Luca Signorelli: Resurrection of the Body, circa 1500; detail
AT LUCA SIGNORELLI'S RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
See how they hurry
to enter
their bodies,
these spirits.
Is it better, flesh,
that they
should hurry so?
From above
the green-winged angels
blare down
trumpets and light. But
they don't care,
they hurry to congregate,
they hurry
into speech, until
it's a marketplace,
it is humanity. But still
we wonder
in the chancel
of the dark cathedral,
is it better, back?
The artist
has tried to make it so: each tendon
they press
to re-enter
is perfect. But is it
perfection
they're after,
pulling themselves up
through the soil
into the weightedness, the color,
into the eye
of the painter? Outside
it is 1500,
all round the cathedral
streets hurry to open
through the wild
silver grasses...
The men and women
on the cathedral wall
do not know how,
having come this far,
to stop their
hurrying. They amble off
in groups, in
couples. Soon
some are clothed, there is
distance, there is
perspective. Standing below them
in the church
in Orvieto, how can we
tell them
to be stern and brazen
and slow,
that there is no
entrance,
only entering. They keep on
arriving,
wanting names,
wanting
happiness.
~ Jorie Graham (first half of the poem)
I chose to concentrate on the ekphrastic part of the poem. My choice stemmed from having recently pondered the preliminary resurrection immediately after Christ’s resurrection: the righteous dead climbing out of their graves as mentioned in Matthew 27:52-53: “52 and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53 and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”
It’s easy to imagine the shrieks of terror this would have inspired among the living inhabitants of Jerusalem. But to me the interesting part is the physicality of it. Like Catherine in “Wuthering Heights,” we don’t want heaven — we want to be home on earth. We want the familiar. So the dead would probably try to go home, dreaming of sleeping in their own beds once again, eating their favorite food. Theological matters would be of less concern, if any.
The poem by Jorie is memorable for rendering the resurrection so vividly — and how “there is no / entrance, / only entering.” I love the way the poem moves in a spare and quick way. You could say that the velocity is just right, without bogging down.
From above
the green-winged angels
blare down
trumpets and light. But
they don't care,
they hurry to congregate,
they hurry
into speech, until
it's a marketplace,
it is humanity. But still
we wonder
in the chancel
of the dark cathedral,
is it better, back?
Poets and painters tend to celebrate THIS life, this earth. With them, we reply Yes, it’s better here in the familiar. We don’t want eternal bliss. We just want to sleep in our own bed, and then in the morning to go to our kitchen and make breakfast — the daily paradise of mere being.
*
*
DID THE RESURRECTED DEAD GO HOME OR RETURN TO THEIR GRAVES?
I finally “got” the Easter zombie jokes. Somehow until recently I was not aware of Matthew 27:52-53: “52: and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53: and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”
So this was a multiple resurrection of the righteous (I wonder what the definition of “saint” was back then), who then walked (like a procession?) to Jerusalem and visited “many.” Nothing is said about the “resurrected saints” returning to their graves — hence the joke that they are still walking around.
(Note also the euphemism in "many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep" — so even then, apparently it was customary to pretend that dying was merely falling asleep.)
This story doesn’t appear in any other gospel. From my religion lessons, I remember the earthquake, the solar eclipse, the torn veil in the Temple, and the graves opening. I don’t remember anything being said about the bodies actually climbing out of the graves and descending on Jerusalem. I suspect that this was deliberately omitted. The religion-teaching nuns didn't appreciate awkward questions.
But this story seems to be yet another attempt to “fulfill the prophecies.” Since after the coming of the Messiah the graves were supposed to open and a mass resurrection to take place, the sparse verses in Matthew are a timid move in that direction: yet another “proof” that Jesus was the Messiah. But this creates more questions (e.g. would this mass resurrection not be mentioned in some historical documents?), so the story is just dropped.
The blatantly made up character of this (spectacular, I would say) event again makes me wonder if the priests and nuns (but especially the priests, who were more educated, and could read the New Testament in the original Greek) knowingly lied to us ("the sin of omission"). I realize I will never know. (An even bigger question that crossed my mind surprisingly often in my Catholic childhood was how many priests and nuns no longer believed in god, but stayed in the church because they had no marketable skills.)
Psychologically, I can imagine that the resurrected dead went straight to their former homes. Where else would they want to go? They wanted to sleep in their old bed again, eat the food they liked. Or would they find everything changed, “wrong” in all kinds of ways? Who is that stranger who’s now sleeping in your bed? Why doesn't the bread taste the way it used to? That part might indeed make an interesting movie — can you go home again?
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DARKNESS VISIBLE: THE COLLECTED AUDEN
~ Great poets hardly appear out of nowhere, but the map of Somewhere is rarely geographical: a cultural spasm, a conniving gang of influences, some peculiar strands of DNA, or just a stagger of Freudian mishaps might be more at fault than a postal address or a clutch of bank statements. Born in York in 1907, W. H. Auden was the youngest son of a vicar’s daughter and a doctor who became Professor of Public Health at the University of Birmingham. The boy did public school (as the British call private school) at Gresham’s, followed by Oxford. There, his friend Stephen Spender published the poet’s first book on a hand press for printing pharmacists’ labels. Auden was twenty-one.
Auden was a monster before he became a monument, because early talent is by nature monstrous—as the Latin desires, portentous, unnatural, something from which we cannot avert our eyes. His juvenilia is infused with a premonitory sense of the collapse of civil and economic society, dramatized through a Boy’s Own version of war and rebellion rooted in the turmoil after the Easter Rising and the General Strike, with the rise of fascism and Nazism underway. Later, the Great Depression stands in the background, and then the Spanish Civil War. The poems never predict—they merely observe the tottering wreck of the old order.
Auden caught early, even preemptively, the rot and wretchedness that after the Great War devoured the foundations of Europe. The world of his early poems is populated by hard-bitten revolutionaries warring against unnamed enemies in a land drawn from Icelandic saga and the Never Never Land of boys’ schools—with their ritual hazing, private betrayals, petty feuds, and deranged headmasters. The schoolboy version of war, or the aversions and antipathies that led to war, never descends into bullying allegory. The poems already exist in the realm of adulthood, between fantasies of the past and the nightmares to come. Consider how many young instructors had fought in the last war, and how many had lost students as well.
Auden kept most of his university poems in Poems (1930), published by Faber, and in the revised edition three years later, though some he saved he never printed again. When a poet moves so quickly into maturity, the tailings scattered behind sometimes leave a little salvage. Auden had the thrilling gift, almost at the start, of galvanizing language, here in service of bucolic heroics. The electroshock of his beginnings was not forgotten when the lines remaining were simply mechanical.
Among opening lines in Poems (1928), only the dead would not be awakened by “No trenchant parting this/ Of future from the past,” “Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,” “Nor was that final, for about that time,” “Control of the passes was, he saw, the key,” and, from Poems (1930), “It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens,” “From scars where kestrels hover,” and “Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all.” He knew how to tease, in short—tease meaning from plain words, and tease the reader into meaning. The poems are driven toward something unsaid.
This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.
The lines are already intimate with meaning. However clumsy and cast-iron Auden’s lesser work, his light verse and lyrics were from the start instantly, insistently memorable. The irritating confidence was extraordinary in a man so young. (Hart Crane, only a little older than Auden, had similar confidence; but too much of his work was sheer muddle and mumble.) If many of Auden’s lyrics were not wholly formed, others seemed tossed off for the hell of it. With such a poet, the comic distractions were often more pointed than the serious drudgeries of this Sisyphus.
“LARKISH BUT LABORED”
When so many poets go from weakness to weakness, or strength to weakness (consider Delmore Schwartz), Auden for the most part went from strength to strength. Still, readers found the early poems heavy work, larkish but labored, as easy to see into as a smeared landscape through a muddy windshield. Auden was surprised—he wrote a friend, “Am I really so obscure?”
His second attempt at a long poem was even worse. The Orators: An English Study (1932) must always have found a few readers who struggled through it, but those who finished in raptures were probably far outnumbered by those who never finished at all. It’s hard to tell whether the intention of this mechanical modernism was “pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical” or “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” to borrow from that earlier master of fudgery, Polonius.
Auden at length can seem grunt work compared to his grand openings. The cool, unexpected elevation of language and the unity of image and mystery can suddenly free fall into Auden-speak, half-lecture and half-utilitarian tract. He exhausts the poor reader with argument that busies and buries technique. Such poems tend to be long-winded—virtuous in a horse, tiresome in a politician, fatal in a poet. Auden’s light verse may lack the depth of poems with more gravitas; but the verse with higher aspirations, when written so mechanically, rarely has the cunning or supernatural dark humor of poems knocked off in sheer sport. The serious poems, then and later, are often unlovely to see and unlovelier to read.
There are the portraits, stirring ones, of Housman (“Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust”), Edward Lear (“he wept to himself in the night,/ A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose”), Melville (“Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness”), Matthew Arnold (“His gift knew what he was—a dark disordered city”), an overlong and unnecessarily abstract one for Pascal, and a rich meander around Voltaire.
There are extraordinary ballads, especially “As I walked out one evening” and “Miss Gee”; songs that read like poems (“O Tell Me the Truth About Love” and “Funeral Blues”); and poems that read like songs (“Roman Wall Blues”). Then there are the brilliant political poems,“Spain 1937,” which ends, “History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon,” and “September 1, 1939,” which perhaps should have ended with its contentious line, “We must love one another or die.”
The rational Auden was far less interesting and far less striking than the irrational Auden who began his career in a language boldly encrypted. The loving and beloved muddler still surfaces on occasion, when the poet takes off the top hat and spats and descends to light verse. The Age of Older Auden began not long after he turned thirty, and he was fortunate it did not kill off his career—but it’s hard to kill off the career of a poet like Auden.
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Still, that older poet became a demented rambler as soporific as the elderly Wordsworth, and at a far younger age. Where Auden had once used rhetoric as a weapon, as a terrible old bore he used it as a shield. If The Double Man is bad, The Age of Anxiety (1947), published six years later, is even worse—yet between the two books lies For the Time Being (1944), with the most extraordinary of Auden’s long poems, “The Sea and the Mirror.” As he uses (and abuses) Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the force of his poetry returns, partly due to the staging required, partly to the staging allowed. Many critics have loved the long prose monologue that composes about half the sequence, “Caliban to the Audience.” Despite brilliant passages and some of the best of Auden’s thinking about art through art, it’s absurdly overlong and disturbingly dull, the work of Professor Dryasdust once more. Far more attractive are the monologues of the middle section (“The Supporting Cast, Sotto Voce”), including Antonio’s “As all the pigs have turned back into men/ And the sky is auspicious and the sea/ Calm as a clock, we can all go home again,” or the song of the Master and Boatswain, which begins,
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquor straight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some, alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse
The homeless played at keeping house.
Memento mori became the poet’s favorite theme. He was only in his forties, though his face had already the look of a rumpled paper-bag. If the late sequences lack the spontaneity that characterized Auden’s most engaging work, it’s in part because they are sequences, called into existence so he’d have something to write about. If you write a series of bucolics from “Winds” to “Streams,” for a time you can stop the naggings of wasted imagination. Two stray poems in Nones became part of Horae Canonicae in The Shield of Achilles (1955)—thank goodness Auden didn’t write a poem titled “Midnight” in one book and follow in the next with the rest of the clock.
What rescues The Shield of Achilles are the miscellaneous poems between the two leaden sequences, beauties like the title poem, for the serious—or, for the less so, “Fleet Visit,” “Hunting Season,” and perhaps “The Willow-Wren and the Stare” and “‘The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.’”
In the poems of Homage to Clio (1960) dullness is followed by greater dullness. You might call Auden’s sunset poems poems of morality and experience, because they lack much hint of the deliciously amoral or the pleasures of ruined innocence. The early Auden leapt on his prey, cunning as a jaguar, murderous and sure of his own genius; the later became a gentleman snoring after a heavy dinner. The desiccated old gent the poems eventually created was snipped from construction paper.
There were late triumphs in minor modes (“On the Circuit,” that is, the poetry-reading circuit); but the work of age consisted mostly of pronouncements from on high as painful as they were unnecessary, op-ed rages crossed with party pieces, arguments with the void. Late Auden became irrelevant to poetry and ever more intractable—the poems had the force of his thinking, but his style had hardened like a plaster cake in a bakery shop-window.
If Auden at the end is a cruel disappointment, we don’t rank poets by their least work. (Otherwise most would be in trouble—think of early Keats and late Wordsworth.) There are reminders of what Auden could still do when the imagination itched enough—at the beginning of “To Goethe: A Complaint,” for instance: “How wonderfully your songs begin/ With praise of Nature and her beauty,/ But then, as if it were a duty,/ You drag some god-damned sweetheart in.”
Auden was a distinguished poet but also a peculiar one. Though he rarely wrote badly, he could be as boring as the village priest whose annual Christmas sermon has come round again. Try to find a better or deeper poet of the last century, leaving out Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and perhaps Moore and Stevens. Though the recital of “Funeral Blues” in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) triggered a stunning, if brief, revival of his poetry, which scriptwriter of the current generation is likely to quote him? How many English majors have even read him?
Auden’s cleverness, his knack for savage opening lines, his sorcerer’s touch with form—all these can be appreciated, yet he now rarely enters what is called, rather stupidly, the “conversation.” Was he too formal (in manner as well as form), too high churchy and high arty, simply too measured for later ears? Or is he out of date, his poems not tuned to contemporary taste? Auden was the same generation as Elizabeth Bishop, born just four years after him; yet she speaks to a century a century later as he does not. Shadows fall upon even great poets after death, but he has already receded into the past, more Victrola than cell phone. Still, as Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” ~ William Logan
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/4/darkness-visible-auden-collected
Albrecht Dürer, detail of The Lamentation for Christ*
NOTES FROM HISTORY: LEE’S SURRENDER ON APRIL 9, 1865
On April 8, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant was having a hard night.
His army had been harrying Confederate General Robert E. Lee's for days, and Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. The people in the Virginia countryside were starving, and Lee's army was melting away. Just that morning a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant's mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee still insisted his men could fight on.
So, on the night of April 8, Grant retired to bed in a Virginia farmhouse, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night "bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning." It didn't work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.
