Wachet auf
“Pусские очнитесь,” pronounced “Russ-kee-ye och-nit-es,” rings a few bells in my mind. Alexis Klimoff, my college Russian language instructor, would sometimes say “студенты, очнитесь!” — “students, wake up!” — to our class still-waking first year students. The question is, can it work on a Russian population deprived of accurate information and swamped in propaganda? More generally, can we wake up to the moral action required to end a war and provide relief to its victims?
Putin has, in effect, criminalized speaking the truth, choked off independent media, and is selling lies about the war in mass rallies, on billboards, and, most insidiously, to school children. China began a campaign of censorship and indoctrination so thorough after the Tiananmen Square uprising that it has become common for young Chinese citizens to believe and repeat the official line that it was a minor incident instigated by hooligans and foreign agents. The People’s Liberation Army crushed an actual liberation movement in early June of 1989, killing an unknown number of protestors — likely thousands — and wounding many more. The Berlin Wall fell later in November of 1989, and the world changed. Putin, ever nostalgic for Soviet power, is undertaking a similar rewriting of Russian history in real time, going so far to make even the youngest children learn to repeat the party line, as if to erase the present from the future. This incident, based an an interview with a Russian school teacher, as reported by the New York Times, reads like story out of the USSR:
“On March 8, Manfly wrote on Instagram: “Recently at school, I was told I couldn’t have any other stance other than the official, state one. You know what? I have one! I do not want to be the mirror of state propaganda.”
Manfly told the Russian-language outlet Meduza that the school administration fired him the next day. He claimed one of the school guards attacked him when he returned to get his personal belongings.
“[Teachers] immediately fled to their offices, so as not to help and not to participate, which the is the saddest part. Everyone is keeping their mouth shut, either afraid or supportive,” he told Meduza, adding that out of 150 school employees, only one teacher called him and expressed support.” ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/20/putin-russia-schools-ukraine/ ).
The letter “Z” is appearing everywhere in Russia: again, on billboards, but also on tee shirts worn by television announcers and flags waved by children. Plenty has already been written about this ( for instance, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/why-has-the-letter-z-become-the-symbol-of-war-for-russia ). Ukrainians and Russians opposed to the war have taken to striking out the letter Z, in protest:
Signifiers matter. I began writing about signs and language, and how we feel called, or not called, to moral action in another post. Our hunter-gatherer brains, evolutionary biologists and experimental psychologists tell us, favor the singular and nearby — our child, in her crib — over the many and far away. Those children, those countries, the many, the Other. A Russian pilot dropped a bomb on a theater in Mariupol. He or she was flying at a great altitude, but not so great as to not see the red roof surrounded by white letters spelling out “дети” — “children", in Russian — and a green park. It must have looked like a perfect target. Some commander ordered the strike. Many levels above him or her, Putin ordered a war of annihilation against Ukraine. The adults and children taking shelter in the theater knew Russian warplanes were dropping bombs on their city. They saw or heard them fly overhead, and they tried to communicate with them in almost the basic way possible: four block letters made of stones painted white, big enough to be visible from the sky, a plural noun signifying many lives, distant, sheltered, unseeable, yet vulnerable, begging to be seen and cared for precisely as lives that required extraordinary protection, not to be forgotten, dismissed, or obliterated. What happened next, and what continues to happen, is a war crime.
Will Russians ever be able to reckon with Putin’s war on Ukraine if, generations from now, they never knew it even happened? In Hannah Arendt’s words,
“We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion—quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost—would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.” (Arendt, “What is Authority?” p 2)
The goals of totalitarian censorship and erasure include rending a population shallow, which is to say, fundamentally unable to question official lies and false histories. The harm of erasure, of not seeing, will continue in the absence of truth-telling, intersubjective acknowledgement, and the hard work of remembrance. Again, thinking of Arendt, who experienced and wrote about totalitarianism and statelessness, Anne Applebaum wrote the following in The Atlantic just recently, well into the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
The stateless, and those classified as noncitizens, or non-people, are assured of nothing. The only way they can be helped or made secure is through the existence of the state, of public order, and of the rule of law. ( https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/03/arendt-origins-of-totalitarianism-ukraine/627081/ )
To be unseen and unacknowledged, to have one’s culture and identity stripped away, is to remain perpetually vulnerable and traumatized. There are, thank goodness, fascinating efforts underway to counteract the Kremlin’s crack-down on independent journalism and dissent. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger has made waves with a powerful video directed at Russian citizens:
And the MIT Technology Review, amongst other sources, reports on how activists and hackers are using everything from online advertising to smartphone apps to send messages to Russians:
We’ve seen the powerful role that civil society can play in telling the story of Ukraine, advocating for its interests, and rallying international support,” says Jack Pearson, a foreign policy communications specialist who previously worked for the UK Foreign Office specializing in digital diplomacy. “Now we’re seeing efforts from communities around the world to break the Kremlin’s information stranglehold, to reach ordinary Russians.”
