Damage in Donetsk region under control of pro-Russian separatists, eastern Ukraine, Feb. 28, 2022. (Stringer/Anadolu)
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot once noted. Americans, especially, have what the historian Louis Hartz called a “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” But we can’t afford any willed innocence about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin has reduced Russia to a failed state that runs on thuggery, cyber-piracy, gas and war, and all this has been getting cover from Putin’s longtime sycophant Donald Trump and his Republicans, not least through the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference. Putin must be stopped by force, and his American apologists must be thoroughly discredited, much as Hitler and Mussolini and their American apologists and collaborators were, even if doing so requires pain and sacrifice from the rest of us.
What T.S. Eliot called “very much reality” doesn’t stop there.
Putin has suggested that Russian forces will round up and kill anyone who resists the invasion. He is trapped in the past, mourning the Soviet Union’s collapse, whose redress, he believes, will be his legacy to Russia. It isn’t hard to imagine Russian soldiers collecting Ukrainian resisters, including civilians in street clothes who’ve fired guns or threw Molotov cocktails at Russian troops, and massacring them on Putin’s orders.
Soviet soldiers did precisely that, on Joseph Stalin’s orders, in April and May of1940, when they massacred nearly 22,000 Polish army officers, police, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests and left them in mass graves. (Many of the victims were Ukrainians and Jews, including the chief rabbi of the Polish Army.)
Of course it’s true that most mass killings in Eastern Europe in that period, including the horrific massacres in Kharkiv now Ukraine’s second-largest city, were committed not by Russians but by the German occupiers after 1941. It’s also true that many in the Soviet republics, such as Ukraine and the Baltic countries, welcomed the Germans at first as their liberators from the Soviet boot, and that many of their citizens collaborated with them in murdering Jews.
Photos taken by the Nazis in Ukraine in 1941 to document what they and some Ukrainians were doing, too horrifying for me to display here, can be seen easily enough at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. We don’t know whether Putin could do anything similar to Ukrainian resisters.
I admit to being sensitive about this. Although my Lithuanian-Jewish grandparents came to America in 1909, they had siblings, cousins and elders who were terminated in 1941, in much the same way as the mass killings in Ukraine.
In 2002, I went to the sites where they’d been slaughtered, and I stood in a Lithuanian Jewish State Museum reading English translations of Nazi Einsatzgruppen reports about Lithuanians who worked with and for the Nazis. “Work” like that was done throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, as recounted in the historian Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands” and in Jan and Irena Gross’ “Golden Harvest,” the latter showing how thousands of Poles raided the homes of Jews who’d been taken to slaughter, even extracting gold fillings from the teeth of the corpses.
The Einsatzgruppen documents report that some Lithuanians got drunk even while machine-gunning their victims under German supervision because they didn’t “like the work” and wanted to dull their pain and disgust. A few even went AWOL.
I abhor what Putin is doing and threatening to do, and support Ukrainians’ truly heroic resistance to it. They’re also redeeming their country from part of its past by standing with a president who happens to be Jewish.
But I can’t forget — and dread any renewed possibility — of the “very much reality,” mentioned by Eliot, that’s depicted in photos that perhaps we can’t bear to see but no willed innocence of mind can prevent. Read the lines below from W.H. Auden, who felt it all coming in 1939, and then a few lines from me about an arresting moment I experienced in Berlin on Holocaust Memorial Day, more than a decade ago.
From W.H. Auden, “Ode to W.B. Yeats,” January 1939:
All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
To solace myself, I add some lines of my own, first published by the Washington Monthly in 2018. Some of it may appear outdated, but not by much.
Donald J. Trump isn’t a Nazi, although his father came close. It’s true that historical analogies between Trump’s policies and Hitler’s are often facile, and sometimes dangerously misleading. But here’s one that I’m not inclined to shrug off.
During a long stay in Berlin in 2009, I went often to the Grunewald railway station to have my coffee. It’s a picturesque little station, built in the 1899, fronted by a cobblestone square and surrounded by splendid, well-preserved villas of that period.
It’s also the point from which more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to concentration camps, a few hundred a week, from 1942 to 1945. At the station’s Track 17, a steel strip along the platform edge records, in raised letters, each week’s shipment of several hundred “Juden” to Theresienstadt, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, Łódź and, later, directly to Auschwitz and other death camps.
