The Quarrel, coast of Cyprus; photo by Dalia Staponkute. (My thanks to Kerry Shawn Keys)*
ENGLISH LESSONS
When it was Desdemona’s time to sing,
and so little life was left to her,
she wept, not over love, her star,
but over willow, willow, willow.
When it was Desdemona’s time to sing
and her murmuring softened the stones
around the black day, her blacker demon
prepared a psalm of weeping streams.
When it was Ophelia’s time to sing,
and so little life was left to her,
the dryness of her soul was swept away
like straws from haystack in a storm.
When it was Ophelia’s time to sing,
and the bitterness of tears was more
than she could bear, what trophies
did she hold? Willow, and columbine.
Stepping out of all that grief,
they entered, with faint hearts,
the pool of the universe and quenched
their bodies with other worlds.
~ Boris Pasternak, translated by Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuck
*
Oriana:
If poets can be divided into categories based on the ancient system of the four elements, Pasternak is overwhelmingly the poet of water. His early poems in particular are drenched in downpours and summer thunderstorms:
Noon midnight, cloudburst – come for her!
Walking home, soaked to the skin!
Whole tree-loads of water
On eyes, cheeks, jasmine!
Hosanna to Egyptian darkness!
Drops chuckle, slide, collide,
And suddenly the air smells new
As to patients who’ve come through.
~ from “Rain,” from My Sister, Life, 1917
translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France
and from an early poem that alludes to the revolution and Kerensky:
It chuckles to a birdcherry and drenches
the lacquered carriages, the shivering trees.
Fiddlers wade through the moon’s wake
to the theater. Line up, Citizens!
Puddles on cobblestones. Deep roses,
like throats welling with tears,
are sprayed with glistening diamonds.
Whips of joy splash eyelashes and clouds.
But English Lessons is a quantum leap above these outpourings. The image of Ophelia floating in the stream must have easily found home in Pasternak’s mind. For him, water was a symbol of life and resurrection — including his inner life, made fertile by communion with watery nature outside and his inner rainstorms.
While water is generally a symbol of life, it can also be associated with death. Lorca does it with marvelous subtlety:
Narcissus.
Your fragrance.
And the depth of the stream.
*
I'm pondering the difficulty of writing transcendent poems without relying on religious terminology. It took centuries to develop that terminology, and it will take a while to develop words that express the sense of the sacred outside of the traditional framework. In English Lessons, ”other worlds” (note the plural) works for me — the mystery is there, the mystery of the visible transposed onto the imaginary.
*
‘LARA': THE TRUE STORY OF PASTERNAK'S MUSE AND MISTRESS
~ What price love? Lara chronicles the horrifically steep costs for Olga Ivinskaya, Boris Pasternak's mistress, muse, and model for Yuri Zhivago's lover in Doctor Zhivago (alluringly played by Julie Christie in David Lean's 1965 movie adapation). Olga's connection with the persecuted author and her role in ushering his novel into print made her “a pawn in a highly political game” that landed her in the brutal Soviet gulags — twice.
Anna Pasternak, a British journalist and granddaughter of Boris Pasternak's sister, Josephine, (who married a Pasternak) notes up front in this sympathetic account of Olga's heartbreaking, courageous ordeal that "both Olga and her daughter, Irina, have received a bad rap from my family." Relatives and biographers, she writes, have regularly "belittled and dismissed" the woman who was Boris's mistress from 1946 until his death in 1960, at age 70, as "a temptress" and "a woman on the make." Why? Because recognizing Olga's role in the lionized writer's life would have meant acknowledging his "moral fallibility.”
With Lara, Anna Pasternak sets out to correct the record. Did Boris use Olga? Sifting through the evidence more than 50 years after his death, his great-niece concludes that Boris Pasternak truly loved Olga Ivinskaya. But while he had the backbone to defy Soviet repression in his literary work, he was less steadfast in his personal life: "his great omission was that he did not match her cast-iron loyalty and moral fortitude.
He did not do the one thing in his power to do: he did not save her." By divorcing Zinaida, his second wife, and marrying Olga, Anna Pasternak argues — as did Olga herself, often angrily — the author would have given his lover and helpmeet status and protection. Yet, partly out of cowardice, partly out of selfishness, and partly out of a declared unwillingness to “live a life together on the ruins of somebody else’s,” Pasternak's long public affair with Olga left her woefully vulnerable.
The couple met in 1946 at the offices of the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir, where Olga, a twice-widowed, blond-haired, blue-eyed, 34-year-old "tired beauty," worked as an editorial assistant. The revered poet, 22 years her senior, was 10 years into his unhappy second marriage — to Zinaida, the wife he'd stolen from one of his former best friends. He had one son from each of his marriages. Olga had a son, Mitia, and a daughter, Irina — who was immortalized as Lara's daughter Katenka in Doctor Zhivago. Irina, too, paid for her close relationship with the writer, and was sent to a labor camp with her mother within months after his death.
Pasternak's parents and two sisters had left Russia for Germany and England in 1921, but he refused to abandon the country he loved and live as an exile; this unwavering loyalty to his homeland enhanced his enduring stature. While Pasternak was dogged by the KGB, vilified as a Jew, and blocked from publishing for years — forced to subsist on his work as a renowned translator of Shakespeare and Goethe — his life was spared because of an order from Stalin: “Leave him in peace, he dwells in the clouds.”
The protection did not extend to his lover. First arrested in 1949, Olga refused to denounce Boris through months of interrogations in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison — where she lost the child she was carrying. Postcards from Boris (pretending to write as her mother, a ruse that probably fooled no one) helped sustain her during grueling, blazing hot summers and arctic winters in the abysmal Potma labor camp. Boris, meanwhile, argued continuously for Olga's release and helped support her family with his meager earnings as a translator, despite suffering a severe heart attack during her incarceration.
Lara is both a tragic love story and a dramatic account of the sheer determination it took to write and publish an uncompromising literary masterpiece under dismal circumstances. The book, enhanced by family photographs, vividly captures Olga's risky loyalty to the defiant, desperate, and strikingly handsome author during increasingly hostile persecution in the late 1950s, when Doctor Zhivago was first published in Italy and Pasternak was forced to renounce the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature. As Julian Barnes also makes clear in The Noise of Time, his novel about Dmitri Shostakovich, the toll of artistic oppression is acute; it can be argued that Pasternak, who had been called "the last romantic in Russia," was essentially hounded to death.
With its overview of Russian history in the mid-20th century, including the privations of World War II, the abominations of Stalin's Great Terror, and Khruschev's insufficient thaw, Lara is a chilling, upsetting reminder of what can happen when free speech is curtailed. One particularly sobering fact among many: Doctor Zhivago wasn't published in Russia until 1988. ~
https://www.npr.org/2017/01/25/510816406/in-lara-the-true-story-of-pasternaks-muse-and-mistress
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BORIS PASTERNAK’S HIS COUNTRY DACHA
Pasternak's study in his dacha; Misha Firer is our guide
This is the writing desk of Boris Pasternak, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature, in his dacha in Peredelkino, a Soviet writers’ commune southwest of Moscow. Pasternak wrote parts of his epochal novel “Doctor Zhivago” right there.
And this is Pasternak’s outhouse that he used when Mother Nature disrupted his lyrical train of thought. [Oriana: One reason I decided to use this image is that it shows the lush vegetation that the writers in Peredelkino enjoyed.]
Up until his death in 1960 from cancer having endured a two year smear campaign by the Soviet government and KGB, the Nobel Prize winner hadn’t had a sewer installed.
Nor any of his fellow writers inside the dacha compound surrounded by a pine tree forest, whose books were known to millions of readers in the workers’ paradise.
Boris Pasternak hailed from a family of famous artists. His mother was a pianist and his father Leonid collaborated with Lev Tolstoy to draw illustrations for his novels.
In the summer of 1903, Pasternak family stayed in a rural area in the Urals. One summer day, Boris tried to get on a wild horse of an herd grazing on the hill and fell down.
A herd of horses galloped over him as he lay frightened pressed to the ground. Miraculously, his only injury was a broken leg which never healed properly giving him a slight limp.
As little Boris lay motionless expecting to be trampled to death he heard an Orthodox Church bell toll in a distance. He would hear the bell toll again, at a church near his dacha, a day before his death, and knew that his time had come.
The tour guide was licensed by Boris Pasternak’s son Yevgeny. She vouched that all the stories that she told us are true. It was endearing as she called every family member in the Pasternak family by patronymic and hasn’t mentioned even once that they were Jewish.
Due to his limp but mostly for his father’s protection, Boris was not drafted into the army during the First World War. For seven years, Boris studied philosophy. Then he made a turnaround, and pursued music studies for another seven years.
He decided to test his music mentor, famous composer Alexander Skryabin. If Boris played an overture on his piano and Skryabin notices a dissonant note that he deliberately plays, he’s going to continue studying music. And if he doesn’t that would mean that Skryabin is tone-deaf and Boris would switch to writing poetry.
Skryabin didn’t notice the wrong note that Pasternak played, and Pasternak became a poet. [Oriana: I suspect that Skryabin did notice but was too polite to say anything.]
I have been to half a dozen guided tours in Moscow and whereabouts and I’m yet to meet a male in the group. I guess Russian men are nekulturniki.
Pasternak’s poetry was only popular among the immigrants but got little traction in the new country of the Soviet Union. All of his extended family fled abroad from the Bolsheviks but Boris kind of liked the new regime and decided to stay. He made a living translating books from English and Georgian into Russian.
Boris has remained untouchable for years even during purges as Stalin specially told his henchmen to leave this ethereal man alone since he was not of this world ["dwelled in the clouds"]
This decision would come to bite his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, because Boris had finally got disappointed in the Bolsheviks and accepted the reality of who they were: tyrants and assassins, and sped up on writing his novel that had portrayed them in a hyper critical light.
In “Doctor Zhivago”, Pasternak criticized October Revolution, totalitarian regime, and expressed his bitter disappointment in communism wrapped up in a love story.
For years Pasternak, a quiet man flying in the clouds, has been putting together the most damning book about the Soviet Union except for Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago Gulag, while living in the heart of the KGB monitored commune of the state scribes.
The book was smuggled to Italy where it was published and quickly became an international sensation.
The portrait of Nehru in Pasternak's dacha
If not for the intervention by Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Pasternak would be thrown into a forced labor camp. Soviet general secretary wanted to be friends with India after China had pivoted away from the Soviet Union and he went easy on Pasternak suggesting that he leave the country.
Kitchen at the dacha
KGB used Pasternak’s mistress to strong arm him into rejecting the acceptance of the Nobel prize. But this was not enough and they pressured Pasternak’s literary friends to denounce him.
Literary Gazeta wrote: “Pasternak received “thirty pieces of silver…He was awarded for agreeing to play the role of bait on the rusty hook of anti-Soviet propaganda.” Pravda called Pasternak a “literary weed.” Pasternak was thrown out from the Union of Writers of the USSR.
Boris Pasternak drinks a toast with his dacha neighbor, famous children’s author Kornei Chukovsky for receiving Nobel Prize in Literature.
Chukovsky's dacha
Kornei Chukovsky , Soviet author of “Crocodile” and “Moydodyr” children’s poems. His dacha is a short walk from Pasternak’s. Chukovsky never denounced his friend.
Last story that the tour guide had told us was about Nancy Reagan visiting Moscow and deciding to stop at Peredelkino to visit Boris Pasternak’s museum.
The KGB top brass felt insulted — they’re so many fine writers in our motherland why does US president’s wife want to pay dues to the one who wrote nasty stuff about it.
However, they couldn’t help but oblige the honorable guest, and didn’t want to shame themselves and say that there’s no such museum in existence. So they built on a fly a Potemkin museum with Potemkin exhibits to show Nancy which they gutted right after her visit.
This, I believe, is the country that Pasternak wanted to reveal in his novel to the readers: behind the glittery facade, there’s nothing but cruelty and deceit. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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WHY STALIN SENT THE RETURNING SOVIET POWs TO THE GULAG
Stalin sent the returning POWs to gulags because, even in Nazi forced labor, they saw it was better than communism. This is not an exaggeration — many jumped off the trains going back and told the tales. Stalin knew that returned, disgruntled WW1 soldiers were a key component of the Bolshevik rebellion. For the same reason, Putin does not want back POWs from Ukraine. ~ JP Norair, Quora
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AWAITING THE BLACK CROW DURING THE GREAT TERROR: THE FEAR THAT SPARED NO ONE
~ On August 13, 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the rehabilitation of millions of people killed and jailed under Josef Stalin. Stalin's repressive campaign reached its peak in 1937-38, a period that is today known as the Great Terror.
No one was spared — the Great Terror spanned all age groups, genders, professions, and ethnic backgrounds across the Soviet Union.
Vladimir Besleaga, a prominent Moldovan writer, was six years old in 1937. He recalls the climate of fear that hung over his small village in what is now Moldova.
Awaiting The 'Black Crow’
"During this period, people in the village were being arrested on a massive scale,” says Besleaga. "Every morning, the neighbors would ask: 'So, who's been taken away last night?' The words 'black crow' were on everyone's lips. That referred to the car that came in the depth of night to arrest people.”
This was also the time when reading and writing in Romanian became a crime. Books were confiscated and the Romanian language was banned from schools.
Despite the risk of being denounced, Besleaga's mother secretly taught him to read Romanian with a zoology manual stolen from a government storeroom. Besleaga says he has never completely shed the fear in which he spent his childhood.
"Fear enveloped everyone, no one could say anything openly," Besleaga says. "People were vigilant so that nobody would report on them. The fear was so great that it's still in our blood to this day.”
Stalin's regime, wary of the well-educated, cracked down particularly hard on intellectuals.
In 1992, archeologists discovered a mass grave outside the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. It contained the bodies of 138 intellectuals and high-ranking officials shot and buried in secret.
Mar Baijiev is a famous Kyrgyz playwright and former lawmaker. His father died in prison during the Great Terror.
"Orders were given to arrest, shoot, exterminate all those who were educated and understood what was happening," Baijiev tells RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service. "Just look at the Atabeyit, how many great people are resting there. There are no words to describe it, these were ghastly times. While our fathers were in prison, we were ordered to recite slogans such as 'long live Stalin, hurray!' There was such huge propaganda at that time. But what else could we do? My father's body was buried at [Kazakhstan's] Karaganda [prison camp.] I've visited his grave there."
'Without Right Of Correspondence’
The Belarusian poet Todar Klyashtorny also lost his life during the Great Terror. His daughter, Maya Klyashtornaya, tells her family's story to RFE/RL's Belarus Service.
"I was born in 1937. My father was already in prison, my mother was in detention," Klyashtornaya recalls. "Once, through the intervention of an acquaintance who was a lawyer, my parents were granted a meeting. Both were so shocked at each other's disheveled appearance that my father lost consciousness."
Klyashtornaya's father was executed a few month after this reunion. But only much later did her mother learn of his fate.
"She hoped that he would be released since she'd just had a baby," Klyashtornaya says. "She hoped up to the very end, until they told her that he was sentenced to 10 years in jail without right of correspondence. This essentially meant that the person was no longer alive. This was used when people were to be executed: sent away for 10 years, to some unspecified destination, without right of correspondence."
Like many relatives of so-called "enemies of the state," Klyashtornaya and her mother served time in a prison camp.
Klyashtornaya's tragic childhood has shaped her whole life.
After the Soviet collapse, she became the president of an organization formed to protect the memory of the repressions. Today, she takes care of a memorial built on the site of a mass grave outside Minsk.
Ethnic minorities suffered heavily as a result of the repressions and other Stalin-era policies. While Chechens were deported to Central Asia in 1944, ethnic Koreans were forcibly displaced as early as 1937. Many community leaders were executed.
All-Encompassing Repression
Between September and October, 1937, approximately 170,000 ethnic Koreans living in the Soviet Union's Far East were rounded up and herded onto cattle trains bound for the bare steppes of Central Asia. The official motive: "Suppress the penetration of Japanese espionage."
The parents of Roman Shin, a lawmaker in Kyrgyzstan, were among the deported Koreans.
"They were deported without being asked anything, in cattle trains," Shin tells RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service. "My parents were also deported. People were sent to Kazakhstan, to the steppes, or to Uzbekistan. We can praise our government for having already rehabilitated a great number of Koreans, although many died without having been rehabilitated."
The rehabilitation process is slowly moving forward as former Soviet countries gradually unlock their archives.
But millions of people scarred by their childhood under the Great Terror are still hoping to obtained redress for their jailed, tortured, or murdered families. ~
The Solovetsky Stone in Moscow, near Lubyanka Square
The Solovetsky Stone (Russian: Солове́цкий ка́мень) is a monument on Lubyanka Square in Moscow to the victims of political repression. It is in close proximity to the Lubyanka Building, headquarters since 1918 of Soviet security services, from the Cheka to today's FSB. The monument is made up of a large boulder brought from the Solovetsky Islands in the far northern White Sea, where the first permanent camp of the Soviet penal system, the Solovki prison camp, was set up in 1923. The boulder rests on a granite plinth inscribed "To the victims of political repression". The monument was erected in 1990 to honor victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. Since then it has been the focus of annual and occasional gatherings and ceremonies: in particular, the Day in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression from 1991 onwards on 30 October and, since 2007, "Restoring the Names" on the day before.
Solovetsky Stone in St Petersburg
https://www.rferl.org/a/1078131.html
Oriana:
Will Russia ever admit the truth about Stalin and the Great Terror? Will it be taught in schools as part of history lessons? How can such huge facts be concealed? How is the existence of mass graves explained?
Never underestimate the power of non-stop propaganda. It's hard for a "good boy" or "good girl" not to believe their teachers, to accept the simple fact that these adults (especially the history teachers) are lying. The child can find herself torn between loyalty to the family and wanting the believe the teachers. And this is not something that you discuss with other children. It's a marvelous relief to realize, sooner or later, that the parents are right and that other children know that too.
Speaking from personal experience, I can state that the great majority of Polish parents effectively counteracted the official lies. And there was the BBC (my favorite), the Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe coming across heavy static with a different version of the evening news. I chose to trust the BBC. And still do! Every morning I get my news from the BBC website. Of course there's no longer any conspiratorial, secretive feeling about it, nor is my trust completely uncritical -- I've certainly learned that "truth" is a complex matter, and no one can be 100% unbiased. But even in this approximate situation, it's possible to at least steer toward the truth.
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THE PALESTINIAN NEUROSURGEON WHO WANTED TO STAY IN GAZA
Husam Abukhedeir, a Palestinian neurosurgeon, photographed on Thursday at his home in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. He left his native Gaza in November because he felt that conditions caused by the war had stripped him of his power as a physician — and endangered his family.
As a boy, Husam Abukhedeir had a dream.
"I would tell myself, 'Husam will not be anything except a doctor,'" he recalls.
He wanted to help the people of his beloved Gaza, where he spent his carefree childhood summers. His parents worked as teachers in Saudi Arabia during the year, and they all traveled to Gaza almost every summer. After he finished high school, his parents retired and the family went back to live in Gaza.
Abukhedeir did indeed become a doctor — with a specialty in neurosurgery. He went on to head the neurosurgery department at Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, and began training other doctors in the field.
Then came the war: On Oct. 7, Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking about 200 hostages. Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza has so far killed nearly 27,000 Palestinians and caused countless injuries, displaced millions and left extensive damage to infrastructure, including hospitals.
Abukhedeir confronted cases unlike anything he'd seen before.
On Nov. 14, he decided he and his family had to leave Gaza for their safety. Because he has a U.S. green card and his wife and their five children are U.S. citizens, they were able to enter Egypt after a week. He has since relocated with his family to the United Arab Emirates for a neurosurgery position.
The 43-year-old is haunted by his experiences at Al-Shifa during the war. He worries that the war has cost his community greatly — not just lost lives and demolished buildings, but also human capital and talent that may be hard to make up for years to come.
But he holds out hope that he can return to rebuild and help his community.
*
Abukhedeir's path to becoming a doctor was full of challenges. When he finished high school in Gaza he came face-to-face with a realization: Being from Gaza hamstrings you in many ways.
"You always feel you're different. You're not like other people ... just because you're from Gaza," he said.
That was clear when he was applying to medical school.
His retired parents didn't have the funds to finance an education abroad. The only medical school he could consider at the time was Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. He was accepted in 1999, but friends discouraged him — what if the need for permits from Israeli authorities to exit and reenter Gaza or possible conflict interrupted his medical education?
He applied to study engineering in Gaza as a backup. But he kept hoping he'd find a way to pursue medicine, remembering how his parents always told him "Gazans are destined to struggle. But tomorrow is going to be better.”
Then he landed a scholarship to study medicine in Sudan. Abukhedeir made the hard choice of not going back to Gaza to visit his family the entire six years of his studies out of fear that he might not be able to return to Sudan.
"My colleagues would travel back to their families every summer and I would just stay behind," he says. "[Travel] is like a dream for people from Gaza. To plan for it, you need months. And it may not work out in the end. Other people just book a ticket and go.”
Once Abukhedeir graduated in 2005, he returned to Gaza as an intern at Al-Shifa Hospital, then got a job as a general practitioner at the neurosurgery department.
"And honestly, I started to really love the specialty. It's a very delicate specialty and I found myself in it," he says.
The three-week war between Israel and Gaza in 2008-09 made Abukhedeir determined to pursue neurosurgery.
During the fighting, severely injured patients flowed into Al-Shifa, including brain and spinal cases. Abukhedeir realized he didn't have the skills to treat some of the most complex cases. That's when he decided he needed to enroll in a neurosurgery residency program — training that can take as long as seven years. But there were no such specialized programs in Gaza.
Abukhedeir's choice was to leave again. It took years to make it happen. Paperwork delays — the kind that many Gazans are used to — saw precious opportunities come and go. In 2011, he secured a scholarship to a six-year program in Jordan and gained additional expertise in the U.S., Asia and Europe through short-term courses and conferences.
In 2021, he finally came home as a credentialed neurosurgeon.
"I knew that it is Gaza forever," he says. "I wanted to go back to serve my people and fulfill a mission." Part of that mission was helping to grow a neurosurgery department and a residency training program — the kind of infrastructure he dreamed of having at home when he was younger.
"We built a good neurosurgery department," he says. "We had seven residents at Al-Shifa and seven residents at the European hospital [another hospital in Gaza they partnered with]. We really cared about teaching residents the way we learnt abroad.
"Years ago, we really needed a program like that, and finally we were able to build it for the trainees. Thank God. I swear it was like a dream," he says.
Abukhedeir took this photo, showing the toll of Israel's strikes on Gaza, from inside his office at Al-Shifa Hospital on Nov. 3.
Abukhedeir and his family could have left Gaza when the war began in October. But they chose to stay.
"I couldn't leave my patients," he said. "But also, as the head of the department, I couldn't just leave my younger colleagues and trainees. They needed a leader.”
He considered sending his family to safety, but his wife and kids all believed in his mission and didn't want to leave. He says his 7-year-old son cried and said he didn't want his dad to be alone in Gaza.
So they stayed, camping out in his small office at Al-Shifa Hospital for a month after he and his wife decided Israeli airstrikes meant their home was not safe.
His 13-year-old daughter, Hanin, says it was such a hard time.
"There were terrifying sounds," she remembers. "And we all slept together in a small room. There were no beds or covers for sleeping.”
How do you decide who lives and who dies?
Abukhedeir had to operate in grueling shifts to try to keep up with the continuous flow of patients. He was devastated by what he saw: children as young as 2 with concrete or wooden shards piercing their faces.
"Skulls are completely crushed sometimes, bleeding, brains oozing out, shrapnel filling the brain," he says. Many patients came in with no IDs or surviving family members. The doctors had to give each a numerical tag, writing on their skins "anonymous patient 1," "anonymous patient 2" and so on.
He said patients would come to Al-Shifa in waves of a hundred or so after airstrikes leveled residential buildings. Abukhedeir and his team saved some patients but had to face a bitter reality: They did not have the resources to treat everyone.
"These are my people, my community" he says. "My goal as a physician is to heal them — not to decide who I'm going to treat and who I'll leave.”
Abukhedeir recalls a young man in his 20s who was injured in an Israeli airstrike and paralyzed due to suspected bleeding in his spine. He needed an MRI scan before Abukhedeir could perform surgery, but Israel's blockade of Gaza meant that the hospital's dwindling supply of electricity and fuel wasn't capable of powering the machine.
"You look at this young man, and his family is around you screaming, 'He will be paralyzed.' It's one of the hardest situations to be in," he says. "As a surgeon you see people you can't serve, even though you have the expertise to do the surgery.”
In late October, an Israeli airstrike killed the stepson of his 40-year-old sister Dalia; she was badly injured. She came to the hospital with more than 60% of her body covered in second- and third-degree burns.
"I actually couldn't recognize her from how burnt she was," he says.
Dalia died shortly after.
Abukhedeir had no time to mourn.
Israeli forces were encircling Al-Shifa Hospital, cutting supplies to the medical complex as they were looking for what they believed to be a Hamas command center underneath. (On the edge of the hospital compound, they found a tunnel shaft leading to several underground rooms, part of the larger tunnel network in Gaza. The Israelis also said they found weapons in the hospital. But the evidence presented by the Israelis did not show evidence of a command center.)
During that phase of the war, says Abukhedeier, "most of the patients who were in the ICU, they died because there were no resources. "We stopped offering surgeries because resources at the OR were depleted.”
Abukhedeir felt he had been stripped of his power as a physician. He'd become a mere witness to the death and suffering of his people.
He feared for the lives of his wife and kids — and his own life.
That's when he decided to leave.
From his new home in the United Arab Emirates, Abukhedeir keeps in constant contact with his young neurosurgery trainees who are still in Gaza serving other hospitals. Their situation breaks his heart.
He says it feels like everything he dreamed of, worked for and was able to accomplish was demolished.
"The end of the war is unclear. And even when the war is over, everything is gone. My house is gone," he says.
Gaza has also lost Abukhedeir's expertise — for the near future and potentially for years to come. He is one of many health care workers who left Gaza fearing for their lives. That's on top of hundreds who were killed since the war started and others who were injured, arrested and detained, including the director-general of Al-Shifa Hospital, who was arrested on Nov. 23, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Abukhedeir removes shrapnel from a patient injured during the Hamas-Israel war in October.
Abukhedeir says that even though he and his family are now safe, he is full of dread: His elderly parents are still in Gaza. He lost connection with them multiple times for weeks at a time.
"Their living conditions are horrid," he says. "God be with them.”
He worries constantly that he will get a phone call about yet another family member or friend killed in Gaza.
But when he talks to his children, he tries to strike the same cheery note his parents struck when they encouraged him as a child.
"God willing, this hardship will pass," he softly tells them. "We will be back to rebuild our house that was destroyed. And will repeat all the happy memories we lived together there."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/02/02/1228089758/israel-gaza-war-palestinian-neurosurgeon
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A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR IDENTIFIES WITH THE PAIN OF BOTH SIDES IN THE ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR
Last week, the International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling that the charge brought by South Africa that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza is "plausible." The court called on Israel to take all measures to prevent the killing of civilians in the Palestinian enclave.
As expected, the court's decision is controversial, with both those in favor and those expressing disapproval.
It's not the first time that a direct or indirect reference to the Holocaust has surfaced since the war began after Hamas struck southern Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages. The day of the attack has been described as the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
In late September, days before the Hamas attack, we interviewed Estelle Laughlin, a Holocaust survivor, about a study that examined whether social connections improved the odds of someone surviving a concentration camp like Auschwitz. According to the authors, the answer was yes, but by the smallest of margins.
We got back in touch with Laughlin this month to ask her how, as someone who lived through the Nazi genocide, she reacts to this current crisis — and the suffering on both sides.
FROM THE GHETTO TO LUBLIN-MAJDANEK
In the fall of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Laughlin was 10 years old. She and her family were among the 400,000 Jews who were soon forced to move into the Warsaw Ghetto.
Despite fierce acts of resistance, including the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that her father helped to organize, most of the Jews there were unable to save themselves from the Nazi extermination campaign. Laughlin, her older sister and her mother were transported in cattle cars to the Lublin-Majdanek concentration camp in the spring of 1943 and later to two other forced labor camps, all within Poland. The Soviets liberated her months before World War II officially ended. Today, at age 94, she lives in a suburb of Chicago and is the author of a memoir, Transcending Darkness: A Girl's Journey Out of the Holocaust.
Laughlin doesn't remember how she first learned of the events of October 7, when Hamas launched its deadly attack against Israel. But that difficult day haunts her. "Once you have [endured] a dramatic experience like the Holocaust," says Laughlin, "some part of [it] stays with you all your life." The attack by Hamas and ensuing war reawakened in her a decades-old sadness that human cruelty still burns strongly in the world.
Laughlin says she identifies with Israel and the Jews whose lives were threatened or taken. But the stories and images of Palestinian suffering and loss that have poured out of Gaza feel eerily familiar to her, too. "To me, they are human beings like I am a human being," she says. "I want the best for them as I want the best for us."
"All life is sacred," she continues. "And it's unfortunate that human beings have to feel threatened for generations for no good reason. It's devastating.”
Laughlin sees the Hamas attack as the latest eruption in a historic current of violence directed against Jews. "We contribute to the good of all humanity," she says, "and yet we are so often persecuted."
Laughlin says that as a young woman, her mother was chased out of Belarus for being Jewish. And yet she told Laughlin that the Russians were "a suffering people."
"And I couldn't understand," she says, "how could she have sympathy for somebody who chased her out of her little shtetl?" Somehow, her mother identified with the suffering of those who'd imposed suffering upon her. "And that amazed me."
When Laughlin was a schoolgirl in Warsaw, children regularly pelted her and the other Jewish kids with pebbles. "We were so frightened," she recalls. "The antisemitism was right in front of me — it was so visceral."
Then came the German and Soviet occupation of Poland, the ghetto and worse. To the Nazis, "we had no value as human beings," she says.
As Laughlin tells it, in those most difficult of times, her community of Jewish people found ways of supporting one another. "We recognized the sanctity of simple moments with friends — that was our sustenance," she says.
For Laughlin, besides luck, it was her mother and sister who helped her make it out of the camps alive. "We were like one organism," she recalls. "The people in our barrack called us the three monkeys in a very affectionate way because we would pick the lice from each other's heads to relieve the itching. In order to survive a hell like a ghetto or concentration camp, you had to have something to hold onto. So you hold onto memories, you hold onto love. I doubt that my mother, my sister or I would have survived without the other."
"Love maintained us," she says.
One day at the concentration camp in Majdanek, Laughlin spotted her sister's name on a list. She and her sister and mom had a pact — if one of them was to be sent to the crematorium, all three would go together.
"So my mother and I, we traded places with two women who were on the list who hoped to see another sunrise," she says. "And the following day, my mother and I went with my sister, absolutely sure that we are being marched to the crematorium."
Instead, they were taken to work at an ammunition factory in a forced labor camp.
Ultimately, in 1947, two years after they were liberated, Laughlin, her sister, and mother all made it to the U.S. And she says she survived with an enduring sense of compassion and love for humanity, including for the Germans. "Without those values, survival would be hardly meaningful," she says.
To Laughlin, Israel has represented the one safe harbor in the world for Jews who've been persecuted throughout their history. Indeed, a few of her friends — fellow survivors — moved to Israel after the war. She has some family there too.
But now she feels that October 7 has endangered that refuge. Laughlin says the Hamas attack was directed at Jews, resulting in hundreds of deaths and the more than 200 hostages being taken into Gaza. The events set in motion by that day have shaken "the security of my people, of my children, of my grandchildren," she says. Laughlin's cousins who live in Israel have told her how frightened they've felt these last several months.
Feeling the pain of Palestinians
Over that same time period, Laughlin has also been watching and reading the news coming out of Gaza. The enclave has been devastated by Israel's military response — the leveling of buildings, the displacement of nearly two million people, soaring rates of starvation and disease and the deaths of more than 26,000 Palestinians.
Laughlin says she's holding the Jewish pain of this war alongside the Palestinian pain. "When the dignity of any human being is diminished, the dignity of all humanity is diminished," she says. "Not only in relationship to my community but to any community of innocent people being attacked."
When Laughlin considers the Palestinians living in Gaza, she says, "I identify with their plight ... with their isolation that the rest of the world keeps on going on as though nothing happened, and their world is crumbling."
"I feel their pain," she adds. "I know their insecurity. I think suffering needs witness."
As a measure of self-protection, one she's unintentionally honed in the decades since her childhood in Poland, she bears witness with empathy but "with a distance."
Laughlin has a metaphor for the intractability of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. "I guess it's like when you see somebody hitting their head against the wall. And you say, 'It hurts — why don't you stop?'"
"I am an old woman," Laughlin reflects. "I wanted to leave this planet, this Earth, a better place than I found it. It's sad to see that people are still so self-destructive. We live in the 21st century. We accumulated so much knowledge, but our values are still Stone Age. We have not learned to control our emotions."
She longs for a better way forward. "There are two people claiming the same piece of land, and that's a problem," she says. "Somehow, they'll have to work it out. I hope that they will use [their] better instincts [of] compassion and reason. I have faith that there are bright, well-meaning, resourceful people — both among the Arabs and among the Jews in Israel. And that they will listen to their wiser parts, [their] kinder parts... and find a resolution.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/01/30/1227849885/a-holocaust-survivor-identifies-with-the-pain-of-both-sides-in-the-israel-hamas-?ft=nprml&f=327351768
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KING OF THE EXTRINSICS: WHY SOME VOTERS VOTE FOR TRUMP
~ Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behavior.
Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.
We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the cues and responses we receive from other people and the prevailing mores of our society. They are also molded by the political environment we inhabit. If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalize and internalize it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.
If people live in a country in which no one becomes destitute, in which social norms are characterized by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end. This process is known as policy feedback, or the “values ratchet”. The values ratchet operates at the societal and the individual level: a strong set of extrinsic values often develops as a result of insecurity and unfulfilled needs. These extrinsic values then generate further insecurity and unfulfilled needs.
Ever since Ronald Reagan came to power, on a platform that ensured society became sharply divided into “winners” and “losers”, and ever more people, lacking public provision, were allowed to fall through the cracks, US politics has become fertile soil for extrinsic values. As Democratic presidents, following Reagan, embraced most of the principles of neoliberalism, the ratchet was scarcely reversed. The appeal to extrinsic values by the Democrats, Labour and other once-progressive parties is always self-defeating. Research shows that the further towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum people travel, the more likely they are to vote for a rightwing party.
But the shift goes deeper than politics. For well over a century, the US, more than most nations, has worshiped extrinsic values: the American dream is a dream of acquiring wealth, spending it conspicuously and escaping the constraints of other people’s needs and demands. It is accompanied, in politics and in popular culture, by toxic myths about failure and success: wealth is the goal, regardless of how it is acquired. The ubiquity of advertising, the commercialization of society and the rise of consumerism, alongside the media’s obsession with fame and fashion, reinforce this story.
The marketing of insecurity, especially about physical appearance, and the manufacture of unfulfilled wants, dig holes in our psyches that we might try to fill with money, fame or power. For decades, the dominant cultural themes in the US – and in many other nations – have functioned as an almost perfect incubator of extrinsic values.
A classic sign of this shift is the individuation of blame. On both sides of the Atlantic, it now takes extreme forms. Under the criminal justice bill now passing through parliament, people caught rough sleeping can be imprisoned or fined up to £2,500 if they are deemed to constitute a “nuisance” or cause “damage”.
According to article 61 of the bill, “damage” includes smelling bad. It’s hard to know where to begin with this. If someone had £2,500 to spare, they wouldn’t be on the streets. The government is proposing to provide prison cells for rough sleepers, but not homes. Perhaps most importantly, people are being blamed and criminalized for their own destitution, which in many cases will have been caused by government policy.
We talk about society’s rightward journey. We talk about polarization and division. We talk about isolation and the mental health crisis. But what underlies these trends is a shift in values. This is the cause of many of our dysfunctions; the rest are symptoms.
When a society valorizes status, money, power and dominance, it is bound to generate frustration. It is mathematically impossible for everyone to be number one. The more the economic elites grab, the more everyone else must lose. Someone must be blamed for the ensuing disappointment.
In a culture that worships winners, it can’t be them. It must be those evil people pursuing a kinder world, in which wealth is distributed, no one is forgotten and communities and the living planet are protected. Those who have developed a strong set of extrinsic values will vote for the person who represents them, the person who has what they want. Trump. And where the US goes, the rest of us follow.
Trump might well win again – God help us if he does. If so, his victory will be due not only to the racial resentment of aging white men, or to his weaponization of culture wars or to algorithms and echo chambers, important as these factors are. It will also be the result of values embedded so deeply that we forget they are there. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/29/donald-trump-americans-us-culture-republican
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Thomas Camlet: WHY LENIN HAD THE TSAR AND HIS FAMILY SHOT
I once heard from an expert that Pasternak gave a very accurate description of the major events of the Russian Revolution in Doctor Zhivago.
My “expert” was stationed at the British Embassy in Moscow at that time.
He was a founding member of the British Communist Party. (He renounced communism in the 1930s because of Stalin’s purges and declared himself a Socialist.)
In 1917 he was a young British naval officer attached to the British Embassy in Moscow. (He knew Lenin personally.)
I attended a lecture of his at Fairleigh Dickinson University and afterward had a long one-on-one lunch with him.
At that time he was an 88-year-old Socialist Member of Parliament.
I was introduced to him by my ‘History of the Middle East’ Professor. (Whose father signed the UN Charter for Iran in 1945. But I will save that remembrance for another day.)
I will leave you with one tidbit from our conversation:
I asked him; Why did Lenin have the Tsar and his family killed? Was it because people could rally around them to fight the Whites and the Reds?
He sat back. and while laughing, shook his head and said: No. He said that at that time everyone wanted nothing to do with the Tsar.
I asked again; Well then, why did Lenin have the Tsar and his family shot?
He then looked me straight in the eye and replied: “Because they were arrogant”.
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DIMA VOROBIEV ON “IS RUSSIA A MAFIA STATE?”
Post-Communist Russia is a private enterprise of a few state-oligarchical clans around President Putin. On his watch, this circle produced 100+ billionaires. This makes many anti-Putinists call Russia a “Mafia State.”
This is misplaced.
It’s true that inside their business network, they practice neoliberal principles of governance. However, the way they organize things around Russia in general, harks back to the Mercantilist era. They consider attempts of civil society to organize itself independently of the State as subversive and even “extremist” activity.
You need to understand that Running Russia is an extremely “high-risk-high-reward” project. Therefore, we can see here in action several management principles shared by criminal cartels.
1. Clear Project Objectives and Scope
Profit maximization through ruthless elimination of competition. Priority on business with very short investment horizons. High liquidity and relentless focus on the cash stream flow. Performance indicators are pervasive on all levels of bureaucracy.
2. Robust Risk Management
Potential risks are detected and assessed early on. Anything deemed “non-systemic opposition” and “extremism” is taken care of right away by the concerted effort of legislators, courts of justice, the police, and the media. Mitigation and risk assessment are reviewed and updated 24/7/365.
3. Agile Governance
Extreme flexibility and rapid adaptation to changing circumstances. The SMO in Ukraine, for example, quickly metamorphosized from a lightning commando attack to a prolonged, well-funded mercenary war where all participants are given a chance to get rich. Agile methodologies, iterative development, and frequent reassessment of outcomes.
4. Cross-Functional Teams
Already, the Crimea annexation and the 2014–2022 insurgency in Eastern Ukraine showed how good Putin's Russia is at forming cross-functional teams that bring together diverse skills and perspectives. Problem-solving capabilities and innovation help mitigate the many bureaucratic hurdles and rampant corruption that still plague the system.
5. Easy Reporting and Communication
The de-institutionalization of the Russian state in the post-Soviet era had at least one positive effect. Communication between key decision-makers that could be stuck in the top-heavy, strictly hierarchical bureaucratic structures flows easily through informal channels.
6. Adaptive Leadership
President Putin is a star example of adaptive leadership. He started off in the 1990s as a “pro-Western liberal,” and now has the full turn-around to become a champion of anti-Western resistance and “traditional values.” His unique blend of stubbornness, indecisiveness, and procrastination encourages competition and innovation among people who want to win his attention and trust. As a former spy, he seems to be open to feedback and capable of navigating uncertainties.
7. Governance Committees
The use of consigliere is how governance committees work in classical cartels. They are experts who can provide oversight and ensure alignment with organizational goals but aren’t powerful enough to become independent sources of power. Inside the circle of uniformed silovikí, Nikolai Patrushev is the most prominent one. Among “Putin’s liberals”, it’s Alexei Kudrin. Neither belongs to the circle of Putin’s billionaires, yet often surpasses them in influence.
8. Flexible Project Management Approach
President Putin’s PM accommodates uncertainty and change. A decade ago, priority in handling the military operations in Eastern Ukraine, Syria, and Africa was given to private contractors. After Prigozhin’s mutiny, the contractual part was moved back to the top brass in the military and security forces—but the commercial principle remained in place.
9. Strict Compliance Oversight
Compliance requirements remain robust, no matter what. When some players in the petroleum and banking sector tried to defect and take with them assets after the start of SMO in 2022, quite a few of them were eliminated. There is also a possibility that the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up to mitigate legal and regulatory risks.
10. Learning Culture
President Putin fosters a culture of continuous learning. Witness him upgrading the SMO from a WW1-style trench war to a new type of battle dominated by drones, electronic warfare, unmanned aircraft (“cruise missiles"
), and missiles. Another impressive example is dodging Western sanctions and export bans.
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Below, a piece of patriotic art celebrating the resurgence of Russian nationalism. A combatant in the distinctive uniform of Wagner mercenaries stands alongside a medieval Rus warrior. The shield is adorned with Russia's imperial eagle. The word "Rus" is written in ethnic fonts. Behind them are onion domes of the Orthodox Cathedral.
Their economic model bore a strong resemblance to that of Colombian cartels. They exploited the land for local resources such as honey, tar, pelts, and slaves. They transported the stuff across extremely hostile territories and sold them to wealthy Mediterranean "gringos" at astonishing markups. Haters may call this "mafia"—but these guys were our government! ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Kurt Scholz:
Russia reminds me of East Asia, where the criminal elements were part of the state for centuries, for whom they provided services and could in return expect leniency in the enforcement of the law if they ever were caught. “Journey to the West” nicely explains that principle, with each evildoer being redeemed through past services and never destroyed after being defeated.
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HOW MONGOL RULE INFLUENCED RUSSIA; THE TURKIC INFLUENCE
Dima: Not much. Many people confuse Mongolian influence on us with Turkic influence. Turks impacted the Russian civilization much more. This a big secret buried in our history books.
Mongol rule was “Mongol” only during the first decades of their dominance over the eastern Russian principalities. The rest of the time it was an era of de-facto Turkic rule. The descendants of Genghiz Khan were Turkified about as fast as the Scandinavian Rus aristocrats became Russians.
Yoke, for real?
Rus principalities enjoyed a great degree of autonomy under the Mongols. They were not very interesting for the Empire of Juchi (a.k.a. the Golden Horde) economically. The empire also valued the Orthodox church as their trusty ally. The clergy beatified Count Alexander Nevsky, the champion of Mongolian subjugation of Kievan Rus.
A combined annual tax used to be between 1–2 ton of silver, or grain enough to feed a force a 10–20 thousand men for a year. Much more important for “Mongols” were Russian troops for military expeditions to Europe, North Caucasus, and against their neighbors in the prairies.
Russian principalities, on their part, had a powerful ally in their wars against Germans, Lithuanians, and Poles. The centralized tax collection, introduced by the Mongols, meant an end to internecine wars between Russians themselves. Russian merchants had permission to trade along the Volga river and its tributaries.
Turning the tide
From the end of the 15th century, Muscovy took increasing control of the northern part of the Baltic-Caspian trade route. We managed to turn the tables on our former masters by conquering Kazan and Astrakhan. We remained, however, in a vassal relationship with the Crimean Khanate. The full independence came only in 1700, thanks to Czar Peter the Great.
The total duration of the “Mongol-Turkic yoke”, as Karl Marx called it, lasted, therefore, more than 450 years. For most of that time, the front end of the Empire that we had to deal with was Turks, Turks, Turks.
The secret brotherhood
The Turkic influence was profound. It included:
The highly centralized absolutist government, centered around tributary taxation. The poll tax in Russia is a Golden Horde’s innovation.
Turkic weapon systems and battlefield tactics.
The widespread use of mercenaries as expeditionary troops and tax collectors (Cossacks).
Food. The abundance of Russian recipes for meat wrapped in dough, from pelmeni to pirogí, comes from our Turkic neighbors. Meat was an exclusive feast in old Russia.
Interiors and clothes. The trademark padded jacket of Soviet troops in WW2 is a descendant of the fabric armor worn by Turkic warriors. Turks also brought to us the elaborate and colorful floral designs from Iran. Tápochki (light heelless footwear) are essential inside Russian homes, and shápka (warm headgear) is almost always needed outside, even in the sauna.
Female ring dance.
Many Russian nouns related to trade, clothes, tools, household items, and military originated from Turkic languages.
The image below features high fur hats for noblemen and a tall headgear beneath a large shawl for noblewomen. Both were Turkic influences. Pointy boots with upward-turned noses were borrowed from Mongol fashion. The knee-length sleeves, too. They symbolized that the wearer delegated manual work to their subordinates.
Irene Bolz:
Going along with your first bullet point, I have read that Census was introduced the first time.
Many words come from Turkic; some examples:
bashka = from Turkish “bas” head
Izyum = from Turkish uzum means grape
sarai = palace
Scynthiana Turanturk:
Mongols in Kipchak Khanate (Golden Horde) Islamized and were assimilated by the local Kipchak Turks/Kazakhs. So there is not much Mongolian culture that can influence Russia.
Rob Lim:
It says much that Moscow would rather accept the rule of the Golden Horde rather than help from the Papacy. The former, however harsh, did not look to extinguish the Eastern Orthodox religion.