Reliable news is hard to get in Russia at the moment. State news outlets are telling viewers that the invasion is a defensive move, while independent Russian stations like TV Rain are being shut down at the behest of authorities. Meanwhile, international press organizations such as the BBC and Voice of America have been blocked. To fill the information void, a small army of activists are exploiting holes in the Russian firewall. In so doing, they’re trying to provide a modicum of fact in a Russian media ecosystem that is increasingly untethered from the truth.
(https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/04/1046794/the-activists-using-ads-to-sneak-real-news-to-russians-about-ukraine/)
Still, what has become a war of annihilation of Ukraine, rooted in Putin’s old deep-seated refusal to acknowledge Ukrainian culture and identity as separate from Russia, will have long-lasting consequences, if left unchecked. We see this even today, in Turkey’s continued denial of what most of the rest of the world, and especially Armenians and the Armenian diaspora, acknowledge as the Armenian Genocide. The mass slaughter of Armenians and erasure of Armenian history, culture, and identity that began in the Ottoman Empire and was not only the inspiration for Raphael Lemkin’s interest in war crimes — the Polish lawyer would coin the word “genocide” — but also a training ground for German officers who would later become orchestrators of the Holocaust. The result of this denial has been a continued trauma not only for descendants of survivors, something we see in everything from recurrent street protests to recent arguments over legislation in Congress, but for Turkish citizens themselves, as evidenced by the popularity and controversy over Fethiye Çetin’s memoir, My Grandmother, which uncovered her Armenian grandmother’s forced conversion to Turkish identity. If peace requires acknowledgement, atonement, and shared truthful memories, the totalitarian program would keep us in a state of perpetual anxiety or, at the very least, cold war. Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost — the move toward a more open and responsive government and free press in the Soviet Union — was a major factor in ending the totalitarian culture of the USSR, as people began to reckon with the past and present. Putin notoriously considered the dissolution of the USSR a catastrophe. His despotic repression of Russian dissidents, his programs of censorship and propaganda, along land grabs and increasingly violent wars are turning the clock back to a vision of an imperial regime that only a Stalin or Hitler could admire. As Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office of Ukraine wrote in the New York Times,
“…business as usual now means accepting Russians bombing maternity hospitals and theaters full of civilians taking shelter. These atrocities are part of the Russian siege on the city of Mariupol, which has left hundreds of thousands of residents without food, clean water, electricity and communications. More than 1,200 civilians have been murdered. Russia violated an agreement on a humanitarian corridor almost before it began. This is how it wages wars. It did it in Grozny in 1999 and in Syria in 2015. Now, it is doing it in Ukraine. This is a scorched-earth campaign to wipe Ukraine — its people, its culture, its history — off the map.” ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/21/ukraine-zelenskyy-the-west-underestimated-our-bravery-russia-brutality-civilians/ )
Jacques Derrida, in thinking about how to develop an understanding of compassion and otherness in The Animal That Therefore I am, coined a hybrid word, “l’animot,” out of the French singular for animal (l’animal), the plural (animaux), and, of course, word (mot). Say l’animot and l’animaux out loud and they sound the same, but just knowing you are substituting the singular for the plural is unsettling, and to be unsettled is precisely what we need, as moral agents. We need to think twice, to see our daughter looking at his from her crib — or our cat looking at us while we soak in the bathtub, as what began inspired Derrida’s articulation here — and to apprehend the complexity and, in the case of the bomber pilot over Mariupol, the dire reality in what is signified. As Derrida writes of our relationship to what we commonly reward as animal-kind,
The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority; it is also a crime. Not a crime against animality precisely, but a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals. Do we agree to presume that every murder, every transgression of the commandment"Thou shalt not kill" concerns only man (a question to come) and that in sum there are only crimes "against humanity?" (Critical Inquiry, Vol 20, No 2, Winter 2002, p 416)
Evolutionary biologists and experimental psychologists argue that lumping manifold otherness into a cognitive category at a remove from sphere of our quotidian moral action is what we, as humans, naturally do. The problem is that we run the risk of willfully committing serious crimes against others, like the dictator and the bomber, or overlooking, not seeing, or being numb to the Other, like an indoctrinated population. We find can ourselves on the precipice of being overwhelmed by a horror or outrage we read about in the news, even though we are hard-wired not to grasp such things unless we think a little bit deeper and work to develop greater compassion. It is time to wake up to the signs all around us.
Bach’s “Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns de Stimme,” performed by the Netherlands Bach Society: