Dear Readers:
When following a war, it is always exciting to read about battles, especially tank and drone battles. But one must never forget the horrors of war, especially for ordinary, non-soldier, folks. Even those civilians who do not experience violence or physical trauma, may experience other horrors, like losing their home, being displaced, or even being separated from their children. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to drive home after a hard day’s work, to discover that your home is not there; or, even if your home is still there, being ordered by some soldier to get into a bus and leave right away. Where are you supposed to go? Where are you supposed to live? Where are your kids, whom you last saw running off to school? To a schoolhouse which may, also, no longer exist?
Today I have this short piece, which is rather good news for a change. Some Ukrainian children displaced by the war have been found, and they are safe.
According to reporter Alexei Degtyarev, 161 “lost” Ukrainian children have been found, and they are living in Germany. This according to Ukrainian Chief of Police Ivan Vygovsky. [yalensis: The piece doesn’t say if the kids are living with their parents, or just by themselves in Germany. I am guessing the whole family moved to Germany, but that’s just a guess.]
By working closely with the German police, Vygovsky located 161 children who had previously been thought to have been taken to Russia. Recall that the Hague Court unfairly accused Russian President Putin of kidnapping a certain number of Ukrainian children. In truth, Russian soldiers did evacuate some Ukrainian children from the war zone for their own safety. The Russian army is quite good at evacuating civilians before ripping a place apart; they learned some of these logistical tricks in the Syrian war, but it was also standard Soviet practice. Some of the evacuated Ukrainian kids were taken to live in Russian summer camps while the Russian ombudsman would try to figure out who their parents were, and how to get them back to their parents.
Maria Lvova-Belova, who works directly under President Putin as the Russian Ombudsman for Childrens Affairs, reported that, so far, she has been able to return four of these lost children back to Ukraine, where they had been unwittingly separated from their parents. She had to do the research to figure out who they were and try to contact their parents or guardians. She says they have a complete list of names of the remaining children who were evacuated, and they are still hoping to find their parents.
But meanwhile, these other 161 kids turned out not to be in Russian custody, but rather living in Germany.
All of this is a reminder of the horrors and just sheer inconvenience of war, and why it should never happen.
Awful Avalanche 
Amidst all this death and destruction brought about by clueless zealots safely ensconced in western capitals it’s hard to maintain hope, the last of the tragic imperfections to escape Pandora’s box…
Over at Andrei’s place the other day he was touting Russia’s new heavy launch vehicle the Angara A5 which presently has an approximate thrust of 2+ million lbs which will, over it’s development lifetime, increase substantially. For comparison, the newly built/flown USA’s Vulcan rocket has approximately the same thrust, as it is currently configured.
Okay…so what does this have to do with hope? I’ll get there.
Over the years, I’ve watched DC take up the torch of English schoolboy fantasies, attempting [and failing] to finish the business of the Crimean war, namely the destruction/balkanization of Russia. All that has been accomplished in this great waste of life and resources is to restart the “cold-war”. During this débâcle I’ve asked myself the question, which I have repeated out loud on these pages and others, if we have to have a do-over of the cold-war…might we at least get a replay of the Space-Race?
To be clear, I respect Putin’s intellect, his calm demeanor, his ability to see the future and not overreact. That said, I do not think of him as a JFK figure. JFK clearly redirected the energy and creativity of the US’s most talented citizens away from the “cold-war” towards the “Space-Race” and he did so while placating many in the Aerospace/Defense industry…while keeping them at the top of their game.
During the “Space-Race, the US did more than land on the moon, we explored the planets, built/launched space platforms to monitor weather, developed evermore sophisticated IC chips…at every level of technology we improved the human condition. We did all of those things because they were “hard”. The cold-war as a mechanism for development is regrettable but, not it’s substantial accomplishments.
