some history.

My great-grandfather, Vasyl Myhovych, was conscripted to fight in the First World War. He was a peasant from the province of Halychyna, the backwoods of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and thus, he was considered expendable. Living in Nebyliv, he was so far removed from Sarajevo & the assassination of the Archduke, the rest of Europe, he was probably not even initially told why he was fighting. (Sounds familiar, yes?)

It was 1915, & the middle of February. A battle was being fought close to Vasyl’s hometown. Many of the villagers from Nebyliv and Perehin’ske had to hide in the woods & along the Lymnytsia valley. My great-grandmother Anastasya gave birth to my grandmother one night, alone & concealed in an old cow-shelter on the frozen riverbank while her husband fought some miles away. A week after my baba Anna was born, Anastasya was told of her husband’s death. One night, heading off the field after a battle, he had picked up what he believed to be his flashlight; it was really a disguised grenade, planted insidiously by the other side, to lure unwary soldiers in the dark. He died in a million pieces.

What has really changed, now? Whenever I remember my great-grandfather, I can’t help but think of Iraq. The peasants are still sent to fight in distant wars by leaders of empires who see them as disposable, dispensable. They don’t need to be told why they’re fighting, of course not! Just send them off to the desert & maybe they’ll come back alive. Maybe their children will have mothers or fathers, maybe not. Say what you will about the rhetoric & manipulative tactics of Michael Moore, but I appreciate how his films have highlighted the ways in which governments exploit the lower classes to carry out their delusions, their violent & selfish agendas. So many people turn to military service because what it (falsely) ‘promises’ them. Money while they serve, & maybe other things like education & such. If they survive the degradation & depersonalization of basic training. If they survive combat. If they survive their post-traumatic-stress syndrome. If if if.

In 1919, Anna Akhmatova wrote:

Why is our century worse than any other?
Is it that in the stupor of fear and grief
It has plunged its fingers in the blackest ulcer,
Yet cannot bring relief?

Westward the sun is dropping,
And the roofs of towns are shining in its light.
Already death is chalking doors with crosses
And calling the ravens and the ravens are in flight.

She may have well been writing this now, really. So many things that are happening are rooted in a ‘stupor of fear & grief’. It deeply, profoundly disturbs me how people forget, repeat – with history as an endless Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain & then letting the force of hypocritical politicians nudge it down the other side in their aggression, jealousy, greed, ignorance.

But I really don’t like asking the rhetorical question about why people are stupid, why they can’t change, why they can’t just make better choices & refuse to succumb to hypocrisy... I really don’t.

War can change people. My grandpa, my baba Anna’s husband returned from his conscription in the Second World War even more committed to his pacifism, a messy dove tattoo inked on his arm. He brought booklets & literature about the Holocaust, he taught my mother & her brothers about what happened, about what he had seen & heard after camps were liberated. & then he went back to his garden, & tried to make everything grow.

And I like to think of Anna as well. She never fought, but she endured so much as a result of war & revolution. As an infant she survived the typhus outbreak, because of the blood flowing in the water from the battles; she lived through the beginning of the collectivization, the Holodumor in Ukraine, the Depression, the Second World War, the death of her husband, so many deaths. & she has always been the toughest & the kindest person I have ever known; the most generous, most devout, most peaceful. She has always acted with such quiet, affirmative conviction. & she was born as her father passed on, born while the fire was flying, a little miracle.

Go here:

http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/twominutesofsilence/