It’s hard for most Americans, especially those of us whose parents fought in World War II, to imagine that people who boarded the trains had no idea of what lay ahead. Yet, although Jews had been vilified and some attacked on the streets since 1938, some things remained unthinkable to Berlin Jews, most of whom had been middle-class, law-abiding citizens since birth. They showed up at station on the appointed dates, children and luggage in tow, for what they’d been told would be deportation to resettlement and work centers. At worst, they expected something like what Japanese-Americans experienced in internment camps on our own West Coast during the same war.
Under the watchful eyes of German police, they took their seats in ordinary passenger coaches for many of these departures. Only later, far beyond Berlin, were they transferred to box cars. Sometime after that, postcards they hadn’t written were sent to relatives or acquaintances whom they’d listed with the authorities, assuring them that all was well in their new locations.
One day in April of 2009, as I sipped my coffee at the Grunewald station alongside retirees in their 70s and near a beer-garden where younger Germans also overlooked the square, three police cars swept in and officers leapt out, commanding us, “Don’t Move.” Then approximately 45 young military officers in formal parade dress descended from a tourist bus. Their uniforms were attractive, but alien—clearly not German. As they milled about, one of the men seated near me asked a police officer, “Was is das?”
“Israelis,” he answered. They were Israeli army officers.
A silence descended upon the square like nothing I’d ever felt, so thick you could have cut it with a knife. Not another word was spoken, but I thought that I sensed three dimensions in the quiet all around me. The first was straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “They’re here. They’ve come.” The second was of admiration, or at least respect, for these vibrant young officers, stunning negations of the image of “Juden” that some of these older men must have remembered from their infancy. The third dimension, I sensed from the tightened body language around me, carried a flicker of resentment at having to be reminded, instead of being left to sip one’s coffee in peace.
A black car with tinted windows ascended a ramp toward Track 17. The Israeli officers fell into formation and followed. They’d come to lay a wreath on Track 17 on Yom Ha’Shoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ironically, I hadn’t remembered the day myself.
I recount this now because some Americans remind me of Berlin Jews who didn’t think the unthinkable when they should have. After watching the Trump administration tear apart weeping parents and children—on the initiative of its senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who’s Jewish—I’m thinking that although Trump has now found it politically expedient to halt the practice, more than a few of my fellow Americans were thinking, “Well, they deserve it, unlike me, a law-abiding citizen, and a veteran.”
Those Berlin Jews had been law-abiding citizens, too, at least until 1935, and more than a few were military veterans: Some 12,000 of the Jews who had served in the German military had fallen in World War I. In an irony beyond ironies, it was a Jewish lieutenant, Hugo Gutmann, who secured an Iron Cross, First Class, for a 29-year-old corporal under his command, Adolph Hitler.
We now know that German veterans of that war, Jews and non-Jews alike, were lied to and sent into harm’s way for no good reason. So were soldiers in the Nazi Wehrmacht 25 years later, whom my father, a corporal in the U.S. Army Combat Engineers, was ordered to supervise as prisoners as his 277th battalion clanked across northern Germany, because he spoke Yiddish, which is closely related to German.
He did it with mix of grief and revulsion. One day, when his battalion commandeered a Nazi-friendly baron’s estate in the town of Hohne, my father and others scouted a cottage behind the mansion and found a white-haired, well-spoken man who said he was a caretaker but whom the G.I.’s suspected was closer to the missing baron. As some of them prodded him down the hill toward the mansion, jabbing him roughly with their rifle barrels, my father said, suddenly, almost instinctively, “Cut that out.”
“Why? You should enjoy this Sleeper, you’re a Jew.”
“Cut it out, I said.” He had no illusions about Nazism. But he was a young American, emancipated from his ancestors’ European hell, and he thought he was fighting for a world better than one in which the tables of unjust power are merely turned, a world where justice—dare one say, “due process”?—is stronger than revenge.
Watching the fires that Trump is stoking week in, week out, I wonder when his supporters and enablers will see that the unthinkable could happen to them. I’m not inclined to alarmism, but what if, a couple of years from now, veterans who say they fought for an America where people are free to speak their minds decide to speak their own minds in ways Trump doesn’t like? How far might this admirer of Vladimir Putin go against Americans he thinks are his enemies? He’s already said that he wants to tighten libel laws; his ICE agents have developed arrest-and-detention tactics that a craven Congress would let him expand with the stroke of a pen; municipal police forces are more militarized than ever before.
Yes, historical analogies are risky. But, sipping coffee overlooking the Grunewald station’s charming cobblestone square, you’d never imagine what happened there if you hadn’t been told.