When I implied that Putin is no JFK…I may have misjudged the man. In one respect, the most important aspect, he may well be every bit JFK’s match. By reinvigorating the Russian Space Program, Putin has..torn a page out of Kennedy’s playbook. Now, will America rise to the challenge or, will we shrug off the future and degrade into one of those has-been states that liter the dustbin of history? Can the US re-imagine itself, run a fair race, not attempting to trip the competitor in the adjacent lane as DC/London’s 3LAs would have us do? Can the US win honestly anymore? As weak as American “leadership” is at present, it may fall to Putin to throw down the gauntlet. Mr. Putin, name the finish line and throw down the gauntlet.
And so, in the midst of war, hope springs eternal.
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Yes, the Space Race was definitely better than the Arms Race, but why do we need any big races between nations at all? We already have the Olympics — though only for “good” nations, of course — and US-style “free market” competition, fake though it is, since monopoly practices and special subsidies for big business are growing all the time. Can’t the world shift to the yin-yang non-zero-sum social game the Chinese (and in the future, the BRICS?), etc., are trying to demonstrate for us? To me, full-time, full-bore imperialism and life-and-death competition are pathologies of warrior societies that refuse to adjust and transition into the contemporary international era. Why can’t we concentrate on making arms limitation treaties and lots of creative new types of non-competitive treaties that can take us beyond the might-makes-right, dominator/subaltern mind-trap? True, capitalism itself breeds the notion of economic activity as a cutthroat race, but new models of non-pugilistic economic systems and world systems can surely be worked out over many decades. Half-humorously, how about working out a modus operandi for international relations that treats a group of nations as a form of large-scale “polycule,” a new concept of non-hierarchical social bonding that has apparently begun to sporadically appear in real life:
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2024/04/17/what-is-a-polycule-nyt-story-happening-near-boston/?p1=hp_featurebox
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It sounds very bonobo! (but in a good way). Still, the cynic in me says that these people will all end up hating each other eventually….
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Why not stay neutral toward the future? ;-)
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Well, it’s certainly true that pair-bonding doesn’t really work out that well for most people. Allude to the high divorce rate. It’s hard for one person to bear the burden of being “the all and everything” for another person. Their lover, friend, soul-mate, car-repair and jack of all trades. Aren’t people better off when they have more options than just one support person? I have always believed that children should also have a multitude of adult support, and not just the 2 parents. In general, the more friends and support a person has, the better off they are. If one person dies, they are not completely bereft, because they still have other friends to fall back on.
Having said that, I am not sure I would want to go the hippy commune route either. A lot of those structures devolve into the alpha male plus harem kind of thing.
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P.S. – typing that, I was just reminded of the pioneer of the Russian version of the “polycule”, none other than the author and revolutionary, Nikolai Chernyshevsky. I have mentioned before that Chernyshevsky was an enormous influence on Lenin. In his novel “what is to be done?” he laid out his version of the polycule, which consisted of 4 people living pretty much together, but with separate rooms, 2 males and 2 females, and practicing free love, although he couldn’t come out and say it, due to Tsarist censorship.
(Come to think of it, his novel probably wouldn’t be allowed today in Putin’s conservative Russia either – LOL!)
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On the other thread, we were just talking about a different mythological figure, Cassandra. Then (great minds always thinking alike), I just happened to see a comment on the MOA Palestine thread. Somebody posted a very long tweet by Norman Finkelstein called “Samson and Cassandra“. People can read it themselves, it’s too long to quote the whole thing, Norm starts off with:
“My Mother once told me the story of an emaciated woman in the Warsaw Ghetto who would wail from her window sill that all the Jews in the ghetto would be killed. She came to be called Cassandra, after the prophetess of doom in Greek mythology. Everyone just assumed that she was mad. My Mother speculated in retrospect that somehow she had become privy to the truth: Jews weren’t being “relocated” in the East; they were being transported to their deaths.
I have hesitated thus far to sound the alarm. But at the risk of being thought mad, it must, as an act of political responsibility, be said out loud: Israel is hurling toward the precipice and dragging the rest of the world with it.”
