seanessay.com A fellow writer had no idea civilians refer to the Russian soldiers as Orcs.
Ukraine must be on my mind, because in Free Fall Friday class I did two fiction pieces about civil engineers there, and then a parent’s musing. Here’s the musing.
Prompt- shadows
There is a shadow on my land. When I was a boy we heard stories about the millions killed during the manmade famine, the holodomir, where the breadbasket of Europe—there’s a reason our flag is half wheat yellow—saw people collapsing in the street from hunger. Millions died. Our parents told us they blamed Stalin.
Perhaps because it’s true, or perhaps it’s easier to scapegoat just a named individual, perhaps because they didn’t want to think that an entire nation wanted to kill us… I only know that decades later the Soviet Ambassador to Canada, after students showed a documentary of the holodimir, wrote to the student newspaper to say the famine was due to a bad crop year. But no. When boxcars of food from the free world were stopped at the border, that is not merely an act of nature.
Today it would be so easy to blame everything on Vladimir Putin in Moscow, and to say that if he were suddenly hit by a bus then the war would be over. But no. The Kremlin as a whole believes in this war, and the Russian people as a whole believe in Putin. (According to western research) Have you seen their Youtube interviews of “the man in the street” in Moscow and Saint Petersburg? That city is no longer called Leningrad, but make no mistake: The shadow of recent communism and the old Czar is still chilling Russia. I have no idea why the Russians don’t aspire to the west and democracy and joining the European Union. You would have to ask them.
What bothers me is the shadow this war has cast over our land and our children. How can I tell my kids that people believe in peace after this? How can I say that all are equal when they hear stories about the Orcs and their tortures and murders? It’s a shadow on their innocence.
… …
Commentary
On Friday one of my fellow writers had no idea the Ukrainian civilians called the Russian soldiers “Orcs,” from the bad guys in The Lord of the Rings. I said, “They hate them. It will be dozens of years before they forgive them.”
Russia, long after communism, is still poor, and the Orcs in Ukraine, during their stealing and shipping stuff home, would say, “What right have you to live so well?” Hence I fully expert the Russians to blow a certain dam to wash away many Ukrainian villages. (Aesop had a fable about a dog and a manger)
The Russian security services treat their own people only a little better than the Orcs treat Ukrainians: A recent Youtube tells of a young male full time student and journalist, while in his own home in Moscow, being stripped naked, beaten and raped, according to his female flatmate, simply for the crime of attending a street demonstration. His flatmate says she was beaten too, and threatened with rape, but they didn’t rape her. And then the male was served a draft notice.
Can you say, “Geneva Convention?” Russian officers can’t. I guess they think that because Russia is too big to occupy they will never face trial for their war crimes.
As for being “big,” I groan when Russians, including Putin himself, fantasize to each other that European states are all against them, envy them, and want to occupy Russia… without admitting to themselves that to western eyes their country is a vast stupid wasteland not worth bothering about. In fact, Russia’s Gross National Product is no bigger than a smaller European nation. (One of the PIGS)
Until the “special military operation” many Ukrainians felt fine speaking Russian, many Russians felt fine crossing the border to visit relatives in Ukraine. Not now. Some day Ukraine will be free of the Orcs. After all they have suffered, they won’t suffer Russian-style corruption. And then Russians across the border will become as envious as Putin was back in the days when, stationed as a spy in East Germany, he gazed with shame across the border at the radiantly free and prosperous republic of West Germany.
Living well is the best revenge.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
In the country with the most Ukrainians outside of Ukraine and Russia,
In the region where the most Ukrainians settled,
October
2022
A footnote:
Of course (hashtag) “not all Russians” are bad. I was in London England in 2020, telling two Russian men, hotel workers, how the fall of communism meant, I joked with mock-dismay, that I could no longer say that Canada was the biggest country in the free world. They both said grimly, “Russia is not free.”
Now I understand: Imagine it being against the law to think, or say, you have “invaded” Ukraine, or are waging “war.” Can you spell nineteen eighty-four? The innocent westerner in me is just boggled.
History
I remember, back in the 20th century, an East German student telling me that when people were shot dead crossing the Wall, their families couldn’t bury the defectors unless they agreed to say it was a car crash or something—now history is repeating in Iran, as they are killing protestors—but not as many as in Kiev until the hated fuhrer was sent packing to Moscow in 2014.
As for Putin’s East Germany—For Film Lovers who like happy endings:
A Schoolteacher will of course find her teenagers falling asleep if she tries to teach them “history” about the Berlin Wall. Better to show a film. But which one?
Not The Lives of Others (4 stars, 2006, winner of the best foreign language Oscar, review) because it’s rated R.
And not the suspenseful flic about a potential defector, Barbara (31/2 stars, 2013, P-G 13 for some sexual material, thematic elements and smoking, review)
Not the comedy Goodby, Lenin! (3 stars, Rated R for brief language and sexuality, 2004, review)
Maybe she could show the trailers, and the beginnings of the movies, after first enthusiastically warning the kids the shows have subtitles, just like anime! Maybe the students in detention could take turns reading a paragraph aloud—at least the reviews won’t be R rated.
