Today we are all Ukrainians...except those with guns to our heads

Anyone who thinks or believes that every person in a family plays a part in the generation/birth of the culture in which that family exists, is living and breathing under a rock. The culture, too, of the international geopolitical ‘family’ is a culmination and a composite of all of the players, the nations, which form the primary influences moving, nudging, shoving and dominating that culture.

As by far the largest manufacturer of military weapons in the world, with the largest military budget, by far, of any country in the world, the United States has attempted to ‘protect’ itself by inflating hard power, military might, and diplomatic muscle, backed by iron and steel and technologically advanced chips and algorithms, without necessarily issuing a declaration of policy, that has become manifest in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

To have given up their nuclear weapons, for the promise and commitment of economic and political support from Russia, another hollow piece of rhetoric, is now proving to have been a predictable and perhaps catastrophic, if honourable and ethical and modest and moderate piece of political business.

Writing in The Hindu, on February 22, 2022, in a piece entitled, “Explainedd/ When ad how did Ukraine give up its nuclear arsenal?” Priyali Prakash writes this:

Ukraine was the country with the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union collapsed. As Ukraine battles powerful Russian armed forces, leaders of the country have expressed regrets about giving up their nuclear weapons which they believe might have held off an invasion of their territory by Russian President Vladimir Putin….At the time of U.S.S.R. dissolution, Ukraine had an estimated 1,900strategic warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and 44 strategic bombers, according to the Arms Control Association of the U.S. …The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, (Start) was a bilateral treaty signed by former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. It limited the number of ICBM’s and nuclear warheads that the countries could possess. The treaty obligated the successor states (of the Soviet Union: Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus) to join the Nuclear NPT at the earliest and the nuclear weapons were to remain under the control of a ‘single unified authority ‘ until then….After extensive political manoeuvring, Ukraine ratified Start in February 1994 when it signed the Trilateral Statement along with the U.S. and Russia. Ukraine committed to full disarmament in exchange for economic compensation and security assurances….Ukraine transferred it last nuclear warhead to Russia in 1996 and dismantled its last strategic nuclear delivery vehicle in 2001….The Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances is a political agreement between Ukraine, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. It was signed in 1994. According to the memorandum, signatories Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. agreed to respect the ‘independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine’ after the country agreed to give up its nuclear stockpile. Ukraine was also promised that its territorial integrity and political independence will be maintained and that the signatories will not use economic coercion against Ukraine to their own advantage.

Of course, many argued at the time, 2014, that the Russian annexation of Crimea was a direct and blatant disavowal and denial and sabotage of the Budapest Memorandum. This latest invasion/war/onslaught by putin on Ukraine itself, is an even more heinous literal evisceration of the Budapest Memorandum.

But, signatures on a piece of paper, however well intentioned at the time of writing, by all political operatives, in all countries, tend to have a way of, like the ink in those signatures, of fading into the mist of forgetfulness, neglect, opportunism, or downright venal narcississtic ambition, whether personal or national. Explained away by some ruse, these historic national self-sabotaging moves have implications. And it is the diplomatic world’s laser focus on what can only be called ‘legal documents’ (without the legal frameworks to enforce them) that seduces both the leaders of nations and eventually the people of those nations into thinking and believing that ‘security’ has been achieved, at the time of such signings.

It would take several warehouses of digital storage to contain the abrogated ‘treaties’ of history, so we must not be shocked that another treaty has been breached. And, no doubt, there are other treaties that have been left to the dustbin of history by other signatories even to the Budapest Memorandum. Some treaties will fade simply because the conditions that gave rise to their signing have changed. And some will be trashed if and when an opportunity for ‘claiming a new prize’ appears like a new sprig of green in Spring, to those patiently waiting for such an opportunity.

Military might, spy and intelligence history and background, and economic prowess are three alleged ‘gems’ in the aspirational crown of national political power. And men, once having been informed about the nature of the game, will use every trick at their disposal to ‘win’ however they perceive that to be defined. Goal driven, even obsessed, strategy and tactics shaped into the larger goal… these are the footprints of history for centuries. History, too, is replete with libraries filled with stories, both as documents and narratives of history and those of renowned literary pieces, that chant like choirs of adulation for the victors, and like requiems for losers. And that compilation of stories, whether or not they comply with the full disclosure of the full range of evidence, depends on the diligence and scope of the researchers, and the availability of the evidence at the time of writing.

How many times have we heard about the Budapest Memorandum in the last month? At least on Canadian and American television, rarely. Boris Johnson mentioned it at least once in a news clip from the U.K. Perhaps, his country is experiencing some considerable angst about the abrogation of a treaty to which its national signature is attached. Does the U.S. have a similar kind of angst?

And, once again, why is there not some oversight agency beyond think tanks, and universities and the United Nations, to which international shared intentions, once committed in some urgency, can be continually assessed. It is not, and will not be adequate for any negotiations aimed at bringing this conflict to a close to merely put another band-aid on the crisis without addressing the ways in which the Budapest Memorandum has become void. War crimes, like all other crimes, are not able to be contained in the “act” of the commitment. They all have significant context, just as do personal acts that are considered crimes. They all stem from a personal biographical history that has shaped, indirectly perhaps but nevertheless impactfully, those acts in which law enforcement engages.

Time, for most of us in the west, has collapsed into concentration spans of seconds, rather than weeks or years, or decades. Only with the benefit of a long-vision, perhaps only accessible to those whose vintage has rendered us merely spectators, on a stage where the current actors are playing their roles, does the span of time seem more relevant. Just yesterday, for example, in a television furniture  commercial, Kelly Clarkson had five different costume changes in a thirty-second spot. Is that attention-seeking on steroids? Or is it rather based on the believe that only through such tactics will the message ‘score’?

We are so intensely and acutely conscious of the momentary shifts in assaults, numbers of apartment bombings, bridges blown out, tanks bombed, and missiles dropped, and babies and mothers killed, all of that highly relevant, that perhaps the world inadvertently complies with those who take advantage of others, in forgetting, or perhaps not deeply learning in the first place. While the action takes place on the battlefield, our adrenalin rushes, in some vicarious identity with the victims. We grieve just as Erin Burnett on CNN’s Out Front wept last night while interviewing the widower of a mother and two children, shot at point-blank range by Russian soldiers. What we are watching is so horrific and so unimaginable and so unforgiveable and so……..(fill in the blank with your most objectionable adjective) that it is hard to imagine how Ukrainian negotiators can even enter a --room with their Russian counterparts, let alone begin the process of a respectful dialogue.

And then there are the questions of whether or not those negotiators have been schooled and steeped in the history, the culture and the ethos of all of the significant themes, theories, treaties and relationships that have brought us to this moment. They too will be angling for a win, a message they can deliver to their superiors and their people that will convey the kind of confidence and trust that have been absent from the last eight years, since the annexation of Crimea.

And we in the west, have to reckon with the fact that we have been asleep, turning our gaze in other directions-- perhaps toward the stream of refugees from North Africa, -- perhaps into Syria where another brutal dictator is propped up by putin, or --perhaps to North Korea where another tin-pot dictator has fired missiles to magnetize attention from America, or --perhaps to Bejing and Hong Kong, where another potential autocracy is stirring for military take-over or –perhaps to Tehran and the Iranian nuclear deal and their ambition to develop nuclear weapons or…….

Attention both to the fine points in the ‘weeds’ as well as to the broad scope of both history and culture, seems like a curriculum that demands and expects some kind of vacillation….and we cannot leave either aspect to specialists and experts only. We need to pay attention to the announcements that blurp out of our governments, for example, on Ford’s silent but inexcusable and relentless crawl to privatize the public health care system in Ontario. We also need to pay attention to an election-campaign announcement from the Minister of Education that Ontario is going to start to teach programming to grade one students. We all know and agree that digital technology has taken over the economic life of our world, and new algorithms are going to be designed and developed, and our best and brightest students will need a proficiency in their methods and capabilities. However, as the kind of literacy that formerly addressed our capacity to “read” and to “write” in our language seems to have eroded over the past few decades, it would seem pertinent and relevant that our educational leaders will want to underwrite those skills and talents as well as the STEM skills.

Employment cannot and must not be reduced to slamming another widget (person) into an empty slot. It has to be a complex process based on a longer-term cultural consciousness that includes and welcomes a far more collective and collaborative perspective that includes us all. And that is one of the important features we could be losing, if we have not already lost, in seeking to place STEM skills above and ahead of ‘normal’ literacy.

We need to be able to read and to discern the difference between words and people we can and do trust and those in whom we cannot and must not place our shared trust. And that social and cultural and political and economic and ethical and philosophic requirement of our culture will only rise in significance as we distance ourselves from ourselves through the interjection of technology into our relationships.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to ALL! 

Failing criminal prosecution, will time run out on the Russian wannabe-czar?

 Living in Canada for the better part of some eight decades, I have been almost blind to the role and significance of something called Interpol. The International Police Commission, I would have considered one of the protections against what we formerly considered to be international crime. And, only this week, when the arrest of vladimir putin seemed like one of the few paths to terminating this massacre in Ukraine, did the issue of Interpol take shape in my mind. Could not Interpol begin the process of putting the Russian criminal on their most wanted list, and then begin the process of finding and arresting him, in order to prosecute him for the multiple war crimes, and the crimes against humanity he is obviously committing hourly in Ukraine?

I have been deeply aware for a considerable time that the notion of international collaboration, shared commitment and a strong and united phalanx of nations is and will continue to be essential to combat what are international crises including global warming and climate change, the pandemic, world poverty and starvation, and income inequality, human rights abuses and state terror.

However, the tokenism of many states and leaders to an international world order that sought a healthy environment and ethos for all of the globe’s inhabitants is blatantly obvious, if only we look at the historically tepid and disdainful relationship between the United States and the United Nations. Who can forget that not that long ago, media magnate Ted Turner, the founder of the CNN 24-7-365 news outlet headquartered in Atlanta, actually paid the membership dues of the United States to the United Nations, in order to keep his homeland in good standing at the august, if somewhat emasculated body?

So began a modest search for the nature and history of Interpol, from the scarcity of coverage in the public media. In Canada, the international police agency gets barely a mention in the national press. However, in 2018, in the Washington Post, and then reprinted in the National Post in Canada, Vladimir Kara-Murza, on November 20, 2018, wrote a piece entitled, “Analysis: Vladimir Putin is about to gain control of Interpol, the world’s main law enforcement organization”. Biographical footnotes on the piece read: Kara-Murza is a Russian historian, filmmaker, and democracy activist. He is Vice Chairman of the Open Russia movement and chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. The piece was prompted by the proposal of a Russian nominee of putin’s to become the head of Interpol. Excerpts of the Kara-Murza piece follow:

Unlike other international organizations, Interpol does not list its former presidents on its official website. (This has now changed; they are now listed on the website.) There is good reason for this. Between 1940 and 1945, the organization—then known as the International Criminal Police Commission—was led, successively, by three Nazi war criminals: SS General Rienhard Heydrich, the chief architect of the Holocaust; SS General Arthur Nebe, who, as the head of Einsatzgruppe B was responsible for murdering tens of thousands of Jews in Poland and Belarus; and SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, founder of the Mauthausen concentration camp and one of the main instigators of the Holocaust, who was hanged at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity. It is a page in its history the International Criminal Police Organization would rather forget. Putin’s regime is no Third Reich—but his actions at home and abroad are a travesty to very concept of the rule of law….

At the same time as Kara-Murza was writing in the Washington Post, November 19, 2018, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was reporting on the same issue of a potential Russian president for Interpol. The piece is entitled, Ukraine Threatens to Suspend Interpol Membership If Russian Elected President. It reads in part as follows:

‘Russia’s possible presidency at Interpol is absurd and contradicts the spirit and goals of that organization,’ a Ukrainian Interior Ministry statement cited Avakov (Ukraine’s Interior Minister) as saying on November 19. Avakov had earlier warned that having a Russian at the helm of Interpol would pose a ‘hybrid threat to the whole world.’

Josh Jacobs, writing in The Guardian, October 17, 2021, in a piece entitled “Has Interpol become the long arm of oppressive regimes?”:

First mooted in 1914, Interpol was established in 1923, in large part to stop people from committing crimes in one country and fleeing elsewhere with impunity. The organization has been misused by oppressive regimes before-in 1938, The Nazis ousted Interpol’s president and later relocated in the organization to Berlin. Most countries withdrew and it ceased to exist as an international organization until after the second world war. The 194 member states support searches for war criminals, drug kingpins and people who have evaded justice for decades. Its red notices are seen as a vital tool and the closet thing to an international arrest warrant, leading to the location of thousands of fugitives each year. Red-notice* subjects have included Osama bin Laden and Saadi Gaddafi, the son of Libya’s former dictator. As criminals move around an increasingly interconnected world and terrorist incidents increased, the use of Interpol’s system has mushroomed. In the past two decades, red notices increased tenfold, from about 1,200 in 2000 to almost 12,000 last year. Alongside the growth of the most-wanted list, international legal experts say there has also been an alarming phenomenon of countries using Interpol for political gain or revenge-targeting nationals abroad such as political rivals, critics, activists and refugees. It is not known how many of the roughly 66,000active red notices could be based on politically motivated charge; Interpol does not release data on how many red notices it rejects…Seeking to manipulate Interpol is a feature of transnational repression, in which countries extend their reach overseas to silence or target adversaries…

The Guardian, on January 18, 2022 reports in a piece by The Associated Press, entitled, “Torture complaint filed against new president of Interpol.” Maj Gen Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi ‘was elected for a four-year term as Interpol president in November. He has been accused by human rights groups of involvement in torture and arbitrary detentions in the UAE…

So we are unable to contemplate any glimmer of hope that Interpol has either the capacity or the will even to issue a red notice on Putin, who has used the device multiple times to build the political ‘moat’ around the Kremlin. On March 3, 2022, Rachel Gilmore of Global News, reports, “Canada is calling for Russia’s membership in the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) to be suspended, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday. (Trudeau said) ‘We’re supporting this because we believe that international law enforcement co-operation depends on a collective commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and mutual respect between INTERPOL members.’

From the website, utkaltoday.com, we learn: In a major difference between the ICJ (International Court of Justice) and the ICC (International Criminal Court), the ICC has around 105 members. Some countries, like the US have never joined the ICC. The IJC has as its members all the members of the United Nations, which means around 193 countries

The territorial jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court is restricted to its member states.

We also note, sadly, as reported by the website www.ijc-cij.org, China, like  America and Russia is not a member of the ICJ.  (Also) The International Court of Justice has no jurisdiction to try individuals accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity. As it is not a criminal court, it does not have a prosecutor able to initiate proceedings.

So, the patterns of history continue to repeat, apparently. Nuremburg trials may have addresses individuals who committed gross crimes, war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, one can only guess that there are many reasons why international bodies, like the United Nations, are tilted in both their structure and their purpose toward humanitarian issues. Reining in a state terrorist like putin falls through the cracks of international legal and law enforcement agencies. Is this another of the multiple bows to national sovereignty that ham-string the Security Council, with five states having a veto over all attempts to neutralize actions and motives that are slaughtering, displacing, wounding and decimating the land, and the people of Ukraine?

This war is not restricted, either in its definition by the aggressor, nor in its  application by, for, and to the rest of the world, to a Russia-Ukraine conflict. Yesterday’s bombing of the NATO-deployed training facility only kilometers from the Ukraine-Poland border, is a blatant thumbing of the nose of the Russian czar, almost daring Biden, the United States and NATO to ‘take off the gloves’ as it were, and cross their own ‘red line’. Power-addicted maniacs, like alcohol and drug-addicted individuals, need their ‘fix’ and they will take whatever measures are needed to achieve their “medication”…in this case, the military, political, cultural and historical domination of a proud, creative, courageous and crumbling people and nation.

There is apparently, a broad base to the notion that only those actions that some legal framework considers out-of-bounds, contrary to the law, criminal, and prosecutable, can and will be prosecuted. We champion the ‘rule of law’ and as opposed to the law of the jungle, it is preferable. However, creating a snare/trap/definition/crime/law that is both expansive and highly sophisticated in its targeting, along with the resources needed to make such a law’s enforcement feasible and accountable, needs a geo-political culture that sees the nation-state players willing to concede that they are willing to enter into such a collaborative arrangement. The surrender of a portion of national sovereignty is a legitimate and reasonable price to pay for the people of the globe. Unfortunately, many leaders and governments are unwilling to pay such a price. And nationalism, including white supremacy, grows like a malignant and devouring monster.

History, however, like the swiftly flowing river it is, has offered multiple examples in the last several decades, that would point to the need for and the relevance of muscular international co-operation. And perhaps, beyond the headlines and the carnage, there are vibrations of hope over the longer term. Perhaps.

Yuval Noah Harari argues that what’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history, in The Economist, February 9, 2022. Harari writes: Contrary to popular misconceptions, the first clear evidence for organized warfare appears in the archeological record only 13,000 years ago. Even after that date, there have been many periods devoid of archeological evidence for war. Unlike gravity, war isn’t a fundamental force of nature. Its intensity and existence depend on underlying technological, economic and cultural factors. As these factors change, so does war. Evidence of such change is all around us. Over the past few generations, nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, forcing the most powerful nations on Earth to find less violent ways to resolve conflict. Whereas great-power wars, such as the second Punic war or the second world war, have been a salient feature for much of history, in the past seven decades there has been no direct war between superpowers. During the same period, the global economy has been transformed from one based on materials to one based on knowledge. Where once the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells, today the main source of wealth in knowledge. And whereas you can seize oils fields by force, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. The profitability of conquest has declined as a result. Finally, a tectonic shift has taken place in global culture. Many elites in history-Hun chieftains, Viking jarls and Roman Patricians, for example –viewed war positively. Rulers from Sargon the Great to Benito Mussolini sought to immortalise themselves by conquest (and artists such as Homer and Shakespeare happily obliged such fancies). Other elites, such as the Christian church view war as evil but inevitable. In the past few generations, however, for the first time in history the world became dominated by elites who see war as both evil and avoidable.

The question facing the world, both its peoples and its leaders, today, is whether or not this optimistic historical pattern is being challenged by putin’s aggressive war of acquisition, disruption and insurrection. If our hope is anchored among the Russian people, many of whom are being arrested while many more are fleeing their totalitarian homeland, we seem to be in another waiting game. The game to see whether peace negotiations can put and end to this before the slaughter of the Ukrainian people forces them to surrender, and the waiting game on whether the Russian people can and will summon the courage, the fortitude and the iconoclastic will to bring putin down before the numbers of their war protesters falls to a mere rump…both keep ticking their time-bomb implications before our eyes.

While truth’s demise is blaring from every screen and microphone, and the refugee numbers mount before our ears and eyes, the clock keeps ticking. And perhaps its inexorable tick-tock carries with it the beating of the human heart of compassion, empathy and eventually the humane lava-floe of Harari’s history.

  

*Abusive red notices are intended to send a menacing message; you may leave your country but you can still be punished.

We are all praying for silence and peace in Ukraine...

 Fiona Hill, former National Security Official in the U.S., tells any interviewer who will listen, ‘we are already in World War III.

In his twitter account, former chess champion, Russian-born Gary Kasparov writes:

This is already World War III. Putin started it long ago & Ukraine in only the current front. He will escalate anyway, and it’s even more likely if he succeeds in destroying Ukraine because you have convinced him you won’t stop him even though you could.…There is no waiting this out, This isn’t chess; there is no draw, no stalemate. Either Putin destroys Ukraine and eventually hits NATO with an even greater catastrophe, or Putin falls in Russia. He cannot be stopped with weakness….the price of stopping a dictator always goes up…if they  care so much about the fine print and think Putin does too, ask Zelensky to issue Ukrainian passports to any volunteer to fly in combat. Sell jets to Ukraine for I (Euro) each and paint UKR flags on them.

The cries from the street carry words like,

“You are using Ukraine as a shield to protect NATO countries” and

“Are you going to sacrifice Ukraine so NATO won’t have to go to war?”

Yesterday a maternity hospital was destroyed by a Russian bomb/missile, leaving a monstrous crater immediately adjacent to the building and dozens of pregnant mothers in trauma, if not death.

Crimes against humanity, committee by Putin, have mounted to more than 1000, according to the Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor, while the International Court of Justice is formally investigating Putin on a charge of committing war crimes.

War crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 19948: willful killing, torture or inhman treatment, including biological experiments, willful causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly…..intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population…against civilian objects which are not military objectives…attacking ro bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended…etc…(from the UN website)

Also from the UN website:

The 1998 Rome Statue establishing the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute), in Article 7, Crimes Against Humanity, reads:
Crime against humanity means any of the following as part of a widespread attack directed against any civilian population, with the knowledge of the attack: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment, torture, rape sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, enforced sterilization or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity, persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national ethnic, cultural, religions, gender …or other grounds, that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law…etc. (from UN website)


The significant difference between the ‘real time’ events of the carnage in Ukrainian towns and cities, and the gathering of evidence by Ukrainian and international prosecutors, however, leaves the people of Ukraine between a rock and a hard place…Here is another parallel process, whereby western and NATO leaders are pondering over the ‘fine print’ about avoiding an all-out military confrontation with Putin, while they generate a military ‘Marshall Plan’ to ‘support Ukraine in this fight…the politicians too caught between a rock and a hard place. And while volunteers from around the world are flying to Ukraine to fight on their behalf, and contributions of both medical and military materiel are flowing into Ukraine, the television screens are saturated with both blood and devastation.

 

In my worst nightmares, I never expected to be tapping the keys to print these words. I never anticipated the depths of depravity of a single human being, although crime and war stories, in history and in literary works, ought to have been adequate warning. Putting off, shoving out of mind and out of sight, and out of consideration, for the simple need to get on with whatever needed to be addressed in one’s own life… these are despair-saving or at least avoiding measures. And we all need and take them, consciously or not.

A Russian scholar, Amy Knight, appearing on npr, noted that putin’s greatest fear is that the openness, the freedoms, the opportunities and the culture of the western liberal democracies will come to Russia and leave no room for him and his regime.

The world knows that nothing will be the same after this war ends, no matter how it ends. Whether or not the kind of diplomatic parsing of Article 5 of the NATO charter, about whether or not a no-fly zone over Ukraine would trigger the Third World War, and whether or not such a strategy would even be effective against the

putin has to be stopped and the sooner he is stopped, the fewer lives will be lost, and fewer injuries will be inflicted, the fewer hospitals will be disabled, and the fewer towns and cities will have to resort to bomb shelters, underground caves and subway stations, as safe zones for those who have left. Also the sooner this carnage is brought to a halt, the sooner the refugee migration, now over 2 million, will cease, and the millions of lives that have already been tragically and permanently overturned will be able to begin to grieve, to mourn the inestimable losses and to even think about re-building their nation. We are all facing whatever prospects are to come.

Now, the travesty that confronts every person living on the planet cannot and will not be ignored or avoided, denied or devalued. And, if I were a betting man, I would sadly and despondently place my money on both Fiona Hill and Gary Kasparov, ahead of Biden, Johnston, Trudeau and Macron. Zelensky of Jewish origin, representing his country and the rest of the world, is unfortunately placed in a box in history: having to show leadership, inspiration, creativity and courage to his people, as well as to inspire the rest of the world to come to their aid, while being dubbed a neo-Fascist Nazi and also while having to remain safe and secure out of the range of Russian missiles and rockets and also while steering negotiations with a foe neither he not the rest of the world can or will trust.

 Betting on the Hill/Kasparov reality assessment that World War III has already begun, and that the fine print of Article 5 can be avoided by some kind of ‘end-run’ regardless of how putin responds, does not mean that NATO diplomats, The White House and the various government leaders from London, Paris, Berlin and Rome as well as Warsaw and Budapest, will do enough to provide the military victory that Zelensky and his countrymen and women seek.

In between, war and détente, in between Europe and North America, in between NATO and Russia, in between war crimes being committed and war crimes being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice, in between the facts on the ground (as disseminated by Zelensky and his countryfolk) and the Russia alternative reality (propagandized by putin and Lavrov)…in between the democracy of the west (regardless of its many and deep flaws) and the autocracy of Russia (with even more endemic and foundational inhumanities) in between yesterday and tomorrow…we are all on tenterhooks, including all of the participants. None of us has the insight, the power or the microphone to make a significant impact on the daily and hourly reports of bombs and missiles and roadblocks and tears. There are multiple ‘cooks in this broth’ so many that it is almost too complex for any single agency, government or army to keep up with the developments.

So, not only is truth on the slaughterhouse floor, so is the prospect for truth or any facsimile thereof to emerge after the slaughter ends. There can be little doubt that with 74 million Americans voting for a disgraced president who propagated lies from his first day in office to today, that this American tragedy has emboldened putin. If that many Americans can be seduced into stepping willfully and blindly into a cave of such profound and evident ‘alternative reality’ for whatever reason then why would putin not actually believe that his ‘alternative reality’ of Nazis running the government in Kyiv would ‘sell’ at home and around the world.

There is so much visceral energy extant tilting in the direction of supporting autocracies and China and India seem to be caught up in the swirling winds of that energy. They both abstain at the Security Council, rather than condemn Russia. And with Bejing leaning toward not neutrality but actual support for Russia, the world’s geopolitical stage, too, appears to be tilting in the direction of these two dictatorships. A Chinese reporter was embedded inside Russian soldiers, while telling the Russian ‘side’ of the story, to his Chinese audience yesterday. Erin Brunett’s Out Front, on CNN carried the story last evening.

It would seem that nuanced sophisticated calculations may be the snare that impales NATO and thereby Ukraine, while the millions of ordinary people around the western world are also ensnared in the same entanglement. And yet, without nuanced calculations, we might already have witnessed the first use of a nuclear weapon in wartime since World War II. It is hard not to put ourselves in the Oval Office at the time of President Truman, who faced the conundrum of having to decide whether or not to drop the first hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ostensibly, although not exclusively, to finally bring that war to an end.

The spectre of bringing this war to an end, while still a pale replica of the Great Wars of Europe in the twentieth century, confronts all of us, and especially those charged with leadership and decision-making, on the fly, in the midst of the death toll, and in the face of impending threats and rantings from the Kremlin.

Grace in the face of incredible pressure, that place where Hemingway found that one is at one’s life-edge, taut, highly sensitive to all of the pulsations of the moment and ready for the challenge….is it a masculine model of some kind of hero….and yet, this man’s writer nevertheless took his own life in 1961…

I heard someone say this week, “Now when I pray, I ask that this whole thing be over!” as if to ask God to bring an end to the pain we are all, especially Ukrainians, are going through. The fact that the Ukrainian Orthodox church seeks to break away from the Russian Orthodox church can hardly be a surprise to many of us in the west, after the Russian church endorsed the war and thereby the slaughter of innocent Ukrainians.

I pray that the needle can and will be threaded, so that real détente, from authentic individuals telling each other the whole truth, can and will bring some silence to the cacophony and the carnage.

Must the Hitler archetype wreak even more devastation that the original?

A human community... not just a human race!

 What is it about that a book, a poem, an essay, a person or even a single word will seem to drop into one’s lap, seemingly from out of nowhere, yet so significant ‘it’ cannot be either ignored or discounted?

Is it synchronicity, serendipity, mere chance, fate, or something else that has no name, identity or explanation? And similarly, what is it about that patterns of tragedy, like the litany of human tragedies that have beset the Kennedy family of Boston and Hyannisport, that, once again, have no apparent origin, no explanation no name, no identity and no comprehension?

