Mariupol

Mariupol, a modern European city with historic buildings that survived prior wars, is by all reports a smoking wasteland, where the remaining population has suddenly been crashed through centuries to a state beyond medieval, beyond the stone age.  Perhaps the image is they've gone the other way, into the future of urban apocalypse.

According to the BBC, there is hardly a building in the city that has not been destroyed or damaged by Russian rockets, bombs and shelling. The city has been without electricity and running water.  Russian forces surround the city, preventing food and medicines from entering. Thousands of its citizens have been killed outright, and others are dying of starvation and dehydration, as well as wounds and disease, partly because hospitals have been targeted and demolished.  

 Hundreds of thousands of Mariupol citizens have managed to get out, but Russians continue to agree to humanitarian corridors and internationally supervised evacuations, only to bomb travel routes and machine gun buses of evacuees.  Others have been kidnapped and taken to filtration camps and across the border to Russia or Russian allies.  

This is barbaric butchery with modern weapons, and it is happening before our (averted) eyes.  We've seen the slow demolishing of cities before in recent decades, but mostly in more remote places.  Mariupol is a 34 hour drive from Paris,  26 hours from Berlin, a couple of hours by plane.  

When the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin in 1948, a round the clock airlift by the US kept the city alive and eventually broke the blockade.  But the Soviets did not have nuclear weapons then.  And they weren't lobbing rockets into the city.

Most coverage of the war in Ukraine suggests that Putin has overreached, that he has been humiliated.  But a few observers suggest that his real target all along was eastern Ukraine and the southern ports like Mariupol.  Brett Stephens in the NY Times reports on a theory that Putin is after the considerable fossil fuel and other resources in the region.  This is a more sensible motive if harder to caricature than a grandiose vision of a Russian Empire with him as emperor, or Czar.  People were long perplexed as to why Hitler did not invade England when he was poised to do so, but instead turned to Russia.  But the answer was obvious to some at the time: Russia had the natural resources--the fossil fuels, iron, etc.--that Hitler needed to maintain a fighting force that could compete with what the US could build.  England did not.

Could it be, then, that Putin started this all by making a somewhat symbolic but very pointed rattling of his nuclear arsenal just before he invaded Ukraine, accompanied by speeches that sounded like the ravings of a Hitler-adjacent madman.  Perhaps a version of Nixon's Madman theory--make the enemy think you are capable of anything.

In any case, it worked.  The US and western European countries could be coming to the aid of Mariupol directly, by a thoroughly announced convoy taking food and medicine in, and residents out.  And prepare to give them air cover and military support if the Russians make a move to hinder them.

That the West is clearly not going to take that risk is understandable.  It is also, as Ukraine's president suggests, cowardly.  Of course the main responsibility, the essential moral as well as political crimes here, belong to Russia.  These actions in Ukraine have set world civilization back decades.

 The West not coming to the aid of Mariupol's people in such a direct way may be politically necessary.  But it is still a moral failure.      

This Week in American Fascism

 Culled from Political Wire in the past week or so:

“Federal prosecutors have substantially widened their Jan. 6 investigation to examine the possible culpability of a broad range of figures involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election,” the New York Times reports. “The investigation now encompasses the possible involvement of other government officials in Mr. Trump’s attempts to obstruct the certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory and the push by some Trump allies to promote slates of fake electors..”

“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is threatening telecommunications and social media companies that comply with a request by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, declaring that Republicans ‘will not forget’ their actions,” the Washington Post reports.

Former CBS News correspondent and current Fox Nation host Lara Logan said that “the theory of evolution is the result of a wealthy Jewish family paying Charles Darwin to devise an explanation for what gave rise to humanity,” Rolling Stone reports.

Robert Foster (R), a former Mississippi House lawmaker who lost a 2019 bid for governor, called for the execution of those who support the rights of transgender people, the Mississippi Free Press reports.  Said Foster: “The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad.”

Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Should Texas punish abortions by putting teenage girls and women to death? Or not?”  “That’s the current debate in the Republican Party of Texas, where outlawing abortion is no longer a question of ‘if’ or ‘when’ but a question of whether to kill women for getting one.”

"Quote of the Day"

“Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back”— Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, quoted by the Washington Post, after the presidential election on Nov. 6, 2020.

And one from TPM:

In public remarks, leading Republicans have almost casually and with little fear of political recrimination begun to relitigate same-sex marriage, contraception and interracial marriage. With a robust 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the GOP’s ambition to rework the privacy jurisprudence underlying many of the civil rights gains of the last 60 years isn’t idle aspiration but a very real threat. 

Flame, speech

Flame, speech

 I read in a poem: 

 to talk is divine.

 But the gods don’t speak:

 they make and unmake worlds

 while men do the talking. 

 They play frightening games

 without words.

 The spirit descends,

 loosening tongues,

 but doesn’t speak words:

 it speaks fire.

 Lit by a god,

 language becomes

 a prophesy

 of flames and a tower

 of smoke and collapse

 of syllables burned:

 ash without meaning.

 The word of man

 is the daughter of death.

 We talk because we are mortal:

 words are not signs, they are years. 

 Saying what they say,

 the words we are saying

 say time: they name us.

 We are time’s names. 

 To talk is human.

 --Octavio Paz 

translated by Mark Strand

 

Octavio Paz was at times a diplomat and a teacher but above all he was a person of literature, with a stature and breadth not seen much anymore. In his lifetime—1914 to 1998--Octavio Paz lived, went to school and worked in his native Mexico, in California, New York and Paris. His many volumes of poetry, several plays and his many essays reflect the crosscurrents of cultures he experienced and studied, providing him with the language to explore and express their characteristics. However erudite and international were his tastes and knowledge, he wrote mostly if not exclusively in Spanish.

 I discovered him through his essays when his collection Alternating Currents was first published in the U.S. in 1972, and over the years I collected nine of his non-fiction volumes. Some of his interests and topics—surrealism, Native peoples of the Americas, Buddhism, contemporary film, literature in general—were shared interests, but I was equally engaged by his exploration of Mexican culture and history, about which I knew little. I was sympathetic to and excited by his approach—philosophical and poetic but grounded in the physical and place— expressed in dazzling language.

 His fame as a poet rests with his longer poems, but his major concerns also appear in shorter poems like this one—especially time and humanity.  Reading this poem at this particular moment, the unfathomable fire and cruelty of war in Ukraine and our human helplessness are brought quickly to mind.  Yet there are stories of impromptu concerts in basements and bomb shelters, and there is the solace of human talk.  

Paz was reputed to be quite a talker himself, which is evident from filmed interviews. That's him talking in the top photo.  Octavio Paz was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.