I'm not familiar enough yet with JVL's work to be disappointed, but I am surprised at the tone of defeatism and futility in the reflections above.
Parallels with the 1930s are slippery and tricky at times like this, but if there really is one, I'm more inclined to lean toward the resistance of the Poles in 1939 than to the plight of the t…
I'm not familiar enough yet with JVL's work to be disappointed, but I am surprised at the tone of defeatism and futility in the reflections above.
Parallels with the 1930s are slippery and tricky at times like this, but if there really is one, I'm more inclined to lean toward the resistance of the Poles in 1939 than to the plight of the tragic, morally compromised Republicans of the Spanish Civil War. The Poles, too, were massively outmanned and outgunned, but if they hadn't been betrayed and outflanked by the Soviet invasion, they were prepared to fight on, with or without hope in the short term. They never planned to ask for terms, and they're one of Hitler's few victims who never did.
Jan Karski was one of my professors at Georgetown in the 1970s. The defeat of the Nazis brought not victory but a longer, equally hopeless-seeming defeat to Poland. But even through all that, he never seemed to lose hope or faith in the ideals that drove his heroism in the '40s. Through such indomitable people, Polish freedom was ultimately restored.
If the Ukrainians seek terms, no one can blame them, and no one should condemn them: the kind of courage that Poland showed in 1939 and after is a gift, not an obligation that one person or nation can try to impose on another. But if they choose to resist until they cannot resist any more, and then still spit in the aggressor's eye, our only moral response is profound respect, and whatever we can do to aid the survivors, the refugees, and the captives.
I'd like to believe it. But I'd also like to believe that Disney movies were about reality.
Gaul became France because Julius Caesar cut off the hands of all the males who objected to becoming a province of Rome. They lost, Ceasar won, and a couple of millennia later the descendants of the Gauls were blessed with, and pretty much embraced, a quisling government in Vichy. Then in my lifetime the so called heroic leader of France, who survived WWII only through the intervention of interested foreign powers, withdrew from NATO so he could have the benefits of not being deposed by a pro-Soviet cabal without having to endure the inconveniences of self-defence, leaving all that annoyance to the aforementioned alliance.
Then the descendants of the self-interested power that saved the bacon of that self-same egotist voted to install as their leader a paid agent of a corrupt gangster empire. That agent's primary foreign policy objective was to fulfil the directive of his master in Moscow to defenestrate the alliance that saved half of Europe from becoming postwar Kremlin satrapies. And those descendants will, in two short years' time, restore that paid agent to power so he can finish the work he started.
Pretty hard to be an optimist if you've read any history.
There's a photo tweeted by Adam Kinzinger of two children waving at Ukranian soldiers en route to confronting the myrmidons of the revanant ghost of Stalin. Where they will probably perish.
And yet here we stand, with Wars of Religion, Human Slavery, Absolutism, Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism largely consigned to our past, at least in the West. I would contend that, in the light of all that, being an optimist is easy. It's staying a pessimist that requires real work, constant effort, in fact.
Not sure about pessimism being more work... for me it seems the other way around. Although it is true I've predicted at least twelve of the last two recessions.
On the contrary. I'm no starry-eyed idealist, by any length. Even though there are a thousand steps upwards to civilized behavior, there's only one step downwards into barbarism. But history is a record of people choosing to mount that thousand steps upwards again and again, rather than indulge in what people of my home town used to call "nostalgie de la boue". Between decadence and depravity on one side, and civilization and decency on the other, that which is civilized and decent tends to take far greater strides than that which chooses to lie face down in the mud.
I have not your courage to will to believe that there is some merit in our species that can create a telos that will lead us to a Lamarckian better future.
But I would rather have you as a neighbor than a Cassandra like me. May you increase and multiply.
Maybe the closest I can come is -- I cannot honestly conclude humans ever will be good.
Yet I do believe, and know, it is in our power not to be as dreadful as we can.
Humans -- hell, Americans -- made the James Webb space telescope. And Galileo persisted: Eppur si muove.
