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mariacallous · 8 months ago

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In her 1996 novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, Oksana Zabuzhko wrote that for Ukrainians, “Fear was passed on in the genes.” Zabuzhko, one of the most important living Ukrainian writers, was referring to the childhood fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person in the Soviet era. Anyone who approached you could be spying for the KGB, and if you let a careless word slip, the bad men would come “and put Daddy in prison.” But that line captures what Zabuzhko’s novel is about: the inherited fear of oblivion born between the hungry jaws of empire, or what she calls the “eternal Ukrainian curse of nonexistence.”

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was a sensation when it was published in Ukraine, but it took 15 years for it to be translated to English. Even then, it didn’t find a U.S. readership until the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. The book’s path is emblematic of the tough road to English translation, much less readership, for novels written in Ukrainian. Until this year, not a single novel translated from Ukrainian had been published by a major U.S. publisher.

Tanja Maljartschuk’s Forgottenness, the first to break that barrier, is a book about Ukrainian identity and the struggle against nonexistence. Originally published in 2016, when it won the BBC’s Ukrainian Book of the Year Award, it tells the story of a contemporary Ukrainian writer who becomes obsessed with Viacheslav Lypynskyi, an important Polish figure in the early 20th-century Ukrainian independence movement. Lypynskyi studied Ukrainian at university in the early 1900s, when teaching the language was scandalous; both Russians and Poles considered it “a dialect of either Russian or Polish, or both concurrently.” Printing Ukrainian works was also prohibited, “punishable by imprisonment or exile.”

Throughout history, Ukrainians have faced this paradox: a denial of their existence (Ukrainian isn’t a language) combined with brutal repression (and you are forbidden to speak it). As Maljartschuk writes, the struggle makes many “lose their minds.”

Forgottenness is full of characters shrugging, often in dramatic situations. While American critics often lament shrugs (along with nods and smiles) as lazy dialogue tags, for the Ukrainian writer, the shrug is an important gesture. Soviet-born U.S. writer Gary Shteyngart once wrote, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that Ukraine’s coat of arms could be a man shrugging. This attitude can easily be mistaken for nihilism, but it is far more complex than that. On its most basic level, it comes from a learned acceptance that many situations are beyond one’s control. For generations of Ukrainians, this acceptance has been necessary to maintain sanity.

Ukrainians have found different ways of shrugging. In Forgottenness, the unnamed narrator remembers how her father, like many Ukrainian men of his generation, became immersed in kung fu in the 1980s, needing to feel like he could protect himself. Her grandfather, after feigning insanity to avoid military service, worked as a forced laborer, melting down church bells that were transported across the Soviet Union to be made into weapons; for years, he responded to most things with a joke, fueling himself on laughter.

She remembers how her grandmother was left at an orphanage by a father who would soon die in the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin’s terror famine of 1932-33, during which millions of Ukrainians starved to death. In an attempt to understand and connect with her family, the narrator asks her mother how this genealogy of suffering affected her. “Mom shrugged. ‘What was there to be affected by? That’s how things were, and that’s all there is to it.’”

The narrator has the opposite reaction. Her fascination with Lypynskyi, who almost lost his mind, falling into infirmity under the weight of defending the idea of a Ukrainian nation, comes partly from identifying with him. For the narrator, her inability to shrug leads to an existential crisis. She becomes terrified of the outside world. For months, she stops going outside. She begins to mop her floor relentlessly. She stands on her head to see things from a different perspective. She obsessively reads old newspapers in search of references to Lypynskyi. She is desperate to understand history. In a recurring image of the novel, she imagines time as a blue whale eating plankton by the millions. There is no mystery as to whom the plankton represent.

The historical parts of Forgottenness can be challenging, both to follow and to witness, for the simple reason that Ukrainian history is challenging. Lypynskyi lived through the early 20th century, a time when hope for a Ukrainian nation flickered before being brutally smothered.

As the narrator puts it, in the three years after the Russian Revolution, “Kyiv, like a loose woman, changed hands over ten times … and each new seizure ended in bloody purges.” Borders change, names change, empires come, empires go, and everyone dies. One reason that Maljartschuk’s is the first Ukrainian-language novel to break into U.S. commercial publishing is that so many Ukrainian writers from the 20th century were permanently silenced.

As Ukrainian writer Anastasia Levkova recently wrote, under Stalin, 500 of the foremost Ukrainian writers were executed. But she is quick to point out that Stalin was not solely responsible for silencing Ukrainian literature: For example, Vasyl Stus, one of the most famous Ukrainian poets of the 20th century, died in a Soviet forced labor camp decades after Stalin’s death. It is not just Stalin, nor is it just current Russian President Vladimir Putin—it is the Russian Empire that denies Ukrainian history, Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian existence.

Ukraine, one character in Forgottenness laments, “has so many million bodies but so few actual people.” The Russian Empire won’t even allow remembrance of the bodies. When the narrator goes to visit Lypynskyi’s grave, she cannot find it, because the cemetery’s headstones were bulldozed and used to line the floors of pigsties during collectivization. How is she to come to terms with her past when the empire has erased it?

As she’s fighting panic attacks, the narrator watches pigeons across the street building nests and laying eggs on neglected balconies. “Once in a while, the building’s owners would toss the eggs off the balconies onto the asphalt below. The pigeons would then sit on the roof and dispassionately observe the destruction of their offspring.” The pigeons shrug not because they don’t care, but because—what choice do they have?

The narrator’s inability to be like the pigeons almost kills her. But she can still think, write, and face her crisis head-on. In what might seem like an anti-climax, but is actually a triumph, she seeks out a therapist. As she puts it, in her part of the world, “the human head has one purpose—to eat.” Her mother condemns her for being a drama queen. But the narrator finds another woman, a professional, who listens and who cares. She begins to trust her. She starts talking her way out. Through language and solidarity with a fellow Ukrainian, she finds her way back to the world.

Maljartschuk, a Vienna-based Ukrainian novelist, wrote Forgottenness between the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, a period when Ukrainian art, newly liberated from colonial shackles, was blossoming. Its Ukrainian title, Zabuttya, means both “forgetfulness” and “oblivion,” and although this is not a novel about the war, no event has brought the threat of oblivion into more urgent focus than Russia’s invasion.

According to Forgottenness’ promotional materials, Norton’s inspiration for publishing the book was a March 2022 article in the New York Times about the urgency of bringing Ukrainian literature to the West after Russia’s invasion. Because of the sudden prominence of Ukraine in the American consciousness, there is the temptation for Americans to read Ukrainian literature today anthropologically, approaching it as a window into the country instead of an imaginary story about Ukrainian characters.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of the publisher: I am very grateful that Norton published Forgottenness, and I hope that more U.S. publishers will follow its lead. But how does it affect the reader’s experience to approach the book with images of rubble in mind? How does an American reader get around the trap of reading Ukrainian fiction like it’s nonfiction—of reading it for information rather than emotion—when current events are the reason for its translation into English? The narrator’s panic attacks are brought on not by missiles but by the chaos in her mind and the fear in her genes. Is it not disrespectful to read the book as a guide to understanding Ukraine in 2024?

Fortunately, Forgottenness shares a way to read itself and also to read Ukraine’s latest fight for survival. Maljartschuk personifies the statewide struggle against oblivion in the individual struggle to accept the things you can’t change while refusing to accept the things you can. The struggle, I believe, applies to both the narrator and Ukraine, past and present. The story speaks to what came immediately before the book was published: the Maidan Revolution, in which Ukrainians from every class and background risked their lives to drive out the pro-Russian puppet government, holding Independence Square in Kyiv for three months in the face of a harsh winter, police snipers, government-hired thugs, kidnappings, and torture. But Forgottenness can also speak to what will come after.

The narrator says of her grandfather feigning madness to get out of fighting: “Between a slavish existence and a heroic death, he chose the former, and only thanks to this choice did I become possible.” In her words, she is “the offspring of meekness in the face of power and fear in the face of death.”

But there is no trace of meekness in today’s Ukraine. A generation of Ukrainian writers and artists are now on the front lines of battle or in the rear guard, tirelessly fundraising for equipment for soldiers.

“Everything I’ve done in my life has only come to be by overcoming great fear,” Maljartschuk said in an interview following the 2022 invasion. Fear, as Zabuzhko wrote, lives in the genes. But fear need not paralyze. “Ukrainians are no longer victims,” Maljartschuk added, “but fighters.”

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vitalwebmaster · 2 years ago

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Unbelievable 10 Ways Stalin Under USSR Destroyed the Lives of Millions of Ukrainians

The USSR under Stalin was a dictatorship that led to the suffering of millions of Ukrainians. In this article, we will walk through: the collectivization of agriculture, the famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33, the purges of the 1930s, the deportations of the 1940s, the forced labor camps, the persecution of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and the suppression of Ukrainian culture. Under Stalin’s rule,…

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#Biography #book #books #culture #education #family #history #orphan #orphanage #russia #stalin #ukraine #ukraine history #ukraine war #UkraineMemoir #Ukrainian culture #vitaly #vitaly book #vitaly story

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ammg-old2 · 1 year ago

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For months, forcibly transferred children, ages four months to 18 years, were listed in a public Russian adoption database without mention of their Ukrainian origin. That they were in the database at all was not widely known until May 31, when the Russian dissident outlet iStories exposed its use in an article alleging that the children were being made to sew camouflage nets for the Russian military, which some were even forced to join.

The iStories revelations prompted Russia to scrub the database of all information about the Ukrainian children. Fortunately, much of it had been scraped by at least one group of open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigators who asked not to be named in order to continue their sensitive work. Such groups are scouring publicly available databases, social media, precision satellite imagery showing the locations of camps, and other sources to track the disappearing Ukrainian children.

The Ukrainian government officially estimates that about 19,500 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia since the start of the war. The exact number is unknowable, and keeping track of all of the children is nearly impossible—some of the parents have been killed or lost touch with their children as Russia shifts them from place to place.

At the beginning of the war, some parents in eastern Ukraine sent their children to what the Russians told them were summer camps. The parents believed that the camps would keep their children safe, or provide them with enough food to eat, Syniuk says. Reports have since alleged severe abuse at the camps. No matter the conditions, the camps now appear to have been a pretext for luring the children away from their parents and into Russia. As Raymond said: “They can be given caviar every day, riding horsies and having the best day ever, and it’s still a war crime.”

Dozens of these camps are scattered across Russia, according to Conflict Observatory, an American NGO that collects and analyzes evidence of war crimes in Ukraine. The camp farthest from Ukraine is 3,900 miles from the border, in Russia’s Magadan Oblast. The facilities apparently specialize in political reeducation; some reports suggest that military training is also part of their program.

When Ukrainian parents are ready to bring their children home from camp, many are told that the children will remain in Russia, or that there is a “delay.” Some families have managed to recover their children, but only with great difficulty; others report that their children are not allowed to leave, have been transferred to different camps, or have become unreachable. Now, says Veronika Bilkova, an author of an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe report about the forcible transfer of children published in May, “it seems that really the Russian Federation is getting ready, legally speaking, to be able to adopt these [camp] children as well.”

Not all of the Ukrainian children in Russia came by way of the camps. Others are evacuees, removed by Russian soldiers from areas of Ukraine that Russia’s shelling had made perilous. Anya belonged to this group. Still others were transferred through a process of filtration, in which they were separated from their parents at camps like Bezimenne, in Donetsk, where Russian forces detain and interrogate Ukrainian citizens in Russian-held territories. And then there are the children from Ukrainian orphanages raided by Russian troops, taken across the border to orphanages in Russia.

Many of these supposed orphans actually have parents: In both Ukraine and Russia, families who fall on hard times commonly send their children temporarily to orphanages, experts told me, expecting to later recover them. But once the children are in Russia, according to the OSCE report, “the Russian Federation does not take any steps to actively promote the return of Ukrainian children. Rather, it creates various obstacles for families seeking to get their children back.”

At the moment, the younger the child is, the bleaker the prospects of a return to Ukraine. The only children to have made it home so far, according to legal and human-rights advocates I spoke with, are those old enough to have called their parents or guardians—provided that they have any. Some of those who have made it home reported seeing younger children they knew in Russia—but with the carousel of stolen children still spinning, those sighted likely won’t stay in the same place for long.

#current events #politics #russian politics #child abduction #child trafficking #children #russo-ukrainian war #2022 russian invasion of ukraine #russia #ukraine

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dailyanarchistposts · 8 months ago

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Chapter 6. Revolution

To put an end to all coercive hierarchies and open space for organizing a horizontal, liberated society, people must overcome the repressive powers of the state, abolish all institutions of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and create communities that organize themselves without new authorities.

How could people organized horizontally possibly overcome the state?

If anarchists believe in voluntary action and decentralized organization, how could they ever be strong enough to topple a government with a professional army? In fact, strong anarchist and anti-authoritarian movements have defeated armies and governments in a number of revolutions. Often this occurs in periods of economic crisis, when the state lacks vital resources, or political crisis, when the state has lost the illusion of legitimacy.

The Soviet revolution of 1917 did not begin as the authoritarian terror it became after Lenin and Trotsky hijacked it. It was a multiform rebellion against the Tsar and against capitalism. It included such diverse actors as Socialist Revolutionaries, republicans, syndicalists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks. The soviets themselves were spontaneous non-party worker councils that organized along anti-authoritarian lines. The Bolsheviks gained control and ultimately suppressed the revolution by playing an effective political game that included co-opting or sabotaging the soviets, taking over the military, manipulating and betraying allies, and negotiating with imperialist powers. The Bolsheviks adeptly established themselves as the new government, and their allies made the mistake of believing their revolutionary rhetoric.

One of the first actions of the Bolshevik government was to sign a backstabbing peace treaty with the German and Austrian Empires. To pull out of World War I and free up the army for domestic action, the Leninists ceded the imperialists a treasure trove of money and strategic resources, and bequeathed them the country of Ukraine — without consulting the Ukrainians. Peasants in southern Ukraine rose up in revolt, and it was there that anarchism was strongest during the Soviet revolution. The rebels called themselves the Revolutionary Insurgent Army. They were commonly described as Makhnovists, after Nestor Makhno, their most influential military strategist and a skilled anarchist organizer. Makhno had been released from prison after the revolution in February 1917, and he returned to his hometown to organize an anarchist militia to fight the occupying German and Austrian forces.

As the insurrectionary anarchist army grew, it developed a more formal structure to allow for strategic coordination along several fronts, but it remained a volunteer militia, based on peasant support. Guiding questions of policy and strategy were decided in general meetings of peasants and workers. Aided rather than hindered by their flexible, participatory structure and strong support from the peasants, they liberated an area roughly 300 by 500 miles across, containing 7 million inhabitants, centered around the town of Gulyai-Polye. At times, the cities surrounding this anarchist zone — Alexandrovsk and Ekaterinoslav (now named Zaporizhye and Dnipropetrovsk, respectively) as well as Melitopol, Mariupol and Berdyansk, were freed from the control of the state, though they changed hands several times throughout the war. Self-organization along anarchist lines was deployed more consistently in the rural areas in these tumultuous years. In Gulyai-Polye, the anarchists set up three secondary schools and gave money expropriated from banks to orphanages. Throughout the area, literacy increased among the peasants.

In addition to taking on the Germans and Austrians, the anarchists also fought off the forces of nationalists who tried to subjugate the newly independent country under a homegrown Ukrainian government. They went on to hold the southern front against the armies of the White Russians — the aristocratic, pro-capitalist army funded and armed largely by the French and Americans — while their supposed allies, the Bolsheviks, withheld guns and ammunition and began purging anarchists to stop the spread of anarchism emanating from the Makhnovist territory. The White Russians eventually broke through the starved southern front, and reconquered Gulyai-Polye. Makhno retreated to the West, drawing off a large portion of the White armies, the remainder of which beat back the Red Army and advanced steadily towards Moscow. At the battle of Peregenovka, in western Ukraine, the anarchists obliterated the White army pursuing them. Although they were outnumbered and outgunned, they carried the day by effectively executing a series of brilliant maneuvers developed by Makhno, who had no military education or expertise. The volunteer anarchist army raced back to Gulyai-Polye, liberating the countryside and several major cities from the Whites. This sudden reversal cut off the supply lines of the armies that had almost reached Moscow, forcing them to retreat and saving the Russian Revolution.

For another year, an anarchist society again flourished in and around Gulyai-Polye, despite the efforts of Lenin and Trotsky to repress the anarchists there the way they had repressed them throughout Russia and the rest of Ukraine. When another White incursion under General Wrangel threatened the revolution, the Makhnovists again agreed to join the Communists against the imperialists, despite the earlier betrayal. The anarchist contingent accepted a suicide mission to take out enemy gun positions on the Perekop isthmus of Crimea; they succeeded in this and went on to capture the strategic city of Simferopol, again playing a crucial role in defeating the Whites. After the victory, the Bolsheviks surrounded and massacred most of the anarchist contingent, and occupied Gulyai-Polye and executed many influential anarchist organizers and fighters. Makhno and a few others escaped and confounded the massive Red Army with an effective campaign of guerrilla warfare for many months, even causing several major defections; in the end, however, the survivors decided to escape to the West. Some peasants in Ukraine retained their anarchist values, and raised the anarchist banner as part of the partisan resistance against Nazis and Stalinists during the Second World War. Even today, the red and black flag is a symbol of Ukrainian independence, though few people know its origins.

The Makhnovists of southern Ukraine maintained their anarchist character under extremely difficult conditions: constant warfare, betrayal and repression by supposed allies, lethal pressures that required them to defend themselves with organized violence. In these circumstances they continued to fight for liberty, even when it was not in their military interests. They repeatedly interceded to prevent pogroms against Jewish communities while the Ukrainian nationalists and Bolsheviks fanned the flames of anti-Semitism to provide a scapegoat for the problems they themselves were exacerbating. Makhno personally killed a neighboring warlord and potential ally upon learning he had ordered pogroms, even at a time when he desperately needed allies.[86]

During October and November [1919], Makhno occupied Ekaterinoslav and Aleksandrovsk for several weeks, and thus obtained his first chance to apply the concepts of anarchism to city life. Makhno’s first act on entering a large town (after throwing open the prisons) was to dispel any impression that he had come to introduce a new form of political rule. Announcements were posted informing the townspeople that henceforth they were free to organize their lives as they saw fit, that the Insurgent Army would not “dictate to them or order them to do anything.” Free speech, press, and assembly were proclaimed, and in Ekaterinoslav half a dozen newspapers, representing a wide range of political opinion, sprang up overnight. While encouraging freedom of expression, however, Makhno would not countenance any political organization which sought to impose their authority on the people. He therefore dissolved the Bolshevik “revolutionary committees” (revkomy) in Ekaterinoslav and Aleksandrovsk, instructing their members to “take up some honest trade.”[87]

The Makhnovists stuck to defending the region, leaving socio-economic organization to the individual towns and cities; this hands-off approach to others was matched by an internal emphasis on direct democracy. Officers were elected from within every sub-group of fighters, and they could be recalled by that same group; they were not saluted, they did not receive material privileges, and they could not lead from behind to avoid the risks of combat.

In contrast, officers in the Red Army were appointed from above and received privileges and higher pay on the scale of the Tsarist Army. In fact the Bolsheviks had essentially taken over the structure and personnel of the Tsarist Army after the October Revolution. They retained most of the officers but reformed it into a “people’s army” by adding political officers responsible for identifying “counter-revolutionaries” to be purged. They also adopted the imperialist practice of stationing soldiers far across the continent from their homes, in areas where they did not speak the language, so they would be more likely to obey orders to repress locals and less likely to desert.

To be sure, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army enforced a strict discipline, shooting suspected spies and those who abused the peasants for personal gain such as embezzlers and rapists. The insurgents must have held many of the same powers over the civilian population as does any army. Among their many opportunities to abuse that power, some of them probably did. However, their relationship with the peasants was unique among the military powers. The Makhnovists could not survive without popular support, and during their lengthy guerrilla war against the Red Army many peasants provided them with horses, food, lodging, medical help, and intelligence gathering. In fact the peasants themselves provided the majority of the anarchist fighters.

It is also debated how democratic the Makhnovist organizations were. Some historians say Makhno exerted substantial control over the “free soviets” — the non-party assemblies where workers and peasants made decisions and organized their affairs. Even sympathetic historians relate anecdotes of Makhno bullying delegates he saw as counter-revolutionary in meetings. But one must weigh these against the many occasions Makhno refused positions of power, or the fact that he left the Military Revolutionary Soviet, the assembly that decided military policy for the peasant militias, in an attempt to save the movement from the Bolshevik repression[88].

One criticism the Bolsheviks had of the Makhnovists was that their Military Revolutionary Soviet, the closest thing they could have had to a dictatorial organization, wielded no real power — it was really just an advisory group — while individual workers’ groups and peasant communities retained their autonomy. More charitable is the description by Soviet historian Kubanin: “the supreme body of the insurgent army was its Military Revolutionary Soviet, elected at a general assembly of all insurgents. Neither the overall command of the army nor Makhno himself truly ran the movement; they merely reflected the aspirations of the mass, acting as its ideological and technical agents.” Another Soviet historian, Yefimov, says “No decision was ever taken by just one individual. All military matters were debated in common.”[89]

Grossly outnumbered and outgunned volunteer anarchist militias successfully defeated the armies of the Germans, the Austrians, the Ukrainian nationalists, and the White Russians. It took a professional army supplied by the world’s greatest industrial powers and simultaneous betrayal by their allies to stop them. If they had known then what we know now — that authoritarian revolutionaries can be as tyrannical as capitalist governments — and Russian anarchists in Moscow and St. Petersburg had succeeded in preventing the Bolsheviks from hijacking the Russian Revolution, things might have turned out differently.

Even more impressive than the example provided by the Makhnovists is the victory won by several indigenous nations in 1868. In a two year war, thousands of warriors from the Lakota and Cheyenne nations defeated the US military and destroyed several army forts during what became known as Red Cloud’s War. In 1866, the Lakota met with the US government at Fort Laramie because the latter wanted permission to build a military trail through the Powder River country to facilitate the influx of white settlers who were seeking gold. The US military had already defeated the Arapaho in its attempt to open the area for white settlers, but they had been unable to defeat the Lakota. During the negotiations it became apparent that the US government had already started the process of building military forts along this trail, without even having secured permission for the trail itself. The Oglala Lakota war chief Red Cloud promised to resist any white attempts to occupy the area. Nonetheless in the summer of 1866 the US military began sending more troops to the region and constructing new forts. Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors following the direction of Red Cloud began a campaign of guerrilla resistance, effectively closing down the Bozeman trail and harassing the troops stationed in the forts. The military sent down the order for an aggressive winter campaign, and on December 21, when their wood train was attacked yet again, an army of about one hundred US soldiers decided to pursue. They met a decoy party including the Oglala warrior Crazy Horse and took the bait. The entire force was defeated and killed by a force of 1,000–3,000 warriors that waited in ambush. The commanding officer of the white soldiers was knifed to death in hand to hand combat. The Lakota left a young bugle boy who fought with just his bugle covered in a buffalo robe as a sign of honor — with such acts the indigenous warriors demonstrated the possibility of a much more respectful form of warfare, in contrast with the white soldiers and settlers who often cut out fetuses from pregnant women and used the amputated genitals of unarmed victims as tobacco pouches.

In the summer of 1867 US troops with new repeating rifles fought the Lakota to a standstill in two battles, but they failed to carry out any successful offensives. In the end, they asked for peace talks, which Red Cloud said he would only grant if the new military forts were abandoned. The US government agreed, and in the peace talks they recognized the rights of the Lakota to the Black Hills and Powder River country, a huge area currently occupied by the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana.

During the war, the Lakota and Cheyenne organized without coercion or military discipline. But contrary to the typical dichotomies, their relative lack of hierarchy did not hamper their ability for organization. On the contrary, they held together during a brutal war on the basis of a collective, self-motivated discipline and varying forms of organization. In a Western army, the most important unit is the military police or the officer who walks behind the troops, pistol loaded and ready to shoot anyone who turns and runs. The Lakota and Cheyenne had no need for discipline imposed from above. They were fighting to defend their land and way of life, in groups bound by kinship and affinity.

Some fighting groups were structured with a chain of command, while others operated in a more collective fashion, but all of them voluntarily rallied around individuals with the best organizational abilities, spiritual power, and combat experience. These war chiefs did not control those who followed them so much as inspire them. When morale was low or a fight looked hopeless, groups of warriors often went home, and they were always free to do so. If a chief declared war, he had to go, but no one else did, so a leader who could not convince anyone to follow him to war was engaging in an embarrassing and even suicidal venture. In contrast, politicians and generals in Western society frequently start unpopular wars, and they are never the ones to suffer the consequences.

The warrior societies played an important role in the indigenous organization of warfare, but women’s societies were vital as well. They played a role similar to that of the Quartermaster in Western armies, provisioning food and materials, except that where the Quartermaster is a simple cog obeying orders, the Lakota and Cheyenne women would refuse to cooperate if they disagreed with the reasons for a war. Considering that one of Napoleon’s most important contributions to European warfare was the insight that “an army marches on its stomach,” it becomes apparent that Lakota and Cheyenne women exercised more power in the affairs of their nations than the histories written by men and white people would lead us to believe. Additionally, women who chose to could fight alongside the men.

Despite being impossibly outnumbered by the US military and white settler paramilitaries, the Native Americans won. After Red Cloud’s War, the Lakota and Cheyenne enjoyed nearly a decade of autonomy and peace. Contrary to pacifist allegations about militant resistance, the victors did not begin oppressing one another or creating uncontrollable cycles of violence just because they had violently fought off the white invaders. They won themselves several years of freedom and peace.

In 1876, the US military again invaded the Lakota territory to attempt to force them to live on the reservations, which were being transformed into concentration camps as part of the campaign of genocide against the indigenous populations. Several thousand troops were involved, and they met with several early defeats, the most notable of which was the Battle of Greasy Grass Creek, also known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Around 1,000 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, defending themselves from an attack, decimated the cavalry unit commanded by George A. Custer and killed several hundred soldiers. Custer himself had previously invaded Lakota lands to spread reports of gold and provoke another wave of white settlers, who were a major driving force for the genocide. The settlers, aside from being an armed paramilitary force responsible for a large share of the encroachments and murders, provided a sufficient pretext for bringing in the military. The logic was that those poor humble homesteaders, in the act of invading another country, had to be defended from “marauding Indians.” The US government ultimately won the war against the Lakota, by attacking their villages, invading their hunting grounds, and instituting strong repression against the people living on the reservations. One of the last to surrender was the Oglala warrior Crazy Horse, who had been one of the most effective leaders in the fight against the US military. After his group agreed to come into the reservation, Crazy Horse was arrested and assassinated.

Their ultimate defeat does not indicate a weakness in the horizontal organization of the Lakota and Cheyenne so much as the fact that the white American population trying to exterminate them outnumbered these indigenous groups by a thousand to one, and had the ability to spread disease and drug addiction on their home turf while destroying their food source.

Lakota resistance never ended, and they may win their war in the end. In December 2007, a group of Lakota again asserted their independence, informing the US State Department that they were withdrawing from all treaties, which had already been broken by the settler government, and seceding, as a necessary measure in the face of “colonial apartheid conditions.”[90]

Some of the most uncompromising struggles against the state are indigenist. Current indigenist struggles have created some of the only zones in North America that enjoy physical and cultural autonomy and have successfully defended themselves in periodic confrontations with the state. These struggles typically do not identify themselves as anarchist, and perhaps for this reason anarchists have even more to learn from them. But if learning is not to be another commodity relation, an act of acquisition, it must be accompanied by horizontal relationships of reciprocity, which is to say, solidarity.

The Mohawk nation have long fought against colonization and in 1990 they won a major victory against the forces of the settler state. In Kanehsatake territory, near Montreal, white people in the town of Oka wanted to expand a golf course at the expense of a forested area in which a Mohawk graveyard was located, sparking native protests. In the spring of 1990, Mohawks set up a camp there and blocked the road. On July 11, 1990, Quebec police attacked the encampment with tear gas and automatic weapons, but the Mohawk defenders were armed and dug in. One cop was shot and killed and the rest ran away. The police cars, which they had left behind in panic, were used to build new barricades. Meanwhile, Mohawk warriors at Kahnawake blocked Mercier Bridge, halting commuter traffic to Montreal. Police began a seige of the Mohawk communities, but more warriors came, smuggling in supplies. The resisters organized food, medical care, and communications services, and the blockades persisted. White mobs formed in neighborhing towns and rioted, demanding police violence to open the bridge and restore traffic. Later in August, these mobs attacked a group of Mohawks while police stood by.

On August 20, the blockades were still going strong, and the Canadian military took over the siege from the police. In total 4,500 troops were deployed, backed by tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, fighter jets, artillery, and naval ships. On September 18, Canadian soldiers raided Tekakwitha Island, shooting tear gas and bullets. The Mohawks fought back and the soldiers had to be evacuated by helicopter. Across Canada, native people protested in solidarity with the Mohawk, occupying buildings, blocking railroads and highways, and carrying out acts of sabotage. Unknown people burned down railway bridges in British Colombia and Alberta, and cut down five hydro-electric towers in Ontario. On September 26, the remaining besieged Mohawk declared victory and walked out, having burned their weapons. The golf course was never expanded, and most of those arrested were acquitted of weapons and riot charges. “Oka served to revitalize the warrior spirit of indigenous peoples and our will to resist.”[91]

At the end of the ‘90s, the World Bank threatened not to renew a major loan on which the Bolivian government depended if they did not agree to privatize all water services in the city of Cochabamba. The government conceded and signed a contract with a consortium headed up by corporations from England, Italy, Spain, the US, and Bolivia. The water consortium, lacking knowledge of local conditions, immediately raised the rates, to the point where many families had to pay a fifth of their monthly earnings just for water. On top of this they enforced a policy of shutting off the water of any household that did not pay. In January 2000, major protests erupted against the water privatization. Primarily indigenous peasants converged on the city, joined by retired workers, sweatshop employees, street vendors, homeless youth, students, and anarchists. Protestors seized the central plaza and barricaded major roads. They organized a general strike which paralyzed the city for four days. On February 4 a major protest march was attacked by police and soldiers. Two hundred demonstrators were arrested, while seventy people and fifty-one cops were injured.

In April people again seized the central plaza of Cochabamba, and when the government began arresting organizers, protests spread to the cities of La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí, as well as many rural villages. Most major highways throughout the country were blockaded. On April 8, the Bolivian president declared a 90 day state of siege, banning meetings of more than 4 people, restricting political activity, allowing arbitrary arrests, establishing curfews, and putting the radio stations under military control. Police occasionally joined the demonstrators to demand higher pay, even participating in some riots. Once the government raised their salaries, they returned to work and continued beating and arresting their erstwhile comrades. Across the country people fought against the police and military with stones and molotov cocktails, suffering many injuries and multiple deaths. On April 9, soldiers trying to remove a roadblock encountered resistance and shot two protestors to death, injuring several others. Neighbors attacked the soldiers, seized their weapons, and opened fire. Later they stormed a hospital and seized an army captain they had wounded, and lynched him.

As violent protests only showed signs of growing despite, and often because of, repeated killings and violent repression by the police and military, the state cancelled its contract with the water consortium and on April 11 annulled the law that had authorized the privatization of water in Cochabamba. Management of the water infrastructure was turned over to a community coordinating group that had arisen from the protest movement. Some participants in the struggle subsequently travelled to Washington, D.C. to join antiglobalization protestors in the demonstration intended to shut down the annual World Bank meeting.[92]

The complaints of the protestors moved far beyond water privatization in one city. The resistance had generalized to a social rebellion that included socialist rejections of neoliberalism, anarchist rejections of capitalism, farmers’ rejections of their debts, poor people’s demands for lower fuel prices and the end of multinational ownership of Bolivia’s gas, and indigenous demands for sovereignty. Similarly fierce resistance in subsequent years defeated Bolivia’s political elite on a number of occasions. Farmers and anarchists armed with dynamite took over banks to win the forgiveness of their debts. Under intense popular pressure, the government nationalized the extraction of gas, and a powerful union of indigenous farmers defeated the US-backed program of coca eradication. The coca farmers even got their leader, Evo Morales, elected president, giving Bolivia its first indigenous head of state. Because of this, Bolivia is currently facing a political crisis the government may be incapable of resolving, as the traditional elite, located in the white, eastern areas of the country, refuse to submit to the progressive policies of the Morales government. In the rural areas, indigenous communities used more direct means to preserve their autonomy. They continued blockading highways, and sabotaged attempts of government control of their villages through daily acts of resistance. On no fewer than a dozen occasions when a particular mayor or other government official proved especially intrusive or abusive, he would be lynched by the villagers.

Decentralized resistance can defeat the government in an armed standoff — it can also overthrow governments. In 1997, government corruption and an economic collapse sparked a massive insurrection in Albania. In a matter of months, people armed themselves and forced the government and secret police to flee the country. They did not set up a new government or unite under a political party. Rather, they pushed out the state to create autonomous areas where they could organize their own lives. The rebellion spread spontaneously; without central leadership or even coordination. People across the country identified the state as their oppressor and attacked. Prisons were opened and police stations and government buildings burned to the ground. People sought to meet their needs at the local level within pre-existing social networks. Unfortunately, they lacked a consciously anarchist or anti-authoritarian movement. Rejecting political solutions intuitively but not explicitly, they lacked an analysis that could identify all political parties as enemies by their nature. Consequently the opposition Socialist party was able to install itself in power, though it took an occupation by thousands of European Union troops to pacify Albania completely.

Even in the wealthiest countries of the world, anarchists and other rebels can defeat the state within a limited area, creating an autonomous zone in which new social relations can flourish. In 1980–81, the German conservative party lost power in Berlin after trying to forcefully crush the squatters’ movement. The squatters occupied abandoned buildings as a struggle against gentrification and urban decay, or simply to provide themselves with free housing. Many squatters, known as autonomen, identified with an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian movement that saw these squats as bubbles of freedom in which to create the beginnings of a new society. In Berlin, the struggle was fiercest in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. In some areas, the majority of the residents were autonomen, dropouts, and immigrants — it was in many aspects an autonomous zone. Using the full might of the police, the city attempted to evict the squats and crush the movement, but the autonomen fought back. They defended their neighborhood with barricades, rocks, and molotov cocktails and outmaneuvered the police in street fighting. They counterattacked by wreaking havoc in the financial and commercial districts of the city. The ruling party gave up in disgrace and the Socialists took power; the latter employed a legalization strategy in an attempt to undermine the movement’s autonomy, since they were unable to forcibly evict them. Meanwhile, the autonomen in Kreuzberg took measures to protect the neighborhood from drug pushers, with a “fists against needles” campaign. They also fought against gentrification, smashing up bourgeois restaurants and bars.

In Hamburg, in 1986 and 1987, the police were stopped by the barricades of the autonomen when they attempted to evict the squats of Hafenstrasse. After losing several major street battles and suffering counterattacks, such as a coordinated arson attack against thirteen department stores causing $10 million in damage, the mayor legalized the squats, which still stand and continue to be centers of cultural and political resistance as of this writing.

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the autonomous youth movement went on the attack in 1986. At a time of militant squatting actions and sabotage attacks on Shell Oil stations and other targets of anti-imperialist struggle, several hundred people rerouted their protest march by surprise and occupied Ryesgade, a street in the neighborhood of Osterbro. They built barricades, and won neighborhood support and brought groceries to elderly neighbors blocked in by the barricades. For nine days, the autonomen held the streets, defeating the police in several major battles. Free radio stations throughout Denmark helped mobilize support, including food and supplies. Finally, the government announced it would bring in the military to clear the barricades. The youth at the barricades announced a press conference, but when the appointed morning came, they had all disappeared. Two city negotiators wondered:

Where did the BZers [Occupation Brigaders] go when they left? What did the town hall learn? It seems the act can start all over again, anywhere, at any time. Even bigger. With the same participants.[93]

In 2002, Barcelona police attempted to evict Can Masdeu, a large squatted social center on a mountainside just outside the city. Can Masdeu was connected to the squatters’ movement, the environmental movement, and the local tradition of resistance. The surrounding hillside was covered in gardens, many of them used by older neighbors who remembered the dictatorship and the struggle against it, and understood that this struggle still continued in the present day despite the veneer of democracy. Accordingly, the center received support from many corners of society. When the police came, the residents barricaded and locked down, and for days eleven people hung in harnesses on the outside of the building, dangling over the hillside, high above the ground. Supporters streamed in and challenged the police; others took action throughout the city, blocking traffic and attacking banks, real estate offices, a McDonalds, and other stores. Police tried to starve out the ones hanging from the building and used psychological torture tactics against them, but ultimately failed. The resistance defeated the eviction attempt and the autonomous zone survives to this day, with active community gardens and a social center.

On December 6, 2008, Greek police shot to death the fifteen-year-old anarchist Alexis Grigoropoulos in the middle of Exarchia, the anarchist and autonomous stronghold in downtown Athens. Within minutes, anarchist affinity groups communicating by internet and cell phone sprang into action across the country. These affinity groups, in their hundreds, had developed relationships of trust and security and the capacity for taking offensive action over the previous years as they organized and carried out numerous small-scale attacks on state and capital. These attacks included simple graffiti actions, popular expropriations from supermarkets, molotov attacks on police, police cars, and commissaries, and bomb attacks against the vehicles and offices of political parties, institutions, and corporations that had led the reaction against social movements, immigrants, workers, prisoners, and others. The continuity of actions created a background of fierce resistance that could come to the fore when Greek society was ready.

Their rage over the murder of Alexis provided a rallying point for the anarchists, and they began attacking police all over the country, before the police in many cities even knew what was happening. The force of the attack broke the illusion of social peace, and in subsequent days hundreds of thousands of other people came out into the streets to vent the rage they too harbored against the system. Immigrants, students, high school kids, workers, revolutionaries from the previous generation, old folks — all of Greek society came out and participated in a diversity of actions. They fought against the police and won, winning the power to transform their cities. Luxury shops and government buildings were smashed and burned to the ground. Schools, radio stations, theaters, and other buildings were occupied. Their mourning turned into celebration as people set fires and commemorated the burning away of the old world with parties in the streets. The police responded in force, injuring and arresting hundreds of people and filling the air with tear gas. The people defended themselves with more fires, burning down everything they hated and producing thick clouds of black smoke that neutralized the tear gas.

On the days when people started to go home, perhaps to return to normality, the anarchists kept the riots going, so that there could be no doubt that the streets belonged to the people and a new world was within their reach. Amidst all the graffiti that appeared on the walls was the promise: “We are an image from the future.” The riots went on for two weeks straight. The police had long lost all semblance of control, and had run out of tear gas. In the end people went home out of sheer physical exhaustion, but they did not stop. Attacks continued, and huge parts of Greek society began participating in creative actions as well. Greek society had been transformed. All the symbols of capitalism and government were proven to provoke the scorn of the masses. The state had lost its legitimacy and the media was reduced to repeating the transparent lie, these rioters simply don’t know what they want. The anarchist movement won respect throughout the country, and inspired the new generation. The riots subsided, but the actions continued. As of this writing, people throughout Greece continue occupying buildings, starting social centers, protesting, attacking, evaluating their strategies, and holding massive assemblies to determine the direction of their struggle.

Democratic states still entertain the option of calling in the military when their police forces cannot maintain order, and occasionally do so in even the most progressive countries. But this choice opens dangerous possibilities, as well. The dissidents may also take up arms; if the struggle continues to gain popularity, more and more people will see the government as an occupying force; in an extreme case, the military may mutiny and the struggle spread. In Greece, soldiers were circulating letters promising that if they were called in to crush the revolt, they would give their arms to the people and open fire on the cops. Military intervention is an unavoidable stage of any struggle to overthrow the state; but if social movements can demonstrate the courage and organizational capacity to defeat the police, they may be able to defeat the military or win them over. Thanks to the rhetoric of democratic governments, soldiers today are much less prepared psychologically to repress local uprisings as brutally as they would in a foreign country.

Because of the globally integrated nature of the system, states and other institutions of power are mutually reinforcing, and thus stronger up to a certain point. But beyond that point, they are all weaker, and vulnerable to collapse on a global scale like never before in history. Political crisis in China could destroy the US economy, and send other dominoes falling as well. We have not yet reached the point at which we can overthrow the global power structure, but it is significant that in specific contests the state is often unable to crush us, and bubbles of autonomy exist alongside the system that purports to be universal and without alternatives. Governments are overthrown every year. The system has still not been abolished because the victors of such struggles have always been co-opted and reincorporated into global capitalism. But if explicitly anti-authoritarian movements can take the initiative in popular resistance, this is a hopeful sign for the future.

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ohsalome · 2 years ago

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Oscars taking apolitical position and between movies about saving birds, lives of volcanologists, the opioid epidemic, ukrainian children from an orphanage, AFI decided to actually give it to fucker Navalny, who called immigrants and Muslims "cockroaches" and who according to him need to be "exterminated".

#OscarsSoWhiteSuprematist

Oscars are in their repertoire, as usual.

#response

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starlightshadowsworld · 1 year ago

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Differences between season one of Bungou Stray dogs and the first 16 chapters of the Manga.

Thinks it's neat seeing whats changed and I really like making lists.

Spoilers for the first season of the Anime and first 16 chapters of the Manga.

For context I watched the Anime subbed and read the Manga in English.

In the Anime Atsushi's flashbacks are usually the same one but in the Manga we see different ones of his time at the Orphanage.

In the Anime the Orphanage has stain glass windows.

Akutagawa coughs a lot more in the Manga.

(Also Bones did him dirty.

And Yosano, her hair is so much better in the Manga. Chuuya looks okay but man he do be looking very gremlin like.)

The Azure Messenger stuff isn't in the Manga but is in the Anime. (I think it's taken from the light novel on Dazai's entrance exam.)

When Atsushi bumps into someone while shopping with Yosano who flips out at them and her when she apologises.

In the Anime the guy tries to guess what her job is, she says she's a doctor. And that he has one arm to many, before breaking the one in her grasp.

In the Manga he calls her a bitch, she breaks his hand and says "then shall I xxx your puny xxx by stepping on them like a proper bitch."

Which he brings up on the train later, blushing and asking did she really mean she'd do, whatever that was.

She's disgusted and bashes his head against the wall.

In the Manga while captured, Dazai calls Chuuya paranoid and tells him his hair will fall out of he frets so much.

Implies it already is and Chuuya takes his hat off to show he's not hiding a bald spot.

Also in his "you can fool Akutugawa but not me" bit.

In the Anime Chuuya calls himself Dazai's old partner and in the Manga calls himself Dazai's old friend.

When rescuing Atsushi on the boat, Kunikida in the Anime says no ones getting paid for this rescue.

And in the Manga says the entire agency is working to save you.

In the Manga Dazai puts on glasses and waves to a random Mafia member saying long time no see before going to archives.

In the Anime we than see Fitzgerald commenting on the bounty plan being a failure.

But in the Manga we see that he's talking about it to Agatha Christy.

Who's listed as, the commander of the order of the clock tower. With the ability "And than there were none."

Before seeing Fyodor Dostoyevsky, head of the underground organisation, "Rats in the house of the head"with his ability "Crime and Punishment."

(Which I think is written in Russian.)

After Fukuzawa agrees to take Kyouka in.

Minoura, the police guy who had to arrest his own subordinate in that case Ranpo took over, comes in. Says he had a case.

In the Anime that's where the scene ends.

But in the Manga it carries on, he spots Kyouka and mentions she looks like the orphan girl turned ruthless assassin who has a warrant for her arrest.

He asks about her parents, if she has any legal documents.

Atsushi cuts in saying he found her after receiving a request from the government to look for this child.

... Just as he was doing the cossack dance in a wheat field.

(Which is apparently also known as the Hopak, a Ukrainian folk dance.... Which, is quite the story Atsushi.)

Junichiro internally says that it's a great improvisation while Kunikida internally calls him a moron.

Fukuzuwa than interjects and says she's his grand-daughter and seeing them both eye him, Minoura is just like... They're cut from the cloth and apologises for his rudeness.

In the Anime Junichiro tells them the case for the car being stuck in a building.

In the Manga Kunikida asks for the present from the police and Kenji holds up a folder saying you mean work.

In the Anime Kunikida says it'll be good for Atsushi to shadow other agents and quickly learn the ropes.

In the Manga he tells Atsushi he can't keep being pampered (weird thing to say to a guy who was just kidnapped) and needs to start working with his fellow agents to get used to his job.

But Kunikida does pat Atsushi's shoulder and says he should be alright.

In the Manga we see Higuichi find Akutugawa in the sea.

In the Anime during her conversation with Mori about Akutugawa's condition, Elise is drawing with crayons on the floor. While in the Manga she's sat at Mori's side.

In the Manga while explaining the rules of Anne's game, Lucy says violence is prohibited in the room and they can't destroy anything in there.

In the Manga after Dazai returns and tries to get Atsushi to write his report, Kunikida ponders that Dazai is always messing with Atsushi.