[…] and goes on to show, in very scary language, how the Israeli leadership are completely nutso. In other words, this woman back in the Warsaw ghetto could see quite clearly what everybody else in the ghetto was trying to deny: that the Nazis actually did intend to kill them all. It’s normal and very human to go into denial, but Finkelstein is compelled to warn us that, in our modern times, Israel clearly intends to bring the whole world down around it.
Not even sure what can be done, or if there is any way to talk these Zionist lunatics down from their perch…
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Excellent comment about the human condition…and the worlds longest river…Denial.
The Israelis are meandering their way to Masada* with not a Cassandra among them.
*Judah’s version of the Jim-Jones-Jungle-juice-happy-hour!
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Slouching towards Bethlehem? (literally…)
By the way, Jungle-Juice is just Kool-Aid with an extra ingredient: poison.
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In part due to you, I wangled the Nitter work-around to see Finkelstein’s Twaat-stream. He gets occasional shout-outs from Lord Bebo, and I watched part of an interview him via Twaater earlier this year too. Wow, can that guy write! He’s a bit long-form for Twaater — entire essays, not just 140 characters. He’s got a powerful moral voice. I will have to peek in on him regularly in the future. One of my favourite bloggers, “Lambert Strether” of Naked Capitalism, has an ironic phrase he likes to use when someone suggests an important book: “another goddamn book I’ve gotta read.” Finkelstein — another goddamn Twaater…”
I don’t think you’re into the Twat-o-sphere, but another voice I like for the morality side of the Gaza genocide is a guy named Alon Mizrahi. He’s a Jewish Israeli, but from an Arab ethnic background. Which is what “mizrahi” means — a subdivision of the Sephardim. I never heard the word before tripping across him. He’s much like Finkelstein in his righteous condemnation of the people who hijacked his religion. Mizrahi has some awesome insights into the twisted psychology of the Jewzi ruling dictators. He writes about how they KNOW the entire world is going to hate them because of their grotesque death-dealing. They WANT nazIsrael to be hated, because that will make the Zionists band together there in order to survive. “Everybody wants to eliminate us because we’re so horrible, so we must unite behind the War Cabinet in order to fight the rest of the world!” He’s not against Jews, because he IS one, but he castigates the killers who have taken over his country. (He still lives there. I don’t know how long he will be able to do that, before he meets the fate of Raghead’s friend Russell ”Texas” Bentley in Donetsk.)
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It’s true I don’t follow twatter that much. I see Finkelstein’s tweets quoted in other places, and I idly wonder how the man gets away with posting entire essays when the whole purpose of twitter was to limit to 140 bytes per tweet.
Anyhow, I read that Finkelstein considers himself the heir to Noam Chomsky (who is useless now and should have died 20 years ago) in terms of the moral conscience of the Jewish people (and human race in general). He comes from a perfect place, because both his parents were holocaust survivors, so he doesn’t suffer from the Unz disease of Denialism. Knowing that the holocaust was real, the death camps were real, and what the Nazis did to his people (and other people) is precisely what gives him the moral authority to castigate the Israeli apartheid fascists.
In regard to “Texas” Bentley, I was reading about him all over the internet yesterday, and I was horrified to learn that he had been killed. Especially if what they are saying is true. But I won’t believe it until I see more factual proofs. If it is true, then the Russian government needs to punish the perps to the full extent of the law. We can’t allow the excuse of war to turn men into animals.
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It’s good that the missing children were found in Poland, but I hope the Ukrainians don’t try to force them to return to Ukraine in order to become future cannon-fodder. Yalensis, I believe the children Putin is falsely accused of stealing are a completely different group, and the false allegation of Russian kidnapping is in-your-face egregious — a typical Yukie Whopper. According to an article in The Gray Zone by an American reporter last year, the names and families of the children were known both to their families in Donbass and to Russian officials. He met some of the children, all with proven musical ability, who were studying their instruments under leading young Russian professional musicians, who donated their time and efforts to a summer school on the outskirts of Moscow. According to the reporter the children told him they were all in Moscow because they very much wanted to be there and were there with the full permission of their parents, who wanted them to study in a safe place without Ukrainian missiles and shells flying overhead. The reporter said other children were visiting Russian summer camps of various sorts. All the students presumably returned home at the end of the summer. The reporter also made a video about the children in the music school. It must still be up at The Gray Zone. I can’t understand why Russia doesn’t appeal the international court verdict, which was clearly based on false information submitted to the court by the Ukrainians.
