Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about denazification, antidisestablishmentarianism, and perverse polysyllabic pursuits. To subscribe to the Tuesday, which I hope you will do, please follow this link.
‘We Are All Ukrainians Now’
“The woman’s pelvis had been crushed and her hip detached.”
I don’t even know what that last part means. I suppose I can imagine a crushed pelvis easily enough. I can’t imagine what a detached hip looks like or feels like.
The woman in question was famous for a minute. She was a Ukrainian mother who appeared in a famous news photograph. She is dead now. So is the child she was carrying. She was photographed being carried out of that Mariupol maternity hospital that was bombed by Russian troops in Ukraine, one of many examples of the savagery in which the Russians have been engaged. It is tempting to write “sub-human” savagery, but savagery is entirely human. Nobody talks about rattlesnakes or scorpions behaving in a savage fashion — nobody expects them to be anything other than what they are. But we expect more of H. sap. — God knows why.
“Unidentified bloodied pregnant woman,” one headline called her. She must have had a name.
We know the name of Tatiana Perebeinis, 43, and her children, Nikita, 18, and Alise, 9. They were killed running for their lives when they were fired on by Russian artillery. Another famous photo. She was an accountant for a Silicon Valley tech company, working out of Irpin. “Photos of Tatiana Perebeinis and her kids lying in a gutter, surrounded by suitcases and pet carriers, ran on the front page of The New York Times on Tuesday and reverberated around the world,” reports the Daily Beast. I suppose they did.
Here is another family being wiped out, this time caught on video. There are more like it than you want to see.
“We are all Ukrainians now,” says the headline over a Wall Street Journal column. The sentiment is a humane one. But it is a lie. We are not all Ukrainians. Most of us are far removed from anything like that kind of danger or that kind of suffering. The worst we have felt is higher gasoline prices and more expensive groceries. These matter, of course, and they matter a great deal to the poor, for whom these additional financial burdens are very heavy. But that is not the same.
It is not easy to be brave, and it is not easy to suffer. But how much easier it must be to suffer oneself than to watch one’s children suffer, to be cold and hungry, to die, blown to pieces in the womb before taking their first breath. How many Ukrainian mothers and fathers would happily — joyfully — give their own lives if it meant that their children could have a decent dinner and a safe, warm place to sleep — i.e., if they could have what my dogs have? Millions, I imagine.
No, we are not all Ukrainians now. Not by a damned sight.
We are not all Russians either. I do not flatter myself that the Russian people have been waiting for my advice, but I will offer it, anyway: You have to act. You must. This is your country, your army, your government, your tax dollars, your flag, your name. Vladimir Putin is not a superman, and he cannot act alone. What is being done by your government is not going to be forgiven. You, and your children, and your grandchildren will bear the shame of this. Things are never going to go back to normal for you. I don’t know if you have noticed, but, to put it in popular terms, the civilized world has got together, and we have voted you off the island. The ties between you and the civilized world that have been cut in recent weeks are not going to be restored quickly, and many of them will never be restored at all. You are not part of the civilized world anymore. We are not going to forget what you have been party to, what so many of you have stood by and accepted.
What makes it worse, if that is possible, and certainly more asinine: You have already lost, in that what your government had hoped to achieve will not be achieved. You can murder as many expectant mothers and children as you like, bomb them until you run out of munitions, burn down the hospitals and the libraries, execute all the mayors, and you will still have lost. And when you are gone, the civilized people of this world are going to help to rebuild Ukraine, and you will be — what? Praying for high gas prices?
‘Denazification’
When Vladimir Putin launched his campaign of mass murder in Ukraine, one of the pretexts he cited was “denazification.” Putin’s propaganda machine has for years been retailing the absurd fiction that Ukraine is a country dominated by vicious neo-Nazis, presumably the very strange kind of neo-Nazis who choose to rally behind Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s Jewish president. Putin is fortunate to have cretins such as Representative Madison Cawthorn (R., N.C.) to aid in the effort.
About denazification . . .
For those who remember just how brutal the 20th century could be, it is remarkable how forbearing the denazification of Germany was. As the tide of the war began to turn and it was clear that the Allies would prevail, Winston Churchill dreamt of dragging Adolf Hitler, whom he considered to be little more than a jumped-up gangster, to England to be executed, quipping that the Americans might make an electric chair available via lend-lease. Churchill opposed the Nuremberg trials, not because he thought they were unjust but because he wanted the Nazi leadership executed without trial. There are competing accounts of the conversations at Yalta and elsewhere, but one version has Joseph Stalin proposing to execute every German officer above the rank of captain. Dwight Eisenhower is quoted in a report to the Senate suggesting that the “ringleaders and SS troops should be given the death penalty, without question. But the punishment should not stop there.” It is unlikely that Eisenhower meant to execute every German belonging to the SS — 800,000 men by the end of the war — but he did apparently favor keeping the German people in punitive poverty for some indefinite period of time.