But there's a note saying "and yet he doesn't stop him.”

#bungou stray dogs #bungou stray dogs manga #bsd manga spoilers #atsushi nakajima #kunikida doppo #dazai osamu #kyouka izumi #chuuya nakahara

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leeenuu · 2 years ago

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Elderly residents are evacuated by a local organization from the southern city of Kherson, Ukraine, Sunday, November 27, 2022. Shelling by Russian forces struck several areas in eastern and southern Ukraine overnight as utility crews continued a scramble to restore power, water and heating following widespread strikes in recent weeks, officials said Sunday. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Technician Oleksandr Puhlenko, of Ukrainian mobile telephone network operator Kyivstar, pours gasoline from a jerry can into a tank of a generator for phone tower on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, November 30, 2022. With Ukraine racing to keep communications lines open in wartime, the country's phone operators have mobilized more than usual to help people stay in touch — such as by revving up generators to power mobile towers after Russian strikes took out the electricity they usually run on. (AP Photo/Andrew Kravchenko)

Newly placed Ukrainian billboard in Kherson, southern Ukraine, Sunday, November 27, 2022. From left, the billboard reads in Ukrainian: "Dear, you are Free" and "Kherson, Hero City". (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Men connect a homemade light with a battery to illuminate the pitch ahead of a soccer game during a blackout in Irpin, Kyiv region, Ukraine, Tuesday, November 29, 2022. For soccer lovers in Ukraine, Russia's invasion and the devastation it has wrought have created uncertainties about both playing the sport and watching it. For Ukrainians these days, soccer trails well behind mere survival in the order of priorities. (AP Photo/Andrew Kravchenko)

Lilia Kristenko, 38, cries as city responders collect the dead body of her mother Natalia Kristenko in Kherson, southern Ukraine, Friday, November 25, 2022. Natalia Kristenko's dead body lay covered in a blanket in the doorway of her apartment building for hours overnight. The 62-year-old woman had walked outside her home with her husband Thursday evening after drinking tea when the building was struck. Kristenko was killed instantly from a wound to the head. Her husband died hours later in the hospital from internal bleeding. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Two residents, left, helped exhume the bodies of six men from a communal grave as war crimes investigators looked on in the southern Ukrainian village of Pravdyne on Monday, November 28, 2022. (Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times)

Food is piled into a construction wheelbarrow by a local resident after receiving it at a mobile humanitarian aid point in the village of Zarichne, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, December 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Andriy Andriyenko)

Hospital staff take care of orphaned children at the children's regional hospital maternity ward in Kherson, southern Ukraine, Tuesday, November 22, 2022. Throughout the war in Ukraine, Russian authorities have been accused of deporting Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories to raise them as their own. At least 1,000 children were seized from schools and orphanages in the Kherson region during Russia’s eight-month occupation of the area, their whereabouts still unknown. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

#war in ukraine #russian world

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thezeinterviews · 1 year ago

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The Times: Olena Zelenska: Our fight for the Ukrainian children stolen by Putin

Desperate parents regularly write to the first lady, pleading for help. ‘As a mother, I don’t know how I would cope,’ she says of the kidnappings by Russia’s troops

Maxim Tucker, Kyiv

Friday November 10 2023, 12.10pm GMT, The Times

There is only a hint of fatigue in Olena Zelenska’s steely green eyes to show she carries the weight of a thousand mothers searching for their children on her shoulders.

She remembers the very first child she realised had been taken by Russian troops, a teenager named Serhii, kidnapped from his village in Chernihiv in the first weeks of the invasion. As the war progressed, more and more stories began to emerge.

“In the very first months of the full-scale invasion, reports of terrible incidents with children started appearing,” she recalls, speaking as part of an interview given exclusively to The Times and Channel 4, to be broadcast on Monday night as part of the documentary Dispatches: The Hunt for Ukraine’s Stolen Children.

At first it was individual children being seized and taken from their families, Zelenska says during our meeting in a secure room deep in the bowels of Ukraine’s presidential administration. Then entire schools, hospital wings and orphanages were emptied by the Russians.

“And the longer this terrible invasion lasted, the more these stories were revealed. We began to understand the huge scale of this when the Russians started abducting children by entire institutions.”

Today, Ukrainian law enforcement has been able to identify 19,546 children that it says have been taken by the Kremlin. Their evidence has prompted the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for President Putin and the Kremlin’s top official for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova.

Russian officials say they have moved many more — some 744,000 children — claiming they spirited them across the border for their own safety. Desperate Ukrainian parents regularly write to Zelenska and her husband pleading for help.

“Behind every one of these statistics is the story of a terrified child,” she says. “Messages from parents, relatives, grandparents, friends who were looking for children nobody could find.” A mother herself to Oleksandra, 19, and Kyrylo, 10, she was moved to act.

“Frankly speaking, as a mother, I don’t know how I would cope if someone took my child away even for a day and I didn’t know where they were. It’s very difficult for me to imagine how one can survive this. This is probably my worst nightmare,” she says, shaking her head at the horror of it.

As President Zelensky fought for the return of Ukrainian territory taken by Putin’s troops on the battlefield, Zelenska decided to fight for the return of Ukrainian children taken by them during occupation.

“I think that everyone who has a voice should spread the information about it, testify. Unfortunately, it is probably one of the most effective ways we can tackle it: to make it public as much as possible so that every person in the world hears about it. It can initiate more powerful actions to make Russia return our children.”

For a woman once assigned as a target for Putin’s special forces, her trips abroad are becoming increasingly frequent as Kyiv leans on her star power to seek humanitarian aid from world leaders. Time has listed her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Now, she is taking on Kremlin diplomats in the international arena.

“We demand that forced deportations be stopped, that forced assimilation be stopped,” she says. “Children of another country cannot be forced to become citizens of another country. It is necessary to create safe corridors to return the children who are now under occupation and in the war zone.” In September she travelled to the UN general assembly in New York to brief diplomats on the matter.

“The pressure has to be very strong, it has to come from everywhere, not just from Ukraine. We hope that all the conscious people of the world will hear us and will feel this the way I do, the way parents do.”

Dispatches: The Hunt for Ukraine’s Stolen Children reveals how children as young as three have disappeared under Russian occupation, often reappearing in an archipelago of “re-education” camps across border, where they are fed Kremlin propaganda and older children are trained for military service against their own country.

In the film, Artem, 15 recounts how he and his classmates were seized at their school in Kupyansk, in the Kharkiv region, by a company of Russian soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs and taken to a “correctional” boarding school, where they were kept for months and forced to wear Russian uniforms emblazoned with “Z” patches, the symbol used to denote support for the invasion of Ukraine.

Russian television is open in its broadcast of how the Ukrainian children are spoon-fed Russian nationalism. They are forced to sing the national anthem, told that Ukraine does not exist and that no one is waiting for them at home.

The Ukrainian Ombudman’s office, led by Dmytro Lubinets, and charity organisations such as Save Ukraine work to rescue them, but only 386 children — less than 2 per cent — have been returned to date. The film follows their efforts as they try to help the family of three-year-old Max, lost in an ambush when his parents are shot trying to flee Mariupol. His aunt is desperate to find him before memories of his home and his mother, who was killed in the attack, fade for good.

The programme also follows efforts to rescue 13-year-old Anastasia and her 14-year-old sister Vlada who were taken to a camp in Russian-controlled Crimea. Both children were told they would be taking a two-week holiday before being put up for adoption by Russian families, despite having their own family in Ukraine.

Documenting evidence of the abductions is the journalist Maryna Mukhina, who escaped occupied Starobilsk, in the Luhansk region, with her three-year-old daughter to avoid her being taken away, before deciding to become a war crimes investigator examining the disappearances for the International Partnership for Human Rights.

