March may be the beginning of spring, and the traditional symbol of hope renewed, but this chilling narrative from the Associated Press on the war in Ukraine will give you pause. This is a must-read piece documenting the horrors of the Ukraine War. The Ukraine War is not some political abstraction, it is a horrific experience where the most vulnerable are dying in droves and the rest of the population struggles to get the necessaries of life and somehow keep going.
Here in the United States we are far removed from living in daily carnage. We’ve never fought a war on our own soil, with the exceptions of the Civil War and 9/11. Not surprisingly, the worst of our politicians and right-wing pundits are either minimizing this reality or they’re saying, at worst, that nobody cares. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that this morning, on the floor of the House, “real Americans don’t care about the war in Ukraine.”
Any American who doesn’t care about this is not only not American, s/he’s not human and should be expelled from both groups. Associated Press:
MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.
There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body. There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There’s the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns, among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell.
They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.
This is the inhumanity of it. These people were killed but there is no method of burying them in a decent manner with proper rites. They’ve been reduced to rotting meat in the road which people must dispose of quickly in order not to contaminate the city. No time to honor anybody’s individualism or their life.
Several appeals for humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians went unheeded, until Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that about 30,000 people had fled in convoys of cars. Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the fire department, homes, a church, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is quite simply nowhere to go.
The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.
People burn scraps of furniture in makeshift grills to warm their hands in the freezing cold and cook what little food there still is. The grills themselves are built with the one thing in plentiful supply: bricks and shards of metal scattered in the streets from destroyed buildings.
Death is everywhere. Local officials have tallied more than 2,500 deaths in the siege, but many bodies can’t be counted because of the endless shelling. They have told families to leave their dead outside in the streets because it’s too dangerous to hold funerals.
Here’s another grim anecdote from this lengthy article filled with same. This is the story of a little girl of six, so young, all of life ahead of her and now that potential has been snuffed out.
Shelling and airstrikes could and did come at any moment, and people spent most of their time in shelters. Life was hardly normal, but it was livable.
By Feb. 27, that started to change, as an ambulance raced into a city hospital carrying a small motionless girl, not yet 6. Her brown hair was pulled back off her pale face with a rubber band, and her pajama pants were bloodied by Russian shelling.
Her wounded father came with her, his head bandaged. Her mother stood outside the ambulance, weeping.
As the doctors and nurses huddled around her, one gave her an injection. Another shocked her with a defibrillator. A doctor in blue scrubs, pumping oxygen into her, looked straight into the camera of an AP journalist allowed inside and cursed.
“Show this to Putin,” he stormed with expletive-laced fury. “The eyes of this child and crying doctors.”
They couldn’t save her. Doctors covered the tiny body with her pink striped jacket and gently closed her eyes. She now rests in the mass grave.
This war did not need to be. This needless misery is being caused by a narcissistic madman with delusions of being Peter the Great and restoring Imperial Russia. Imperial Russia is gone. She’s never coming back. Great empires have fallen and great alliances between democracies have sprung up in their place. Such is the forward march of history.
But men like Vladimir Putin hate progress and they want to keep a certain world order intact, one in which people like themselves rule the masses, who are kept huddled in abject fear and perpetual want. That is what Putin wants to see and what he’s trying to create. He’s literally walking on the bodies of dead children in order to get there.
The only thing worse than Putin are his right-wing fluffers. They should become pariahs. There is no way to justify or soft soap what Putin is doing, both to Ukraine and to his own people, who three weeks into wartime, are already queueing up in Moscow trying to get sugar, after a plunging stock market has wiped out many peoples’ retirement accounts. This is an abomination any way you look at it.
It is long past time to start locking up the TRAITORS That are supporting the War Criminal Putin and his crimes against humanity!!! There are no words to describe the horror that I feel towards Putin and his supporters!!!
I’ve been thinking about a minor movie called Ironclad, a siege narrative about a small force of men holding a Norman keep against King John I of England post-Magna Carta. Specifically, every time I hear new Ukrainian casualties, I think of this exchange after the first losses in that movie’s siege: “This bastard king…” “Aye…”
The Ukrainians have the small consolation that they are winning. It does nothing to blunt the horrors of what Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin has inflicted upon them, his troops and both countries with this senseless invasion.
