virus and the myelin sheath.
His study, published in the journal Nature, showed the myelin sheath suffers from mistaken identity and is attacked by a confused part of the immune system that thinks it is fighting EBV.
His team was looking at B cells, which are the part of the immune system that manufactures antibodies to seek out viruses and other threats. These antibodies stick to the invader and signal to the rest of the immune system to come and attack.
In MS patients, they found antibodies that were designed to attack part of the virus (a protein called EBNA1) could also stick to a human protein in the brain (called GlialCAM). This case of mistaken identity, at the molecular level, is known scientifically as a cross-reaction.
Prof Robinson said: "[The virus] is inducing a cross reactivity between a viral protein that also looks like a myelin sheath protein, which results in damage that causes the symptoms of MS."
Clearly this does not happen to everybody who is infected with EBV. And other factors come into play such as being born at higher risk of MS, being female, childhood trauma and where you live (low levels of the sunshine vitamin D) can increase the risk of the disease.
*
A clearer picture of the cause of multiple sclerosis gives a better idea of how to treat or even prevent it.
One grand vision is to repeat the success of tackling the cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV). Infections with HPV can increase the risk of cancers including those in the cervix, penis and mouth. But a childhood vaccination program has had such a profound impact on the cancers that the old routine of regular smear tests may no longer be necessary.
There are several companies already working on an EBV vaccine, including Moderna, which is using the same technology it used to rapidly develop a Covid vaccine. However, vaccines will need to ensure they don't trigger the immune system to make the same rogue antibodies that have been implicated in multiple sclerosis.
Finding out if a vaccine can prevent multiple sclerosis is going to take decades of work. The earlier ambition is a "therapeutic vaccine" for people who already have MS.
Prof Giovannoni said this would be similar to the shingles vaccine, which is given to people who have already been infected with the chickenpox virus so "even though you've got the virus already, you are boosting the immune system to mount an immune response against the virus and controlling the virus itself.”
Therapies that target B cells that have been infected with EBV - and drugs that attack the virus itself - are also being investigated. Prof Giovannoni said some studies suggested HIV drugs reduced the risk of getting MS so "there's a little hint" that HIV antiretroviral drugs may work in MS.
But there are still massive uncertainties. Once you get EBV, you are stuck with it in your body for life — as it takes up residence in those antibody-making B cells. So is it the initial infection that sets the immune system down the wrong path? Or is it the continual presence of the virus agitating the immune system that leads to MS? Researchers have made huge strides in understanding the causes of multiple sclerosis, but harnessing that knowledge to make a difference to people's lives is a whole new challenge.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61042598
Oriana:
We don’t yet have a vaccine against EBV (one of the Herpes viruses, Herpes 4). But we know how to create vaccines, and Moderna is already at work on it (though this time it may take ten years).
Until now, EBV was known to cause only mononucleosis, “the kissing disease” that’s transmitted through saliva — and mononucleosis wasn’t regarded as serious enough to stimulate research. But if EBV is the main cause of MS, then much more is at stake. An EBV vaccine could potentially wipe out MS — just as small-pox vaccination eradicated small pox.
This brings to mind an even more devastating disease: Alzheimer’s. Is late-onset Alzheimer’s triggered by a Herpes virus? If so, then Alzheimer’s could be largely eliminated — as well as diseases such as Parkinson’s and ALS.
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