A Dyke A Broad #73 Ukraine
Report and photos from Saturday's demo in Paris against the Russian invasion, and what's at stake for Europe.
Hello from Paris!
Saturday, I went to another demo for Ukraine (Scroll down for photos). It started at Place de la République, but turned into a giant march to the Bastille where they had a lot of speakers. Ukrainians of course, but also Chechens and Georgians and Russians and French. All of them hammered home the point that, “Ukraine is Europe,” and “if Ukraine falls Europe will fall.” Because even those countries who don’t care that Putin seems intent on exterminating every Ukrainian civilian who resists, a successful Putin won’t stop there and everybody will get dragged in.
I’ve noticed that many Americans of the left prefer to ignore these realities and instead apply their increasingly myopic, reductive lens of race to the war, declaring that if African students faced racism as they fled Ukraine, then the European support of Ukraine, and welcome for Ukrainian refugees, must be for the trivial reason that they’re all white. But if whites are so supportive of each other, then why is Russia bombing Ukraine? Why is European history inexplicably full of “white” people trying to kill each other? Why was one target of an anti-immigrant wave in France the dreaded Polish plumber come to take their jobs?
The American racial lens is worse than irrelevant here, it’s blinding. If you want to understand European support for Ukraine you have to look towards geopolitics—that complicated mess of land, culture, power, and history.
It is Europe that hosted the bulk of World War I and II. The Soviet empire with its far-flung gulags, its mass deportations and other atrocities. Where wars between England and France for control of land or sea, and wars of religion dragged on, not for decades, but for centuries. Catholics slaughtering protestants. Protestants slaughtering Catholics. Everybody yearning for empire: Brits, Ottomans, Napoleon, Prussians, Imperial Russia and its Soviet successor—hundreds of years of ambition and slaughter culminating in Adolf Hitler and Stalin.
In France, World War II isn’t history, it’s memory woven into our lives. It’s just a couple hours from Paris to the D-Day beaches of Normandy and the nearby cemeteries. There are unexploded bombs all over France. Just last week some builder discovered a giant one that required the evacuation of a whole town. There are cemeteries of war dead in Paris, too, and plaques everywhere. On schools, they remind us that Jewish children were taken to concentration camps. On apartment buildings they honor resistance members who were shot dead or deported.
Some people don’t need the memento mori. The mother of a friend of mine is still haunted by going with her family to the countryside as a small child during the war. They were supposed to be safer than in Paris. One day her father went out and never returned. It was rumored Nazis shot him. Another day she saw a bloody corpse in the street, a man killed in retaliation for something, everyone in the village too afraid to move the decaying body for several days.
Europeans of a certain age remember how Hitler began by nibbling here, nibbling there, then gobbling up land until he bit off more than he could chew—in Russia, in fact. If Putin had had an easy victory in Ukraine, he’d do the same in reverse. And then, if Putin touched any EU (or NATO) member, they’d be obligated to enter a full-scale war after so many decades of peace.
Nobody wants that. Or to relive the Cold War. Which implicates Americans. Increasingly isolated, Putin is replaying Soviet history and turning towards Latin America. Is it time to prepare for a Cuban missile crisis redux?
And of course none of the former Soviet Bloc countries want to be gobbled up, again. At the demo, a speaker from Chechnya, already a victim of insatiable Russia, said that if they supported Ukraine it was because they had fresh memories of life under totalitarianism. It’s increasingly clear Putin’s decided to rival Stalin in both atrocities and paranoia. They remember. They remember all the tyrants that came after. What it was like to be afraid of the knock on the door. Afraid of speaking above a whisper. People were still desperate to cross the Iron Curtain right up until the minute the Berlin wall fell in 1989. My Czech pal Lutzka, now in San Francisco, was in a refugee camp while I was sulking in a nice suburban house in Kentucky. She wants you out on the streets, or at least donating to refugee organizations.