So much space, time, ink and scholarship, as well as artistic expression, have been motivated by and directed to the stirrings of the human ‘heart’, whether that has included the medical as well as the psychological, spiritual and social. We develop strategies, philosophies, tactics and institutions to “teach” young people, as well as adults, about the mysteries of human existence. We anatomize, categorize, compare, measure, describe, inflate (for e.g. with electron microscopes) and then bounce our findings off the findings of others, in a highly sophisticated, highly disciplined, highly controlled and monitored highly defined professional process to search for whatever truth might emerge.

All the while we are engaged in these processes, we have to be aware that whatever the findings of our work, there will be more questions needing to be followed, with ever more sophisticated equipment and ever more nuanced equations and theories, all of them magnetic stars in search of ‘astronomers’ (researchers) to pursue.

It is the dramatic difference between that kind of rigorous pursuit of truth (scientific, empirical, positivist) and the pursuit of centuries of ramblings deep in, among and through the labyrinths of the human “relationship” with God, that begs many questions. Reading books by church fathers, speculating on the divinity of Christ, the significance of the parables, the stories of parting seas, and tablets from a mountaintop with “rules” to live by…these are all foundational to the pilgrimage of those who “seek God” to borrow a phrase from the founder of the Benedictine Order of monks.

Many stimuli lie at the root of such a motivation ‘to seek God’ including those less honourable, and less heroic and less moral and ethical that one might think. Some of those stimuli are deeply embedded in the proverbial ‘man lying in the ditch’ without hope, without friends, without energy and certainly without love. “When the world has ‘trashed’ me, where can I turn?” runs the phrase that serves as a nexus of thousands of transformations of lives that have ‘gone off the rails’ so to speak. Humans, generally, are highly reactive to stories of failure, unproductivity, meaninglessness and despondency that seem to have taken over a life without apparent cause or purpose. We number the homeless, as a blight on our clean and safe streets; we number the opioid overdoses and deaths, as another sign that ‘something is wrong’ in the lives of those men and women, and while we work diligently to help them ‘recover’ and regain consciousness in many cases, we are not fully able to discern the root of their affliction. Similarly, with the highly successful white-collar professional who extorts millions from clients, without apparent need, without apparent aberration or cause, we deploy complex resources to investigate the ‘crime’ and to bring such a person to ‘justice’ in the firm cultural conviction that such acts of investigation and ‘law enforcement’ will deter others from committing similar infractions of the legitimate rights of others.

We are a culture obsessed with searching and finding deviance, abnormalities, individuals who do not fit into the ‘normal’ definition of how humans are to behave in our safe and secure communities, to demonstrate, at least in part, that ‘we have things under control’. Because having things under control, as in banks that are not robbers, and lives that are not murdered, and women who are not preyed upon and attacked, and houses and businesses that are not destroyed by vandals or terrorists…these are all legitimate protections that we have built into the web of social protections.

And yet, as the weight of how we have structured our way of valuing humans, through hiring and wages commensurate with training, experience, contacts and references, we have abandoned thousands to the multiple ditches of despair. It has not been a conscious, willful and malicious ‘trashing’ of a targeted population (except perhaps in Canada, our indigenous populations and communities). We have not set up structures and institutions deliberately to cause people to stumble into ditches of desperation, or tunnels of torment. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands, and the numbers are growing, seem to be shoved aside, or they perceive that they have been shoved aside, given the statistical data.

To champion the “will” as Leni Reifenstahl entitled her triumphant film on Hitler, (Triumph of the Will) or as Ayn Rand has done in her several books by sacralizing the virtues of selfishness, and to nest that triumph in the most narcissistic, affluent and extravagant bed of luxuries ever available in human history, is inevitably going to generate two very different results…the highest number of billionaires in history, as well as the highest rate of homelessness in history. We too often speak about a bi-polar person, denigratingly, as if to indicate that such a person is ‘sick’ and thereby is rendered unemployable, unworthy of inclusion, and dispensible from the circles in which we engage. And yet, it would seen from this perspective, that we have fallen into the trap of generating a western culture that venerates success and disdains failure, as we define those outcomes.

The human will, while considerably powerful, cunning, creative and resourceful, is also vulnerable. And, if and when one’s will seems to have wilted, bent, or even broken, through any number of tragic traumas, some of them resulting from a commitment to ‘serve’ some cause or institution like the military, the church, or even the corporation, we discover the limits of our capacity to keep on keeping on. Those tragic traumas, war, divorce, death, firing, bankruptcy, corporate politics like out-sourcing, serious medical illness or accident….these are all an integral and potentially life-altering dynamic in an individual life, as well as in the life of a family, school, church, community…and taken together, these traumas are embedded in the cultural norms and perspectives and values we both wear and embody.

Those of you who prefer to see many of these traumas as avoidable, preventable and resulting primarily from personal weakness, rather than from forces beyond the scope of the individual, will already have conjured up your ‘nanny state’ argument against this ‘bleeding-heart’ rendition of human pain and tragedy. However, it is in the manner in which we establish our conventional norms, including institutional expectations of perfect loyalty, perfect compliance with the rules and regulations, the norms and the politically correct dictums that we all contribute to the unravelling of human hope and creativity and joyful participation.

Of course, there are now corporations and app’s that are dedicated to training and coaching how to “treat” workers in a humane and compassionate and empathic manner, in order to retain their loyalty and their compliance. More classical conditioning, the only human resource menu that warrants inclusion in too many budgets, is not going to generate the kind of ‘inclusion’ and ‘loyalty’ and engagement that all organizations need and desperately want. Transactional engagements, by definition are a guarantee of self-sabotage.

As we scurry about chasing after whatever problems we generate, individuals continue to be facing multiple conundrums about where, when, why and how to integrate into a culture that ironically champions the virtues of the rugged individual and watches millions fall out of the nest. However, these ‘birds’ are not mere babies, just learning to fly. These birds that fall out of the nest are grown adults facing a world in which political causes seem to have taken over the playing field in the public square. Those patterns of synchronicity and serendipity, as well as those of tragedy and trauma, both continue to have the force of underground rivers of social energy, similar to the underground floes of lava that rumble throughout time. Natural ebbs and floes, too, have their way of contributing to the gestalt of the ‘conditions’ humans absorb and attempt to cope with.

We seem to have developed zillions of ‘aids’ to address the conditions of nature, and the common cold, the sore back and the opaque eye lens, as well as the fractured femur, and the rusted car. And we have contributed human and financial resources to the issue of “protection” against emergent forces like terrorism, polio, the pandemic, and road rage.

What we have not done as well at is identifying those underground lava floes of the collective consciousness that comprise what we all know are compelling conditions that demand our shared, collaborative, consistent and formidable attention and creativity and taking shared steps to face them in the only manner that makes sense.

We cannot mediate, moderate or even slow the traumatic and existential force behind our own emissions of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at the individual level. Nor can we face the crisis of individuals who have floundered in inhospitable ‘seas’ of despair from medicating their pain with opioids on an individual basis. We cannot resolve the human proclivity for combat solely or even primarily at the individual level. And we cannot and will not resolve the questions of racism, sexism, ageism, dogmatic and fundamentalist, literalist and exclusionist belief, faith, or ideology, solely or primarily on the individual level.