Agreed. I wonder why anyone who’s had a liberal education (or who pretends to have had one) has fallen for Trump’s lies and corruption, even though, unlike your average Republican Senator, most Trump believers have gained little from flip-flopping with him so slavishly, unless it’s the psychic boost they thought they were gaining from demonizing and scaring feckless liberals. Yes, some liberals are feckless. (Don’t get me started!) But there has to be more to life than “correcting” or “owning” them, especially when doing so actually narrows the horizons and wellbeing of Trumpists.
Something similar has happened quite often in modern times, not least, of course, in Nazi Germany, which Kingman Brewster toured in 1937 — https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/01/27/sleeper-dogmatism-and-truth/ — but also with American McCarthyism: the same tawdry, angry, exaggerated lies, the same demands from millions of stressed, distressed people that they be lied to because they crave simple, emotionally satisfying narratives that tell them who to scapegoat and who to follow.
Such eruptions sometimes achieve a fleeting brilliance, as Sarah Palin did before people got a good look at her; but sooner or later they collapse, tragicomically or catastrophically, on their own ignorance, brutality, and lies. No American, and certainly one who had the privilege of going to Yale, should fall for it. (End of jeremiad.)
America must step forward and do what’s right – protect the victims of Putin’s abuse. We must reestablish our role as a force for good in the world. There can be no excuse or justification for us to stand by and let this continue for another day.
Even though we all lived through the horrors of war in Vietnam, I have to agree in this case…this is outrageous, Hitlerian indeed. Putin’s comments about “Nazification” of Ukraine are ironic in the extreme. As has been said, now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of their country… and the world. Of course, what we are to do besides sanctioning the hell out of Russia is a very good question for debate. Sad and scary stuff.
Agreed, once again, except perhaps for ever putting the words “brilliant” and “Palin” in the same sentence! As you say, so much of this has been seen before, unfortunately. I lived for a while in France, and the opinions of my French friends about American politics, are, to say the least unprintable. During the Trump era they were incredulous, but they also told me they were not surprised since we often vote like idiots. Their favorite descriptive word would have to be “merde” On the other hand, an email I got today from once of my savviest French buddies was, mainly, sad about the state of the world, both our politics (but they kinda like Biden), and the tyrants like Putin and his admirer, The Donald. And unfortunately, not even everyone who had the kind of education which we were so lucky to have is not an idiot either….Loved the jeremiad, by the way.
I can’t recall where I first learned that the French regard Americans as “les grands enfants,” but it’s hard to argue that they’re wrong. The only counter to it came from Winston Churchill, who said something to the effect that (I’m not bothering to look it up; maybe someone has it at the top of your head), Americans can be counted on to get things right, but only after their myopia has screwed everything up.
What’s happening in the Ukraine is frightening and horrific. I can’t help but think that Putin’s decision is the act of a madman. Surely, the Russian intelligence service isn’t so inept that it utterly missed the depth of Ukrainian nationalism or the real possibility of unity among Western democracies to impose draconian sanctions. If it did miss those things and gave Putin a green light without reservations, then we have a lot more to worry about. Assuming the intelligence service is half-assed competent and cautioned Putin, then he is a madman for lurching forward well aware of the high risks. Now that the gauntlet has been thrown down and news coverage is in real time showing the horrific damage Putin has ordered and the remarkable courage of the Ukrainians – to lay down their lives for their country, it’s hard to imagine Western democracies backing down. I mean…who could look at themselves in the mirror griping about paying a bit more for gasoline when Ukrainians are willing to give up their lives! Russia will be a pariah state internationally so long as Putin leads. The only way out for Russia is to get rid of Putin. The Russian state may be let off the hook in due course but Putin surely will not.
Agreed. Putin did underestimate Western reaction on the scale we’re seeing now. I just hope that the resolve isn’t just temporary and for show. There are ways to keep squeezing Russia into humiliation, internal rebellion, and withdrawal, but only IF we and Europeans are prepared to endure a lot of sacrifice. I’m thankful that spring is approaching; otherwise, a lot of people in the West could be uncomfortably cold, and even in the meantime they’ll be paying sky-high prices to travel.
Thank you. How sad it is that we’ve been reduced to dreaming about a victory against this mad dog. Who knows whether the West can get beyond symbolic or half-effective gestures and begin to shut down Russia’s economy, even if that means that some Westerners (especially Germans) will have to sit around campfires next winter instead of heating their homes and – – horror of horrors — many Americans will be unable to go very far by car after they see the prices at gas pumps.
