RANT: NUKES AND NUTTS PART ONE

 

  

NEXT WEEK MARKS the eightieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively, the only time nuclear weapons were used in wartime. Today, our planet hosts nine nations who have nuclear weapons in their arsenals. Five of those nations (Britain, China, France, Russia, United States) are signatories to the 1970 NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty), along with 191 non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS). The four nuclear weapon possessing states (NWS) that are NOT signatories to the Cold War treaty are: India, Pakistan, North Korea (it left the NPT in 2003 to develop nuclear weapons) and Israel (undeclared). South Sudan is a NNWS that has also NOT signed the treaty.

Under the NPT, only the above five NWS are allowed to possess nuclear weapons since their stockpiles accrued prior to 1970 when the terms of the NPT came into force; the rest must comply with treaty obligations and pledge they will only develop technologies and facilities dedicated to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, eschewing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.* Signatories also agree NOT to share nuclear weapons technology with other states, nor transfer nuclear weapons outside their territories. Signatories to the treaty that violate its terms are subject to sanctions and political pressure from the UNSC (United Nations Security Council). To tamp down the spread of nuclear weapons, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) provides a clearing house for technical information and support for countries that develop civilian nuclear programs. The NPT also requires that treaty members open their nuclear facilities to inspection by the IAEA to ensure no nuclear material is diverted toward weapons production.

 

[On June 12, 1982, the largest protest in American history converged in New York, as an estimated one million protestors marched from Central Park to the United Nations to demand an end to nuclear weapons.]  

 

IN GENERAL, this system has kept in check the “horizontal” spread of nuclear weapons by offering assistance through commercial and financial organizations, and through the IAEA’s nuclear technology training programs. However, the  “vertical” spread of the ‘Big Five’ NWS in creating large stockpiles of warheads and bombs, leaves the NPT open to charges of hypocrisy and unfair treatment, where the ‘Big Five’ have capitalized on their early adoption of nuclear weapons to ‘corner the market’ on nuclear weapons technology, with the IAEA there to ensure certain technologies in nuclear energy production are withheld from signatory nations that might lead them to, for example, enrich uranium to weapons-grade purity. India objected to the closed nuclear ‘club’ and went ahead with its own program in the mid-1970s. Pakistan followed India, developing its nuclear weapons, also outside the NPT. It should be noted that nuclear weapons states are required to adopt policies that would decrease their stockpiles over time. During the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, the USSR and American caches of nuclear weapons were in the tens of thousands. The early SALT1 and SALT2 (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) treaties and the more comprehensive START and NewSTART (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) between the United States and the USSR (later Russia) brought nuclear armories of both countries down to roughly 5,200 warheads apiece, either deployed, in storage, or in the process of decommissioning.

 

FUN FACT: The NewSTART treaty was renewed during the Obama presidency in 2010, but is set to expire next year, unless Trump and his band of sad-sack clowns are foolish enough NOT to negotiate with the Russians for an extension to NewSTART. Without this treaty, there could very well begin a new arms race, and China—not a signatory to the treaty—may grow its own inventory of nuclear weapons to add to the mix. This is a very disturbing scenario, and one would think there would be growing public concern. But it is not on most people's radar. "Meep-meep!"

 

IN THE POST-WWII YEARS, the ‘Big Five’ nations¹ (Britain, China, France, Russia, United States) had economies large enough to establish both civilian and military nuclear programs.² They had emerged victorious from the war and called the shots from their position on the UN Security Council. Between themselves they established nuclear protocols and agreements. Imperfect treaties though all these were, nevertheless, they acted as a brake on a runaway arms race and promoted saner nuclear weapons arrangements. But times have changed, nine nations have nuclear weapons now and more may follow. We face the possibility that loose cannons in one or more governments may open the proverbial barn door, and we may not be able to close it, this time.

 

I SAW BY OPEN WINDOW

I saw by open window.

I saw a sky so blue.

I saw there in the distance

The line the bomber drew.

I heard the earth still breathing.

And then I heard it sigh.

I heard its heart stop beating,

Beneath an azure sky.

 

  

Cheers, Jake.  ____________________________________

 

* INTERESTINGLY, South Africa is the only country to have developed an indigenous nuclear weapons program and then given it up in 1990 to join the NPT. In the 1980s, apartheid SA developed several nuclear bombs (probably with help from Israel) to ward off the USSR which supported liberation movements inside South Africa like the ANC (African National Congress). Today, both countries are partners and founding members of the BRICS coalition. [How times change! Ed.]

 

1. The ‘Big five’ nations also happen to be the five permanent members of the powerful United Nations Security Council. Go figure.

 

2. Eighty years on from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ‘secrets’ of building nuclear bombs and reactors is pretty much an open secret. There are some tricks-of-the-trade around enrichment processes and configuring nuclear warheads onto missiles that will fly, and so on. But many nations that have mature nuclear programs, like Canada for instance, could enrich U-235 to weapons-grade Pu but choose not to because of cost (it’s expensive to build nuclear weapons that have only one use (hopefully!) and that’s to sit in their silos. Whereas nuclear power stations can contribute to the economy by providing cheap³ electricity to run industries, etc. There are also treaty obligations as in the NPT, for instance, which come with penalties should the terms of the treaty be breached, not to mention complaints and diplomatic rows from concerned neighbours.

WHEN you enter the ‘club’, the rules of the game change, your international relationships change, and not necessarily for the better. For example, Israel has nuclear weapons—an open secret—but hasn’t formally declared itself a NWS. If it did NOT have nukes, it would have had to behave like a normal and relatively sane country, knitting together relations with its neighbours and coming to workable solutions internally on how to govern itself. I see nuclear weapons as a distorting factor in Israeli society and politics. Thus, Israel becomes a threat to its neighbours and moves like a wrecking ball through international law. It gets away with too many things it wouldn’t be able to, under normal circumstances. And that’s not good for anyone, including Israel.

 

FUN FACT: Following the June bombings of its nuclear facilities, Iran, suspicious that the IAEA leaked information to the Israelis about their nuclear program and the names of some of their scientists,  ordered the agency to leave. However, it remains a member of the NPT. Should it be attacked again, it will probably withdraw from the treaty and secretly work on a Bomb. It may then declare itself a Nuclear Weapons State or it may keep its status a secret, like Israel. MIT professor Ted Postol says for all intents and purposes Iran is ALREADY a NWS and should be treated as such, like all NWS are treated—with kid gloves. What a bizarro world we have!

 

3. I’m not so sure how ‘cheap’ nuclear power is when you factor in the humongous construction and maintenance costs, not to mention disposal of the highly radioactive waste, something NO ONE has yet found an answer. (Ship it to Mars, perhaps? Elon, what say ye?) There are approximately 440 reactors in 31 countries operating today. 

 

 

RANT: WHO'S IN CHARGE OF THIS SLOW MOTION TRAIN WRECK?

 

IN CASE IT’S NOT CLEAR FROM THE PICTURE, this is a still photo clipped from a cell phone video taken at the Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza last weekend. It was taken just after Israel bombed the refugee tent camp located within the hospital grounds. In the foreground there is a young man lying on a hospital bed with an I-V line in his arm. He is burning to death. Gazans use fire extinguishers to try and douse the flames and smother the blaze with carpets, but the fire is too intense. The young man in the photo was later identified by his younger brother as Sha'ban al-Dalou. He was a 19-year-old software engineering student at the Al-Azhar University in Gaza when he and his family were forcibly displaced last year during an IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) attack that destroyed his home. Last week, he was injured during an Israeli air strike on a mosque which killed 20 people. He was taken to the Al-Aqsa Hospital where he and his mother perished in the fire that engulfed the tent camp where they had been sheltering. He is survived by his father, two sisters and and two brothers.*

 

    Sha'ban al-Dalou

After a year of such atrocities, we are almost numb to it. There is just too much to be taken in, or even believed possible, as Israel wages its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people of Gaza. Yet we must look, and continue to look, and never forget what we have seen. **

 

WEST JERUSALEM’S CAMPAIGN in Lebanon has taken the world’s eye temporarily from the war crimes committed daily by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) in Gaza, but Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse the enclave continues at pace. The latest campaign, called the “Generals Plan”, named after retired General Giora Eiland and other retired Israeli military chiefs, calls for the expulsion of all Palestinians from northern Gaza by attacking infrastructure (like the Al-Qusa hospital) and the remaining populated centres in the district. There’s nothing new in that, except Israel has ratcheted it up a notch by blockading all humanitarian food supplies from entering northern Gaza—as per the Generals' suggestion of using starvation to depopulate the district—warning the remaining inhabitants (some estimates suggest there are between 300,000 and 400,000 Palestinians who have remained in place) to move south of the Netzarim Corridor (see map).¹ Otherwise, they will be considered Hamas operatives and become legitimate military targets. It seems starvation and slaughter are the tools de jour that Israel will use to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza of Palestinians.² And as more and more of the world watches in horror, will this finally prove a bridge too far? Will the international community condemn Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza (and its "scorched earth" assault into southern  Lebanon) and take action to stop it? Will the United States rein in this out-of-control, sociopathic Israeli government, which it easily could have done on day one by stopping military and financial aid? Time will tell, but don’t hold your breath.