Skimming the surface of our hardwiring as ‘social animals’ through networking, nepotism, character references, schmoozing, joining the ‘right’ clubs, living in and gating the ‘upper-class’ communities, attending and volunteering in our church community, or even writing cheques to the United Nations International Childrens’ Fund (UNICEF)….none of these serve as adequate surrogates for actually embracing the far more commanding and demanding, challenging and rewarding view of the blind spot in our culture: that we really are part of a single species that cannot escape some basic needs. This is not a political ideology in search of a political party. Nor is it an incipient religion seeking worshippers. It is not another corporation seeking sales and marketing. It is not a laboratory seeking research dollars, although God knows it needs far more attention including research, dissemination, pedagogy, as well as integration into what we call conventional truth and blessing. It is not an impediment, nor can it be glossed over because it is so obvious it needs no articulation, and no underlining. We are mutually inter-dependent, as well as intra-dependent, that we all need to live in some kind of moderate, modest and safe space, that we all have talents, skills, wisdom and compassion that, when shared, open doors of insight and invention, and when closed, leave millions abandoned to any of our various ‘crimes against humanity’…

That last phrase cannot be restricted to the legal definition any longer. It has to embrace how, for example:

§  the former U.S. administration pooh-poohed the pandemic, and

§  the current lethal, cold-blooded, inhumane invasion of Ukraine,

§  the breakdown of our acceptance, tolerance and embrace of a common set of facts, itself another weapon in what have become civil ‘wars’ of reality/truth/and shared hope

§  the tolerance of excessive greed, wild-west applications of corporate and personal behaviour that trample on all of the minimal protections we all need from each other

§  the massive sycophancy to military might, the alpha male, the institutions of green-broke hierarchies of management and supervision, and the theories and strategies and tactics that uphold these anti-deluvian dogmas

§  the submission of people too frightened to confront the abuse of power when we see it

§  the denial of shared, complicated data that not only illustrates but proves to any reasonable person, our complicit responsibility for the incubator, the greenhouse, and the battlefield that we all share.

We cannot and must not be seduced by the serendipities, nor eunuched by the traumas. We are not only the ‘victims’ of others; we are intimately related to all of those currently imprisoned, those suffering from the pandemic, those who have died from the pandemic, and those millions now scrambling literally to stay alive in the face of missiles and rockets and kalesnikoffs. Our fates, and our serendipities, our immediate gas bills and our food bills, are all tied directly and indirectly to the fates of those Ukrainians.

All of the tyrants, the unleashed varmints who believe that, “because I can do whatever they want I must,” need to be reined in. And nothing short of a global effort will even begin to tackle that file.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simon's answer to the question, "Do I believe in demons?" challenges us all to a renewal of epistemology

 In his book, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, Ed Simon, posits a “demonic poetics” as a potential language to ‘address’ the question of whether or not ‘he’ believes in demons.

There are, for Simon, 7 principles of Demonic Poetics, articulated in his essay on Lithub.com, February 23, 2022. They are quoted here:

1.     Whether demons exist or not, people’s experience of them absolutely exists.

2.     The de3monic is a network of metaphors, symbols, and images that define the diabolical; they shift and interact with each other in different ways across the centuries.

3.     3. As symbols, demons can mean variable and often contradictory things.

4.     There is no clear distinction between categories of the aesthetic and the occult, and demonic poetics is an interpretive frame that understands the literary and the magical as fundamentally the same thing

5. Some demons are always more symbolically ascendant in a given epoch.

6.     Demons exist at the crux of the transcendent, the numinous, the sublime; they are by definition evil, but they are also by definition an aspect of the sacred. There is a something at the core of being that encompasses both the divine and the diabolical, but our language to describe it is always contingent.

7.     A history of demonology is by necessity a history of the world.

From the beginning of human history, humans have spoken about, written about, and drawn on the walls of caves about creatures that exaggerated traits of goodness and beauty, as well as demonic and sinister forces. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, William Blake writes:

Rintrah* roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air/ Hungry clouds swag on the deep”

(*Rintrah is a character in William Blake’s mythology representing the just wrath of the prophet, first appearing in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

Karen Armstrong, in her book, The Case for God, writes:

In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking and speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos.  Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each has its own sphere of competence, and it was considered unwise to mxi the two. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logo was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment, improving old insights, or inventing something fresh. Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it has its limitations; it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or ‘myth’….In popular parlance, a ‘myth’ is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather, like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way. Myths have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. Myth has been called a primitive form of psychology. When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, of fighting monste4rs, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly8n influence our thought and behaviour. People had to enter the warren of their own minds and fight their own personal demons. When Freud and Jung began to chart their scientific search for the soul, they instinctively turned to these ancient myths. A myth was neve inte4nded as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that has in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time…..But a myth would not be effective if people simply ‘believed’ in it. It was essentially a program of action. It could put you in the correct spiritual or psychological posture, but it was up to you to take the next step and make the ‘truth’ of the myth a reality in your own life. The only way to assess the value and truth of any myth was to act upon it…..(Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, Knopf, New York, Toronto, p. xi)

“The Eden Story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. In Eden, Adam and Eve are still in the womb; they have to grow up, and the snake is there to guide them through the perplexing rite of passage to maturity. To know the pain and to be conscious of desire and mortality are inescapable components of human experience, but they are also symptoms of that sense of estrangement from the fullness of being that inspires the nostalgia for paradise lost. We can see Adam, Eve and the serpent as representing different facets of our humanity. In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition. Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions. The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life. Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm. The rabbis of the Talmudic age understood this perfectly. They did not see the ‘fall’ of Adam as a catastrophe, because the ‘evil inclination’ (yeytzer ha’ra) was an essential p[art of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements….The Eden story is not an historical account; it is rather a description of a ritual experience. It expresses what scholars have called the coincidentia oppositorum in which, during a heightened encounter with the sacred, things that normally seem opposed coincide to reveal an underlying unity. In Eden, the divine and the human are not estranged but are in the same ‘place’: we see Yahweh ‘walking about in the garden at the breezy-time of the day’; there is no opposition between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural,’ since Adam is animated by the breath of God himself. (Armstrong, op. cit. p.28-9)

Whether natural and supernatural, or good and evil were ever separated, is neither a mute question nor really warranting much debate. For our purposes, each half of the duality is an intimate and integral part of the other half.  Humans, it would seem, live on the razor’s edge that connects/separates them. And while the language of practical sense, (Frye’s Educated Imagination) uses words descriptively to “separate, and to divide’ and to analyse and to parse” the language of the imagination is essentially a language of bringing disparate things into unity. The deployment of metaphor, similar, personification literary devices, while not discussed as part of the vernacular of the public square, are the bridges that mirror and also ‘lamp’ both our ‘interior world and our exterior world, as well as their mutual inter-dependence. It is often repeated, by politicians, ‘we campaign in poetry and govern in prose’…And even that epithet is a reductionism, confining the process of selling themselves and their policies into a transaction to solicit votes, first by carefully crafted and even potentially seductive images, whereas the process of governing grapples with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of unemployment numbers, inflation numbers, pandemic cases, deaths and hospitalizations, deficit and debt numbers and Consumer price indices (CPI), GNP (Gross National Product)…etcIn Ancient Chinese philosophy, yin and yang (dark-light, negative-positive) is a concept that described how obviously opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another (Wikipedia)

In the west, currently primarily occupying a “logos” culture, deploying the alphabet STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as a social, cultural and pseudo-religious mantra, we are at risk of abandoning some of the inherent qualities of the numinous, the incomprehensible, the ineffable and the effable, And we risk not only abandoning those qualities, but of actually collapsing our “world view” into various files, programs, algorithms and formulae for which we may apply demonic names, evil spirit names, gods or dragons of infamy or the underworld.

Simon’s diligence and sensitivity in depicting, describing and denoting a demonic poetics, while extending many of the qualities of the ancient mythologies, is a contemporary and honourable and insightful and imaginative rendering of a detailed explication of his answer to the question of whether or not he believes in demons. Belief, in a time of drowning in correspondence theory epistemology, has become almost erased from our linguistic encyclopaedia. Just as truth has suffered decapitations from purveyors of political propaganda (trump, putin et al), so too has belief suffered from the slings and arrows of the anemic world view of literalists, and their dark-side counterparts, the denialists.

Poetics, whether of the demonic or of the sacred, has suffered too, from these waves of cultural deprivation. We are, together, complicit in a chemical scorched-earth campaign to leave little more than burned-out metallic corpses of a once-honoured and highly venerated linguistic tradition. I witnessed the decay of both the use of and the embrace of poetics inside the ecclesial structures of the last decades of the twentieth century on both sides of the 49^th parallel. Obsessions of money and sexuality, and their barnacles of dark-blood-sucking distortions, marched headstrong over those more balletic, empathic, and sylph-like attributes of the ethics and morality of forgiveness and transformation. Empty pews, coffers and the litany of empty-and-sold-off sanctuaries testify to the emptiness and the hollowness of multiple faith communities’ having fallen into the tidal wave and the whirlpools of secular, minimalist, and anemic language dark caves.

God, too has become another character in a transactional, empirical chess-board, to whom the question, ‘what have you done for me lately?’ is asked indiscriminately and vacuously. Of course, clouds of prayers are rising through the atmosphere on both side of the Atlantic, now that another Lucifer has unleashed the ‘dogs of war’ on another innocent, self-possessed and highly courageous and obviously deeply spiritual tribe, the Ukrainians. It is and can only be a vapid hope and empty dream of the Russian wannabe-czar that he would so seduce and rape and pillage and kill,  and then hope to embrace this tribe of men and women and children.

As Armstrong reminds us, myths, including their archetypal characters, do repeat throughout human history. And their relative proximity to, relationship to and incarnation of the best instincts and aspirations and subtleties or the worst, most contemptuous, sinister, hellish and demonic potential of the full range of human capacities, in extremis, will inevitably and invariably, capture our attention. Whether that attention emerges from an intellectual, a pedagogical, scientific or a spiritual world view, depends on our unique perspective. And whether that attention seeks to embrace or to avoid, or to welcome the incomprehensibility, as another of the humbling and real contextual currents in which we all swim, also depends on our comfort level with the space in the yaw of the waves between yin and yang, between heaven and hell, and between empirical truth and a method and process of enhancing our imagination to embrace our wholeness.

It is our capacity to be willing and able to embrace that which we do not know, and those things/imps/demons/spirits/angels/gods/ that will always escape our grasp,   and our cognition, that will continually remind us that the human spirit will never die….

Faulkner’s historic speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question, When will I be blown up/ Because of this, the young man or women writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat….It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the las red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound; that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking….I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Simon’s history of demonology is another honourable work, dedicated to bridging the gap between questions like “do I believe in demons?” and the full truth and reality of any response worthy of Simon, or any other writer who take the question seriously, sensitively and substantively. The human mind and spirit, like the question of demons and gods and myths and our relationship to them, whether through the lens of cognition, intuition, experience and/or emotion, will offer new glimpses of the rich complexities of both ourselves and our world.

Thanks to Simon for his profound insight and his provocative nudge into a wider, fuller, deeper and richer explication and understanding of the most mundane of questions. Would that such a mind and spirit were extant and scurrying around and through the corridors of the Capitol, the universities, and the churches and the corporate offices, including the Pentagon and the Kremlin.

Twiggy-like epistemology can only produce emaciated offspring and in the process starve us all on its own vapid fast-food.

This madness continues unabated....

 As shells rain down on the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, having been unleashed in an act of madness, reminiscent of Hitler, as one ten-year-old Ukrainian boy put it, and as Americans like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson  (and trump) laud the Russian czar wannabe, perhaps it is appropriate to note a pattern among men who have, consciously or not, squeezed themselves into a constricting mould, not of hero but of antihero.

The alpha male ought to be a legitimately endangered species, as exemplified by some of these men. From The Guardian , October 10, 2016, in a piece entitled, “Do alpha males even exist?” Dean Burnett writes:

“An alpha male intimidates, he’s unquestionably in charge, no matter what the situation. AN alp0ha male is loud, brash, doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. An alpha male says what he wants, does what he wants, wears what he wants, as long as those clothes are roomy enough in the trousers to accommodate his gargantuan gonads and don’t dissolve in response to all the testosterone constantly leaking from his pores….It’s as is the idea of being qan alpha male is very reassuring to those who lack confidence and are scared by the wider world and people in it, so want to turn the tables….Maybe the supposed human alpha male is a combination of disgruntled male wish-fulfilment and borderline-pseudoscientific justification for resorting to bullying intimidation and generally all-round unpleasant behaviour by men hope to impose their will on a world they find too complex and unnerving so revert to their baser instincts to get what they want, despite knowing deep down they don’t deserve it and shouldn’t have it.”

From the website, greatergood.berkeley.edu, in a piece about the comparison of the alpha and beta male archetypes: “As the expression goes, when all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails.” In our context, if all putin has is weapons and compliant soldiers and Foreign Affairs and national security ministers, then all he will see are enemies to be dominated and manipulated.

In a March 15, 2017 piece in The Atlantic, entitled, “What’s so American about John Milton’s Lucifer (from Milton’s Paradise Lost)?” Edward Simon writes:

Milton’s Lucifer can be read as a kind of modern, American antihero…Many of the values the archangel advocates in Paradise Lost—the self-reliance, the rugged individualism, and even manifest destiny—are regarded as quintessentially American in the cultural imagination….What Milton’s Paradise Lost…also demonstrates is what can be so dangerous about mistaking an antihero for a hero….Milton’s Lucifer is neither bestial, a reptilian Other nor the goofy incompetent of a medieval morality play; rather he’s a conflicted, brooding, alienated, narcissistic self-mythologizer. In other words, he’s a thoroughly modern man….Much as Lucifer invades Eden like the frontiersman who moved further west, he is also capable of justifying his actions with the most exalted of language. Milton writes, But all was false and hollow; though his tongue/ Dropp’d manna, and could make the worse appear / The better reason…..Lucifer’s famous assertion that ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heaven. Lucifer is not just a rebel, but also a character who has tricked himself ( and many of his post Romantic readers) into believing his very words can generate reality. Lucifer’s line is a pithy and dark summation of the American credo of self-invention….But as Lucifer discovered in his rebellion against heaven, extreme self-invention inevitably leads to the ultimate form of alienation: a radical distance from God and from fellow humans.