So if you’re trying to understand why Europe is opening its arms, at least right now, to Ukrainian refugees, that’s why. The fear of an all-out war, its devastation. But especially the hatred and fear of totalitarianism after a taste of freedom. One speaker, a furious woman from Georgia who’d been made a refugee at the age of 12 by a war with Russia and massive expulsion of ethnic Georgians, was practically screaming into the mic at Bastille with anguish and rage that it was happening again. “Putin can’t stand it,” she said, “Every time some country in Russia’s orbit makes a move towards freedom and democracy he steps in. That’s why we have to fight back,” she said. “Do everything we can for Ukraine.”
We aren’t. We are slowing Russia down with major sanctions, but actually doing very little to defend Ukraine. The country is being bulldozed, emptied out by bombs. At the march, I met a Ukrainian woman who has barely been able to drag herself out of bed since the Russian invasion started 12 days ago. The first thing she does every day is call her mother back home to see if she’s still alive. At this point, it’s almost as dangerous to leave. Putin keeps bombing corridors that were supposed to be safe for refugees.
Even if Russia miraculously withdrew tomorrow (they won’t), it’s already a humanitarian disaster.
Before this started, Ukraine had a population of 44.13. The bombing has been so terrible, sending so many people across the border, there might eventually be 7 million refugees —almost a third of their country—in exile. I read that the vast majority of residential buildings have already been damaged. That means most of the 37 million people who remain won’t have decent shelter next winter, not to mention right now. Food will be scarce. There’s little infrastructure left. There’s no water, no electricity. It’s like Haiti four times over, faced with hurricane Putin, devastation on a scale we can barely imagine.
I can’t stand looking, but to look away and do nothing, say nothing, is monstrous.
I’m Reading…
Masha Gessen’s The War that Russians Do Not See
“…the world view shaped by Russian television: “Russia is a victim, as it has been ever since the Second World War. The West aims to establish world domination. Its ultimate goal is to humiliate Russia and take possession of its natural resources. Russia is forced to defend itself.” Days before the full-scale invasion began, the Levada Center asked Russians who they thought was responsible for the mounting tensions in Ukraine. Three per cent blamed Russia, fourteen per cent blamed Ukraine, and sixty per cent blamed the United States.”
Every day I check Facebook to see if a colleague in Kyiv is still alive. Olena Shevchenko offers her daily report.
…People are going mad around me, trying to get to the trains, pushing out those who are weaker and can’t fight for places. Huge crowds of people, who are trying to buy food or medicines. People just want to survive
I think it’s a disaster for my country and it’s a disaster for me personally.
How can it be real? Why are people in 21st century dying in shops, where they just wanted to buy food, in their houses, on the streets? Just because some people decided they want to put their flag on another country? They are ready to destroy everything for what? For imagined victory?! What does this “victory” means?! What is the fucking sense in it? What is this all about?!
Ukraine’s Jewish history is filled with trauma. But while the past is prologue, it’s not destiny
Many immigrant groups in America — including those with roots in Ireland, Japan and Mexico — take pride in the lands they or their ancestors lived in before migrating to the new world. For Jews, the matter is different. Many a pizzeria proudly flies an Italian flag. Very few bagel shops fly a Polish flag or a Ukrainian one. Though my family has always identified as proudly Litvish, meaning that we come from areas where the Litvish dialect of Yiddish was spoken, but I cannot recall any of that pride being set aside for the nations of Belarus or Lithuania.
These were lands we left for good reason.
But they were also the lands where our families lived and our history happened. They are where our ancestors were born and buried, even if — too often — in mass or unmarked graves. Seeing that land bombed and invaded evokes a difficult sensation that deserves to be sorted through.
Essential Reading On Twitter
An essential thread on the war in Ukraine by @PhillipsPOBrien Professor of Strategic Studies, University St Andrews.
Photos from Saturday’s Demo
That’s it for this time,