Andrei Moutchkine:
Czapka - Wikipedia Czapka is Polish, originally an Ulan headgear. Ulan is originally a real Mongol word, meaning rider.
Dima Vorobiev:
There are very few Mongol artifacts in the area of the old Rus, and a very limited DNA footprint. The few Mongol words we have seem to come by the way of Turkic languages.
Scythiana Turanturk:
The language of the Golden Horde was mainly Turkic, not Mongolian.
Biswa Jyodi:
Now I understand why old Russian portraits look like Turkic portraits.
B Toms:
The triumph of Moscovy was in essence the triumph of the Mongols whose way of life the assimilated to and with whom their rulers intermarried. In the end Kazan was effectively merged into Moscovy making Moscovy (later renamed Russia) the true successor to the Mongol Empire.
Rinat Magsumov:
The cultural exchange between Eastern Slavs (Ukrainians, Russians, Byelorussians) and Turkic people (Khazars, Pechenegs, Kipchaks, Bulgars) had to begin long before the Mongol invasion.
Moonflower:
Genghis Khan and his descendants most likely spoke a Turkic language. And the modern Mongolian language is a mixture of Tungus, Han and Turkic languages.
Sergey Berezovikov:
The Mongols inadvertently lead to the unification of Russia. Before the Mongol Invasion, there was no Russia. There were small, endlessly warring statelets. When the Mongols came, those princedoms could not muster enough force to counter them. This resulted in an appalling loss of life, property, and cultural artifacts. In many respects, the development of Rus was thrown back decades. Russian lands lived under the Golden Horde’s influence for centuries. However, as a result, the threat of endless raids from the Great Steppe in the East has vanished — Golden Horde held firm order on their territories. Now the Russians had to deal with threats only from the West, while paying taxes to the East.
In the first half of the XIV century, Moscow Great Kniaz Ivan Kalita (John the Moneybag) established all trade and administrative routes from the Rus to the Horde through Moscow. That strengthened Moscow immensely, and the Russian unified state began to form around Moscow. In XV century, Great Prince Ivan III attached so many lands to Moscovia, that he became known as the Great. At this time, the Horde was weakening and disintegrating into smaller states that no longer could affect Russian policy.
Eamon Colfer:
It led to Moscow becoming the most important Russian city, because the Prince of Moscovy was in charge of collecting the tributes to pay the Mongols.
Gian Paulo:
The Mongol rule kept Russia disconnected from cultural changes that happened in Western Europe, adding a kind of Eurasian approach. I could feel this influence visiting the interesting Republic of Tatarstan.
The Russian soul can be considered European but now western: Europe can be seen as a single block actually but the differences still exist. The former communist states made movements towards transition at different speeds.
Eric Schrnhorst:
The figure of the Czar was invested with the same powers as the Mongol Khan. his state's growth was powered by semi-assimilated Turkic freebooters ('cossack' is etymologically identical with 'kazakh') who retained an uncomfortably wild and self-regulating independence with headmen ('ataman', another Turkic word) of their own choosing. accommodations were made with the old ruling strata, who become 'service tatars' or were deeded high titles and estates and hands in marriage. The old extractive mechanisms were applied to slavic serfs and to foreign subjects further and further east in Siberia. That 'yasak' was still paid in furs.
Whatever the Tsars wanted to be in the end of days and they really badly wanted to be German, a third of the Russian nobility still had surnames of Tatar origin (did you think *Rachman*inoff and *Yusup*ova were Russian?). before the Romanovs, the Rurikids were insistent on co-opting Horde authority through blood union. for example Ivan the Terrible was himself descended through his mother from Chingissids.
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ELENA GOLD ON RUSSIA’S NEAR FUTURE
“Plan ‘B’ has already been put into action,” stated an expert on Russian political talk show ‘The Meeting Place’. “This plan means that they [Ukraine] won’t try to advance at the front, and will concentrate on striking deep in the Russian territory with the goal to destabilize the situation in Russia.”
“The Meeting Place” is the TV show on NTV channel that was the first major TV channel that Putin took over after he was elected as the president of Russia 24 years ago. There are no independent TV channels in Russia anymore. NTV was nationalized in 2001 — less than a year after Putin’s inauguration.
Rumors are, Boris Nadezhdin is no longer in good books with the presidential administration because he called “the special military operation” a mistake. There is a directive not to give him any air time or mentions in the media. The electoral commission will likely get an order to disqualify him from the race, formally because of “too many mistakes” in signatures, so his name won’t appear on the ballots.
There are no elections in Russia: it’s a show to re-appoint Vladimir Putin.
Putin’s regime cannot risk to repeat the Belarus scenario from 2020, when the whole country voted against the re-appointment of Alexander Lukashenko and gave votes to Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of an oppositioner jailed by Lukashenko.
Putin’s administration cannot afford a situation like this — not with an ongoing war in Ukraine and a giant amount of weapons circulating in Russia (it’s really easy to buy grenades, guns, assault rifles and even larger systems on the black market).
But by allowing Nadezhdin to collect signatures, they might have already created a movement that endangers Putin’s monopoly on power: in the queues, people could meet and chat with like-minded individuals, seeing — for the first time since February 2022 — that there are a lot of people who want an alternative future for Russia. (Anti-war protests were immediately forbidden in Russia after the start of the war, under the threat of 15 years in prison.)
After the last week mass protests in Bashkiria, there are mass protests in Yakutia that have been ongoing for several days.
The situation in Russia is “boiling and seething”, and the silent discontent becomes more and more vocal.
In his 2002 book “Blowing up Russia”, ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko said that the explosions of residential buildings were done by the FSB as part of the secret plot that made Putin the president of Russia. In 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned in London with radioactive polonium-210 by Russian assassins and died within weeks. His killers fled to Russia. One of them conveniently died in 2022; the other is now a senator of the Russian parliament.
If Putin was ready to kill hundreds of Russians to become the president, he will be willing to kill tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of people, to keep this power.
Nothing good is awaiting Russia in the near future — for as long as Putin is in power.
ONE OF THE HEROES OF OCTOBER 7
When the terrorists infiltrated the Nova festival Ben heard screams and gunfire. He managed to get to his car, picked up 4 people he didn't know on the way and set off. When he reached a nearby town, he dropped them off at a safe place and called his brother who begged him to come home, but he refused. Instead of running away, he took an unusual and brave decision and turned back to the festival grounds. He entered a fire ground, a place where thousands of terrorists are slaughtering hundreds of people, and there he gathered 8 more people he didn't know, brought them to a safe place and again.. came back. On the way he called his girlfriend who begged him to come home, but Ben wanted to reach his friends, he knew they must have already been injured, he wanted to save them. On the way he picked up 3 more people, but this time, the terrorists caught him and brutally murdered him. His vehicle was found with hundreds of bullet holes. This is a story about Ben, an unusual person. It's a story about courage, about a guy who came to enjoy and dance at a party and in one moment found himself in a fight for life. It's a story about Ben, who didn't think about himself, and wanted to save others. He could have escaped, but returned to hell for others and paid for it with his life. ~ RDX PRO, Quora
Yegal Herstein:
May his memory be a blessing.
Ultra Violet:
Beautiful man inside and out! What inspiring selflessness. I thank him. What heroic deeds. I'm speechless at this beautiful man's commitment to others.
Sean Kane:
May His Name be Remembered.
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The alignment of the global left with Hamas is the final evidence of its
moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Now it's others who will have to
advance Enlightenment values. ~ Haaretz
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SOVIET WOMEN AND AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE 1950s
The first photo is from the USSR. The women are from a “collective farm” (“kolkhoz”). No money, no documents, not allowed to leave the village, working for ”trudodni” — in literal translation, “workdays”. Basically, for a scribble in a notebook — once the crops were harvested and the required amounts of grains, vegetables, meat, milk and produce had been delivered to the Soviet processing plants, what was left, was divided between the workers — based on the number of “workdays” scribbled in the notebook. Farm workers in the USSR weren’t paid.
The dream time of the lovers of the USSR, who despise freedom and critical thinking. That was the dream that the USSR carried to other countries of Eastern Europe.
The second photo from the USA. A completely different life. Looks like another universe. ~ Elena Gold
John Mears:
"once the crops were harvested and the required amounts of grains, vegetables, meat, milk and produce had been delivered to the Soviet processing plants, what was left, was divided between the workers — based on the number of “workdays” scribbled in the notebook. “
The crazy thing to me, is that we still call them communist or socialist.
I get that is what they have claimed, but the above quote is not only true, but it is also about as far away from being socialism as outright capitalism is.
Marx was right when he said Russia was't suitable. They never even got close. Just went straight to fascism. [Oriana: This reminds me of what Misha Iossel wrote: “The Soviet Union was never a socialist country. It was a Fascist country.”]
Viktor Sergenko:
Problem is, that’s exactly what you get when you try to implement communism in practice. So far every single attempt has landed in the same place.
Elizabeth Koenig:
Communism has not worked wherever it has been imposed.
Gregg Goodfellow:
What is astonishing to me is that some people living in the West bought the lie of a better, more wholesome and well rounded life under communism and worked to help Russia. Propaganda was one element that USSR seemed quite skilled at. Spies who eventually made it to the USSR were invariably hugely disappointed at the reality as you have accurately depicted it.
Elena Gold:
And now Putin wants to de-privatize apartments that were privatized in 1990s — so, this wonderful USSR practice where the state controls all of your life entirely can return.