Is it not reasonable to connect the dots between Lucifer, trump, Hitler and putin….given their shared attempt to reinvent both themselves and their world, irrespective of the carnage and slaughter and dismemberment and devastation they have rained and currently rain down on other human beings?

One of the most pathetically ironic aspects of the current situation in Ukraine is the absolutely hollow intonation by putin that Ukrainians and Russians are brothers, while he slaughters ‘his’ very own brothers in his manic and mad dash to plant himself in history as the Russian wannabe czar who restored Russia to a former greatness. And then, also pathetically ironic, to utter the contemptible assessment that Ukraine, led by a Jewish president, is ruled by neo-Nazi fascist nationalists…one has to ‘spit’ the words from one’s mouth, they are so abhorrent.

 

Turning the world upside down and eviscerating what has passed for ‘world order’ for nearly three-quarters of a century, is nothing short of a new theatrical, political, military and unbridled  Lucifer loosened himself from all constraints that would, could, should and must apply to human of beings intent on co-habiting with the rest of humanity.

What putin is doing, and seemingly luxuriating in the doing, is not only vicious, venal and lethal, bereft of all morality, ethics, and decency. It is also so abhorrent that no one really wants to contemplate, again. It is an unpalatable reminder, echo and thundering cacophony of the Third Reich. This war which they rest of us watch, read, listen to and cringe at bring us face to face again with the horrible spectre of what humans are capable of and willing to do to other human beings, for their own narcissistic ends.

 

Mistaking an anti-hero for a hero is not exclusive to the United States. The mistake is also ‘manifest destiny’ in many other places, where Lucifer’s are rising out of the dust of public squares where the levers of power and authority have devolved into vaults of cash, and coteries of wimp sycophants.

Greed, especially unfettered and unleashed, is not only “not good”; it is lethal. Ambition unfettered by counsel, compassion and moderation is self-alienating as well as self-annihilating. However, the price that others have to pay for such unfettered greed and ambition, twins never yet separated from each other, is inordinate.

While the ‘west’ is busily engaged in providing military materiel.

 From Euronews 04/03/2022 by Thoman Duthois:

The EU would finance the purchase and delivery of arms to Ukraine totalling 450 million euros, the very first time the European Union (is) providing military equipment to /Ukraine.

Germany has broken its long-standing foreign policy of banning  all exports of lethal weapons…and will deliver1,000 anti-tank rocket launchers, 500 stinger surface-to-air missiles, nine Howitzers, 14 armoured vehicles and 10,000 tonnes of fuel to Ukraine.

Sweden, also breaking with its neutral stance, announced that it would deliver anti-tank weapons to Kyiv.

France has committed equipment and support.

(The) Belgian government promised 2000 machine guns, 3,800 tons of fuel, 3,000 additional automatic rifles and 200 anti-tank weapons.

Portugal has offered…bulletproof vests and helmets, night vision goggles, grenades and ammunition of various calibres.

The Czech Republic is sending 30,000 pistols, 7,000 assault rifles, 3,000 machine guns, and several dozen sniper rifles as well as one million round of ammunition.

Romania is providing fuel, body armour, helmets, ammunition and other military equipment. Bucharest has announced that eleven Romanian military hospitals are prepared to receive Ukrainian wounded.

The US announced a new 350 million Euro package of military aid, bringing the total military aid from Washington to Ukraine over the past year to a total of nearly One Billion Euros.

Canada is sending military protective equipment such as helmets and bulletproof vests but also anti-tank weapons systems and upgraded ammunition.

Finland announced a historic policy shift to send weapons to Ukraine, promising 2,500 assault rifles, 150,000 rounds of ammunition, 1,500 rocket launchers and 70,000field rations.

Denmark announced it would be sending 2,700 anti-tank weapons and would let Danish volunteers join International Brigades forming in Ukraine to defend the country.

Norway already announced…shipments of helmets and bulletproof vests, it would also be sending 2,000 M72 anti-tank weapons.

Croatia is sending 16 million euros worth of protective gear and light arms.

Slovenia has promised rifles, ammunition and helmets.

Italy has announced it will send military equipment but has not disclosed details yet.

On the humanitarian side, there will be estimated 4 million refugees anticipated by the UNHCR, to flee Ukraine and flow west into neighbouring countries.

From WCVB.com, a list of some humanitarian organizational helping Ukrainians during crisis:

Ukrainian Red Cross will use funds to help those in need..as well as paying for blood collection efforts; mobilization of volunteers and resources, and emergency activities.

The International Committee of the Red Cross

UNICEF…health, nutrition, HIV prevention, education, safe drinking water, sanitation and protection

International Rescue Committee

Save the Children

UN Refugee Agency

Sunflower of Peace. .collecting non-perishable medical supplies, including bandages, Neosporin, Aspirin, ibuprofen, and other supplies as well as batteries and flash lights

Keep Ukraine’s media going…fundraise to help media relocate, set-up back offices, and continue operations

Keep the Kyiv Independent going.. to bring trusted, important information about facts on the ground during the conflict

Pavlotsky family GoFundMe….

And from today.com:

Global Empowerment Mission, in Poland using donations to buy refugees train and plane tickets to help them reach family or friends

Globalempowermentmission.org

World Central Kitchen WCK.org

Global Giving Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund

Razom for Ukraine…helping Ukraine pursue a democratic society that has civil rights for all

The latest reports have putin taking western voices off the air, such as Voice of America, and also the Duma has passed a law that would see fifteen-year prison sentences for anyone in Russia found guilty of using words like “war” and “invasion” to describe the Russsian military ‘invasion’ of Ukraine. No doubt other western news outlets will eventually be impacted by a regime so terrified of the truth, especially the truth of its own commission and omission.

The BBC, for example, has resorted to providing 4 hours daily of what they call ‘short-wave’ broadcasts of the Russian invasion, because this outlet too has been suspended by putin.

 Now waking up in the Orwellian world where ‘war is peace’ and ‘brothers are enemies’ and neo-NAZI fascists are used as ghost enemies operating the Ukrainian government, according to the Russian dictator, in what we all hope is the sunset of the first pandemic in a century, while the toxic carbon and methane emissions continue to spew into the atmosphere, and the price of gas spirals out of control, along with the price of ordinary food items, with little hope of even a slight moderation of these developments, can only evoke what our parents and grandparents were going through back in the 1940’s.

However, there was no 24-7-365 real time reporting of events, deaths, criminal investigations and refugee migrations.

It is hitting us all in the face, moment by moment, demanding that we actually turn away, find a sports game, or even a Hallmark movie as an antidote.

This is madness!