I am not at all surprised by Trump and his minions. Horrified but not surprised…
Agreed. I wonder why anyone who’s had a liberal education (or who pretends to have had one) has fallen for Trump’s lies and corruption, even though, unlike your average Republican Senator, most Trump believers have gained little from flip-flopping with him so slavishly, unless it’s the psychic boost they thought they were gaining from demonizing and scaring feckless liberals. Yes, some liberals are feckless. (Don’t get me started!) But there has to be more to life than “correcting” or “owning” them, especially when doing so actually narrows the horizons and wellbeing of Trumpists.
Something similar has happened quite often in modern times, not least, of course, in Nazi Germany, which Kingman Brewster toured in 1937 —
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/01/27/sleeper-dogmatism-and-truth/ — but also with American McCarthyism: the same tawdry, angry, exaggerated lies, the same demands from millions of stressed, distressed people that they be lied to because they crave simple, emotionally satisfying narratives that tell them who to scapegoat and who to follow.
Such eruptions sometimes achieve a fleeting brilliance, as Sarah Palin did before people got a good look at her; but sooner or later they collapse, tragicomically or catastrophically, on their own ignorance, brutality, and lies. No American, and certainly one who had the privilege of going to Yale, should fall for it. (End of jeremiad.)
America must step forward and do what’s right – protect the victims of Putin’s abuse. We must reestablish our role as a force for good in the world. There can be no excuse or justification for us to stand by and let this continue for another day.
Even though we all lived through the horrors of war in Vietnam, I have to agree in this case…this is outrageous, Hitlerian indeed. Putin’s comments about “Nazification” of Ukraine are ironic in the extreme. As has been said, now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of their country… and the world. Of course, what we are to do besides sanctioning the hell out of Russia is a very good question for debate. Sad and scary stuff.
Jim,
Agreed, once again, except perhaps for ever putting the words “brilliant” and “Palin” in the same sentence! As you say, so much of this has been seen before, unfortunately. I lived for a while in France, and the opinions of my French friends about American politics, are, to say the least unprintable. During the Trump era they were incredulous, but they also told me they were not surprised since we often vote like idiots. Their favorite descriptive word would have to be “merde” On the other hand, an email I got today from once of my savviest French buddies was, mainly, sad about the state of the world, both our politics (but they kinda like Biden), and the tyrants like Putin and his admirer, The Donald. And unfortunately, not even everyone who had the kind of education which we were so lucky to have is not an idiot either….Loved the jeremiad, by the way.
Un-fecklessly yours, I hope, Greg
I can’t recall where I first learned that the French regard Americans as “les grands enfants,” but it’s hard to argue that they’re wrong. The only counter to it came from Winston Churchill, who said something to the effect that (I’m not bothering to look it up; maybe someone has it at the top of your head), Americans can be counted on to get things right, but only after their myopia has screwed everything up.
What’s happening in the Ukraine is frightening and horrific. I can’t help but think that Putin’s decision is the act of a madman. Surely, the Russian intelligence service isn’t so inept that it utterly missed the depth of Ukrainian nationalism or the real possibility of unity among Western democracies to impose draconian sanctions. If it did miss those things and gave Putin a green light without reservations, then we have a lot more to worry about. Assuming the intelligence service is half-assed competent and cautioned Putin, then he is a madman for lurching forward well aware of the high risks. Now that the gauntlet has been thrown down and news coverage is in real time showing the horrific damage Putin has ordered and the remarkable courage of the Ukrainians – to lay down their lives for their country, it’s hard to imagine Western democracies backing down. I mean…who could look at themselves in the mirror griping about paying a bit more for gasoline when Ukrainians are willing to give up their lives! Russia will be a pariah state internationally so long as Putin leads. The only way out for Russia is to get rid of Putin. The Russian state may be let off the hook in due course but Putin surely will not.
Agreed. Putin did underestimate Western reaction on the scale we’re seeing now. I just hope that the resolve isn’t just temporary and for show. There are ways to keep squeezing Russia into humiliation, internal rebellion, and withdrawal, but only IF we and Europeans are prepared to endure a lot of sacrifice. I’m thankful that spring is approaching; otherwise, a lot of people in the West could be uncomfortably cold, and even in the meantime they’ll be paying sky-high prices to travel.
With regard to the Ukraine, you might be interested in a story I just posted on Medium.
https://medium.com/morning-musings-mag/retreat-retweet-retreat-49aab9227c2e
I’m an optimist, hoping that fiction can become reality.
Thank you. How sad it is that we’ve been reduced to dreaming about a victory against this mad dog. Who knows whether the West can get beyond symbolic or half-effective gestures and begin to shut down Russia’s economy, even if that means that some Westerners (especially Germans) will have to sit around campfires next winter instead of heating their homes and – – horror of horrors — many Americans will be unable to go very far by car after they see the prices at gas pumps.