As it turned out, the business of reforming Germany — West Germany at first, and then unified Germany — did not require such drastic and bloody measures. Or, rather, it did not require those measures precisely, though Soviet domination of East Germany was vicious enough. The reconstruction of post-war Japan involved quite radical measures, including intervening in the nation’s religious life, but it was accomplished without very much open violence.
I do wonder what it would take to turn Russia around. I suppose it would start with a Russia that wanted to be turned around, or at least a critical mass of Russians who want that. I don’t think there is one. Jay Nordlinger is right to say that the Russians who protest Putin’s junta are some of the bravest people in the world. But I do not think there are enough of them.
Words About Words
The occupation and reconstruction of Japan by American forces provides one of the few opportunities to use the word antidisestablishmentarianism. It is a cool-sounding word that people sometimes use without knowing what it means, e.g., Ice-T’s describing himself as the “epitome of antidisestablishmentarianism.” Americans who have bothered to learn anything about their Bill of Rights know what an “established” religion is — a state church — and from that might guess that the disestablishmentarian position is the program of those who call for an established church to be disestablished, as we have seen in some (but by no means all) European countries and in the individual U.S. states, some of which maintained established churches well into the 19th century. (Massachusetts was the last to disestablish, in 1833.) But there are those who oppose this sort of thing, and they are the antidisestablishmentarians. Ice-T and others who like the sound of antidisestablishmentarianism tend to use it as though it meant “anti-establishment” or “radical,” but, of course, it means the opposite of that. Antidisestablishmentarianism is in most cases a conservative disposition, a positively reactionary one.
We need a word for our so-called Catholic Integralist friends, who seek to use the power of the American state to effectively establish a church that more than a few in the Founding generation were not sure should even be tolerated. Neo-establishmentarian? Novoestablishmentarian?
Dorks?
I am a conservative in these matters: I like having the First Amendment in the United States, but I also tend to want to see countries with established churches keep them. The evangelical atheists talk about the prospect of having an established church as though it were the stuff of neo-medieval nightmares, but Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom are not exactly unlivable hellholes. Neither is Malta. Monaco is pretty nice.
Scotland would have to build a lot of gulags before it caught up with the officially atheist states of recent history.
Rampant Prescriptivism
That thing most of us endured last weekend — with the exception of our faithful readers in Scottsdale, Honolulu, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, Cape Town, Seoul, New Delhi, and a few other enlightened locales — is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time.
It is the one weekend of the year that has us all à la recherche du temps perdu.
Daylight Saving Time is a great example of the progressive imagination, forever at odds with the organic cycles and natural variation in human life, insistent that no aspect of that life — down to the time on the clock — is beyond regimentation and rationalization. Inconvenient. Irritating. Arrogant. And, in spite of the connotations of the word “progressive,” absolutely stuck in the past.
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Beastly News . . .
This looks like Katy is being very sweet, but I guarantee you she is just checking to see if Pancake got some yogurt without sharing.
Recommended
Vinson Cunningham interviews Cornel West in the New Yorker. It is a very interesting interview, and Professor West is as charming as ever. One almost has to be in awe of the effort it must take for such a brilliant mind to argue itself into such asinine, predictable, and at times genuinely stupid conclusions.
In Closing
We are about two weeks into Lent, the Christian season of penance and preparation for Easter. In my neighborhood, there were Mardi Gras decorations up for six weeks before the day itself, but I think that has something to do with there being a lot of New Orleans Saints fans around here. But no one decorates his house for Lent. (I wonder what that would even look like.) Lent comes from the Old English word for spring, and Easter is far from being the only resurrection festival celebrated at that time of year. There are many things I like about Lent, and many things about it for which I am grateful, and one of them is the way the season discomfits my secular friends. They don’t quite know what to say: “Uh . . . happy? . . . Ash Wednesday.” “Good . . . Good Friday.” We haven’t forgotten how to do penance — that’s what all our insane dietary fads are about, mostly — but we have forgotten why. To understand why we must do penance is to understand a great many things that affluent modern people spend a great deal of time and energy working to not understand. It is to remember something that many of us would rather forget and to know something that many of us wish we didn’t.
If you think Lent is about giving up beer or chocolate bars for 40 days, you don’t understand anything about it at all.
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