Under Khrushchev, there was a “political spring”: executions and being sent to GULAG for nothing were mostly canceled (my father was still prosecuted by KGB for being “the son of the enemy of the state” in late 1950s — sent to work to the middle of nowhere after the college, to build cities in “virgin lands”, rather than assigned a job in a city.)
Some leaks of the foreign music and fashion into the USSR were happening in 1970s and 1980s — short skirts on women were widespread. There was also some dancing to pop music, but it was considered “harmful bourgeoise influence” and if reported, could stain one’s “references” for life — you’d be labeled unreliable and would never get a responsible position in any company, only low-level jobs like a janitor.
The USSR of 1970s-1980s was a mild version of today’s North Korea, with slightly more food.
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MUSLIM MAN REFUSED GERMAN CITIZENSHIP BECAUSE HE WOULDN’T SHAKE HANDS WITH A WOMAN
A Lebanese Muslim doctor applied for a German citizenship through naturalization and passed the naturalization test.
But he was not granted the citizenship because he refused to handshake with the female official when the naturalization certificate was handed over.
The woman withheld the certificate and rejected the application.
He filed a petition which was turned down by a German court.
The court said “anyone who refuses to shake hands on gender-specific grounds is in breach of the equality enshrined in the German constitution”.
The Administrative Court of Baden-Württemberg (VGH) ruled that someone who rejects a handshake due to a "fundamentalist conception of culture and values" because they see women as "a danger of sexual temptation" was thereby rejecting "integration into German living conditions.” ~ Ajax, Quora
Travel Zone:
Great.
Kudos to the German court for upholding German equality and gender laws.
It is time that those who move (of their own free will) to another country follow the host country rules and do not demand, on some spurious grounds, rules for themselves which are different from the host country constitution, norms and practices.
USA, UK, Europe and others in the west ought to follow this rule too.
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A QUESTION MARK IN SPACE
The object is far outside our galactic neighborhood, possibly billions of light-years away. But astronomers have seen similar objects closer to home.
Two of our galaxy’s most famous stars were recently photobombed by what appears to be a celestial question mark.
The symbol was spotted in a new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of the forming stars Herbig-Haro 46/47, which are well-known and have been frequently observed by astronomers. These two stars can provide clues about how our own sun may have formed. They’re relatively close to Earth, about 1,400 light-years, and relatively young, only a few thousand years old. In fact, they’re still in gestation and have not technically been “born” yet, which is marked when the stars start shining from their own nuclear fusion.
The image is the first of the twin protostars from the NIRCam instrument on JWST. It was captured using infrared light, which penetrates space dust more easily than visual light, and it is the highest resolution image of the objects ever seen at these wavelengths.
His best guess is that the question mark is actually two galaxies merging.
“That's something that's seen fairly frequently, and it happens to galaxies many times over the course of their lives,” he says. “That includes our own galaxy, the Milky Way … [it] will merge with Andromeda in about four billion years or so.”
The hints pointing to two galaxies are found in the question mark’s strange shape. There are two brighter spots, one in the curve and the other in the dot, which could be the galactic nuclei, or the centers of the galaxies, Britt says. The curve of the question mark might be the “tails” being stripped off as the two galaxies spiral toward each other.
“It's very cute. It's a question mark … But you can find the colons and semicolons, and any other punctuation mark, because you have 10,000 little smudges of light in each image taken every half hour,” says David Helfand, an astronomer at Columbia University. The sheer number of shining objects we find are bound to create some serendipitous images, and our brains have evolved to find those patterns, he says.
Astronomers have seen similar objects closer to home. Two merging galaxies captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 also look like a question mark, just turned 90 degrees.
Helfand says the question mark seems to be two objects, the curve and the dot, but could be more that just happened to line up. They could also be completely unrelated objects, he says, if one is much closer to Earth than the other.
Britt warns that estimating distance based only on colors in the image can be tricky. The red of the question mark could mean it’s very far away (light waves stretch as they travel through the expanding universe, shifting to redder wavelengths) or that it’s closer and obscured by dust near the object.
It would take more investigation to identify exactly how far away the question mark is. This could be done by measuring photometric redshifts, determined by the brightness observed through different filters, but this would only provide an estimate for the distance, Britt says. Spectroscopy, which analyzes light from the source to determine its elemental makeup, could provide a more exact distance but requires a separate instrument to measure.
Given the number of intriguing targets spotted by JWST, the question mark may never receive this treatment. For now the source of this symbol in the sky remains a cosmic mystery.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/nasa-question-mark-james-webb-telescope?rid=E18AE510841C77329A0E2626CC03D351&cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=Editorial::add=reactivation3
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NORMAL FORGETFULNESS VERSUS DEMENTIA
It may be reassuring to hear from neurologist Richard Restak, 82, whose new book is How to Prevent Dementia: An Expert’s Guide to Long-Term Brain Health. He says there might be a more everyday reason for memory lapse: “All through life, stress causes a decrease in normal brain function: you have difficulty with memory; you can’t come up with names.”
Of course, it’s impossible to completely avoid stressful things, but one you can choose to swerve, he says, is worrying that you’re getting Alzheimer’s because of mild forgetfulness: “There are examples of people coming out of shopping malls and being unable to remember where they parked the car. Well, that’s just normal forgetting.”
A more worrying version of the story would be, Restak says, “If you come out of the mall and you can’t remember, ‘Did I drive here, did I take a bus or did somebody drop me off?’”
Restak is clearly still mentally sharp: as well as writing books, he is a clinical professor at George Washington University in Washington DC. But he calmly accepts a mild decline in his abilities that comes with age. He recalls a book tour dinner many years ago in which he was introduced to a dozen new people. “I had no trouble at all remembering the names,” he says. “I’m not sure I could do that today.”
Problems recalling names are easily fixable, in any case, Restak tells me: “Memory is based on images, not words. So I could take your name, Amy Fleming, and see a picture of you in flames – flaming – and so when I next see you, your name will come to me.”
Memory is also often more about paying attention than cognitive deficits. Returning to Restak’s mall analogy, he says if you’ve got something more interesting than car park coordinates on your mind when you arrive, you won’t pay attention to the seemingly insignificant car park zone, and therefore you won’t lay down a memory of it. It is much harder to pay attention to things that don’t excite us.
Signs of a dementia-depleted memory are far more marked, says Linda Clare, professor of clinical psychology of aging and dementia at the University of Exeter. “It’s a real gap somewhere that there shouldn’t be,” she says. “My own experience of this was telling my mum that I was going to make a big move from Cambridge to north Wales and that I’d found a house. And the next morning, she had no recollection of any of it. Then I knew for sure that this wasn’t just normal forgetting.”
Clare recalls another example, of a man who got into the car and couldn’t remember what the controls were for. “It’s those crunch moments that send you off to the doctor.” But she concedes that it is hard to draw precise markers, as circumstances other than dementia can cause dramatic momentary lapses – such as urinary tract infections, hormone imbalances, mini strokes, depression and anxiety.
If you experience a dramatic memory lapse, or cognitive changes that aren’t normal for you, the usual investigative pathway would be a visit to a memory clinic, via GP referral.
“We’re trying to encourage people, if they do notice a change in functioning, to go to the doctor,” says Clare. This is partly because other health problems causing the cognitive symptoms, such as cardiovascular disease affecting blood flow to the brain, could be picked up, but also because drugs can help slow the progression of dementia if taken early.
But let’s roll back a little: if you’re panicking because you’re getting older and can’t name the actor in the film you’ve just seen, it’s worth diverting this mental energy into positive action. For example, you might want to start by learning new ways to manage stress. “Try to decrease stress, and cognitive function will improve,” Restak says.
Clare suggests breaking the vicious cycle of worrying about your health by focusing on taking care of yourself. “It’s not always easy,” she says. “Responsibilities don’t go away. But is there a way to get a little bit more sleep, or have someone give you a break for an hour or two to do something you want to do? Small things that keep you going are worth doing.”
On the other hand, having a mentally demanding job can be beneficial because it keeps the brain agile and strong, and make a dementia diagnosis less likely. “Whatever a person can do to stimulate their mental functioning is a good thing,” says Clare. “We think complex mental activities are protective.”
Not that having a mentally taxing job is a prerequisite for brain health. Restak’s key phrase for tackling dementia is “cognitive reserve”, which is something you can build like a muscle. He says: “The brain remains highly malleable throughout the lifespan, and cognitive reserve can be built up from childhood and at any time during the next 70 years.”
Having a well-exercised brain will not necessarily prevent dementia, but it can keep you functional for longer if you do get the disease. Restak’s top tip is to find something that “viscerally interests you” and indulge it like a “magnificent obsession: you continue to build on it with books, you go to movies about it – that’s the way the mind stays sharp”.
Keeping your brain doing new stuff, he says, is a way of “forming new networks within the brain”. This applies to learning new languages, to musical skills, and is also why you should keep up with new technology instead of letting others do it for you.
Reading novels is another cognitive reserve-building power move. “They demand a lot more in terms of cognitive functioning than a nonfiction book, which you can open up to whatever chapter is of interest to you,” says Restak. “You can’t do that with a novel.” You have to hold in your mind the story so far, who everyone is, follow the text and subtext and use your imagination.
Novels and puzzles require working memory. “Working memory is associated with IQ,” he says. “If you’ve got a strong working memory, there is not a chance in the world you have dementia.”