Like that short rotund A-hole in North Korea, who rules by fear alone, ready to kill ANYONE, even family members if he finds them annoying or not kissing his boots properly …
Putin has the run of the world in his mind, his mansions, a huge boat, power and lots of ill-gotten money, taken from the people … with the money streams hitting hard times there, the Ruble worth less than our penny, getting enough war machines built and setup to attack us Internationally … bleak and black times are the Albatross hanging around Putin’s neck now …
I think Putin is finding it very difficult to fight in the Ukraine now, with the whole world breathing down his neck and there is no hiding his god-awful butchering of the citizens there without striking military hotspots, just unarmed kids their mom and dads, Grampa and Grandma — the worst war crimes possible — he is earning a summary execution if ever brought to justice …
It’s worth noting that the Kim family has been ruling North Korea for seven decades. A lot of that has to do with limited ambitions. The only place they want is South Korea, whose vaster prosperity is protected by impressive firepower. It’s much like how Francisco Franco of Spain managed to outlast his fellow fascists in Europe, keep the horrible oppression localized. Putin didn’t learn that lesson and Kim Jong Un is tettering on the edge of forgetting that one himself.
Well, Franco also kept up with the times. For starters, while Spain tried to maintain its limited overseas empire after WW2 (basically just the modern country of Equatorial Guinea and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and some territory that’s now recognized as part of Morocco) by elevating the colonies to provinces but, by the 1960s, it began moving towards granting independence to “Spanish Guinea” (which happened in 1968) and to “Spanish Sahara.” The latter ran into problems largely because Morocco and Mauritania both claimed the territory as rightfully theirs while Spain was willing to recognize an independence movement (POLISARIO) and neither Morocco nor Mauritania was willing to accept an independent Western Sahara state (but Spain decided to simply abandon the whole territory and let the parties fight it out amongst themselves).
Also, Franco–unlike his fascist comrades–never saw himself as THE leader of Spain. He saw his role largely as a “protector” or even a “regent,” running the country until it was “ready” for the monarchy to be restored. He oversaw a law passed in 1947 affirming Spain’s status as a monarchy and allowing him to choose the new King, eventually choosing Juan Carlos to be the new King after Franco stepped down (or, of course, died) ; Juan Carlos even assumed a number of duties as Head of State in the year and a half before Franco’s death.
But, yeah. Franco never really aspired to restoring the glory of the Spanish Empire. Latin America was off the table since none of the countries wanted to returned to Spain’s control (especially since most of them had fought vicious wars for independence more than a century before); Japan occupied the Philippines during the war and the US had already planned on granting the country independence shortly after the war; and, as far as Spain’s old European territories, during the war, they were already under German or Italian control (neither of which would be willing to cede them to Spain, especially in Italy’s case–most of Spain’s old European territory was the southern half of the Italian peninsula). Franco simply wanted to keep the Spain that he’d won during the Civil War which meant cracking down on nationalist movements in Catalunya and the Basque Country (both areas had been granted rights prior to the Civil War which would allow them to use their own languages in government and in education and were given a limited amount of autonomy–which would only be restored after Franco’s death).
And, most historians have noted that Hitler and Mussolini were both highly pissed at Franco for failing to join the Axis war effort and only providing minimal material support.
Of course, Hitler and Mussolini were pissed at Franco. As far as they were concerned, they thought he owed them for helping out in the Spanish Civil War. He obviously disagreed. That defacto neutrality is probably best reflected in popular culture by “the plane to Lisbon” in Casablanca.
Just watched Man On Fire again after spending my afternoon with a soon to be 6 year old little girl who lost her daddy 3 years ago. Some here have berated me for my strong language & passion. For those who aren’t in a rage…go find ur fucking heart. Oh & enjoy your cushy life enjoying the privileges that all the dead boys on the battlefield bought for all of us. Like CSNY sang after Kent state in 1970, “what if you knew her & found her dead on the ground? How can you run when you know?”.
I often think of a Dylan lyric – “How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”