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Well, it was Germany, not Poland, but yes, I hope I didn’t imply that any of these 161 children were the same as the ones that Westies accused Putin of kidnapping. The latter – well, I didn’t realize they went to Music Camp, but good for them! It sounds like a fine way to spend the summer.
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Only very few report the story via Russian or Ukrainian media, cc*. Among them “Anonymous News”, below via Google translate. But yes those are in fact kids listed as kidnapped by Russia. I am a bit puzzled why Ukraine asks international police for help to located kids supposedly kidnapped and taken to Russia.
https://tinyurl.com/Ukrainian-kids
<i>Some of the children and minors “kidnapped” by Russia according to the Ukrainian account are regularly staying in Germany with their parents. Only a few of them have any connection to the areas formerly or currently controlled by Russia. The Federal Criminal Police Office confirmed this on Thursday at the request of Russia Today
The head of the Ukrainian police, Ivan Wygovsky, had previously met with the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Holger Münch, on Tuesday. After the meeting, Vygovsky claimed that Ukrainian police officers, working with their German colleagues, had found 161 Ukrainian children in Germany who were previously believed to have been taken to Russia.
In his response to the RT DE query relating to this, a spokesman for the BKA said that Ukraine had asked international police central offices, including the BKA, for support in determining the whereabouts of missing children and minors who “subsequently of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are said to have been kidnapped”. Last year, the Ukrainian authorities presented lists with the personal details of “missing Ukrainian children/minors”, which were processed in this country. As the central office of the German criminal police, the Federal Criminal Police Office has taken over the coordination of missing persons searches for Germany.
All personal details were checked in the information systems and registers available to the police in order to obtain evidence of a stay in Germany. After possible contact addresses were collected, requests were sent to the locally responsible police stations of the federal states with a request to check the addresses and interview those affected and their accompanying persons. The authority spokesman summarizes the results of the investigation as follows: </i>
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“I am a bit puzzled why Ukraine asks international police for help to located kids supposedly kidnapped and taken to Russia.” I think it was all part of some conspiracy to frame Putin for kidnapping children. The most heinous crime. So the Hague court could put out an arrest warrant on him. Westies play these nasty games every time they need some kind of crisis or false flag to divert attention. They probably just compiled some random list of missing kids and decided to blame them all on Putin.
The real mystery is why a loyal Ukrainian official like Vygovsky would blow the lid off this conspiracy. Either he did it inadvertently, like wasn’t in the loop? Or maybe he is an honorable man? Who knows?
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<i>They probably just compiled some random list of missing kids and decided to blame them all on Putin.</i>
unlikely.
<i>The real mystery is why a loyal Ukrainian official like Vygovsky would blow the lid off this conspiracy.</i>
My second thought was, that it is one way or another “the ordinary”, Western/EU/?Russian? way, to deal with matters? It feels I saw numbers containing tens of thousand kids. The numbers used change constantly. Given such high numbers the location of 161 does not mean much really.
https://info-ukraine.be/en/assistance-belgium/kinderen-en-jongeren/my-child-has-disappeared
The problem seems you may talk about displacement in times of war and the propaganda arm of the Ukrainian state does not find that term helpful. 😉
They are displace wherever they are in the West, but not East or in Russia? There they can only be kidnapped.
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It’s true that 161 kids is not very much, in the scheme of things. But Westie propaganda always gets very huffed up if anything bad happens to even “one” of a group that they consider to be of their own kind. In this case, Ukrainians.
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Russia does not recognise ICC and sees it as Western tool, which it is. Dealing with it would imply some form of recognition.
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This was mean to be reply to ccdrakesannetnejp.