Some of the exercises he suggests would “strain anybody” he says. The medical definition of dementia is a loss of memory, language, problem-solving and other cognitive abilities that is severe enough to impact daily life.
“So if you’ve enough working memory to learn and name, say, all the prime ministers since the second world war, it can be stated categorically that you do not have dementia,” Restak says. “If you don’t follow politics, listing the members of your football team according to position, or alphabetically, would do just as well.”
Along with reducing stress and keeping mentally agile, sleep – particularly naps – is your memory’s friend. “Laboratory studies confirm that naps solidify already learned information,” writes Restak. “When we first learn something, that knowledge goes into the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for the initial formation of a memory. When we nap, hippocampal activity matches the pattern of activity that occurred when we learned the new information. This is called neural replay.”
Sleep problems often increase with age, though. Restak says: “A daytime nap can prove helpful in regulating your night-time sleep.”
None of this advice comes with guarantees. “You can’t take a specific person and predict whether or not they’re going to get Alzheimer’s on the basis of their lifestyle,” says Restak. “A high percentage of it is genetic, but these steps will lower the odds.”
Avoiding drinking to excess is another one, he says. “Everybody recognizes that alcohol is harmful, but you have to live. If one drink a day causes you to feel better about life, I would say fine. Make up for it with the other ways of preventing dementia, – doing plenty of exercise and sticking to a healthy diet, say.”
The evidence continues to mount, too, for looking after your cardiovascular health and hearing, and for socializing as much as possible.
Cheeringly, just as it’s never too late to build your cognitive reserve, it’s never too late to boost your systemic health. “Making changes to benefit your health, at any stage, has an impact,” says Clare. “Even if you start exercising when you retire, it will still have a benefit. Do whatever you can do at that time – we’re never a lost cause.” ~
Oriana:
I think genetic testing should be easily available, and not just from dubious small companies. Past the age of 65 (that's when Medicare benefits begin), it should be routine. And simple tests of cognitive function should be a part of the yearly check-up.
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YOUR APPENDIX IS NOT USELESS
It was the first day of spring break in 1992 in Phoenix, and 12-year-old Heather Smith was excited for her family's upcoming ski trip.
But before Smith and her family had even packed their snow pants, she realized she didn't feel good. "I woke up feeling just a little bit nauseous, and I wasn't sure why. Throughout the course of the day, I started to feel worse and worse and started to develop pain in the abdomen," she says.
By about midafternoon, her father took her to urgent care. She ended up getting emergency surgery to have her appendix out.
Smith still has a small scar from the appendectomy. And after the surgery, she found herself intrigued by the part of her body she had so suddenly lost. "It inspired me to wonder: Why do we have this weird little organ in the first place? What does it do? Why does it get inflamed?"
Smith grew up to be a professor of anatomy at Midwestern University and editor-in-chief of a journal called The Anatomical Record. And all these decades later, Smith has made a mark in the field by studying the very organ that threw off her family's vacation plans in 1992.
She acknowledges that the appendix has a bad rap as a useless organ that can cause you pain and require emergency surgery. "But it turns out recent research shows it does have functions that can help us," she says.
What and where is the appendix?
The type of appendix that humans and some primates and rodents have looks like a little worm. It's about the size of your pinky finger, and it projects off the cecum, which is the first part of the large intestine.
You can identify the location based on a landmark called McBurney's point. So if you draw a line between your bellybutton and the part of your pelvis that sticks out [on the right], two thirds of the way down, that's about where the appendix is.
How did scientists get the idea that the appendix was useless?
There had been a lot of discussion about what the appendix might do as a function, whether it served a function, prior to [Charles] Darwin's time. The [fact] that we can live without it does provide some support for the idea that it's vestigial and it doesn't really do anything. And so Darwin's interpretation of it as a vestige was reasonable at the time, given the information that he had.
But now with modern technology, we can see things like the microanatomy and the biofilms in the appendix, and we have a better understanding of what it is and what it's doing.
How has the appendix evolved over time?
If you map the distribution of appendices across a phylogeny — a tree of mammal life — you can interpret that the appendix has actually evolved independently. It has appeared independently multiple times throughout mammalian evolution. So that is evidence that it must serve some adaptive function. It's unlikely that the same type of structure would keep appearing if it wasn't serving some beneficial role.
So what are the appendix's beneficial roles?
It turns out that the appendix appears to have two related functions. The first function is supporting the immune system. The appendix has a high concentration of immune tissue, so it's acting to help the immune system fight any bad things in the gut.
The second function that it serves is what we refer to as the safe house. So this was a hypothesis that was put forward by a team from Duke University in 2007. And they argued that the appendix may serve as a safe reservoir for the beneficial gut bacteria that we have.
During times of gastrointestinal distress — you know, a diarrhea episode where all of your good gut bacteria is getting kind of flushed out of the system — the appendix is kind of this blind tube with a very narrow diameter and narrow lumen, so the good bacteria doesn't get flushed out of the appendix. The idea is it's safe during this time of gastrointestinal distress and it can then exit the appendix and recolonize this good bacteria throughout the rest of the gut.
So the appendix is kind of helping us in two ways, both within the gut: It's helping to fight off invading pathogens, but also to repopulate the gut with beneficial bacteria after gastrointestinal issues.
Why do some people get appendicitis?
Appendicitis is predominantly happening in the industrialized nations of the world — areas where fiber content of the diet tends to be lower. So one hypothesis is that, with the lower fiber content, we're more likely to get little pieces of food that's being digested stuck [inside] the appendix and cut off blood supply and cause this inflammation.
The other hypothesis that doesn't seem like it's quite as plausible these days has to do with an old idea called the hygiene hypothesis. The idea is that these days we do so much oversanitization, with all of our antibacterials and all our antibiotics that we take, that our immune systems are not developing properly because they don't have exposure to the full range of pathogens that we would otherwise. And so the immune system overreacts and panics. And because the appendix has so much immune tissue, it's one of the areas where this manifests.
Could this new understanding lead to new treatments?
I think there's some promising treatments out there. People are looking into antibiotics and other ways of treating appendicitis without completely removing it, given the evidence that is accumulating that it is in fact helpful for your health to have an appendix. Studies have shown that infections with the really bad, nasty bacteria C. diff tend to be higher in people who have had their appendix removed.
So there are health benefits to retaining the appendix. In an ideal world, we would have a future where we wouldn't have to always remove it.
What have you gained from studying this "weird little organ"?
I think this study has shown me the importance of looking into small anatomical details. Anatomy is just the study of the body, so you'd think that it's a dead science. You'd think we know everything about the body, especially the human body.
But it turns out that there's actually a lot more variation and function and microanatomical adaptations that haven't been fully realized. So doing just descriptive studies of exotic animals that have never been described or looking at small parts of our own bodies that haven't been well documented are absolutely worthwhile.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/02/02/1228474984/appendix-function-appendicitis-gut-health?ft=nprml&f=191676894
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WHEN PEOPLE DIE IN THEIR SLEEP, THIS IS WHAT THEY DIE OF
When someone dies in their sleep, it's usually due to natural causes, especially in older adults. The most common reason is a heart condition, like heart failure or a heart attack. The heart just stops working effectively, and it's often peaceful, without any pain.
Another reason could be a stroke, where the blood supply to the brain is interrupted. This can happen without any warning, especially if the person has underlying health issues. Then there's something called 'sleep apnea', which is when breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep. If severe, it can lead to sudden death.
Of course, there are other reasons too, like aneurysms or chronic diseases that finally take their toll. But usually, when someone passes away in their sleep, it's because their body has reached a point where it can no longer sustain life, and it shuts down in the most gentle way possible. It's nature's way of allowing a peaceful exit, I guess. Sad, but in a way, it's also kind of serene, don't you think? ~ Audrey Lewis, Quora
Kate Robinson:
I had a seizure in my sleep 20 years ago caused by apnea that caused me to have a bad dream that I was having a seizure. I was just experiencing in my head what was happening in reality. It caused me to arch my back and struggle for air as if I was choking. It wasn’t pleasant — sort of a nightmare or anxiety dream. So dying in your sleep may not be as peaceful as many think.
Angela Sibbald:
Sometimes people near death experience terminal delirium. This can cause restlessness and agitation. There are medications that can assist in alleviating these symptoms. A combination of reassurance (presence of family/friends or caregivers) and medications can then lead to a peaceful passing.
Cynthia C:
I have often seen elderly couples who were together since very young. That many of them pass away from a “broken heart”. They have been with one another since almost their entire existence that they cannot bear to be away from one another, that they end up passing away not much longer from each other.
Betsy Chalen:
As a veterinarian I know that the best way to die is under the gentle and compassionate hands of a well qualified doctor who first sedates you painlessly and then gives you an an IV overdose of barbiturates. We show so much love to our pets when we choose gentle compassionate euthanasia. We know 100% that they do not experience pain. They are not alone and they are not scared. I wish that this option was available to humans. Especially children and those we know have a terminal and painful condition.
Elle See:
This happened to my dad. He had recently been released from the hospital with heart issues. He fell asleep in a chair waiting for mom to bring him lunch. If someone has to go, that's the way to do it! The only thing better would be if he got to eat first!
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Ending on beauty:
All the true vows
are secret vows.
The ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.
There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.
~ David Whyte, All the true vows, for John Donogue
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