My position on Russia is clear: Russia is the enemy. Russian soldiers waging war on Ukraine’s territory must be destroyed, and any Russians who claim that Ukrainians today are somehow fighting for their freedom should fuck off.
Russia is waging a genocidal war against Ukraine. Russia has declared its intentions to destroy Ukraine as a nation and obliterate the Ukrainian people, their language, history, and culture. To leave no physical evidence to contradict its revised version of world history.
My grandparents taught me that Russia was bad. The Russian language was ugly, with its guttaral ы and harsh Г (pronounced “G” in Russian, as opposed to the soft “H” sound in Ukrainian). In the hyperpatriotic Ukrainian diaspora this was considered an objective fact.
But as I came of age in the multicultural US, where we were instilled with the value of tolerance, I began to wonder if my grandparents’ ideas weren’t of another time. Yes, it makes sense to fear and loathe the people who invaded your villages and killed your neighbors. But we were all living comfortably in the American suburbs, and when I went to college in New York City, I found that people with roots in Eastern Europe, like Russian Jews, were the folks I had most in common with.
It is not interesting, today, to say simply that my grandparents were right.
Instead I wonder about what was wrong with that promise of a multicultural global world that distracted its “citizens” with great international mobility and connectedness, while allowing for the rise of a country whose hunger for power and dominance could commit genocide in the name of squelching national spirit, or in their words, “denazification.”
Today Ukrainians who for years have been committed to promoting dialogue, transcending difference, to peace and harmony, are becoming more militant in their language and positions. I too am becoming more militant, not only against Russia but against anything that distracts from taking Ukraine’s battle for democratic statehood (and protection of its people from obliteration) seriously.
Now is the time to question universal humanist values, where the individual life of the civilian woman who is raped and then shot 6 times in the back with an automatic rifle is equivalent to the life of the Russian soldier who killed her.
Because that is logically valid when you make political decisions based on economics (counting and calculating numbers) instead of principles.
It is on my conscience that instead of interrogating the global order, I demurred to it. As if that global order had already guaranteed me a place where I could be myself (whatever that means) without fighting.
As the grandchild of people for whom blending in with their surroundings meant survival, I learned to not stand out, to read quickly and deftly what people expected of me and to slide by unnoticed. Instead of making demands based on where I come from or what I stand for, I was busy avoiding danger.
It was only much later that I began to sense that I actually had no idea who I am. And that that in itself is not good. You risk becoming a receptacle for evil.
John Demjanjuk, the notorious Ukrainian-American auto worker from Ohio who was tried and convicted in Israeal of being the sadistic Treblinka guard “Ivan the Terrible” only to be proved innocent years later, represents the little-discussed darkness of the post-WWII Ukrainian diaspora. He kept a vegetable garden and to all appearances led a “normal” life in the US suburbs, while his past remained on another continent, hidden from view. It was undoubtedly brutal, but we will never know when and where he stood on which side of the line between victim and perpetrator (I suspect that he knew both positions intimately).
What makes him odious and tragic for all Ukrainians, to my mind, is not what he did, for that we can never know with any certainty, but his evasive silence (which is decidedly unpolitical). His silence was his stubborn plea to remain a victim whose fate is up to someone else to decide (whether his family tirelessly claiming his innocence or the court of Israel, and then Germany, using him to make a historical point). Had he said what he had done in 1943, he would be a man of action—even if evil action. Would that have reflected badly on the entire Ukrainian nation? Yes, we would have an anti-hero. But Germany has Hitler, and today it is a European power.
Demjanjuk’s silence makes him pitiful and, by extension, all Ukrainians pitiful. How many tens of thousands of our people have had to die in the past two months so that we can finally prove our claim to our own land and that we have the spirit and courage to live as a free sovereign nation?
Today, April 29, 2022, is the first day that I asked: Why did I not demand in 2005 that Ukrainians in Ukraine speak Ukrainian? Instead I spent the next several years learning Russian to follow the most interesting conversations among local artists and thinkers. I liked the challenge and appreciated the stimulus since I was young and still open to learning new languages. But were I a bit sharper, I could have learned Russian to read philosophers Bibikhin, Mamardashvili and Pyatygorsky, and still demand that Ukrainians in Ukraine speak Ukrainian.
It’s what they’re doing now. Only after the mass Russian invasion has made speaking Russian tantamount to speaking the enemy’s language. For some people, it triggers their trauma. Others are ashamed.
What is wrong with all of us that only in the midst of Russia’s genocide of Ukrainians do we begin to respond decisively to the fundamental questions of who we are and how we want to live? Why do we need the experience and evidence of crimes against humanity to ask ourselves what “humanity” is? Philosophy used to concern itself with questions like that.
PS This war is going to be long and ugly. Community Self-Help, “my band of volunteers,” has ordered 60 gas masks for a unit fighting on the eastern front. The order costs $9000. If you know of an organization that could contribute a significant part of this sum or want to organize a drive, please contact me personally.
dear Readers, this piece has been revised since it was originally published and shared via email. please consider this version authoratative and shareable. thank you!