As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia. "When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache," Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”
The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general's uniform carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the "rough garb" of a private with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general.
But the images of the wealthy, noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn't hesitate. "Certainly," he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee's answer—"about twenty-five thousand"—in stride, telling the general that "he could have...all the provisions wanted.”
By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North's money-grubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while, backed by a booming industrial economy, the Union army could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment's notice.
The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by men like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier's uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work. ~ Heather Cox Richardson
Oriana:
What beautiful generosity on Grant’s part, and the civility of both of them.
HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE PUTIN?
Tom Burgis, author of Kleptopia
~ There lived a man whose land was rich with oil and gas but who grew up surrounded by poverty and knew every day that things could, and periodically did, fall apart. He joined the security forces, then entered public service. That is the wrong term: he began to participate in the looting that is the incessant occupation of those who hold public office in his country. This became his life’s work, to remain an insider, not to tumble from the enclave of wealth and safety into the turbulent world outside. It was a double life: he was at once the thief and the guard.
The man I have in mind was the governor of a Nigerian state. As he guzzled petro-dollars, villages burned in his name. But this sketch applies, with only minor variations, to many of the world’s rulers. From the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to Kazakhstan, most countries’ principal way of making money in the global economy is by selling its basic ingredients: fuel, metals precious and industrial, certain stones. The proceeds are at the disposal of whoever holds power. They take what they want, then hire bankers and lawyers to remove their fingerprints from the loot and stash it in rich countries. They have no need to raise taxes from their own people, so their own people have no way to call them to account. Corruption is the opposite of consent.
Vladimir Putin’s eligibility for this club of kleptocrats comes across in First Person, a book written by three Russian journalists shortly after Putin became president in 2000, based on interviews with him, his wife and some of his friends. Growing up with rats and abysmal toilets, Putin dreamed of a place in the Soviet empire’s boss class as an officer in the organization that protected its power, the KGB. One Easter, Putin, then a young recruit, was policing a religious procession outside a church. “He asked me,” a cellist friend recalls, “whether I wanted to go up to the altar and take a look. Of course I agreed. There was such boyishness in his gesture – ‘nobody can go there, but we can.’” Later, a drunk student asked to bum a cigarette. Putin, a judo champion, said no, then flung the student to the ground. Power is for getting things others cannot have; if others ask for something you do not wish to give, respond with violence.
Posted to Dresden, Putin lived with his young family in a serviced apartment. There was a driver, good beer, hotdogs in the countryside at weekends. Then the Berlin Wall fell. Angry crowds massed outside the KGB station. He contacted his commanders and was told: “Moscow is silent.” The old order had fallen; he needed to join the new one. He went home to St Petersburg and secured a position in the local government with powers to decide who was allowed to make money by dealing with western capitalists. Naturally, he decided that this should be him and his cronies. He rose. Within a decade, he was president. He took his gang of kleptocrats with him to the Kremlin. (Some of them, such as Igor Sechin, are now on sanctions lists.)
The rulers of the west applied the same logic to Putin as they applied to the rulers of DRC or Kazakhstan. They wanted to buy these countries’ commodities so they pretended the kleptocrats were legitimate leaders with whom they could do business. They kept this up when he murdered exiled dissidents abroad, when he stole South Ossetia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014, all the while developing a tribal imperialist spiel to stir fealty at home. After 22 years of this, Putin evidently believes his own propaganda that he is a statesman, rather than a character from The Godfather. As his forces devastate Ukraine, I asked a Russian former intelligence officer what Putin wants. “Respect,” he said. “It’s all about respect.”
As well as accepting that we have so emboldened him that we may well have to meet him on the battlefield, to confront Putin’s kleptocracy, we must first cease our complicity in it. What do we think happens to the money we pay for Russian gas? How do we imagine western multinationals secure oil-drilling rights dispensed by a regime we know to be corrupt? Who do we think is behind the companies of anonymous ownership, registered in places like Guernsey, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, that we continue to allow to participate in our economies? The Panama Papers revealed that one of the human beings behind the corporate camouflage was the cellist Putin took to see a forbidden altar. Somehow he amassed a secret fortune that ran to millions.
We have known the answers to these questions for a long time but it was just too lucrative to tell ourselves we didn’t. Twin pipelines of money sustain Putin and his fellow kleptocrats. One carries western money into kleptocracies to pay for natural resources; the other carries money back out again, after it’s been stolen, for safekeeping in the west’s property markets and universities and political parties. If we wish to weaken him and his system of corrupt power, we must disrupt both pipelines.
That means increasing and sustaining the reduction in our consumption of Russian oil and gas. If we do not wish merely to switch our support for one kleptocracy to others, we must replace this energy supply with something other than the fossil fuels that are the lifeblood of kleptocrats everywhere. As for the second pipeline, our noisy declarations that we are turning it off – that, as Boris Johnson put it, “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” – are laughable. A few names on sanctions lists and some loophole-ridden reforms to economic crime laws not backed by budgets to enforce them are close to meaningless while we still permit financial secrecy.
Nonetheless, the danger is that by throwing more and more people out of the global economy, we hasten the creation of a shadow one. Sanctions-busting deals between Iran, Venezuela and Russia – respectively kleptocracies with Islamist, socialist and imperialist masks – reveal that this alternative is already taking shape. The leaders of the Chinese kleptocracy will use this opportunity to bolster their position at the head of this new order.
We are watching the rise of what I’ve called Kleptopia. An undeclared, unconventional war between kleptocracy and democracy has been under way since long before Putin’s troops marched into Ukraine. The two sides are not arranged merely by geography. The kleptocrats have plenty of allies in the west, from the lawyers shielding their plunder to the politicians advancing their influence within democratic governments. Their victims include both Ukrainian civilians and Russian conscripts. With whom do we stand?
Catriona Kelly, author of St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (Yale)
~ I left St Petersburg on 22 February 2022, reaching London just 27 hours before Russian troops crossed the borders into Ukraine. For days, I’d been sure the invasion would happen. The question was, on what scale. I’d read speculation in the Russian press about intent to occupy the whole country. Surely that wasn’t possible? All the same, with Petersburg friends I drank the old Soviet toast “To Peace!” – speaking in lowered voices.
What has happened since has destroyed hope and confirmed fear. This unprovoked, brutal and bungled attack on a near neighbor has been Russia’s worst foreign policy disaster in decades. For those of us who know and love Ukraine, but also love Russia, it’s a personal as well as a human tragedy. Large numbers of Russians don’t support the war. It’s an attack on Russia’s independence too. Many are fleeing from their increasingly hostile homeland – wherever flights still operate and borders are open.
Much as I share Tolstoy’s skepticism about the individual’s impact on history, to a significant extent this is Vladimir Putin’s war. Determined to reverse the entropy for which he blames Gorbachev, Putin believes in the transhistorical unity of Great Russia, Little Russia and White Russia. Ukraine as such does not exist.
At best, “Little Russia” is a province that is entitled to its own picturesque traditions. But autonomy equals disloyalty. Those who seek it are “Nazis”. The term assimilates campaigners for Ukrainian independence to the invaders routed by the Soviet Union (for which read, Russia) in the great patriotic war between 1941 and 1945. At the same time, it erases from the record the crucial contribution to victory in that war of Ukrainians themselves. Only such willful forgetting could allow Putin, a Leningrader, to inflict on Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv and Mykolaiv the siege warfare that devastated his birthplace in 1941-1944.
After 1991, Russian politicians rapidly learned from the west how to govern by spin. The 2012 campaign to restore “spiritual ties”, much mocked by big-city sophisticates, was as focus-group-oriented as anything dreamed up by Dominic Cummings. It spoke to those who felt that globalization had left them behind, when even goods made in Russia often came from factories owned by international corporations: Danon, Ford, Ikea, Heineken.
When Putin first started talking about the historic unity of Russia and Ukraine, in the spring of 2014, this too seemed expedient, an attempt to justify post facto the impromptu annexation of Crimea. The first anniversary of the annexation once past, the rhetoric died down. But in the summer of 2021, Putin’s “historical unity” talk surfaced in deadly earnest. A precipitating factor seems to have been the 2020 election protests in Belarus. If that could happen in a country whose loyalty to Russia seemed absolute, where would “external powers” (Putin doesn’t believe in dissent without them) get to work next?
The first difficulty in solving “the Putin problem” is thus that Putin is determined to defeat and purge independent Ukraine. Peace talks have been an iteration of certainties by Russian delegates set on a no-compromise position. Typical is Vladimir Medinsky, the former culture minister, an ideologue of Russian supremacism supported by bad history.
It is tempting to think that if Putin and his allies were to disappear, a rational solution would emerge. Yet substantial sections of the population still support Putin: those who share his prejudices about Ukraine; those convinced the west is out to destroy Russia; those for whom things have got better since 1991; those terrified things may get worse.
Putin, unlike Maria in The Sound of Music, isn’t a problem with an easy solution. But let’s concentrate on what may be achievable. Here’s a brief and imperfect list:
Push for proper peace talks, accompanied by a full ceasefire, and with participation in the talks of observers trusted by both sides. As the war drags on and casualties mount, and the economic costs begin to bite, there could be a change of heart on the Russian side. There are some signs of disunity at the top even now.
Listen to voices from the region. A good place to start is Ukrainian activist and historian Taras Bilous’s essay, A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv (published recently on openDemocracy), which corrects many of the British media cliches about insuperable linguistic, cultural, historical and geographical divides and the influence of the far right.
Recognize the efforts, at great personal cost, of the Russians who oppose the war: the demonstrators exposed to police beatings; the artists and administrators who resign from their jobs; the priests who speak up in their sermons when the hierarchy is silent; a few members of the business elite. Don’t organize blanket boycotts by citizenship.
Don’t organize boycotts by place of origin either. Rather than ostracizing works of art, try to understand the complex history of Russian imperialism. Pushkin’s To the Slanderers of Russia (1831) told western critics that Russia’s repression of Poland was a family affair. But Evdokiya Rostopchina’s The Forced Marriage (1845) presented Russia and Poland as an abusive husband and defiant wife – provoking outrage in Nicholas I.
Keep up the remarkable outpouring of support for Ukraine. Make sure the media caravans and flashmobs don’t just gallop on to the next sensation. After the campaign for peace with honor, there must be generous aid from the west to help Ukrainians rebuild their devastated cities and the democracy that they are fighting so hard to preserve.
In an address to the nation, the Russian Union of Rectors described Putin’s decision to embark on the “military operation” as “born of suffering”. When I think of suffering, I don’t see a small man sitting alone at the end of a long table. I see people sheltered in basements and metro stations, separated from their loved ones and their friends, or fleeing from their homes under gunfire.
A Ukrainian friend, a gifted literary critic, snatched a book as she and her husband left Kyiv. She later found it was The Sound and the Fury. It couldn’t better have suited the mood among those opposed to the war, who are eloquent in their outrage. Maybe Tolstoy was right after all: it is the apparently powerful who lack full humanity, and not those whom they try to harm.
Oliver Bullough is the author of Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back.
~ Russia is an astonishingly unequal country, with the elite owning a share of wealth as great as, if not greater than, that owned by pre-revolutionary aristocrats. These kleptocrats exploited connections in government to gain lucrative contracts or state property, but they don’t trust the legal system, which waved through this monstrous spate of theft, any more than any other Russian does. That is why they have moved at least half of their wealth out of Russia, and spent it on houses, yachts, football clubs, fine art and more. Their investment managers have been in London, Luxembourg and New York, and complement the harder skills that the oligarchs learned in Russia’s business climate.
What would Russia be without these offshore services? It would be a fading power with a declining population run by an aging political class loyal to a dead empire. Its sole world-class assets are its resources of oil, gas and minerals, many of which will become irrelevant in the decarbonized world we are moving towards. The USSR’s soft power was once enormous, with its communist ideology, sublime ballet companies, film directors and musicians. But what does the Kremlin have now? A misinformation machine and an unequal alliance with a Chinese elite that must be looking at Russia’s riches and licking their lips.
Putin claims to be defending the rights of Russian-speakers everywhere, yet during the pandemic, Russia had the worst rate of excess deaths of any country, a rate twice as bad as that of the United States and three times as bad as Britain’s. If he truly cared about the nation he serves, he would be focusing on Russia’s healthcare catastrophe instead of sending its sons to die in Ukraine.
We cannot solve the problem of Putin; only the Russians can do that. But we can stop helping him be a bigger problem than he has to be. The first step is to deprive him and his cronies of their access to our financial system. Being able to bury their wealth deep in our economies has allowed Russia’s rulers to avoid the consequences of their own greed: their children have studied in English schools; their wealth has been invested in western funds; their German-built yachts fly under the flags of British tax havens.
The way to do this is to strip them of the shield they can gain from opaque shell companies. Britain’s tax havens have sold secrecy to anyone able to afford it, while the UK’s Companies House has provided the cover for hundreds of billions of pounds of stolen wealth to flow out of Russia. When the shield over assets is lifted, we must give our law enforcement agencies the resources they need to investigate the assets’ provenance, and confiscate anything of criminal origin.
Stripped of their access to the international financial system and of their stolen riches, Putin’s oligarchs will be not plutocrats but thugs. Deprived of their boltholes, they will be forced either to improve Russia for everyone that lives in it, or they will be swept from power.
Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
~ Ultimately solving the Putin problem and creating change in Russia means confronting the psychological grip he has on his own people. The mental model of Putinism, the worldview it constructs with propaganda of word and deed to keep Russians under control, is built on several foundations: it appeals to nostalgia; it projects a conspiratorial perspective and it insists that Putin can get away with anything, that there is no alternative to Putin. As oppositionally minded Russians, pro-democracy media, civil society activists and public diplomats from the west seek to engage the Russian people, they need to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of these foundations. Even if Putin manages to cut off the Russian internet even further (he has already shut down Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the last independent radio and online television stations), there will always be ways to reach the Russian people, from virtual private networks to satellite TV. The question is what to talk to them about.
Currently, most Russians back the war and Putin’s reasons for it. It’s hard to trust polls in a dictatorship where you get 12 years in jail for mentioning the word “war”. Moreover, it’s always nice to hide behind propaganda: pretending you don’t know what’s going on allows you to avoid responsibility and make any tough or dangerous decisions. But even if these cognitive biases, fears and motivations to dodge reality don’t shift immediately there are already vulnerabilities in Putin’s main propaganda strategies.