Zelenska is clearly moved by the psychological scars left on the children who are saved, let alone those who stay in Russia.

“One little girl was returned to her parents after about six months,” she says. “She was asking them every day if they loved her. She was told that her parents had abandoned her. That she is not needed. And she tries to reassure herself again and again that it is not true.”

Asked if she is worried the world is tired of the war in Ukraine and distracted by other crises, such as the one in the Middle East, Zelenska says she is “outraged” and that there should be “no place in the modern world to neglect the rights of children”.

“Are we saying that for decades, humanity built mechanisms to protect the rights of the child only to give them up to the aggressor now?,” she asks. “If this can happen now, well, we can already get tired of ourselves. We cannot afford to get tired. If everyone gets tired now and stops fighting, it could be the final rest for the world as we know it.”

Ukraine needs the world’s help to get its children back, Zelenska says, because it has proven impossible for Kyiv to trust Putin in any dialogue.

“We need the help of the whole world to make it impossible for them to keep our children. To create facilities and mechanisms for exchange, so that we simply take them back. But this pressure must be so powerful that they don’t have any other way out but to return the children.”

Every parent should be motivated to take action to help reunite these children with their families, she believes.

“If you are a parent, you know you as an adult are responsible for the little ones. If this was your child, you’d go anywhere, even to hell, to get your child back.”

Maxim Tucker is the producer of Dispatches: The Hunt for Ukraine’s Stolen Children, which airs first on Monday, November 13 at 11pm on Channel 4 and afterwards on Channel4.com

Article

#olena zelenska #olena selenska #ze interview #olena interview #russia #ukraine #war #2023 #interview 2023 #the times interview #the times #zelenska

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mariacallous · 9 months ago

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In mid-February 2022, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin-backed authorities of the so-called “Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics” (“DNR” and “LNR”) announced a mass “evacuation” and began deporting orphaned and unaccompanied children to Russia. Since then, some estimates show that around 2,500 such children from occupied Ukrainian territories may have ended up in the Russian Federation. According to Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova herself, around 1,500 unaccompanied Ukrainian children were transported to Russia and purportedly ended up in Russian orphanages. (Both she and Russian President Vladimir Putin are wanted by the International Criminal Court for their alleged complicity in the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, which is a war crime.) Media reports indicate others have been placed in foster homes or been “adopted” into Russian families. Before taking in these children, prospective “parents” are required to go through a special preparatory course. The independent outlet iStories learned what Russians looking to adopt or foster deported Ukrainian children are taught in this program. Meduza shares an abridged version in English.

‘Children with PTSD are difficult’

The first children forcibly taken from Ukraine at the start of the full-scale war were placed in foster families in the Moscow region in April 2022. Almost immediately, local authorities developed a special program to prepare foster and “adoptive” parents. Officially, the program says the children are “from the combat zone,” but from the content, it’s clear the children were brought to Russia from occupied parts of Ukraine.

According to the program’s description, prospective foster and adoptive parents must undergo an interview to determine their “motives, expectations, and understanding of the legal and other consequences of taking in children who have come from the combat zones.” In particular, they’re asked whether they have family or friends from Ukraine, how they think a child’s nationality affects their upbringing, and their views on the differences in raising boys and girls.

Ordinary programs for would-be foster and adoptive parents also have an interview component, but it doesn’t include questions about Ukrainian friends and family, an employee of a charity that helps orphaned children told iStories on condition of anonymity. According to him, the main goal of the separate program is to make sure families thinking about taking in children deported from Ukraine are well-informed of what awaits them, as not everyone can handle it.

“In the beginning [after they started bringing children from Ukraine to Russia], the guardianship offices’ phones were ringing off the hook — people wanted to take children into their families. Some did, and then they faced problems because children with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] are a difficult ordeal for the whole family. It’s not like the child will say: ‘Mommy, I’m so grateful to you, let me wash the dishes.’ This is a child who’s more likely to misbehave, not listen, not clean up after themselves, smear feces on the walls, fight, or withdraw into themselves. It will be far from idyllic,” he said. According to him, out of every 100 people who take part in ordinary foster and adoptive training programs, about 70 drop out. Here, the rate could be even higher.

A rush job

Everyone who wants to take in a child brought from Ukraine has to go through the program. “It’s very strict now. You have to go through training and get a certificate — otherwise, they won’t give the kids to you,” said an employee of a center that conducts these classes. She believes having a separate program for those assuming guardianship of “evacuated” children is justified as many of the children are traumatized and find it difficult to adapt to another country. “There are lots of problems there. After all, children from those places are embittered children,” she explained.

Foster parents who’ve attended the course praise the program. “It’s necessary and relevant, in my opinion,” said Anastasia, who went through the training. “They teach everything possible given the current realities, considering our current understanding of the situation in these republics [Ukraine’s annexed territories] and of children’s psychology and their reaction to trauma. It’s a bit rough around the edges because it’s clear what events necessitated its development. It was put together hastily, on the fly, and it’s not as detailed as it could be.”

At least 50 of these courses are planned for 2024. Training center employees say between two to 10 people attend each. In 2023, there were almost twice as many classes. It’s difficult to say how many families completed the program during the two years of full-scale war.

One of the program blocks is dedicated to issues related to “national and cultural traits.” Prospective parents are taught to overcome “difficulties in interethnic differences” and told to “create a multicultural environment in the family.” But it’s unclear exactly how this can be done safely in the current conditions in Russia, psychologists told iStories. “How can you create a multicultural environment if people are arrested for Ukrainian songs? If a child says their country was attacked, how should surrogate parents react?” asked one psychologist who works with orphaned children and adoptive parents.

‘A second home’

In order to help a child adapt, say “specialists” who conduct the trainings, one has to understand the typical features of their “social and national-psychological profile.” “At any moment, a situation might come up, amidst certain political interactions, that touches both on nationality and mentality. The better we understand the mentality of this people and the mentality of their children, the more we can help the child. The child’s national identity is a reality that needs to be taken into account and worked with,” said an instructor at a training session for social workers. Attendees weren’t told exactly how they should work with the children’s “mentality.”

Anastasia, who went through the sessions for prospective parents, said the program assumes that the culture and language of the children deported from Ukraine are the same as in Russia. “It was put together with the understanding that we have one national identity. When kids from the “LNR” and “DNR” came, there weren’t problems related to culture and language. Mostly, there were practical problems because orphanages there aren’t as developed as they are here: the kids haven’t used computers or spent time in the kitchen.”

Some families find it too challenging to raise children taken from occupied Ukrainian territories. In these cases, these children, who have already experienced war and forced deportation, are orphaned for a second time: they’re thrown back into the system and sent to a Russian orphanage. “There have been cases where the family couldn’t cope, and they had to give up [the children]. [The parents] were so worn out, pushed to a nervous breakdown, and they pleaded: ‘For God’s sake, take these kids away. We can’t handle it.’ We had to remove the children,” recalled one employee of a training center.

One child welfare specialist decried Russia’s approach: “Russia should have officially declared that it’s joining the international practice of not adopting children left without guardians as a result of warfare and that it will send information about each child to welfare services in Ukraine and make no decisions about the child’s fate without them. But if it were possible in Russia to do what’s needed from a professional point of view, there wouldn’t be any warfare.”

The program, however, makes no mention of trying to locate deported children’s relatives. Instead, parents and social workers are told to make a “second home” for them. “Children have come to another country, have found themselves in a situation where they have no home, no parents, no family,” say the instructors. “Therefore, our main job is creating conditions where the children don’t just become a part of the new family but also understand that they have a second home here which will accept them and help them overcome hardships.”

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