I'm not familiar enough yet with JVL's work to be disappointed, but I am surprised at the tone of defeatism and futility in the reflections above.
Parallels with the 1930s are slippery and tricky at times like this, but if there really is one, I'm more inclined to lean toward the resistance of the Poles in 1939 than to the plight of the tragic, morally compromised Republicans of the Spanish Civil War. The Poles, too, were massively outmanned and outgunned, but if they hadn't been betrayed and outflanked by the Soviet invasion, they were prepared to fight on, with or without hope in the short term. They never planned to ask for terms, and they're one of Hitler's few victims who never did.
Jan Karski was one of my professors at Georgetown in the 1970s. The defeat of the Nazis brought not victory but a longer, equally hopeless-seeming defeat to Poland. But even through all that, he never seemed to lose hope or faith in the ideals that drove his heroism in the '40s. Through such indomitable people, Polish freedom was ultimately restored.
If the Ukrainians seek terms, no one can blame them, and no one should condemn them: the kind of courage that Poland showed in 1939 and after is a gift, not an obligation that one person or nation can try to impose on another. But if they choose to resist until they cannot resist any more, and then still spit in the aggressor's eye, our only moral response is profound respect, and whatever we can do to aid the survivors, the refugees, and the captives.
Ukraine, even fallen, will rise again.
I'd like to believe it. But I'd also like to believe that Disney movies were about reality.
Gaul became France because Julius Caesar cut off the hands of all the males who objected to becoming a province of Rome. They lost, Ceasar won, and a couple of millennia later the descendants of the Gauls were blessed with, and pretty much embraced, a quisling government in Vichy. Then in my lifetime the so called heroic leader of France, who survived WWII only through the intervention of interested foreign powers, withdrew from NATO so he could have the benefits of not being deposed by a pro-Soviet cabal without having to endure the inconveniences of self-defence, leaving all that annoyance to the aforementioned alliance.
Then the descendants of the self-interested power that saved the bacon of that self-same egotist voted to install as their leader a paid agent of a corrupt gangster empire. That agent's primary foreign policy objective was to fulfil the directive of his master in Moscow to defenestrate the alliance that saved half of Europe from becoming postwar Kremlin satrapies. And those descendants will, in two short years' time, restore that paid agent to power so he can finish the work he started.
Pretty hard to be an optimist if you've read any history.
There's a photo tweeted by Adam Kinzinger of two children waving at Ukranian soldiers en route to confronting the myrmidons of the revanant ghost of Stalin. Where they will probably perish.
Words fail.
And yet here we stand, with Wars of Religion, Human Slavery, Absolutism, Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism largely consigned to our past, at least in the West. I would contend that, in the light of all that, being an optimist is easy. It's staying a pessimist that requires real work, constant effort, in fact.
Not sure about pessimism being more work... for me it seems the other way around. Although it is true I've predicted at least twelve of the last two recessions.
On the contrary. I'm no starry-eyed idealist, by any length. Even though there are a thousand steps upwards to civilized behavior, there's only one step downwards into barbarism. But history is a record of people choosing to mount that thousand steps upwards again and again, rather than indulge in what people of my home town used to call "nostalgie de la boue". Between decadence and depravity on one side, and civilization and decency on the other, that which is civilized and decent tends to take far greater strides than that which chooses to lie face down in the mud.
I have not your courage to will to believe that there is some merit in our species that can create a telos that will lead us to a Lamarckian better future.
But I would rather have you as a neighbor than a Cassandra like me. May you increase and multiply.
Maybe the closest I can come is -- I cannot honestly conclude humans ever will be good.
Yet I do believe, and know, it is in our power not to be as dreadful as we can.
Humans -- hell, Americans -- made the James Webb space telescope. And Galileo persisted: Eppur si muove.
Nihilism is not an option.
I'm working on it. Not very good at it. I guess if you are still horrified you're not yet a complete nihilist.
Beautifully stated. Thank you.
The Poles had their own Snake Island, in the local defense of a post office and a base in Danzig (Gdansk) .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_the_Polish_Post_Office_in_Danzig