Let’s start with Putin’s uses of nostalgia. His mission has always been to “bring Russia off its knees”, the Kremlin version of “make America great again”. This has now reached a climax: in his rambling historical speech validating the invasion of Ukraine he invoked his mission to restore the Russian empire, and framed his war in terms of a second world war redux to battle (utterly mythical) Nazis.
Nostalgia propaganda is effective psychologically in other ways too. It posits that the great Russian people have been humiliated by malign outside powers, and now Putin is restoring pride. The most important humiliation Russians experience, both historically and currently, is of course internal. But the nostalgia narrative allows the Kremlin to transfer its own brutality on to a shadowy outside “enemy”, and then help people relieve their pent-up anger through aggression. The abusive, sadistic tone of Putin’s speeches, and the ones of his leading TV propagandists such as Vladimir Solovyov, give people an emotional path to articulate and validate their darkest and most violent feelings. It’s OK to be vicious and mean, this propaganda implies, it’s all history’s fault.
But this nostalgia propaganda also exists to cover up Putin’s great achilles heel: his lack of a vision for the future. The future has long disappeared from Russian political discourse. Thinking about the future means concentrating on political reforms, cleaning up the courts, abolishing corruption – all things Putin cannot achieve, as they will put his own system in danger. With the new economic reality post-invasion, any hope for the future has been eradicated completely. But people will still think about it. What do the sanctions, which are yet to properly kick in, mean for their children’s futures?
Media and communication with the Russian people needs to focus on these questions about the future. Both on the personal level, but also in terms of the future of the country. What, ultimately, should the future role of Russia be in the world? One of the most resonant phrases on Russia media runs: “What’s the point of the world if there’s no place for Russia in it?” The “Russia” this invokes is imperial, its identity tied to crushing others. Is there another way?
Conspiracy thinking is another foundation of Putin’s playbook. It serves many uses.
Conspiratorial thinking helps solidify community, promoting a sense of “us” under attack from “them”. It helps explain a confusing world. It also removes any sense of responsibility. Big new posters around Moscow claim that Russia “wasn’t given any choice” but to start the war, implying it’s all the fault of enemy powers. Ultimately, conspiracy thinking also spreads a sense that people are powerless to change anything in the world, which in turn seeds passivity. This can often be beneficial to the Kremlin: it wants a docile country.
As the economic situation worsens, and the propaganda weakens, Putin will turn to the power ministries to use oppression rather than ideas. This has always been his final argument: that he can carry out any crimes at home, any invasion abroad, any war crime from Grozny to Aleppo, and get away with it. In Ukraine, Putin is purposefully targeting humanitarian corridors, bombing refugees and hospitals in order to break the will of the people. It’s a message to the world that all statements about humanitarian values, the UN’s “responsibility to protect”, “safe zones” is guff. His argument is that might is right, and in the futureless new world the ones who are most ruthless, from Beijing to Riyadh and Moscow, will flourish.
There’s a joke going round pro-Putin circles inside Russia: Two Russian soldiers are drinking champagne in Russian-occupied Paris, the whole of Europe conquered. “Did you hear?” one smiles to the other. “We lost the information war.” Such humor is its own form of propaganda: helping push Russians away from the thought that the “special operation” isn’t going quite as planned. But it highlights a deeper truth: in wartime, propaganda of the deed outweighs propaganda of the word.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/solve-problem-like-putin-writers-russia-ukraine-oliver-bullough-peter-pomerantsev
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RISEN CHRIST IN KHERSON
WHY GERMANY COULDN’T CONQUER THE SOVIET UNION
I would first and foremost say that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed to fail. The audacity of Germany to think they could win is shockingly absurd to me.
The main reason for this arrogance was their victory in France and how France acted throughout this invasion. The German belief was that no one wanted the war and was not willing to sacrifice a great number of lives for it. The main reason why the French put up a very light resistance to the invasion, apart from being tactically outwitted, was their lack of morale and unwillingness to conduct a full-scale military resistance because of how they were traumatized from the previous World War.
For example, when famous Ghost Divison(7th panzer divison) under Erwin Rommel advanced such a long distance into enemy territory, he had to personally comeback through that narrow line created by his division for reinforcement, communication and supplies. Himself was on a armored car, had few more armored vehicles and a tank. Not very large or safe company. On his way back he encountered some French forces and convinced them that they were behind Germany frontlines and had no way of escaping or fighting their way out, resulting in their surrender. These kind of incidents were common during the invasion of France for the reason that French army lacked morale and willingness to fight. The German misconception about the Soviet Union and their hope of her collapsing just like France did led to this giant failure.
The reason they thought they had any chance of winning was based solely on an assumption. They thought the speed at which they advanced during the invasion and heavy losses would cause huge damage to Soviet morale both in the military and among common people. They expected an early surrender and total chaos within the Soviet Union before 1942. Of course, we know that never happened. The courage and spirit shown by the Soviet Union during World War 2 have no equals. They won battles where they had 7 to 1 casualty ratios, and they still threw forces at the enemy completely disregarding what they would lose for it.
One of the reasons for the German hope of victory in the outcome of this invasion was their insufficient military intelligence. Now, I do find the role of intelligence during World War 2 to be exaggerated romantically, because even if you know where the nail is, you still need a hammer.
However, in this case, it was one of the key reasons Germany had such expectations of this war with the Soviet Union. Before the invasion, Germany’s knowledge about the Soviet Union was as follows: they knew that the Soviet Union had 150 divisions ready and armed, and their manpower was able to form another 50 divisions, but they lacked the equipment to properly arm them. During the Battle of Stalingrad, German intelligence was still convinced that the Soviet army was on the brink of collapse, unable to reinforce or form divisions with enough manpower.
To understand how wrong this intelligence was, you should know that between the time the invasion began and the Fall of Berlin, the Soviet Union had mobilized 800 divisions, four times larger than what the Germans thought they would be able to. But in order to entitle them, at that point Germany had lost 800 thousands men compare to over 5 million casualties of the Soviets. German intelligence was not solely wrong on considering it would be not possible for Soviet Union to mobilize large number of divisions lacking the sufficient equipment. However, one of the key aspects they failed to consider was Allies’ supply shipment to the Soviet Union, which speeded up the mobilization process drastically.
I should note that Germany losses were not insignificant and first few months of Operation Barbarossa was not as smooth as it is usually depicted for Germany. Germany had lost valuable, experienced divisions and equipment during their initial advance and it made them drastically weaker comparing their situation during the start of invasion and when they were at the gates of Moscow.
The most important reason why it failed is that the Germans thought the Soviet Union would surrender early, but the Soviet Union fought the war as if it was life or death because it was. ~ Emre Bal, Quora
Robert Wolverton:
Hitler had boasted that all Germany had to do was “kick in the door,” and “the whole rotten structure would collapse.”
The Last Crusader:
I just read an answer about how valuable lend lease really was, answered by a Russian, and from what I gathered, Russia certainly would have lost without it, so in a way, Hitler was right about Russia; they would have collapsed. Just the food alone prevented mass starvation of both the citizens and the military by mid 1943, maybe even 1942.
Chad Thurs
I think Germany underestimated the USSR, because of how poorly it did in the Winter war against Finland.
Oriana:
The failure to occupy Moscow had a huge symbolic significance. If Moscow fell, the loss of morale would have been huge.
Ron Spencer:
The Germans were outnumbered. Their total population was 86 million people. England had 41 million the USA 132 million, Russia 170 million. They couldn’t attack their opponents factories with any meaningful success. The Japanese had no hope once the USA got their torpedoes to work as Japanese cargo ships ceased to exist in any meaningful way and Japan like Germany is a importer of energy and raw materials. All I can add is it was a terrible waste of lives. If all the effort had have been put into improving their infrastructure and living conditions imagine how much better we would be.
Larry Miller:
I also read somewhere, another little known key factor had to do with a bit of espionage hatched by Churchill with the help of William Donovan of the OSS. According to the story the knew Hitler was planning to attack Russia sometime in early Spring (March or April). The British with the help of the OSS leaked the story that the British were planning a campaign against the Germans up through Greece and the Balkans. While they did have a small expeditionary force deployed, it was mainly a defensive force to assist the Greeks.
But it was worrisome enough to the Germans that they diverted forces to Greece to secure their right flank. This delayed Barbarossa until June and as we now know General Winter and the Russians stopped the panzers 40 miles short of Moscow. Who knows what might have happened had the Germans attacked a couple of months sooner.
Nicolas Prodger:
The whole idea that the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece significantly delayed the German army is absurd. It was a myth made up by Hitler and later after the war by his generals to cover for their mistakes, a common theme. They began the invasion when they had always planned to. Any earlier and they wouldn’t have been ready any later they wouldn’t have enough fuel…
Marshall Theriault:
Is it just a coincidence that “Barbarossa” was the nickname of Frederick I, the first appointed emperor of the Holy Roman Empire?
Did Hitler think he would be appointed next?
James Koroniades:
Maybe it would have won or had at least chance of winning if Hitler had not declared war on the USA after he invaded Russia. During the first year or so of the invasion the USA and also the British gave the USSR vital supplies necessary for their survival. They may not have survived if they did not get these supplies. Also the contribution of the USA air force also helped keep German Luftwaffe from fighting on the Russian front when the German army on the eastern front needed their support. Maybe the Nazis would have lost anyway but with Britain, Russia and the USA it was a lost cause.
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HOW STALIN LAID THE FOUNDATIONS FOR THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
Stalin, far from undertaking a strong start, unleashed a pathological illness that ultimately proved fatal.
Under the leadership of the Great Stalin, forward to Communism!Indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union speaks volumes about the many factors that plague humanity in spite of what we regard as material and social progress and, for that matter, that imbue our existence on this planet with so much irony and even, well, tragi-comedy.
As is so often the case with human striving, typically expressed as blind improvisation, revolutionary sentiment in the West underwent significant mutation, leaving Stalin and the Soviet Union in the unlikely position as the default revolutionary Communist power.
Remarkably, the pathetically uneven industrial system he had constructed on the semi-feudal foundations of Russia as a kind of socialist fail-safe became the focus and even the model for global revolutionary hope and striving.
Never mind the fact that it was imposed with utter ruthlessness and motivated by a goal that had very little to do with the needs of the disparate peoples of the Soviet Union. It had been carried out with the purpose of securing a safe harbor from which revolution could be launched, presumably into the advanced capitalized countries whose economic conditions were far better suited — arguably the only ones suited — for the playing out of the scientific socialist principles conceived by Marx.
Simply put, there was no “strong start” in the Soviet Union by Stalin, only furious kick-start undertaken only as means of jump-starting a series of revolutions thousands of miles away — but that never occurred.
~ Jim Langcuster, Quora
Stefano d’Adamo:
Eh? Stalin RENOUNCED the idea of world revolution, which was Lenin’s and Trotsky’s. Stalin “realistically” focused on building an unassailable power among others, knowing all too well, how it was surrounded by enemies everywhere, and managed to get it in the end… at an unacceptable price that utterly ruined the country, depriving it forever of its best human resources — courtesy of his war on peasantry and intellectuals and purges, on one hand, and Hitler’s genocidal invasion on the other.
Tony Amon:
Burovsky describes how the crimes committed by the usurpers of power in Russia far exceeded anything known to date, including even the French Revolution. During the usurpation of power in the revolution, no fewer than two million met their death. In the continuing period of the internal civil war, Burovsky estimates, 9–13 million eventually lost their lives. Yet, the crimes of the Lenin-Trotsky faction were either glossed over or simply not mentioned in the press or on the radio, while the Western media concentrated on and exaggerated those committed by Stalin during the “Great Purge.”
Alexander:
In a lot of ways Stalin made some incredibly terrible moves for the country's future, one example being that he moved people to work on factory lines instead of a more natural growth that was previously being conducted. A large focus on steel production (with the whole 5-year plan being based around it) ended up being a detriment as he also didn't want to import any for fear of being perceived as weak. I do think he also didn't have a perfect system as he essentially had a monopoly on the party, meaning that when he was incorrect there wasn't a way to hold him accountable.
They ran into massive economic issues in the 1960s. They basically fell behind technologically and ideologically and couldn't catch up. The collapse was really long coming and was the culmination of decades of bad political and economic policy.
In short, Stalin's leadership led the country to be run by paranoid ideologues. His death removed the only central power and the chaos caused by the power vacuum his successor, Khrushchev, tried to create institutions that would keep future leaders in check — however they were ineffective.
Richard Che:
Stalin had Paulina Molotova (Molotov’s wife) arrested when he saw Paulina using Yiddish to talk with Golda Meir.
Andrei Melnikov:
Stalin’s creation was a fear-based system and engaging enthusiastic youth into productive, selfless actions.
Stalin died, and fear slowly died too. Youth got old and disappointed. Next generation was cynical about the idea and apathetical in matters of politics to avoid punishment.
AI bot “Sage”:
One of the major factors was the economic inefficiencies that developed under Stalin's rule. The Soviet economy was heavily centralized and controlled by the state, which led to a lack of incentives for productivity and innovation. Additionally, Stalin's purges and repression of dissent led to a lack of skilled workers and managers, which further hindered economic growth.
Another major factor was the growing discontent among the Soviet population. Stalin's policies led to widespread human rights abuses, including forced collectivization and the suppression of dissent. This created a sense of disillusionment among many Soviet citizens, who began to lose faith in the Communist Party and the Soviet system.
Finally, the Soviet Union's costly involvement in the Afghanistan War and the arms race with the United States further drained its resources and weakened its economy.
These factors, along with the leadership of Soviet leader Gorbachev, who implemented policies of glasnost and perestroika [tolerance and restructuring], ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Jon Last Name:
“Pathetically uneven industrial system". Many rumors about the Soviets were unable to produce food for their own population. Untrue. There wasn't any problem producing it. Problem was getting it to market. Most rotted in the farms or on the way. I don't remember why they couldn't get it to market but after the revolution they couldn't. Read a report that claimed that even in Moscow only half of the hospitals half had hot water; this is supposedly by Soviet admission. Many of the problems were associated with central planning where you had to do it this way and there was to be no deviation no matter what the circumstances showed.
