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You may have heard that after some agonizing over their traditional neutrality, Switzerland has followed the EU lead for freezing the bank accounts of oligarchs, and denying them entry to the alps. This from a country that once stored Nazi gold. The Swiss have surely done the right thing. Holocaust survivor and author of Night, Elie Wiesel, said:
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
Sean Crawford said, “Perhaps one of the silver linings to this cloud of horror is exposing social media, including false video clippings, demonstrating to regular people, including anti-vaxxers, that Russians commenting on social media, while disguised as Americans in the free world, are not to be trusted.”
(From Toronto Star: Russia’s internet Research Agency has been described as an online “troll farm” accused of propagating misinformation around the world)
It was a survivor of the gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, novelist and Nobel laureate, who said:
Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. … Last week I mentioned a fable about a lying Russian bear . Solzhenitsyn also said that one man who stops lying could bring down a tyranny. (He has oodles of quotes on the web)
I see that Canada has more backbone this time around, even if she was late in joining the EU in banning Russian jets. The last time the civilized world did an embargo, Canada still allowed Russians to land and refuel in Gander. This time they have closed that loophole.
This morning I suddenly realized there is no Feb 30th, so no prepared essay. That’s fine, sometimes it’s quite fitting to quote others.
One last quotation. After being heard on the radio talking it over with each other, 13 border guards on Snake Island sent a response to the self identified “Russian warship” that was threatening to blast them into the next world unless they surrendered:
“Russian Warship, go fuck yourself.” … I’m sure someone is already making a T-shirt.
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Sean Crawford
Once a member of the Ukrainian Students Club,
receiving Babushka’s Bulletin,
during a year when the Russian ambassador wrote to the campus student newspaper,
claiming the holodomor (as western food relief trains were stopped at the border!) was merely a bad crop year,
Alberta,
February 28,
2022
Wow department: Allen Lobo, on Quora Digest, an American and son of India, has a lengthy lucid human piece at the intersection of the economical and the geopolitical called Who Would Benefit From the Russian-Ukraine War? Wow, just wow. Too bad I can’t find a link for you.
Cultural note: In London, at this time of year back in 2020, when I mentioned “the free world,” two Russian hotel staff grimly told me: Russia is not free.
Cultural thought: One might expect Europe today to be like in 1913, with a crisscross of mutual defence treaties, a patchwork of war alliances, and a tangle of suspicion. Nope. Only one alliance, and only one danger to all the rest of Europe. I wish I knew a professor of Social Studies, because then I could ask: What is it about Russia? Surely they can’t be innocent about the horror of war. What makes that country so uncivilized?