 

RECENTLY, ISRAEL ANNOUNCED that it would be confiscating UNRWA’s (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) headquarters in Gaza City (what’s left of the place) and will develop it as an Israeli settlement.³ The headquarters is, of course, United Nations property.⁴ UNRWA has said it has great difficulties in getting aid into Gaza and to the Palestinian people, not only because of the blockade and the problem with so much of transportation infrastructure having been destroyed, but also because of the nature of the conflict whereby UNRWA workers, vehicles, warehouses and shelters are periodically attacked by Israeli drones and bombs. Thus far, 182 staff members of the UN aid agency have been killed.

 

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION earlier this week has warned, in writing, mind you, to withhold⁵ military shipments to Israel if aid relief to Gaza, including the northern district, is not brought up to humanitarian standards. Yea! [Applause!] Genocide Joe, you sure taught that Netanyahu a thing or two! Oh…wait. Why does the Israeli PM have a whole month to open the borders for food and medical supplies to get into Gaza? Why not immediately? That a real puzzle. What could be the reason? Let’s see. Could it be, maybe…the upcoming U.S. elections? Biden doesn’t want to tick off donors, those rich, American-Zionist Christians and Jews, zealots, and Israeli lobbyists who pour millions into Presidential and down-ballot political campaigns. Trump, for example, got $100 million from Miriam Adelson. Wowzers! He and his Democratic rival, Harris, who also gets scads of money from the same sources, are Israel supporters to the max, no matter what! At least until after November 5. 

 

IN OTHER WORDS, no U.S. political leader has the balls to really sanction Israel, to cut off arms and financial aid by using America's real leverage to tamp down this sick, rogue nation’s dangerous and genocidal military adventures. And Western nations, in Europe and elsewhere, while they raise complaints about Israel's behaviour, none of them will do anything because they're afraid of what the U.S. will do to them (sanctions, etc.). So, it's a roost full of cucks in the Western world!  Though it must be said that the recent attacks on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have raised the ire of several European countries, including Spain, France and Italy, who have issued harsh condemnations of such flagrant violations of international law. Some columnists have even called for the expulsion of Israel from the UN. 

 

Just to make the point: Biden sent Netanyahu a ‘sternly worded’ letter the other day which warns the Israeli PM that there needs to be an improvement in the conditions of Gazan relief or the U.S. may stop the flow of arms and money into Israel. And to show Netanyahu he really means business, he's sending him an anti-missile battery. So there! 😆 Biden sent a THAAD missile defense system and 100 American troops to operate it. That’ll teach ‘em! You won’t get any more weapons from us a month from now, boyo, if you don’t get with the program! In the meantime, Bibi, pleasepleaseplease don’t bomb any more hospitals or starve any more Gazans, or use toddlers for target practice. Okay? Thanx.⁶

 

A FINAL NOTE: We will probably see before the November 5 U.S. elections the long-awaited Israeli response to the Iranian missile barrage of October 1. [Which, please remember, was a response, to the assassination of the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, on July 31, while he attended the presidential inauguration ceremonies in Tehran, and for the assassination in Beirut of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Ed.] The October 1 Iranian barrage was directed at Israeli military targets and caused just one accidental civilian death in a tit-for-tat, non-escalatory reprisal meant to signal that Iran would not initiate further attacks unless Israel makes good on its threats to launch a "lethal and surprising" strike in the coming days.