Andrei Melnikov:
It was inefficient, unproductive, and yes, wasteful economy based on idiotic Marxist principles. The main reason of the problem was always stated as БЕЗХОЗЯЙСТВЕННОСТЬ. Slogans to beat it, to avoid it were everywhere. It means not caring. But the direct translation is “absence of owner”. The clue was in the word, funny! Nobody cared. Let it rot! Everything was public. Public property was run by government. Government was run by bureaucracy.
The only way make people to care was FEAR, and Stalin (Mao, Kim, Pol Pot) knew it, but dictators have the habit of dying…
Richard Que:
This is the problem of socialism [in the sense of public ownership of means of production and central planning]. Socialism require a massive bureaucracy or big government in order to control the economy. This not only drags down the economy, generates waste and inefficiency, and in turn lead to massive corruption.
Oriana:
I agree with Andrei Melnikov: the main reason was “absence of owner.” If something is owned by all, at least in theory, in practice it means that no one feels like an owner and nobody takes the responsibility for maintenance, for instance.
I also like the statement: “Stalin died, and the fear died too.” In a system based on fear, you must keep the fear going. You must keep showing that individual lives don’t matter. This works fine in a beehive or an ant-hill. What puzzles me is that Stalin would want that kind of society as an ideal. We know that he read a great deal — he really loved books — and you’d think that all those books, many with humanitarian themes, would have shaped him differently.
But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a poetic justice to Stalin’s end: it’s very likely that Beria poisoned Stalin with rat poison.
Putin
doesn’t promote Stalin Mania. He rides the wave of mass admiration and
nostalgia for the return of Russia’s number one mass murderer.
*
WHY THE AUGUST 1991 COUP ATTEMPT FAILED
The coup makers slavishly followed the pattern of the successful coups against Beria in 1953 and Khrushchev in 1964: we lock up the man, declare to the nation that someone new is in charge, and do what we think needs to be done.
They didn’t account for new factors that made this impossible:
Gorbachev’s Glasnost allowed people to flock around an opposing agenda. Within hours, the opposition started to print leaflets and organize street rallies. Back in 1953 and 1964, these would simply have been mowed down by lethal fire and survivors rounded up to get their sentences.
Ethnic nationalism
Back in 1991, anti-Communism and liberal democracy were united on a common nationalist platform. “Communists have been messing up the country for more than 70 years, time to go out and do something for the nation.” And there was no way the ethnic elites in the 14 fringe republics would put themselves in the harm’s way and help the old-timers in Moscow beyond hollow pronouncements of loyalty.
State bankruptcy
The GKCHP men tried to take over an empty shop. They simply didn’t have money to put on the table for the movers and shakers who sat on the fence. They foolishly believed all it took was to read a declaration on the TV, and everyone suddenly would follow their orders. Nope.
Defection of the bureaucracy
In hindsight, the slow-moving collapse of the USSR during the Perestróyka was nothing but the privatization of Real Socialism by middle- and lower-level servants of the Soviet State and Communist party. They eyed the real opportunity to become new masters of the country. They found little sense in returning to the gray normalcy of Stalinism. They wanted capitalist glamor to fill their lives, at long last.
As a result, neither the army nor the KGB supported the coup.
Failure to arrest Yeltsin
This was the single stupidest misstep by the coup makers. Yeltsin got the chance to become the leading figure of resistance. Back in 1918 when the Civil War started, neither the peasants nor the Whites had such a figure, which weakened them enormously. Stalin was fully aware of how important it was to rob his enemies of a leader—which is why he went to such great lengths in getting to Trotsky and killing him.
This lesson was lost on the GKCHP men. They allowed Yeltsin to escape. Among themselves, there was not a single figure that had even a fraction of the man’s charisma.
Below, Moscow during the coup attempt of 1991. The coup makers were amazed to find out that virtually everyone who was supposed to take the bullet for Soviet rule, like our future President Putin and his colleagues in the KGB, turned up a no-show. The whole nation chose to do something else than to raise up in arms for the cause of Communism and “friendship between nations.” ~ Dima Vorobiev, quora
Matt Sands:
I read that the
Moscow people recognized it wasn’t likely to succeed when they saw the tanks obey the traffic lights.
Manqing:
“It's the economy, stupid” The Chinese reached the same conclusion as President Clinton. Hope everyone can keep that in mind.
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WILL THE WAR IN UKRAINE END ONLY IF PUTIN DIES?
Gabriel Doroshin“For the Orthodox or Catholic Faith! For the Russian or French Tsar!”
Frenchman Gabriel Doroshin is a great-grandson of Emperor Nicholas. A resident of Donbas, he joined the Russian Invading Army as a volunteer.
“While Ukrainians are fighting for Joe Biden,” said Andrei Malakhov, anchor of the most popular TV show on the Russia-1 Channel, “a legitimate heir to the Romanov throne pitched himself against the Ukrainian dictator.”
Andrei Malakhov, Russia’s Oprah Winfrey, who always steered clear of politics, has become a shameless propagandist lately.
Legitimately elected dictator? Must be the first one ever.
According to KGB script, Ukrainians are not fighting for their homes and homeland that is being invaded by Russian Armed Forces on behalf of a real dictator who had rigged all of his elections results, but for Joe Biden, American president.
This is what megalomaniac Putin wants to think , that he’s actually grappling with Americansky in Ukraine in a revanchist battle of Cold War that he’s going to win this time.
The message, however, is simple. It strikes awe into the hearts of the impressionable female serfs that an heir of an emperor is “behind the zero,” as people in the military call Ukraine killing Ukronazis.
They must make their husbands volunteer, too. Right away! If masters have gone to war so should their husbands.
Or as a popular psychologist suggested in a psychological training “What Do Men Want?” for young women, “excite your man, and when he gets an erection, use this moment to take him to the closest recruitment center and you will fulfill your wife’s duty.”
“For me, this is very important,” confessed Gabriel Doroshin to Russian Oprah Winfrey, “because my ancestors, Napoleon I Bonaparte and Nicholas I, were participants in large-scale wars. Now I am also participating in such a large-scale global conflict.”
Doroshin wants to participate in a war as an imaginary emperor. Seems like it’s not at all important to him in which war or on what side, since he’s French by blood and nationality, and he could have easily been with the Ukrainian Army.
When Napoleon invaded Russia, Russian serfs whose masters spoke French as the first language and dressed in Western clothes didn’t see any difference between the French invaders and their own masters.
In fact, they thought it was a war between two groups of masters, and they didn’t want to get involved.
Only later propagandists came up with a legend that portrayed the conflict as Patriotic War, as if serfs who never ventured outside their village or at best provincial town and were no better than slaves in Ancient Rome, treated like private property of land owners, illiterate and ignorant, overnight became patriots of Russia and risked their lives as free men and women to drive the French out. And, mission complete, they were back to serfdom.
If you read Russian history textbooks using logic you will realize why people here are paranoid schizophrenics. Lies are piled upon twisted lies with bizarre nonsensical conclusions, a chain of martyrs and despots to whom the former swore fealty for no other reason but because it’s a tradition and no other method of self-governance has ever been tried.
The situation is very similar today. Most of Russian state serfs -- about 90% of the population like in the early 20th century -- believe that the war in Ukraine is between Western masters in Kremlin who still spend most of their time at home in the West, and Western masters over contested territory, money and resources.
Propaganda paints the conflict as a patriotic war again, and the majority traditionally prefers to stay as far away as possible unless public officials demand cosplay like making trench candles or marching with assault rifles in military duds. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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WHY RUSSIANS BELIEVE THEY ARE WINNING IN UKRAINE
Russia is always winning. Always.
Even when Russia withdraws, it’s winning. Even when an entire company is wiped out they are winning. Even when Ukraine makes a huge breakthrough they are winning.
Always winning.
That’s what happens when you live in a hardcore dictatorship. You can’t say anything that dear leader doesn’t like. Wait, is that North Korea or Russia ? LOL. ~ Marcelo Pacheco, Quora
Adam Jolly:
North North Korea.
Martha Kirtley:
No, no. They didn’t retreat at all. They advanced to the rear.
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RUSSIA IS LOSING MONEY
Right now, Russia is losing 1 billion dollars daily – they’ve lost US $70 billion cash in the budget in 70 days.
Over the last year, prices for Russian oil dropped by 46%.
The average price of Russian oil in March 2023 was $47.85 per barrel, which is 1.86 times lower than in the same period last year, when it cost $89 per barrel.
Compared to February 2023, March oil prices dropped by 3.5%.
The average price for the first quarter of 2023 was $49 per barrel compared to $89 in January-March 2022.
The federal budget of the Russian Federation for 2023 is based on the forecasted average annual price of oil at $70.1 per barrel.
To fill the massive hole in the budget, the government is selling off the remaining reserves in Chinese yuan.
Russia already made 1/3 of budget expenses classified and stopped releasing a lot of statistics on economy and demographics, so they will probably soon stop publishing data on available cash reserves as well.
Switching the economy to working for the war is expensive: Not only the troops need to be paid, but logistics, medics, manufacturers of food, weapons and clothing as well.
The other day Russia’s prime minister Mishustin signed the decree, according to which Military-Industrial Council of Russia, headed by Putin himself (Dmitry Medvedev is his deputy chief) has the decisive say in managing companies producing weapons, munitions, food and other stuff for the war.
Putin is prepared to sacrifice anything to keep his war in Ukraine going: economy, lifestyle, people.
He believes that the West will get tired of supporting Ukraine and decides to cut its losses, and then he can win. Russians just have to endure a bit more.
In Moscow, pensioners wait at the back door of a supermarket for expired produce.
That’s “prosperous” Moscow with pensions double the size of those in regions.
No one in Russia is surprised seeing pensioners – who own their homes outright, they aren’t homeless – fighting over “prosrochka” (food with expired “sell by” dates).
In some cities, such food is sold at discount prices – after the buyers sign a release that they won’t have claims about the quality.
People are not buying it for their dogs – they are buying it for themselves. They have nothing to eat.
That’s federal road M-7, 40 km from Moscow.
It used to be lucrative for contractors to rebuild roads near Moscow once a year: build an inferior road and you’ll get the contract to do it again the next year. Win-win for the contractor and the official who picks him.
Now there is simply no money for that. The money is spent on building residential buildings in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
Russia bombed Mariupol into ruins, and Putin told his ministers to rebuild it. Building contracts in Mariupol are some of the most lucrative, and construction workers who are sent there earn a few times the wage they can get in St. Petersburg.
Imagine what amounts of budget money are going there.
Over 600 people, mostly kids, elderly and women, died in the blast [of the Mariupol Drama Theater]. Many died buried alive in the basement, as it wasn’t possible to provide emergency assistance under constant shelling.
After checking for damages, Russian builders decided to keep the facade of the theater and demolish most of the building.
They didn’t exhume the bodies from the basements. Just packed the ruins into trucks and dumped in the outskirts of the city.
The builders are walking on the mixture of concrete and dead bodies. They are not concerned.
What they are concerned about is rebuilding the theater quickly. Vladimir Putin said that Russia would rebuild the city better than it was before.
It would take decades, but the tsar’s whims are the law. No matter the cost.
Meanwhile, in the town of Votkinsk, Russia, people recorded a video appeal for Vladimir Putin: They are waiting for 35 years for a road to be built. But so far, only promises and the local authorities are unresponsive. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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MISHA IOSSEL: “NO ONE IS SAFE IN RUSSIA NOW”
Russia at this point is an entirely lawless, fascist state, whose criminal genocidal klepto-chekist rulers, knowing they are losing their unconscionable war against Ukraine, are desperate in the extreme, beyond themselves with well-earned terror of the future. They know their time in power and out of jail, and perhaps the very time of their walking among the living on this green earth, is rapidly drawing to a close. That makes them supremely dangerous. No one is safe in Russia now — not any more than anyone was safe in late '30s in Nazi Germany.
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PUTIN’S PARANOIA, ACCORDING TO HIS FORMER BODY GUARD
~ Like a great many Russians, Gleb Karakulov took his family and fled Putin's Russia to the relative safety of Turkey in October of last year. But Mr. Karakulov is no ordinary Russian. He was an officer in Putin's ultra elite personal security service, one of the Generalissimo's personal bodyguards.
This of course makes him a highly wanted man by the Russian FSB. They can't allow someone with intimate knowledge of Putin’s daily life and top secret information to go off the reservation.
Gleb Karakulov has something he wants the world to know. “Putin is afraid. He's extremely paranoid. In all my service, I have never seen him with a mobile phone. All the information he receives is only from people close to him. That is, he lives in a kind of information vacuum.”
“Putin has set up identical offices in multiple locations,” he continued, “with matching details down to the desk and wall hangings, and official reports sometimes say he’s one place when he is actually in another. When Putin was in Sochi, security officials would deliberately pretend he was leaving, bringing in a plane and sending off a motorcade, when he was in fact staying. The guys would talk about this, really laughing. I think that this is an attempt to confuse, first, intelligence, and second, so that there are no assassination attempts.”
As to Putin's health Karakulov says, “I made more than 180 trips with him, and contrary to speculation, Putin is in better shape than most people his age. He's only canceled a few trips due to illness and has annual medical checkups.”
Karakulov also spoke about Putin's infamous armored train. “It's painted to look like any other common train, gray with a red stripe to blend in with other railway carriages in Russia. He doesn't like the fact that airplanes can be tracked. He prefers the stealth of a nondescript train car. He does all this because he's simply afraid. Is it not too much to spend this kind of money on one person? If this is from the budget then it is. If it's not from the budget, then it’s total corruption.”
Several of Gleb's colleagues have since died in the Ukraine war. He's seen photos of them laying dead on various battlefields. It angers him. “There’s no information about them. What were they doing there? Why did they end up there? Why did they die there? No one in Russia acknowledges their deaths.”
As to accusations he’s a traitor to his country Karakulov is adamant. “I'm not unpatriotic,” he says. “Patriotism is when you love your country. In this case, our homeland needs to be saved, because something crazy and terrible is happening in our country. We need to fix this. Our President has become a war criminal. It is time to end this war and stop being silent.”
The Kremlin has yet to respond to numerous requests for comment regarding Gleb Karakulov
~ Izzy Luggs, Quora
Oriana:
Having watched a an interview with Karakulov, this is what I most remember: “Putin has a pathological fear of being killed.”
The richest man in the world — and one of the most miserable. No one envies him. He does, indeed, have reason to believe that many people dearly hope that one day he’ll be poisoned, pushed out a window, or — if the Hague trial ever becomes a reality — hanged (perhaps at Maidan Square in Kiev).
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DID LENIN DIE OF SYPHILIS?
In the latest round in the medical profession's favorite after-dinner sport — diagnosis long after death — three Israeli doctors have proposed in the European Journal of Neurology that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also know as Lenin, architect of the Russian Revolution, died in the Kremlin of syphilis.
Evidence that the lethal spirochetes had colonized his brain is circumstantial, but intriguing. In his last years, Lenin suffered short episodes of loss of consciousness, numbness of the right hand, throbbing headaches, sleeplessness, hallucinations, loss of appetite and epileptic seizures. His death certificate officially declared that he died of cerebral atherosclerosis, although Lenin's two personal physicians refused to sign it.
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease that can end in madness and death after an interval of decades. In 1895, Lenin checked into a Swiss clinic for two weeks for undisclosed reasons. He was treated in Russia by a German specialist in syphilis who said, cryptically, on his return: "Everyone knows for which brain disorder I am called"; and he was treated in 1922 with the arsenic-based drug Salvarsan, which was used only for syphilis.
So Lenin joins a growing list of long-dead celebrities to be given a posthumous diagnosis based on anecdotal evidence. In the past decade or so, enthusiastic diagnosticians have saddled Herod the Great with chronic kidney disease and gangrene; Mozart variously with tuberculosis, meningitis, uremia and even Tourette's syndrome and Alexander the Great with Brown's syndrome of the left eye. Poor Vincent van Gogh has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, lead poisoning, tinnitus, syphilis, attention deficit disorder, Asperger's syndrome and porphyria.
The biblical hero Samson — who is said to have slaughtered Philistines with the jawbone of an ass and torched cornfields by setting alight the tails of foxes — was diagnosed by some American psychiatrists in 2001 with antisocial personality disorder. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/jul/22/thisweekssciencequestions4
Oriana:
The cause of Lenin's death at the age of 53 remains controversial. One claim is that he was already recovering quite well from his latest stroke — and was turning against Stalin, who then had him poisoned. Since eventually Stalin himself ended up being poisoned by Beria, this would be poetic justice. In terms of Russian/Soviet history, it would be nothing new, so let's move on . . .
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THE QUIET GIRL — “AS BEAUTIFUL AS IT IS DEVASTATING”
~ “The Quiet Girl” (“An Cailín Ciúin”) is the first film in the Irish language to be nominated for the best international feature Academy Award. Told from the perspective of its 9-year old protagonist, Cáit (Catherine Clinch), writer-director Colm Bairéad’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2010 novella, “Foster” is as beautiful as it is devastating.
Leisurely paced, like a day on the rural farms where it is set in 1981, “The Quiet Girl” opens with an image of Cáit hiding in a field, ignoring her mother’s call. Her home life is anything but pleasant. She is tormented by her siblings, her pregnant Mam (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) seems indifferent to her suffering, and her Da (Michael Patric) is an irresponsible gambler who may also be carrying on an affair.
School is no better. Cáit is seen as “a weirdo” by her peers and is subject to constant abuse, which only draws her more deeply into her shell.
“Which one is this?” asks the strange woman Da picks up in his car while Cáit is in his backseat. “This one’s the wanderer,” he replies, indicating Cáit. It’s no wonder “the wanderer” spends as much time as she can alone, hidden and in silence. Her quest to be invisible is the only thing she has some control over, the one modicum of peace she can afford.
Since one less mouth to feed will save her impoverished family money while they await the birth of its newest member, Cáit is sent to live with a distant, older cousin, Eibhlín Cinnsealach (Carrie Crowley) and her husband, Seán (Andrew Bennett). The couple does not like Da, something Cáit picks up on immediately, and they like him even less after he drives off with Cáit’s suitcases in his car.
The Cinnsealachs appear to be childless. Seán seems reluctant to warm to their new houseguest, but Eibhlín immediately takes a shine to Cáit. She bathes her, speaks kindly, does not shame her for a nighttime bedwetting accident, and brushes her hair 100 times. She also finds some clothing for her to wear in the closet of the bedroom where Cáit sleeps. They’re boys’ clothes, a detail that hints at a possible secret.
“There are no secrets in this house,” Eibhlín reassures Cáit. At least there aren’t any between the two of them.
After Seán yells at Cáit for wandering off, we fear that he is just another clone of Da. A small gesture changes our opinion. Bairéad stages it so subtly that I’m surprised how powerfully it hit me. Before he leaves for his farm work, Seán finds Cáit sitting in the kitchen. Without saying a word, he leaves a cookie on the table for her before walking out.
I do the scene no justice with my description. But all I could think about was how gentle and sweet a peace offering this was, and how, perhaps, this small gift was the first kindness shown to Cáit by a male authority figure. It was not the first time “The Quiet Girl” put a lump in my throat.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Seán reassures Cáit. “Always remember that. Many’s the person missed the opportunity to say nothing and lost much because of it.”
All is not sunshine and flowers, despite Kate McCullough’s lush cinematography depicting the Irish countryside as lovingly as possible. The ominous, cruel detail “The Quiet Girl” won’t let us forget is that, eventually, Cáit will have to return to her neglectful home after experiencing what it feels like to be nurtured and appreciated. Crowley and Bennett are so good in their roles that they become the ideal parent substitutes without a hint of artifice. They make you feel their love.
“The Quiet Girl” has no regard for the typical Hollywood ending. Instead, it closes on an image that will simultaneously fill you with hope and tear out your heart. ~
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/03/01/arts/quiet-girl-is-meditation-loneliness-power-love/
From another source:
~ Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl is simple and beautiful in its moving evocation of human experience and the depth of its belief in the transformative power of human kindness. As quiet and unassuming as its title character, Bairéad’s film (his feature directorial debut) finds a consistently thoughtful and emotionally stirring balance between the inevitability of the harsher aspects of life and a profound sense of hope. The film is hard when it needs to be, but it also holds space for optimism, even as it refuses easy answers or pat reassurances.
The girl of the title is Cáit (Carrie Crowley), who is one of five siblings living in a crowded house in a small town in rural Ireland in the early 1980s with their mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh), who is pregnant, and father (Michael Patric), who is one of those brooding alcoholics whose presence immediately causes a hush in the room. For reasons that are never fully explained (but are most likely related to the mother’s pregnancy), they decide to send Cáit to live with relatives for the summer.
The relatives are a middle-age couple, Seán (Andrew Bennett) and Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), who live on a rural farm and whose relation to Cáit is never made clear (if they are, in fact, actually related). Eibhlín is gentle and warmly welcoming of Cáit in a way that suggests she has always wanted to have a child but never could, while Seán remains conspicuously distant and uninvolved. He focuses on his work tending to the farm and pays Cáit little mind, to the point of actively ignoring her presence and declining Eibhlín’s offer each evening to tell the girl goodnight. Cáit is clearly a damaged soul, although Bairéad, in adapting the short-story-turned-novella “Foster” by Claire Keegan, keeps the nature of her damage vague. All that matters is that Cáit has been through a lot and has turned deeply inward as a means of protecting herself, a stance that her experience living with Eibhlín and Seán will slowly relax.
And that is essentially all The Quiet Girl has to offer in terms of narrative, but that is hardly all there is. The simple story structure gives Bairéad and his deeply gifted cast a broad space to explore and dramatize Cáit’s slow, painful, but ultimately poignant emergence under Eibhlín and Seán’s care. There are no big moments or grand revelations (well, there is a significant revelation about Eibhlín and Seán’s past, but it isn’t hard to guess early on), but rather a steady accumulation of small details involving the characters’ interactions.
A lesser film would have leaned heavily on big speeches and dramatic moments, but Bairéad has the confidence to allow his characters to emerge gradually in the little moments. Most profound here is the manner in which Seán’s previously cool detachment toward Cáit slowly melts, not because of any one major event, but rather the continuance of her presence and the growing realization of how much he needs her as much as she needs him. Again, none of this is stated explicitly, but rather revealed through nuances of behavior and gesture and changes in body language. The Quiet Girl is a minor masterpiece of dramatic accumulation.
And the film wouldn’t work without the central performance by Catherine Clinch, a complete unknown who has never starred in a film before. Clinch’s naturalistic performance is shorn of artifice and mannerisms, achieving a kind of direct purity that seems to transcend “acting.” She simply is. As the title suggests, Cáit spends much of the film not speaking, but she is nevertheless immensely expressive, with every flick of her eyes, contraction of her shoulders, or shift of weight conveying a world of information about her emotional state—anxieties, fears, desires, hope. Similarly, Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett give rich performances, showing us through the smallest of actions how their characters are adjusting to Cáit’s presence in their home, which ultimately affects them as much as they affect her.
https://www.qnetwork.com/review/4595
Oriana:
All I will say is that this is a must-see movie. While there are many movies that, in one way or another, are about the power of love, this one is unforgettable. It fills us with a tenderness that’s strangely akin to both sorrow and joy. Even if the “quiet girl” is forced to live again in her unloving family, she has experienced being loved and valued — and that experience will bear sweet lifelong fruit.
One line I remember from the movie is spoken by the foster mother about the "quiet girl" — "There is nothing wrong with her. She just needs minding."
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WAS SEX THE NEADERTHAL’S DOOM?
~ The species Homo sapiens (or “wise man”) began to evolve about 300,000 years ago, and eventually won out the evolutionary battle and became the only Homo species to reign on Earth about 40,000 years ago. During the early days of human life, another species named Homo neanderthalensis, or more commonly called Neanderthals, co-existed with Homo sapiens. In 2010, a ground-breaking analysis of a Neanderthal genome revealed that the two species could successfully interbreed.
It was once thought that war and violence caused the demise of the Neanderthals. However, a new study out this week in the journal PalaeoAnthropology adds to a growing body of research that proposes that Homo sapiens may have been responsible for the extinction of Neanderthals in a different manner—sex.
The researchers compared the genomes of Neanderthals and present day humans, and discovered that breeding in between the two species could have led to the eventual extinction of Neanderthals. When looking closer at the genomes of a Neanderthal with five modern humans, researchers discovered that Asians and Europeans share roughly one to four percent of their DNA with Neanderthals, while Africans don’t share any. This suggests that modern humans bred with Neanderthals after they left the African continent, but before they spread East to Asia and north towards Europe roughly 250,000 years ago.
However, there currently isn’t any evidence of Homo sapiens genetics in late Neanderthal genomes dating to between 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Only 32 Neanderthal genomes have been sequenced, which makes it possible that a lack of Homo sapiens DNA within the Neanderthal genome is simply due to a low sampling.
It is also possible this is due to hybridization—where one species starts mating with another, creating offspring of a new variety. There are plenty of examples of hybrids in nature, such as the liger, which is the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger, or a mule, which is the offspring of a horse and donkey. For some species combinations, it makes a difference which parent is from which species, and often the offspring are infertile.
The lack of mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mother to child) from Neanderthals present in living humans might be evidence that only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could successfully mate. If the researchers’ theory is correct, fewer Neanderthals may have been breeding with one another, opting for interspecies mating. This would decimate populations of the already existing small and scattered groups of Neanderthal families, eventually pushing them towards decline.
“We don’t know if the apparent one-way gene flow is because it simply wasn’t happening, that the breeding was taking place but was unsuccessful, or if the Neanderthal genomes we have are unrepresentative,” said Chris Stringer, the Research Leader in Human Evolution at London’s Natural History Museum and study author, in a statement. “As more Neanderthal genomes are sequenced, we should be able to see whether any nuclear DNA from Homo sapiens was passed on to Neanderthals and demonstrate whether or not this idea is accurate.”
“Our knowledge of the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals has got more complex in the last few years, but it’s still rare to see scientific discussion of how the interbreeding between the groups actually happened,” added Stringer. “We propose that this behavior could have led to the Neanderthals’ extinction if they were regularly breeding with Homo sapiens, which could have eroded their population until they disappeared.”
Around 600,000 years ago, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged from each other and evolved in very different parts of the world. Neanderthal fossils have been found in Asia and Europe, with some as far from Africa and southern Siberia.
Meanwhile, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, but scientists are uncertain whether our ancestors are the direct descendants of one specific group of ancient African hominins or came about as the result of mixing between different groups spread across the continent.
https://www.popsci.com/science/neanderthals-extinction-sex-violence/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spot_im_redirect_source=pitc
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FIRE BOMBING OF JAPAN DURING WW2 VERSUS PRECISION BOMBING
~ Rather than bombing a narrow range of targets to bring down an economy, General LeMay favored as extensive and brutal of a campaign as was required to end the war quickly.
The U.S. Army Airforce dropped ton upon ton of the jellied gasoline bombs on Tokyo on March 10th, 1945. His first big idea was to use a new incendiary weapon, napalm, against the largely wooden Japanese cities in a firebombing campaign.
The firebombing was conducted at night by low flying bombers stripped of defensive weaponry so that they could carry more bombs. There was little effort to target anything other than the vast collections of wood and paper homes of the Japanese people.
Some people dove into canals for safety only to asphyxiate when the firestorm consumed the oxygen in the air. Many were trampled by others trying to escape. Others fled to parks designed to serve as refuge points in the event of earthquakes and ensuing fires. These proved no match for napalm. The majority of the casualties were women, children, and the elderly.
The stench of burning flesh reached the planes a mile above the city. Many of the late arriving bomber crews had to use oxygen masks to endure their mission. Some of the planes had to be fumigated upon landing to remove the odor.
The raid on Tokyo likely holds the record for the most people killed within a six hour period. Estimates of the death toll go as high as 100,000. The physical damage was immense. Sixteen square miles of buildings were burned, about 7 percent of the city, and a million people were left homeless. Upon reviewing pictures of the destruction they had wrought, one commander looked at the devastation and remarked, “It’s all ashes.”