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Spare a thought also for the suffering children of Gaza. I bet there are an order of magnitude more of them who have been traumatised by war than there are youthful Ukrefugees. And the things they have been through, en masse, are way worse than what’s happened to the Ukie kids who have had to flee. (Barring, of course, those supremely unlucky children who were hurt, or whose parents were killed, when Russian or Ukrainian explosives hit them directly. I’ve seen pix of Ukrainian child amputees, and dead kids covered in blankets there, but not nearly as many as there are photos of Palestinian kids with horrific injuries.)
What will the “life paths” of these children look like, especially the Gazan ones? Working in psych, I read about the backgrounds of many badly bent patients. The ones from Africa stood out because they were hurt by atrocities far worse than what we Westies get hit with. In the “catchment area” of the mental health service I worked for, we had a lot of families who came from Sudan, both in the Muslim Darfur region and the black Christian breakaway nation of South Sudan. They saw people being killed in front of them, endured hunger, had to flee for their lives. Growing up twisted from that made some of them suicidal, left them so hopeless that they turned to illegal drugs, and some were schizophrenic. The latter might not have become so schizo, or maybe they could have managed it better, if not for the trauma. All of us have strengths and weaknesses, underlying tendencies for dysfunction, that can get worse if life snaps us.
Based on statistics I’ve read, about half the population of Gaza is under 18 years old, and there are supposedly more than 2 million people in that ghetto. So we’re talking close to a million little souls who have spent half a year (so far) starving, hiding, seeing death, hearing screams, always in fear for their lives. What will they be like in 5 years, a decade, 20 years from now, assuming that they don’t all die in the open-air Auschwitz? Their growth has been stunted by malnutrition. Are they going to be a race of midgets?
I’m a keen observer of people, and in my rambles around town, I sometimes notice older people who are abnormally short. Well-formed biologically, not congenitally misshapen. I spot them most often in the suburbs that are home to people from the Greek and Mediterranean parts of the world. Sometimes it’s Asians, mostly of Chinese appearance, but they tend to be tiny to begin with. The small folks I spot are in generally their 50s and 60s. They would have grown up during the decades just after WW II, when times were tough and nutrition wasn’t great. It took a while before deprivation ended, so the next generations were squatty. Plus any species from a small island tends to be stunted. Also people with genes to be tiny were ironically selected for, because the big ones tended to be pressed into service for war, and a lot of them never came back. But I digress…
Anyway, how does it end, in Gaza? It’s not like both sides can declare “shooting’s over!” and get back on with life. Everything needed to maintain civilised life in the Strip has been smashed. No homes, drinking water, sewer pipes — aside from the guerrilla tunnels!. No shops, no garden plots, no hospitals. Are the maybe-a-million kids going to live in tents like Bedouins? For that matter, are the Israelis going to be treated like dogs by the world (I hope so)? Will THEY have to leave with their tails between their legs? (Mr. Subliminal — “send them to the remains of Ukraine”) We are going to see a mighty reckoning somehow, involving millions. No way around it, but many ways it can play out.
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It’s just heartbreaking what these Palestinian kids are going through. The Israelis are so cruel, they even stopped deliveries of anesthetics (not to mention bombing all the hospitals into oblivion), and you see these horrific stories of children enduring limb amputation without anesthesia.
Yes, those million souls are going to grow up (if they survive) physically stunted and mentally traumatized. But there is always hope. I saw Max Blumenthal on Judge Nap, I think it was yesterday, talking about Palestinian endurance, and how many families are starting to return to their bombed out homes, they will stake their tent where their home used to be. Even some bakeries are opening again. Max says the main problem is that there is no money, the entire economy has been destroyed. But he is hopeful that at least some of them can endure. He says they have a certain attitude, and he used a certain Arab word, which I don’t remember, but it means “steadfastness”, or something like that. They have a deep feeling that this is their land, they belong to this land, and they are not going anywhere.
I don’t know if Max is just being overly hopeful or sentimental, it’s easy to ascribe super-human endurance to people who basically don’t have any hope of surviving… but maybe some will survive after all.
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“Sumud” is the word. Which I never knew before, but the ongoing genocide has sensitised me to that.
