Russian ballistics are still blasting Kyiv. They’re too high and too fast to stop with regular ground defences. People are dying. I’ve lost count how many at this point. Every day somebody somewhere dies. Another apartment burns, another playground, school, hospital, shopping centre flattened. And Donald Trump exhorts the Ukrainians not to shoot back. . .

            He’s not the only one.

            Margaret Shkimba is a long-time writer for the Hamilton Spectator, whose writings thus-far have been far too bland for me to pay much attention to. Today she grandly declared she was “not a supporter of military conflict, of armed aggression, or of war”, in case we had any notion to the contrary. She goes on to say she is “utterly disturbed” by a whole litany of world conflicts, including “the continuing devastation wrought upon Ukraine” Curiously though, she does not mention just who is wreaking devastation upon Ukraine. She earlier had no problem calling out Donald Trump and Israel for their misdeeds, but will not name, anywhere in the piece, the butchers of Ukraine.

            Odd. Such information is readily available, from a casual glance at her own newspaper. Are we to believe Ms. Shkimba is really unaware of who’s dropping the bombs? Oh goodness gracious no! By leaving out the Big-R (and the rootin’ tootin’ Pootin, also absent from her villains roll-call), she can imply via parallelism that the devastation upon Ukraine is something else we can blame on the West.

            The sentence doesn’t stop with “the continuing devastation upon Ukraine”. The full sentence reads "the continuing devastation upon Ukraine that threatens to unleash a Third World War.”  Not by Putin, of course, but by “by the robotic march to the front by those who’ve never experienced the horrors of war and who are just dying to ‘protect democracy’.” Not by Russians, who never made a pretense of protecting democracy: she clearly means westerners who do care about democracy. Notice the scare quotes around “protect democracy”. I wonder if it’s a dig against the Canadian volunteers who’ve died fighting Russia, such as the late Dante Johnson-Wells (26, fallen June 13) or Jessy Noel Bourgeois (fallen Aug. 18). I mean, they certainly experienced the horrors of war. . .

            Putin has been threatening us with World War Three ever since the war began, promising to unleash the nukes if so much as a NATO-made shoelace made it to the front line. The world has long stopped taking these threats seriously (or at least called the immediate bluff), except of course for those who wanted to placate him from the beginning. So “WWIII” has become the dog-whistle of cowards, appeasers, useful idiots and third-column russophiles.  It's taken as a given that WWIII will begin not when tyrants like Putin start wars of conquest, but when anyone stands up to them. It’s similar to the tirades against NATO expansion, which held (and hold) that Russia is entitled to dominate those countries forever and is within its rights to attack whom it pleases.

            Having identified that dog-whistle, the omission makes sense. Shkimba refuses to name Russia because deep down she doesn’t hold Russia responsible. She can just list Ukraine alongside Trump’s crimes and Israel’s crimes, and by extension the West’s crimes (all interchangeable in these circles) and imply the true responsibility lies there. Crimes are only crimes if they can be blamed on the West.

            Further in the article, Shkimba promotes an upcoming panel discussion hosted by (among others) Tamara Lorincz of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives –alternatives which, funnily enough, always coincide with Russia’s needs.  Just a few weeks ago, on September 10, Lorincz published her own article in the Spec, calling for an end to NATO exercises in the Arctic. At first, she advanced reasonable enough concerns about the environmental impact, and consultation with Inuit communities, but soon got to her real reason: Sergey Lavrov objected. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the move a “threat to Russia’s security.”

            Well of course he would! That’s what Russians always say when their plans are thwarted. It's Lavrov's job to say it. 

            Sergey Lavrov is the very poster-ogre of Russian nihilism, its chief spokesperson and talking-point parrot. His job is to say that black is white, up is down, aggressors are victims and victims are aggressors. He is the blackest of pots in a world of kettles, blithely lying through his teeth, while bemoaning most piteously his country’s entirely self-inflicted wounds. A wallowing jowly mass of dishonesty and self- pity.

            With a staggering lack of self awareness or sense of irony, he recently told the UN that the West was full of “warmongers” trying to undermine world stability through force, forgetting who it was that started the largest European land war in seventy -five years in the first place, and keep it going every single day. Yet it’s typical of his style – pining for peace while launching wars, blaming the victims and bellyaching about the cost. There’s no lie too shameless or claim too disingenuous that he won’t announce it to the world.

            Nevertheless, there are individuals and groups, such as Tamara Lorincz and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, who will take his claims at face value. Quoting him with a straight face should tell us all we need to know about their credibility.

As for the panel discussion, it’s about the plan to manufacture drones for Ukraine in Canada, and it’s called “Don’t Put a Target on Hamilton”, in case there was any doubt where they stood on that issue. Whether out of russophilia or pusillanimity I neither know nor care, but you’ll notice the implication here that they fully expect Russia to bomb Hamilton, and will hold Hamilton responsible before Russia.  

            Would we not be a legitimate target though? I mean, making stuff for Russia’s enemies during a time of war?  Well, keeping in mind that nothing’s been started yet: the plan is to make drones. The plan is not to declare war on Russia. If Russia were to bomb us, it would be the one making that declaration. It would be the one taking that step, making that decision, taking that action. Lavrov would argue we provoked it, and these folks would believe him. Folk who would never accept provocation as a defence in a murder trial or rape case will accept it wholesale when it comes to nations. Provocation, real or otherwise, lets Russia off the hook for everything, and invading countries is no worse than defending them.

            If they had been around in 1939 they would doubtless have excused the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, and opposed Canada’s entering the war against Germany. They would have opposed aid to Spanish Republicans in their fight against Franco. If they were American, they’d certainly have opposed Lend-Lease Aid to Britain, arguing it would have brought them closer to war with Germany.  

            There are no shortage of people on this side of the fence who whole heartedly buy into Lavrov’s characterization Ukrainian supporters as “war-momgers”, as if they were they ones who started it, and should just let Russia get on with it. Shkimba implies as much. 

            Here's the thing: no one in their right mind loves war. But denial won’t make it go away. Sometimes it is imposed from without. Calling it for what it is, trying to prepare for it, and survive it is no more loving it than going to chemotherapy means loving cancer.

            The Margaret Shkimbas of the world loudly think that if we would just surrender our arms, then war would magically vanish.

            If only that were true! 

 

    Will the victim blaming never stop?

            On the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov/ Ribbentrop pact, or the Hitler/Stalin pact, or the Nazi/Soviet Nonaggression pact, the formal alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, pledging to jointly invade and divvy up Eastern Europe between them, I was told on social media (where else?) I could “thank Winston Churchill” for it.

   

         As I recall, Winston Churchill wasn’t a signatory to the pact. He did not participate in the partitioning of Poland or the annexation of the Baltic countries into the USSR. He was not Prime Minister at the time – he was not even a minister of anything at the time (though he did have a seat in Parliament).

            The thinking goes that Chuchill was to blame for scuppering an attempted anti-nazi alliance with the USSR, driving Stalin, as it were, into the arms of Hitler. It’s hard to see how this was Churchill’s fault: again, he was not part of Chamberlain’s government at the time, and it was Lord Halifax who led the negotiations. Stalin, having failed to join a coalition against he nazis, joined the nazis. Was this the most consequential case of “can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” in history?

            It has been argued the pact gave the USSR desperately needed time to prepare, and held off the nazi invasion just long enough. Indeed, acting completely off guard, losing hundreds of thousands of your soldiers, and letting your enemy advance thousands of miles into your territory, is usually the last thing he would expect your to do. To say nothing that under the terms of the pact, the USSR handed over thousands of tons of raw materials and military equipment right up until the eve of Barbarossa.

Pals: Hanz Guderian and
Seymon Krivoshein

            It seems a funny kind of master strategy, but very typical of authoritarian sympathizers, who tend to insist that whatever happened to the dictator is exactly what the dictator intended. The Party is infallible after all.

    More importantly, it abrogates any sort of moral responsibility on the part of the perpetrators. Did Britain invade Poland, and machine gun twenty-one thousand people at Katyn? Deport a hundred-and-thirty-thousand people from the Baltic states? Attack Finland? Did Churchill pull the trigger on any of these occasions?

            It’s the K-2 height of absurdity, but it’s what Soviet sympathizers have to do when confronted with the intolerable reality that their heroes aided, abetted, fought beside and entered into an official alliance with the nazis. It can only be tolerated if it can be retconned into a master strategy, blamed on the West, or both. It’s perverse really: condemn the side that went to war with Hitler to protect Poland while praising the side that joined Hitler to attack Poland. It can only make sense when one believes that the Party can do no wrong.

            It still happens: many still blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on NATO expansion. In these narratives, Russia has no control over its actions: it’s a mindless drooling zombie only doing what the West tricks it into doing. It’s not a very flattering picture, but it’s necessary to indulge if one wants to keep believing that only the West commits atrocities.  

 

I have learned the hard way not to respond to social media provocations. It never achieves anything. It never changes anyone’s mind. It always makes you feel worse. It commits one to open-ended argument, where responses may be hours, or even days in coming, indefinitely prolonging the grouchiness such arguments inspire.

So I most often bite my tongue and scroll on, but often itch, ITCH, to step in.

I find it particularly infuriating that so few people use their own words to express their own thoughts. Instead they’ll entrust their opinions to influencers, or memes, often with no more input than writing “This!” above it.  These posts are almost never as profound or powerful as the poster believes.  I am often tempted beyond endurance to either shoot it down completely, or at least ask: have you read this thing through? Have you thought this thing through? Are you aware of what this implies? And, because in social media, words are rarely more than slogans, and slogans rarely mean as much as one’s willingness to use them, are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?

I resisted this time, but all the same spent too much of my convalescence day brooding about it. So I’ll put my response here.

The repost in question was from some indie record label owner explaining why he continues to work with Russian bands. Apparently it’s because America’s bad. America has killed lots of people in the last few decades, and so therefore we should all have no problem with listening to Russian bands. I found the answer less than satisfying.

My imaginary response would go something like this: 

It strikes me as classic whataboutism. By listing this long litany of US crimes and atrocities, he’s not actually answered the question of why he’s comfortable working with Russian bands.

Presumably, he either:

a)       Doesn’t believe in cultural boycotts in general

or

b)      Doesn’t believe in cultural boycotts of Russia in particular.

Neither point is made.

In justifying their decision, it’s interesting that the writer has not gone for the “separate the government from the people” line, but rather chooses to rant about an entirely different government. The former would at least have implied a token condemnation of Russia’s actions, but there is none forthcoming here.

However he might feel about boycotts, it is difficult to imagine this person signing any bands with a blatantly Trumpist agenda. Can we assume there are similar prohibitions in place for bands with a blatantly Putinist agenda? It’s wise to assume nothing; from this post we can gather nothing.

There are plenty of US bands who quite openly oppose and condemn their government’s actions, with precious few Russian bands opposing and condemning theirs (unless they’re in exile). To be fair, most of them are probably in jail, or have learned to keep their mouth shut (and who can blame them?), but that’s all the more reason to be vigilant. In Russia, praising the government and pushing its goals is often the quickest way (sometimes the only way) to get things like airtime, publicity, and the privilege of playing live without a visit from the secret police.  So the pool of bands who are bravely anti-Putin, or at the very least safely apolitical is a small one, and the writer gives no indication he bothers to wade it.

There’s also a hint of disingenuousness about it: the writer must be aware that in many parts of the west (mine and yours especially), boycotting Russian cultural products is a relatively simple affair of not much more than switching vodka brands, while a corresponding American one would have to involve moving into the woods and living in cave. One does what one can, but is this person even doing that much? 

The late foreign correspondent Robert Fisk once wrote that he didn’t believe in cultural boycotts and didn’t engage in them, but did respect others’ right to do so. Speaking for my own eternally-humble self, I do my best to ensure my hard-earned shekels don’t go to bands who blatantly go against my values.  Despite all this person's apparent indignation, it’s not clear from their tirade what values they ascribe to. There may be principled objection to the atrocities listed or it may be a cynical way to justify atrocities elsewhere.

Nothing.

 So now the war's over. Hurrah. It should never have begun. 

Thousands of lives. Billions of dollars. Millions pushed into poverty. 

All. For. Nothing. 

Nothing

Nothing. 

Nothing.  

What a stupid time to be alive. 

 So the Tangerine Tyrant and Nobel Peace Prize hopeful has just launched attacks on Iran. 

God help us all. 

Of Hearths and Salamanders: in which paper continues to burn.

 As one periodically revisits horrors from the past, I find myself often thinking of this horrible story from the CBC, about the Peel District School Board pulping its library books. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332

It's not just that they decided to weed the books, which all libraries do, however much it may pain antiquarian hoarders such as myself. It's that they decided to destroy the books, rip off the covers and pulp the lot, that burns me. 

I particularly love the Board's justification: " "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."

For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners." 

Not suitable for any learners? No word on the doubtless vigorous process by which they came to this conclusion; I'm certain some deeply careful and qualified individual read every single page before deciding said book failed to meet their well-defined and public criteria. Thank goodness we have these self appointed guardians to protect our we widdow bwains fwom hawm. Nope, not even a garage sale. Junk the lot!    

That was three years ago, and it still makes me mad. 

Of high minded protecting chaperones protecting the delicate public, there are many precedents though.

 From 221-206 BC, the first Emperor of China, Qin Shui Huang decided to burn every book in his kingdom (or at least the ones which predated his reign), the authors that wrote them, and the scholars that read them. Partly because he didn't want any histories circulating that he didn't write, and partly because he thought poetry was a waste of time. 

Who was it who said “Those who burn books will soon burn people”?

This of course reminded me of Hitler’s Deutsche Studentenschaft making massive bonfires of All Quiet on the Western Front, amongst countless other titles – anything worth reading really.

From there, I couldn’t help thinking of the less dramatic but much more destructive weedings of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR – Glavlit (don’t you just love Soviet acronyms?) who pulped some 24, 138,799 books between 1938 and 1939.

While looking up those figures I found that more recently Buddhist mobs torched some 97,000 books at the Jafna Public Library in Sri Lanka. Shades of Alexandria. . .

I don’t off hand have the figures for Mao, Pol Pot, or Texas, where school libraries are being emptied of anything that smells gay. Suffice it to say, there is a long time-dishonoured tradition of destroying books, and everyone who’s ever done it has thought it the socially responsible thing to do.

Naturally, this all brings us to Bradbury, whose Fahrenheit 451 is the final word on the subject. Bringing that up seems a cliché, like bringing up Kafka or Orwell, but I think there’s an aspect of it most folks don’t fully appreciate. Indeed, the burning of the books, “the blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history” (page 1!) provide the novel’s most arresting images.  But it’s icing on the cake. In the sick, soulless, and slowly dying society of Bradbury’s dystopia, books, along with anything else beautiful or meaningful, lose their value and are quite casually tossed aside.

We’re approaching a post literate society, one very much like that in 451. Addicted to screens and permanent noise, oblivious to nature, frivolous, forgetful. I’ve had more than one student who got through English class without having to read a thing. The teachers are giving up; society won’t back them up. Books aren’t considered important. Even as masses flock to big budget adaptations of Frankenstein, or Wuthering Heights, by directors who haven’t evidently read them.

“You have to burn books,” said Bradbury. “You just stop people from reading them."

The Peel Board can kiss my ass.

 

References:

https://swarajyamag.com/world/remembering-the-jaffna-public-library-destroyed-by-sinhalese-extremists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Directorate_for_the_Protection_of_State_Secrets_in_the_Press 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-book-burning-printing-press-internet-archives-180964697/

Wasterman, Frank. Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. New York: The Overlook Press. 2011

Of Genteel Self-Immolation: In Which the Author Revisits Conspiracy Theories.

            There are days when I contemplate middle-age, and rejoice in my ever-more apparent mortality. It means I will not have to long inhabit the ap-addled abattoir that society is building for itself, and which the poor kids will have to inherit. I swear I would rather jump from a moving bullet-train into a burning sulphur-pit than face the feckless future the tech-bros are planning for us.  

            Such a moment cam upon me again the other day, shortly after a grade-9 student told me in all sincerity, that Stranger Things was based on a true story. That by itself was not the moment of my all-encompassing weltschmerz; that came later. At first, I merely iterated, in the admittedly condescending manner that grown-ups will often inadvertently adopt when confronted with childish fancies they are not altogether in the mood for dealing with (around the time when the elapsed hours since lunch are roughly equal to the remaining hours before dinner, and the longing for caffeine is slowly replaced by the longing for alcohol), that it was “just a story”.

            “Oh no!” my little friend persisted, informing me that one of the actors of the program, the otherwise wonderful Gatan Motarazzo who brought the ever-so-loveable Dustin Henderson to life, told an interview that it was a true story.

            I felt my heart sink into my boots, and maintained in an even more condescending manner, that actors, bless ‘em, aren’t always the oracles of wisdom and truth we take them to be.

            “Yeah, but other people have said it!” came the paraphrased puppy-dog. At which point he whipped out his phone for indisputable proof, and I wished for the roof to collapse on top of me.

            “You Can’t. Believe. Everything. You Read. On. The. Internet.” I slowly, slowly squeezed through bitten-bleeding lip in what I hoped was my most condescending tone yet.

            “But there’s so much of it!” he says, and I wished someone would sticks dynamite up my nostrils and light the fuse.  (“You see how that’s worse? You do understand how that’s worse???”).

            I’d had just about had it at this point, and rather clumsily (for I was caught off guard and not prepared) threw out some such canards about verifying sources and evaluating veracity of information, when he’d opened up youtube to Mysteries Decoded: The Montauk Experiments, and I prayed for someone to dump liquid drano down my throat.

 

            We’re going to pause here for a moment, and in violation of those abhorrent 5-paragraph essay templates I am state-mandated to force-feed our innocent youth, get to my main point/idea/topic/thesis here, having failed to mention it any earlier, in the event my audience’s no-doubt formidable-but-not-infinite attention spans may waver. The point is not that Mysteries Decoded was wretched even by the abysmal standards of Youtube docs. Nor is my failure to dissuade my young charge from believing that the US government was conducting mind-control-time travel experiments in 1981 the reason I wanted to throw myself into a wood-chipper. It was that this young man, far from atypical, had no capacity to tell reality from fiction. No critical faculties. No ability or even willingness to flag fraud or fantasy.

            That fucking depressed me.

            You may ask what the big deal is, and what business I, who once obsessed over Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, have in judging?  Different times, different contexts, higher stakes, I would maintain.

            Look, when I researched my cryptids, I was much younger than he is today. I had to go to the children’s department at the library and sign out – a book. I had to read – a book. If nothing else, I was reading – a book. The benefits of which are manifold. I was also surrounded by adults who valued education, had years of science and media literacy classes ahead of me, and, well, other books. He on the other hand is barraged by videos, memes, and soundbites, every single hour, and he believes all of it. He will come across other, nastier ideas, with no greater ability to discriminate. Today it’s the Montauk Experiment, tomorrow it’s the Protocols of the Eldars of Zion. He will encounter voter fraud conspiracies, anti-vax tirades, 9-11 Trutherism, Sandy Hook denialism, Holocaust denial, New Age quakery, religious fundamentalism, great replacement theory, whatever the hell Putin’s pushing at any given time, and Q-Anon Pizzagate conspiracies.

            Indeed, compare nonsense. If a kid thinks there’s a plesiosaur in a Scottish lake or a hairy ape man wandering BC, it’s not much different from thinking there was a jolly toymaker living at the North Pole (which most of us recently believed). The Montauk conspiracy holds that the US government did mind-control time travel experiments on (unnamed) kidnapped children. It’s Pizzagate in germination. An unverifiable, unprovable, but unshakable conviction that genuine harm is being done to real people. Somewhere. Folks who believe that can be driven to extremes.

            I have no doubt that every government, and the US government in particular, does some pretty nasty things behind closed doors. But I’m much more concerned about what we know to be true than what almost certainly isn’t. I’d rather break open an ICE detention facility where I know children are suffering, than some empty lab in Montauk, Long Island. Those concerned with the latter show precious little concern about the former: they certainly don’t churn out youtube and tiktok channels about it. Nor about child-poverty, childhood leukemia, child casualties of war zones, nor indeed any genuine issue facing actual, verifiable, children. You know, the ones with names.  Energy and indignation are wasted chasing shadows. It’s maddening.

I am neither the first, nor will I be the last to pull out his beard with frustration at the baboons who for years obsessed over an imaginary child sex-ring run by a non-existent global elite, yet now seem to be fully onside with a genuine child-sex ring run by the actual global elite!  Yet this is what happens when critical faculties are turned off. This is the danger of conspiracy theories. Millions have died due to them; Democracy itself may not survive them.

I wish I were being hyperbolic.

That’s why I wanted to dowse myself in gasoline and light myself on fire.