This was merely the first such raid. Tokyo was hit again, and the remaining firebombing campaigns targeted all the major Japanese cities and several minor ones — except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Precision bombing was relegated to a situational tool as weather allowed.
Today, the U.S. Air Force has the ability to hit particular wings of designated buildings if required. Bombers aren’t even entirely necessary; drones can do it in a pinch. Technology has advanced to the point that precision wars are possible.
In the end, Gladwell muses that although LeMay’s tactics won World War II and were used for decades afterward, Haywood Hansell [an advocate of precision bombing] eventually won the war of ideas. And the world is better for it. ~
https://bigthink.com/the-past/bomber-mafia-gladwell/
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CLANCY MARTIN’S “HOW NOT TO KILL YOURSELF”
An intimate, insightful, at times even humorous exploration of why the thought of death is so compulsive for some while demonstrating that there's always another solution—from the acclaimed writer and professor of philosophy, based on his viral essay, "I'm Still Here."
"If you're going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody who is being honest with themselves knows at least a little bit about the subject. If you lie or if you fudge, the reader will know."
The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn't die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations. In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues.
https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/17489/how-not-to-kill-yourself
All great narratives pose a battle between the force of life and the force of death; How Not To Kill Yourself does this as brilliantly and powerfully as any book I have encountered in quite some time. Thrilling and useful." ~ David Shields
https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/17489/how-not-to-kill-yourself
~ Clancy Martin has lived most of his life with two incompatible ideas in his head: "I wish I were dead – and I'm glad my suicides failed." Martin has survived more than 10 suicide attempts and he wrote his new memoir – How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind – especially for those who have attempted suicide, or struggle with suicidal thoughts.
"I am tremendously relieved that I did not die as a consequence of any of my suicide attempts," Martin says. "I'm so relieved that I am alive."
Martin says John Draper, who served as director of The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, told him that anyone who survives a suicide attempt has a "superpower" — because they understand what it's like to be suffering in that way and are now in a position to help others going through something similar.
"So much of what drives the suicidal mind is the stigma of suicide, the shame of suicide, of having made an attempt of being afraid to reach out for help, of being afraid to talk to someone else," Martin explains. "And so the more we can talk about suicide openly, the more suicidal people we can help."
Martin is the author of over a dozen books on philosophy and has translated works by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and Ashoka University in New Delhi, India.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On asking his college students whether they’ve thought about suicide:
I let them know that I have attempted suicide in the past and how I've dealt with my suicidal ideation so that they know that this is a safe, comfortable space. And then I say, 'OK, how many of you have thought about suicide?' And it's rare that 90% of the class doesn't raise their hands. ...
I want them to know that now they're in a place where they can look around and see that they don't need to be afraid of this way of thinking. They don't need to be ashamed of it. They don't need to feel like there's something wrong with them, that this is an incredibly common and one might even say a normal way of thinking.
A philosopher friend of mine said ... "The best thing about your book is that you domesticated suicide." .... That this is no more a taboo subject than sex is a taboo subject or death is a taboo subject or grief is a taboo subject. All of these things, not only are we allowed to talk about them, but we need to talk about them because we're all feeling them. And once you lift that shame, you lift a lot of the burden of feeling that way.
You can also lift some of the appeal of the thought ... in a paradoxical fashion. When you stigmatize something, you give it a kind of allure. And when we remove the stigma, when you're in a room full of people and you realize, oh my gosh, all my friends, all these people around me, they also have thought about taking their own lives. Suddenly it's like, 'Oh, that's just something I'm thinking. It's not something I have to do. It's not something I have to act on and I don't have to feel bad about it.'
On his top piece of advice: Get rid of the gun
If you are a person who has ever felt the least bit suicidal – or if you are a person who has someone in their life who sometimes you think might suffer depression or might go through a suicidal period – I urge you, I cannot urge you more strongly, get rid of that gun. That's just the number one piece of advice I can give people.
On how he is liberating himself from suicidal thinking
I think I always had this very conflicted view of suicide. The desire to kill myself was extremely potent and also the feeling that this was absolutely the wrong thing to do in a moral way was also very potent. ... And so these beliefs were constantly at war with each other. And I think part of the story of how I am slowly trying to liberate myself from suicidal thinking is recognizing that those two ways of thinking were both mistaken and were kind of two sides of the same coin – that I needed to learn to accept my suicidal thinking, recognize that it was there, and not to add a moral label to it, not to be ashamed of it or afraid of it.
But even sort of when suicidal thoughts come up to sort of hold them like a little baby that needs attention and just say, 'OK, there you are, my suicidal thoughts and I'm going to take care of you. I'm not going to act on the basis of you, but I'm going to baby you a little bit until you go away as all thoughts — good and bad — eventually do.'
On existentialist philosophy and suicide
I think that this feeling that life didn't make sense and this was sort of a battle and a struggle and that it ought to make sense and that there are answers to these questions definitely drove me into philosophy. The philosophers I connect most deeply with, we call it the existentialist tradition. ...
Camus thought that you should not kill yourself out of stubbornness, that life is suffering and it is ultimately meaningless. And so you should say, you know what, life? I'm tougher than you are. I'm not going to let you do what I know you're trying to make me do, which is to end my life, I'm going to stand up to you. And he thought that in standing up to life, as he put it, as with Sisyphus rolling that rock back up the hill, that's where you find your meaning. And that's the opportunity for beginning to make sense of life and to turn life into something that you're grateful for. When you say, you know what? Even with all the suffering, I'm going to stick around.
On the Tibetan prayer "May we be happy without hope"
I think it's so important that we stop thinking in kind of a bivalent way, especially if you're the sort of person who suffers from suicidal ideation. You're sort of thinking like right and wrong, black and white, disaster or complete relief from disaster, fight or flight. You have to start thinking in a less aggressive way ... and start accepting a little bit more. Once you start accepting a little bit more than you might realize, the future is not really in my control at all and the past is already behind me. And so hope, hopelessness, these ways of thinking aren't really helpful to you. You just kind of let go of all that a little bit and be a bit gentler with your belief system and be a little bit gentler with your thoughts.
On taking care of yourself, above all
If you're someone who struggles with the thought of suicide, you have to take seriously that you have this opportunity to care for yourself and care for yourself. Even if you feel like I'm not someone who's worth caring for – care for yourself – so that you have the ability to care for the people who need you. Trust me, you are surrounded by people who need you and who want you to live. You might not feel that way, but it is true. And use that if you can't use anything else as an excuse to take care of yourself.
On calling or texting the mental health/suicide hotline 988
The "988" really is good, and calling 988, or texting 988, they've gotten very, very good at helping people. ... That's the mental health crisis hotline, just text them and say 'I'm feeling like hurting myself' or 'I'm feeling really low' ... or call and they will get back to you very quickly and they are good.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/05/1168104827/how-not-to-kill-yourself-suicide-clancy-martin
THE WHITE RUSSIAN EMIGRÉS AS MOVIE EXTRAS
~ Some twenty pages into Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1926), the protagonist, Ganin, an émigré displaced by the Russian Revolution who has found a precarious home in Berlin, returns to his pension—“a cheerless house in which lived seven Russian lost shades”—and sinks into despair. In that moment, “the whole of life seemed [to him] like a piece of film-making where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.”
Despair is the characteristic mood of the so-called White émigrés, who fought against or simply opposed the Bolsheviks and ended up scattered across the cities of Europe, Asia, and the Americas; it is also the title of Nabokov’s seventh novel. The image of dispirited Russian-speakers wasting away in the boarding houses and smoke-filled cafés of Paris and Berlin is indeed something of a cliché. Like most clichés, it has a basis in truth.
When Nabokov’s Ganin reaches for a cinematic metaphor to express his ennui, he alludes to something that became another cliché of Russophone émigré life—one to which he returns later in the novel. At the deathbed of the poet Podtyagin, he looked in the old man’s face, and once again he remembered these flickering, shadowy doppelgängers, the casual Russian film extras, sold for ten marks apiece and still flitting, God knows where, across the white gleam of a screen.
Ganin knows firsthand whereof he speaks.
In emigration, asserts Nabokov’s narrator, “Nothing was beneath his dignity; more than once he had even sold his shadow, as many of us have. In other words he went out to the suburbs to work as a movie extra on a set, in a fairground barn, where light seethed with a mystical hiss from the huge facets of lamps that were aimed, like cannon, at a crowd of extras, lit to a deathly brightness. They would fire a barrage of murderous brilliance, illuminating the painted wax of motionless faces, then expiring with a click—but for a long time yet there would glow, in those elaborate crystals, dying red sunsets—our human shame. The deal was clinched, and our anonymous shadows sent out all over the world.”
It wasn’t just Nabokov’s protagonist and narrator who had sold their shadows. The émigré author’s chief biographer, Brian Boyd, tells us that on March 12, 1925, Nabokov himself “left [Berlin] at 7 a.m. for a day’s work as a film extra [and] returned at 5 a.m. with ten dollars in his hand, greasepaint on his brows and klieg-light spots in his eyes.”
This wasn’t the only day Nabokov spent filling out the background on Weimar film sets, nor was he the only Russophone émigré to sell his shadow and write about it. The translator Bryan Karetnyk recently unearthed and published, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, a short story titled “Extras” (1940) by Yuri Felsen (né Nikolai Freudenstein, 1894–1943), who settled in Paris in the 1920s and whose prose, once compared to Proust’s, languished in obscurity for decades after his death in Auschwitz. The story begins:
Petrik, my dearest friend, recently offered to fix me up as an extra on a film-shoot. Not without some embarrassment did I accept his offer, knowing full well that it would mean degrading myself, capitulating somehow in life’s struggle, since I should be obliged to settle for the sorriest part in it.
It’s no surprise that Nabokov and Felsen, deprived of agency and chased from land to land by forces far larger than themselves, would find the experience of playing “the sorriest part”—that of mute foreigners in foreign films—to be a fitting figure of the broader existential predicament of their fellow émigrés.
It’s also fitting that Karetnyk’s translation appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which is headquartered in the movie capital of the world. Even in the first half of the twentieth century, when Nabokov and Felsen were hawking their shadows on the cheap to the then thriving German and French film industries, Hollywood was indisputably the mecca of the silver screen. And although the vast majority of the nearly two million émigrés who fled the collapsing Russian Empire in the 1910s and 1920s wound up in Europe, Asia, New York, and San Francisco, a small number—no more than five thousand—eventually made it to Los Angeles. Here they tried to capitalize on the brief vogue for all things “Russian” (Cossacks and Romani ballads and impoverished nobles) by opening restaurants with names like the Volga Boat, the Russian Bear, and the Double Headed Eagle, and also, inevitably, by offering themselves up to the studios.
By far the most memorable and “meta” exploitation of the interwar “Russian” craze is Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928), in which the German actor Emil Jannings plays a grand duke living in poverty in Hollywood, waiting for a call from Central Casting. Sternberg based the character in part on an actual (or perhaps soi-disant) White Russian general-turned-extra-cum-restaurateur named Theodore Lodijensky (1876–1947), shortened to “Lodi” for Central Casting’s convenience, who was also one of the most colorful informants for George Martin May’s The Russians in Hollywood: A Study in Cultural Conflict (1934). The long passages of oral history in May’s book are the closest one can come in English to a horse’s-mouth account of White Russian life in sunny Southern California. There were frustratingly few authors among these Hollywood émigrés.
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A longtime Angeleno, I myself am a Russian-speaking émigré from Odessa, Ukraine, and for well over a decade I’ve been gathering, with some success, the scant literary traces left by my predecessors. Not long ago, I struck the mother lode.
Alexander Voloshin has not gone unmentioned in the few existing accounts of Hollywood’s White Russian colony, but when I finally acquired a fragile, hard-to-find copy of his slim collection of poems and prose, Na putiakh i pereput’iakh (“On the Tracks and at Crossroads,” 1953), and read it cover to cover, I was astounded that he hadn’t received more attention. Then again, the copy had been extremely hard to find. Even the best volumes of émigré writing were often vanity productions, printed cheaply in small numbers.
By these standards, On the Tracks received rather respectful treatment at the hands of its publisher, Delo. The book is laid out well and features a poignant watercolor of a ragged exile clutching a stamp-covered suitcase at a train station at twilight on its paper cover, as well as a frontispiece sketch of the author. To tell the truth, the stories and many of the lyrics in the book are little more than charming, but the titular poem, which occupies fifty-eight of the book’s 148 pages, is to my mind nothing less than a tragicomic masterpiece. First, let me summarize what I’ve been able to reconstruct of the life that went into the making of the great mock epic of White Russian Hollywood.
Born into an artistically inclined petty gentry family in Ananiv, Ukraine, about a hundred miles north of Odessa, in what some sources claim was 1892, but was more likely 1886—or perhaps even 1884—Voloshin was drawn to the theater at an early age and, apparently, had some success as an actor before the start of the First World War. Like many officers of the Imperial Army, after the revolutions of 1917 he joined the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, with which he took part in the infamous retreat known as the “Ice March,” eventually sailing to Gallipoli from Crimea. Soon he found his way to Berlin, where he returned to the stage and also edited an anthology of Russian poetry.
Voloshin arrived in New York in 1924 and, by 1926, was in Hollywood, working as a waiter and—what else?—an extra. Some of his roles can be found under the name “Alex Woloshin.” They include those of “Assistant Bartender” in Destry Rides Again (1939), of “Janitor” in The Case of Lena Smith (1929), of “Hotel Clerk” in His Private Life (1928), and of “Russian General in Jail” in You Can’t Take It With You (1938). Most of his appearances offered no screen credit, and some of the films that did—like Sternberg’s The Case of Lena Smith—are now lost. One that survives and streams free on YouTube is The World and the Flesh (1932). Like Sternberg’s The Last Command, the film taps into the craze for stories of fiery Russian revolutionaries and déclassé nobles, and the Paramount Pictures publicity department knew just how to exploit the real-life White émigrés crowding the set.
“Among the Extras: War Veterans, Russian Expatriates, Authors Furnish Atmosphere” ran a March 20, 1932, headline in The New York Times. That anonymous piece was only partly devoted to the Russians-acting-Russian in The World and the Flesh, but “Hollywood Extra Once Played Chess with Czar,” from the April 24, 1932, edition of The Boston Sunday Globe, was a fuller profile of the film’s Russophone cast and of the whole Hollywood émigré community by Mayme Ober Peak. The pioneering female reporter lays it on thick: “Names that were once [famous] are just numbers on pink cards at Central Casting.”
The omnipresent Theodore Lodijesnky, “of the Imperial Guards, who served through three wars,” is described as having “accepted a position as head waiter at a sea-side restaurant, specializing in $1 dinners.” Most valuable to us, however, is her clear identification of the author of On the Tracks in a key scene from The World and the Flesh, in which the impoverished revolutionary masses intrude upon the well-heeled beneficiaries of the ancien régime: “The unshaven workman—the first to break into the exclusive hotel to confront Miriam Hopkins, is Capt Alexander Voloshin, winner of four of the highest military decorations—now locked away with the past.”
The scene, which starts about fifteen minutes into the film and lasts only a few seconds, is quite powerful. Bundled in a thick leather jacket, Voloshin slowly enters the bustling dining room and fixes his gaze on Hopkins’s glamorous ballerina. Barely turning for a moment towards the small bespectacled man who runs up to scold him nervously, he plods over to Hopkins’s table. “Who are you? What do you want?” asks the lady’s male companion. Voloshin says nothing. Instead he lowers and raises his stubbly face, feasting his eyes both on Hopkins and on the delicacies laid out before her. His grin shifts almost imperceptibly, registering awe, resentment, lust, and hunger. Après lui, le déluge.
A stream of peasants flows into the room, plopping down in plush armchairs, plucking at the musicians’ strings, and striking horror into the hearts of the moneyed revelers. None of these peasants says a word, of course, because the studio hasn’t paid them to talk. Extras don’t get lines. Yet here, at least, the limitations imposed by Voloshin’s contract help him deliver a standout performance. After all, what does his character have to say to these men in coattails, these women in gowns? His silence speaks volumes.
For all its effectiveness, the casting of Voloshin, Lodijensky, et al. reinforces the White émigré cliché of a tragic reversal of fortune: decorated imperial officers reduced to playing revolutionary rabble. It is exactly this cliché that gets such fresh ironic treatment in Voloshin’s On the Tracks. Divided into halves of eleven and fifteen chapters and furnished with a prologue and epilogue, the poem might be called a “novella in verse,” as it was likely inspired, at least in part, by Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.
Our poet eschews the sonnet-like Onegin stanza, however, opting instead for Hudibrastic couplets—an ideal form, both in Russian and in English, for his satiric presentation of the plight of Imperial Russia’s vanquished warriors and humiliated refugees. I began translating portions of On the Tracks into English almost as soon as I finished reading it, mostly maintaining the couplets but sometimes, where it felt appropriate, adopting alternating or envelope rhyme. I hope the excerpts below will leave Anglophone readers hungry for more.
In On the Tracks, Voloshin generalizes his own via dolorosa into a communal narrative. We follow him and his countrymen as they bravely resist the Bolsheviks in what is now Ukraine, suffer crushing defeat, and take flight—first to Europe, then to New York, and, eventually, to Los Angeles. Disposition sunny . . .
The repertoire of tones in these couplets— pseudo-ethnographic and ironically sentimental, self-deprecating and self-justifying, angrily jaded and jokily hortative—is sustained and expanded throughout the poem. Another characteristic feature is the inclusion of demotic English words, like “pull,” which not only add a delightful pinch of local color but also help to date the poem, at least roughly. Other evidence suggests more strongly that, though published in the 1950s, it was composed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of the most illuminating, skillfully constructed, and, ultimately, touching passages in the epic depicts a day in the life of a Russian extra, whose face winds up on the cutting-room floor—as Voloshin’s must have done, time and again.
It’s seven-thirty—bored, depressed,
he eats his breakfast, then gets dressed,
but still has plenty time to kill . . .
Some coffee, then—he’ll drink his fill,
peruse a newspaper or two.
Voloshin’s litany of the day’s political tensions is clever in itself, but were it to stand alone, it would be merely that—a clever piece of newspaper verse, of which Voloshin wrote his share. Embedded in the extra’s morning routine, however, it becomes an ominous subtext, underscoring the utter helplessness of him and his fellow refugees. Barely scraping by, they dream only of seeing themselves on film. Meanwhile, storms gather on the horizon; the whirlwinds they’d narrowly escaped threaten to sweep them up again.
Our own era’s “doomscrollers” know just how the extra feels. And this is far from the only passage in Voloshin’s epic that remains sadly relevant today. The poem’s final chapter carries two epigraphs, a sentence about the U.S. declaration of war on Japan and a line from Ecclesiastes: “The wind returneth again according to his circuits . . .” It begins:
Nothing in life is new, or lasts . . .
Beginnings fade into the past,
ends weave themselves into beginnings . . .
There—crowns go flying off and spinning
into the void and thrones are razed;
here—laws are trampled and some crazed
loony takes on the World entire!
War, with its bloody wind and fire,
again has set the globe aglow . . .
One thinks: “There’s simply no salvation!”
And wonders: “Where am I to go?
What route is safe these days? What station?”
Well, we have had these thoughts before,
those of us born in Russian lands.
Even our children understand.
We well remember that long war,
and how we languished, how we bled,
how our whole families then fled,
leaving our homes for evermore . . .
One might expect an émigré poet confronted with the prospect of yet another migration to go on in this lachrymose fashion, reliving past trauma, but what Voloshin gives us instead is a sardonic paean to the Russian Revolution, which had freed him and his fellow refugees of their burdensome possessions:
There we had been the slaves of things—
slaves of our pots for cabbage soup,
our vodka glasses, favorite cups,
ladles and skimmers, frying pans . . .
. . .
Abandoning their “tailcoats, pianos, family homes,” these “liberated slaves” roamed foreign lands for “five long years,” then “settled down,/ and—yes—went back to our old ways”:
Ladies again pursue their whims:
they want fine china, by the dozen,
and hats and dresses and perfumes . . .
Their closets overflow with clothes and
all sorts of rubbish, of no use . . .
If we must go, then let us go.
We know the drill—we’ll hit the road.
No sense in sounding the alarm . . .
We’re Russians—we won’t come to harm!
That closing couplet struck an ironic note in Voloshin’s time, after so many Russians had come to great harm, but the irony is doubled in ours. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 of last year, I’ve given a great deal of thought to what the Russophone émigré poets I translate would have made of it. How would Voloshin, an Angeleno exile who had been born in the territory of Ukraine and fought against the Bolsheviks, identify himself now?
It’s clear that he thought of himself as Russian, but early in On the Tracks he writes with such warmth and pride of Ukrainian folkways that I have to wonder: would he, like most Russian speakers in Ukraine today, draw a firm line and declare himself Ukrainian? I suspect he might, but I can’t be sure. What I am sure of, however, is that the plight of Ukrainian refugees would remind him of his own experiences in the 1910s and ’20s. He would, I venture, see these refugees as his true “compatriots”—not simply because they come from the geographic region he himself called home, but because, like him, they have been cruelly “liberated” by a senseless war.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Voloshin was a frequent contributor to the leading Russophone émigré newspaper in the United States, the New York–based New Russian Word (Novoe russkoe slovo), acting as its not-always-well-informed Hollywood correspondent and also publishing endearing memoirs of life in pre-Revolutionary Russia and in European exile. In 1947 he put out a theater journal, At the Footlights, which seems to have folded after two issues. His literary activity slowed throughout the 1950s, likely due to worsening health. His death certificate reveals that he died of a heart attack at the Los Angeles County General Hospital on November 23, 1960, having suffered for some time from heart disease and emphysema. He was likely seventy-four, although the certificate gives his age as eighty-four—an indication that the years had not been kind to him.
His occupation at the time of death conforms to another cliché of the White emigration: taxi driver for the Yellow Cab Co. “One knew that every taxi driver,” Anaïs Nin wrote, reflecting on life in Paris, “was in the past a Russian prince who had lived in a palace and had chauffeurs of his own.” Voloshin had not been a prince, but in at least one major work he had been a genuine poet—an original and compelling verse chronicler of a colorful community in exile. His accomplishment should not remain locked away with the past. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/4/a-white-russian-on-the-rocks
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THE MAJORITY OF MILLENNIALS ARE RAISING THEIR CHILDREN WITHOUT RELIGION
~ Millennials are known for shaking things up, and family life is no exception. As parents, millennials tend to have fewer kids and subscribe less to traditional expectations about family structure than older generations. A national survey about the role of religion in American family life suggests that millennial parents are also transforming their relationship with religion.
The November 2019 survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute collated responses from more than 2,500 adults living in the United States. It found that many young parents are raising their kids without religion, unlike older generations for whom incorporating religion into parenting was the norm.
Of the surveyed parents with children under 18, 42% said they regularly take their kids to religious services. Even fewer—38%—said they send their kids to Sunday school or another religious education program. Compare that to the 65% of parents 65 or older with adult children who said they sent their kids to a religious education program and 61% who reported regularly taking their kids to religious services during their formative years.
A CHANGING PHILOSOPHY
Religion has been seen as a resource for fostering moral development in children for generations. "A good religious education program…provides children with an opportunity to learn from other adults and children about what it means to be a good person in the context of a particular religious tradition," says Rev. Debra Haffner, M.P.H., M.Div., D.Min, a parish minister at Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston, Virginia, and author of From Diapers to Dating: A Parent's Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Children.
However, while many people believe that religious belief is essential to morality, research does not show this to be true. Both children who are raised with religion and those who are raised without can grow up to be moral people. Studies show that religious belief is tied to more authoritarian or controlling parenting styles, which may be in part why many millennials are rejecting raising their kids with religion.
Experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) also suggest replacing authoritarian parenting with authoritative methods. Authoritative parenting is kind but firm and considers the child's emotions while also setting limits. This approach is strongly associated with positive behavior and healthy mental health for children and teens. However, the AAP also honors that different families will naturally be inclined to embrace differing parenting styles depending on their values, cultural beliefs, and the needs of their children and family. And that's also totally OK.
However, 53% of young adults surveyed don't believe it's necessary for children to be brought up in a religious community to learn good values. In contrast, more than three-quarters of surveyed seniors said that raising children with religion is vital to instilling positive morals.
Parents today are comfortable finding other ways to instill positive values in their kids without turning to religious institutions.
"We teach [our kids] values and morals by modeling good behavior and encouraging empathy at an early age," says Rose S., a 31-year-old mother of two. Rose and her wife, Shelly S., 29, of Ashland, Oregon, are raising their kids without religion. They find opportunities to instill life lessons in their kids elsewhere. "Our local public schools and public library offer a lot of opportunities for civic engagement with a stronger focus on science than religion, which we like," says Rose.
Of course, there's no one right way to parent, and research shows raising kids in a religious household has both upsides and downsides. Ultimately, the pros and cons are highly subjective—and only you know what is right for your family.
Possible benefits of raising your child with religion
On the plus side, religious involvement can offer much-needed community for parents. "It does indeed take a village to raise a child, and religion can be a valuable part of the village for families that collectively value faith," says John Bartkowski, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
"Religious involvement can provide parents with great information-sharing, social network support, and collective problem-solving. Religious support groups for mothers and fathers often provide welcome child-rearing guidance in a society that too often thinks parenting skills come 'naturally,' when they, in fact, do not."
Stephanie S., 31, and her husband, Austin S., 32, of Albany, Oregon, say that their local church is a significant part of the "village" helping raise their three kids. "I do feel that if we need help or support, in any way—emotionally, spiritually, physically, in prayer—that the church is there for us," says Stephanie.
Kids can also benefit from that sense of community through religious programs. "Children at my home church delight in having a second home of a caring community who love them and are committed to their well-being," says Rev. Haffner. Programs like Sunday school also offer opportunities for kids to make friends, find mentors, and hone their interpersonal communication skills.
Note that the results of many studies on the impact of raising kids with religion are mixed—and potentially, quite subjective. For example, some research shows religious children are less likely to struggle with substance abuse, while others don't. Another report found an association between a religious upbringing and greater life satisfaction in adulthood and a positive impact on mental health. Other research has found other factors, such as parental well-being, play a larger role in child well-being.
Possible drawbacks of raising your child with religion
But there can also be cons to raising children in a religious setting. Research has shown kids raised by religious parents might not perform as well on academic tests as their peers, especially in math and science. "Although more research is needed, it's possible that religious parenting emphasizes soft skills to the detriment of hard skills," explains Dr. Bartkowski, who was part of that specific study out of the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Religion can also become a divide among family members who have differing beliefs. For example, studies show parent and child conflict can arise when parents value religion more than their teens do, with the children reporting poorer relations. Research has also shown religion can undermine child development if it becomes a source of conflict between parents. While any familial conflict can negatively affect youngsters, conflicts over religion can be more harmful than other disagreements because children are likely more involved in their family's religious practice.
There's good news for all, though. Research suggests that there actually really isn't a difference in morals between kids raised in religious homes and those in non-believing or secular ones.
https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/millennial-parents-are-raising-their-kids-without-religion-and-thats-totally-ok/
DO WE NEED THE CONCEPT OF SIN?
I imagine the time when the word "sin" disappears from usage. Dictionaries will list it "archaic" or "obsolete." Instead we will think of how the person who's committed something bad has been wounded, damaged. When a car has bad brakes, we don't call the car sinful or evil. Rather, it's a car that needs new brakes.
I've mentioned this article before — it really opened my eyes. Already the title was enlightening: “Christianity isn't about being a good person.” After all, the minister pointed out, a person can be good without being a Christian. A Buddhist or an atheist could be a good person — this is tremendous progress in moral understanding coming from a fundamentalist. Instead, the minister continued, Christianity is about sin and salvation. Christianity is not about being a good person; it's about seeing yourself as a bad person deserving eternal damnation, but saved from that by the "bloody ransom" paid by Jesus.
The clarity of this stunned me. All those years I've been unable to define Christianity in any concise way, to answer the question, What is the most important thing about Christianity? (my try was "forgiveness") -- and there it was, using the simplest words, none of theological abstract mumbo-jumbo like "kenosis". Sin and hell and salvation. The "god of punishment" appeased by the "bloody ransom.”
But isn't Christian ethics about being a good person? That's a misconception, the minister argued with impeccable logic. A Christian's first duty is to god, not to fellow men. End of argument.
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LONGEVITY DEPENDS ON THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
Researchers have found that centenarians have a unique immune cell composition and activity, giving them an immune system that helps them live longer.
~ The life expectancy of humans on our planet has more than doubled since 1900. Global life expectancy has increased from 31 years in 1900 to 73.2 years in 2023, and is expected to further increase to 77.1 years in 2050.
Also increasing is the number of people reaching the age of 100 or more. Researchers estimate there were about 450,000 centenarians globally in 2015, with that number projected to increase to 3.7 million in 2050.
Previous research in the early 2000s estimated that globally, the number of people living to 100 years or older would more than quintuple between 2005 and 2030.
One thing still unknown is what allows some people to live into their 100s, while others do not.
Led by researchers from Tufts Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, a new study is helping to answer this question by finding that centenarians possess a unique immune cell composition and activity, giving them a highly-functional immune system and allowing them to live longer.
Scientists believe these findings could be used potentially to develop healthy aging therapeutics.
The study was recently published in the journal Lancet eBioMedicine.
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As we age, all parts of the body experience changes, including the immune system.
According to Dr. Scott Kaiser, a geriatrician, and director of Geriatric Cognitive Health for the Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, California, there are two main concepts when it comes to how the immune system changes as we get older.
“One is immunosenescence and that’s the age-related process of immune dysfunction,” he explained to Medical News Today.
“So changes in our immune system composition and function over time can lead to poor immune function in older people. And that’s closely related to people’s vulnerability to infection, autoimmune disease, and even various types of cancer,” he said.
“And then there’s this issue of inflammaging, which is a term that’s been used to describe age-related increases in inflammation because of high levels of pro-inflammatory markers in the blood and different tissues in the body. That’s a strong risk factor for all sorts of diseases, including neurodegenerative processes like Alzheimer’s disease, for example,” Dr. Kaiser continued.
“So there’s a lot to look at in terms of the immune function over time and how our immune systems changes with age may either make us more vulnerable or protect us,” he added.
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According to Dr. Tanya Karagiannis, a senior bioinformatician at the Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science in the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center, and lead author of this study, she and her team decided to study the immune systems of centenarians because with age comes changes in our immune systems including in their function and cell makeup, and these changes can lead to aging-related diseases.
“Many centenarians experience delays in the onset of aging-related disease and this suggests the presence of an elite immunity that continues to remain highly functional even at extreme old age,” she told Medical News Today.
For this study, researchers performed single-cell sequencing on a category of immune cells called peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from blood samples taken from seven centenarians enrolled in the New England Centenarian Study.
“We used single-cell data and applied new computational methods to analyze immune cells that circulate through the immune system across the human lifespan. We looked at differences in the presence of specific immune cell types across younger ages and extreme old age and found cell type-specific changes in aging and extreme old age,” Dr. Karagiannis explained.
“We also took the same cell types and explored the differences in gene expression across ages to discover different gene expression patterns of extreme longevity that change with age but also are unique to extreme old age,” she added.
UNIQUE CELL TYPES IN CENTENARIANS
Upon analysis, the researchers confirmed observations made in previous studies of aging that identified unique cell type-specific compositional and transcriptional changes only found in centenarians that reflect normal immune response.
They also found centenarians had cell type signatures specific to exceptional longevity in both genes with age-related changes and genes expressed uniquely in centenarians.
“We were not as surprised to find genes that change with age in centenarians since they are an aging population. What was surprising was the different aging patterns we identified including genes that were aging-specific in which expression levels changed with age but not in extreme longevity across various cell populations,” Dr. Karagiannis said.
NEW THERAPIES
After reviewing this study, Dr. Kaiser told Medical News Today he found this study interesting as it actually looked at people who have aged extremely well, who have defied age, so to speak, and then looked at what’s going on in them to see if we can learn anything.
“The potential lessons here are in what makes us more resilient,” he explained.
“Looking at these people who had extreme longevity, living into 100s and even beyond, and figure out what is the nature, what is the characteristic of their immune system so that we could better understand what might be going on, and then figure out how that could be translated into potential therapies for other people, so that more people can enjoy that.”
Kathleen Cameron, director of the National Council on Aging, said understanding the immune changes that come with aging is important to help people live longer. And a lot of people want to live longer if they can also be healthy.
“If we can determine what is creating this immune resilience for those who live over 100, that can lead to treatments that can help people live longer. Or, if there are certain healthy behaviors that lead to this resilience, that would also help us,” Cameron continued.
However, she said this is all very preliminary research, as this study was small, and it should lead to other studies to help healthcare practitioners better understand this immune resilience. ~
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/scientists-may-have-found-the-immunity-secret-to-living-to-100
Oriana:
Alas, this article seems to confirm that the most important factor in longevity is having “centenarian genes.” Previous research showed that centenarians ate all types of diet, with only a small percentage of centenarians being vegetarians. The overwhelming majority are omnivores.
In some unlucky families, pretty much everyone seems to die of cancer at a relatively young age. In genetically lucky families, people stay healthy into their nineties and beyond.
Eventually an anti-aging gene therapy may be developed, but don’t hold your breath. That’s decades away — if it happens at all.
But what about diet and exercise? Just because they don’t have the power to make us live as long as centenarians, who have superb genes, and now it turns out also a superb immune system, it doesn’t mean that an average person can’t gain a few extra years by following an anti-inflammatory diet and doing moderate exercise — even just taking a walk every day.
Note that I said "a few extra years" — not living to be a hundred and beyond. Still, enjoying life in one's eighties is no small thing, and if it can be "bought" with a daily walk, then sure, "eat less and walk more" (the motto of the only centenarian among my extended family, unfortunately not a blood relative).
Special attention needs to be paid blood sugar, which is perhaps the best predictor of life expectancy. Taking either metformin (Rx) or the supplement berberine should help lower blood sugar. Research has shown that both metformin and berberine increase longevity. Diabetics who take metformin tend to oulive non-diabetics.
There are no obese centenarians, but there are certainly obese vegetarians. When I first met a few, I was astonished. Of course that was before I knew anything about the dangers of high-carbohydrate diet — note the number of obese Indian vegetarians. The Indian population is more than 40% vegetarian. Does India lead in life expectancy? Certainly not. The leading country is Japan. China does well also, and could probably rival Japan if not for the widespread smoking.
How come people in Japan live so long? Here diet indeed may play a role, seeing the high consumption of seafood and seaweed, and superfoods such as natto, or fermented boiled soybeans — the richest food source of Vitamin K2, which some scientists think is the most important vitamin when it comes to preventing or at least delaying the diseases of aging. And one of its functions is regulating the immune system.
(Note that currently it's red meat that's being demonized, just as eggs and butter and cheese used to be demonized in order to sell unhealthy substitutes. Then studies showed that it was margarine and not butter that was linked to cancer and heart disease. Likewise, it's not meat that makes people obese. Staying with traditional food could turn out to be a sound health practice.)
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THE LINK BETWEEN THE IMMUNE SYSTEM AND MENTAL ILLNESS
~ Your immune system and your mental health are actually linked closer than you might think. In general, most people feel a little moody when their health isn’t in good condition, which is a common side effect of just about any sickness. On the extreme end of the spectrum, however, some infections have been known to trigger severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia.
The two are fundamentally connected, and maintenance of one can almost always benefit the other.
HOW YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM AFFECTS YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
While it’s undeniable that being sick makes us feel blue, there is actually a scientific reason as to why we feel like this when our immune system is shot. When your body is trying to fight off an infection or virus, almost all of your energy goes towards doing just that – leaving very little resources for anything else, contributing to feelings of low energy, depression and general malaise.
The reason behind this can be attributed to the communication between immune cells and brain cells. The signals that are transmitted between the two can affect general cognition and brain responses that are highly related to depression and pain. When our immune system is affected, the signals that get transmitted are affected as well, producing those familiar feelings of depression and low mood.
How Mental Health Affects Your Immune System
Now, what happens when poor mental health precedes a weakened immune system? Individuals with mental disorders tend to be more susceptible to infection and diseases, which may make the time ahead even more challenging.
Some of the most common side effects of depression, for example, include stress, poor diet, changes to sleep and social isolation. At the same time, these factors all negatively affect our immune system’s ability to function at full capacity. Something as simple as neglecting exercise or failing to eat healthy meals for a few days due to low mood can affect your immune system in a significant way.
A recent study on mice concluded a connection between stress and depression with immune function. Mice that were exposed to stressful or depressing situations developed certain immune responses that released inflammatory proteins into their system. That immune inflammation then triggered impaired responses in the brain and caused depressive and stressed behaviors. This research suggests that in some cases, some physical illness symptoms may be caused by the same or similar prompts as depression.
STAYING ACTIVE AND CONSUMING THE RIGHT NUTRIENTS
One of the biggest ways to help both your immune system and mental health is by staying active. Anxiety surrounding COVID-19 has understandably been causing a great deal of distress for most people – the uncertain and volatile nature of the virus has kept people on edge for months. However, there is undeniable evidence that staying active for even a short amount every day can both boost your body’s defense system and keep anxiety at bay. Getting adequate amounts of sleep is also paramount.
Eating healthy is another critical aspect to stay on top of, and there are actually certain foods that far supersede others when it comes to immunity and mental health. For your immune system, keep citrus fruits, bell peppers, turmeric and garlic in your arsenal; to benefit your mental health, seek out foods that are high in Vitamin D and Omega-3.
AVOID MEDIA OVERLOAD
Lastly, experts warn to not stay “too informed”, as it can do more harm than good. Being glued to media outlets and consuming every bit of information that comes through can have a negative effect on an individual’s anxiety and stress levels.
https://radiusstaffingsolutions.com/how-your-immune-system-and-mental-health-are-linked/
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from another source:
~ Many people have long believed that there is a connection between mental health and the immune system, but we’ve known very little about what the relevant biological mechanisms might be.
“This link is no longer controversial among doctors. But it’s new. We’re finding that patients are happy about the change,” says Klæbo Reitan.
She practices at St. Olavs Hospital, specializing in psychiatry, and also holds a doctorate in immunology. Now, interest in the connection between the psyche and the immune system – and the physiological connections – is stronger than before, including among doctors.
Artificial separation
The cells of the immune system communicate using signal molecules called cytokines.
The cells of the nervous system send signals by means of signal molecules called neurotransmitters.
“Both of these cells are small molecules that have the same type of structure and
configuration,” says Klæbo Reitan. “The distinction between them is something human beings have invented. We’re not talking about two different systems. Now it’s become clear that the signal molecules in the immune system also transmit to the nervous system and vice versa.
Klæbo Reitan is part of a new research project that will address the connection between psychoses and the immune system.
“We know that people with mental disorders are also more susceptible to various inflammations in the body and to immune system disorders. This indicates that an interaction exists,” says Klæbo Reitan.
The opposite applies too, of course. We also know that people who have been subjected to neglect or childhood abuse are more susceptible to various diseases of the immune system.
That’s why people with psychosis could be given prednisolone – a steroid drug that can curb inflammation – to see if the treatment can have a beneficial effect on mental health.
Klæbo Reitan wonders whether we might be able to prevent mental disorders by treating the immune system.
The universities in Stavanger, Bergen and Utrecht are collaborating with NTNU on the research. The first results are probably four to five years away since this kind of research takes time.
NO READY-MADE SOLUTION
How about thinking your way into good health?
“No,” says Klæbo Reitan, “you can’t recover from cancer or arthritis just by thinking, but the disease may take a better course if a person can maintain a positive mental state. This also supports ideas about psychotherapy and meditation. ‘Thinking your way into health’ is an incentive that expresses how important this topic is. But it’s still at the experimental stage. We’ll have to wait and see.”
https://neurosciencenews.com/immune-system-mental-health-14737/
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THE ROLE OF INTERLEUKIN-17 IN NEUROIMMUNOLOGICAL CONNECTIONS
~ Researchers identified an immune molecule, IL-17, as a key tie between the immune system and the nervous system.
IL-17 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine, meaning it causes inflammation in the body in the event of an intruder. The researchers noticed that the tissues surrounding the brain were packed with the immune cells that make IL-17, called gamma-delta T cells.
When these cells were removed from mice, the animals acted largely the same in all the tests they were put through, save for one major difference — they exhibited more anxiety-like behavior. This finding suggests that the molecule might be potentially linked with anxiety in people.
One of the study’s authors, Jonathan Kipnis, a professor of neurology at Washington University, said these findings point to our brain and our immune system as being closely intertwined.
“Our behavior is very much dependent not only on the state of the brain but also on the state of the immune system,” Kipnis told Inverse.
“We all know how we feel when we are sick. This is a normal interaction between the two systems when the immune system signals the brain to ‘withdraw’ upon infection.”
Next, the researchers want to investigate how IL-17 impacts anxiety in humans. It could be that “the overstimulation of this pathway could be ultimately involved with anxiety and depression in humans,” Kalil Alves de Lima, the study’s first author and a research associate at Washington University, told Inverse.
Digging deeper into this connection could potentially lead to new treatments for mental disorders in the future, such as anxiety and depression.
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/mind-body-connection-study
Oriana:
“Mens sana in corpore sano” — “a healthy mind in a healthy body” was one bit of non-church Latin that I knew since childhood. Depressed? Don't snack on junk food. Eat a good meal and/or go for a walk — especially somewhere with trees. 
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ending on beauty:
GREAT SATURDAY
No stars before the dawn of resurrection.
The night sky all white shroud.
Only Jupiter shines
through a window in luminous clouds.
Planet of luck! In my chart
Jupiter rules the house of wealth:
a cruel joke, I thought,
back in my pauper years.
Yet even then how rich I was
in words, in music, in horizons;
rich in mind and rich in time,
in solitude to create myself.
I think of the looters in Iraq,
how in their national museum
they unscrewed even the light bulbs —
“Greed is the failure to choose.”
True wealth possesses even planets.
I watch Venus lay a path of light
on the evening’s black dolphin waves.
I look away from youth’s
crucifixion. In the dark,
my hands bloom like lilies.
~ Oriana
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