Shielding the Ukrainian Sky…in Times Square
Historical memory and national identity are intertwined. Authoritarians — left-wing, right-wing, it doesn't matter -- attack and rewrite history in order to consolidate their leadership of a state and to develop a culture centered on their figure. Lavrov has had the nerve to say that Russia did not attack Ukraine. Putin has had the gall to say that Ukraine does not exist. No wonder Trump and his colleagues admired them, while selling Americans on white-washed nostalgia for a country that enslaved, discriminated, exploited, and oppressed the many for the benefit of a few. "Make America great again" was not a way to bend the arc of history to justice. It was a way to break it. Что делать? What is to be done?
Putin is going about breaking justice and the truth in Russia, through misinformation, propaganda, and suppression of independent media and dissident voices. Putin is also trying to destroy Ukraine. He is already dominant in Belarus, thanks to his puppet there, Lukashenko. He has sent forces into Kazakhstan, to suppress pro-democracy activists. One of the grim ironies in all this is that Solzhenitzyn, the great Russian dissident who documented the oppression of the Soviet state and wrote movingly on the importance of memory, became a reactionary embraced by Putin, both because of his cultural stature and his expansive nationalism. (Lots has been written about this, eg https://www.politico.com/.../vladimir-putin-guru.../ ). Putin thinks he can achieve his dream through force of arms, but he is wrong. The horrors he is committing is willing to commit are incalculable. In Times Square, the calls to protect Ukraine, to provide much-needed military, humanitarian, economic, and diplomatic support, not just from NATO but from the world community, matched calls of warning — Putin has no desire for a sovereign, neutral, and secure Ukraine. This is a war of annihilation of opposition and difference, consolidation of personal power, and it is threat to democracy everywhere. Blue and yellow are everywhere these days. The world has embraced Ukraine's struggle to remain independent and true to its own history and identity. Right now, it feels like the battle between brutal authoritarianism and wounded democracy revolves around a Ukrainian identity no tin-pot dictator will ever again be able to erase.
And I wonder, would this movement in support of Ukraine have been possible in 2016, before the waves of protest against Trumpism, before the Women’s March, student climate strikers, and more taken to the streets by the millions? From the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 to the Russian wars in Chechnya that lasted from 1999-2009, to Ukraine’s Maiden Revolution of 2013-14 and Putin’s annexation of Crimea (a part of sovereign Ukraine) in 2014, the world stood largely silent. The stakes for the survival of democracy and open societies are higher than ever, and people are taking notice.
Ukrainian Poet Lyudmyla Khersonka gives us an all-too-familar warning about authoritarian movements and the cost to us of looking away from their actions — this is a warning not just about Russia, but about us and every nation with this problem:
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When a country of — overall — nice people
turns — slowly — fascist,
nice people do not notice this transformation all at once.
As when a person we know intimately
goes, next to us, through
an imperceptible process of aging. Imperceptibly, new wrinkles
slice the skin, frightening, deep.
Nice people nod when they run into each other,
and try, more and more, to lower their eyes,
until finally, raising them becomes an inhuman gesture.
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Another Ukrainian poet, Olena Stiazhkina closes "A dispatch from Kyiv," translated by Ali Kinsella only recently, like this:
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"A wonderful poet writes in an email: “We’re alive. But just in case anything happens, come get our dog. Here’s our address.”
Our war is not about the dead. Heroes don’t die. And whoever can’t be a hero and leaves is not a traitor. Quite the opposite: people are taking their own and others’ families; offering shelter from the bombing that never ceases for long; housing refugees on the move. People must stay alive. In order to win.
We write to our friends and loved ones after every air alarm: “As of now, we’re alive.”
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