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Yes, that’s the right word! It’s a beautiful word. Just looked it up on wiki:
Sumud (Arabic: صمود ṣumūd) meaning “steadfastness”[1] or “steadfast perseverance” is a Palestinian cultural value, ideological theme and political strategy that emerged in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War among the Palestinian people as a consequence of their oppression and the resistance it inspired.[2] This noun is derived from a verb meaning “arrange, adorn, lay up, save”.[3] Those who are steadfast – that is, those who exhibit sumud – are referred to as samidin, the singular forms of which are samid (m.) and samida (f.).
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P.S. once upon a time (a couple of years ago) I made a good-faith attempt to learn the Arabic alphabet, just out of intellectual curiosity. I found some youtube vids and online textbooks.
I did learn a little bit, but I had to give it up because I just don’t have the time to learn any alphabet that takes more than, say, 4 hours to learn. The Greek alphabet, for example, can be learned in just an hour or two. Arabic is one of those alphabets that has to be learned in devoted lifetime study, and frankly I just don’t have the time. There is only a cursive form, not a printed form of each letter. That’s okay, it’s actually good to have just one design for each letter. (And, by the same token, I applaud the modern American schools for stopping the teaching of cursive to children, why bother teaching such an outmoded form of writing? One might as well teach them secretarial shorthand as well, like in the 1950’s…)
But the problem with Arabic letters is a different one: Each letter can have many different forms, depending on its position in the word, and which other letters are on either side. Also, there are tiny, tiny marks, squiggles and dots and that sort of thing, which make all the difference to reading the letter. In addition to having little time, I also have poor eyesight. So, again, I am telling the Arabs, just like I told the Chinese: If you expect me to learn your alphabet, then fix it first!
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The way I was able to remember it after seeing it one time (this is gonna seem racist) is by associating it with “StUck in the MUD.” I reckoned you’d come up with an explainer of its derivation. Which is a cool origin story. Puts me in mind of the song from the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the US: “We shall, we shall not be moved…”
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I can’t claim to be a Semitic languages specialist but I did look up the root in wiki. Like all proto-Semitic roots it consists of 3 consonants with varying vowels (Ablaut) in between: ṣ-m-d
Next I found some descendants in Akkadian and Old Babylonian: There is a word (from the same root, allegedly) but with a different semantics, the word ṣamādum mean “to yoke or harness”. Unless it’s actually 2 different roots, I can sort of see the semantic connection between “being steadfast” and “being harnessed up” to the plow. Although it doesn’t fit the other concept of “saving up for the future”.
Anyhow, the same word with the same meaning (“harnessed”) exists in Biblical Hebrew צָמַד (ṣɔmáḏ).
Akkadian, albeit a Semitic language and not linguistically related to Sumerian, used the same alphabet (cuneiform) as did the Sumerians, since the two peoples lived together in complete harmony in a dual-language state. (Well, up until a certain point, and then they went to war against each other.)
For cuneiform buffs, here is the cuneiform form of that same Akkadian word:
𒍝𒈠𒁺 (ṣa-ma-du)
I don’t want to belabor the point but… Albeit not perfect by any means, cuneiform, possibly the human being’s very first real alphabet, is superior to both the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets that followed it (at some point). ”Superior” meaning, it would only take a novice a few days or weeks to learn. And the Sumerians, clever little buggers that they were, came up with this system by simply pressing reeds into a tablet of clay! Not equipped with the mental tools of Scientific Linguistics (which was invented much later by Indian scholars), they didn’t understand the bit about associating a single symbol with a single phoneme. They just pragmatically invented their alphabet and kept adding letters and symbols, as needed.
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P.S. – the other ideological point I wanted to make about the Sumerians is that they, despite living in a class system with a state bureaucracy, had some basic democratic instincts. Hence, they wanted everyone, even simple farmers, to learn how to read and write. As opposed to other peoples and priestly castes (I’m not naming names) who deliberately created difficult alphabets, as they didn’t want the hoi polloi to learn how to read.
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