 

And we are waiting to see what Netanyahu and his cabal will do. They have said they will not attack Iran’s nuclear facilities or its oil infrastructure, just its military. We’ll see. But, if their attack is severe enough, then Iran will respond with significant force and then all bets are off. Fun times in the Levant. 😱

 

ADDITIONALLY: Russia has sent to Iran shipments of defensive armaments and, I believe, advanced jet fighters (which would probably be flown by Russian pilots). Iran entered the BRICS trade alliance this year and is in the process of negotiating a security pact with Russia. Therefore, Putin sent military equipment to support its Iranian partner as the two strengthen their ties within BRICS and unilaterally. Interestingly, Putin has publicly warned Israel against attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. Such an attack would not deter Iran from a nuclear weapons program, rather it would encourage Iran to develop nuclear weapons and the necessary rocketry, and keep them as a deterrent against a nuclear strike by Israel. [Iran may already have “The Bomb” or be capable of developing one within a short period of time. Ed.] Because of the fuktards in charge of the White House and U.S. foreign policy, the nuclear genie may be out of the bottle again, with Iran and possible other countries in the Middle East becoming nuclear powers as the region becomes more and more unstable. Good job, guys!👍

 

👉FUN FACT: The new Iranian president, a newcomer to politics, Masoud Pezeshkian, is seen as a moderate reformer. In fact, he reached out to the United States before the July 31 Israeli attack to renegotiate the original JCPOA (Joint comprehensive Plan of Action) nuclear deal that Donald Trump walked away from in 2018. The plan, though imperfect, kept Iran from developing a nuclear weapon's program. It’s off the table now that Israel, along with  the U.S., may be set to start a war with the Persian state. And, to be clear, the United States does not want to be drawn into a war with Iran because of the danger of it escalating into a conflict with Russia and China who support Iran. But, because of America's obscenely close ties with Israel, may be forced to follow them into the maw of a greater war. 

What an absolute clusterfuck! All this could have been avoided had the United States acquired a bit of humility, ate some crow and, instead of “gunboat” diplomacy, practiced real diplomacy.

 

 Cheers, Jake.______________________________________

 

* Sha'ban's 10-year-old  brother Abdulrahman was also burned in the tent fire and later succumbed to his injuries.

 

** Here’s an interesting, short article on how the media reported (or didn’t report) last Sunday’s attack on the Al-Aqsa hospital the seventh attack since March. For example, there was more coverage of Hezbollah's drone killing four young active-duty Israeli soldiers  in their barracks south of Haifa, than Israel’s attack on the Palestinian civilians at the Al-Aqsa hospital. It took a couple of days before MSM covered the Gazan hospital bombing in any detail. The horrific images of Sha'ban al-Dalou being burned alive [There were three others who also died in the flames, including Sha’ban’s mother] and shown globally on social media, prompted, presumably, even the New York Times to highlight the hospital’s bombing in its Sunday news coverage, a change from its normally ‘Israel-centric’ reporting. It is getting harder to ignore such visceral images or to wash our eyes of them.

 

👉1. FUN FACT: “Netzarim” was the name of the last kibbutz settlement evicted by the IDF from the Gaza strip when Israel withdrew its civilian and military presence there in 2005.

 

“The motivation behind the disengagement was described by [Prime Minister] Sharon's top aide as a means of isolating Gaza and avoiding international pressure on Israel to reach a political settlement with the Palestinians” (Wikipedia)

 

UNDER INTERNATIONAL law, an occupying power has certain obligations it must adhere to with respect to its occupied population. By unilaterally withdrawing its settlers and occupation forces from Gaza in 2005, the Israeli government hoped to bypass such obligations. The withdrawal occurred swiftly, in a matter of days, with the Israelis leaving the enclave to the Palestinians to govern for themselves. When elections were held there in 2006, the Hamas political wing broke with the Fatah Party. After a minor civil war between the two factions, the rival Fatah party, which had governed the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem since the mid-1990s, quit Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge. Most Gazans by that time had grown tired of a Fatah administration, seeing it as little more than a “cat’s paw” for Israel, keeping the peace in the Palestinian territories but not doing enough for the millions of Palestinians they purported to represent. [Of course, Israel did not want a unified Palestinian government, so it secretly funded Hamas to ensure it ended up ruling in Gaza. Divide and conquer is an age-old problem solver for despots and zealots, alike, though there is often blowback against such policies, given enough time, as we have seen recently.

AND FINALLY, some commentators suggest that if Hamas were allowed to run a slate of candidates in the West Bank, it would beat Fatah hands down. Ed.]

 

DURING ITS CURRENT CAMPAIGN of ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, Israel created the Netzarim land corridor, bisecting the enclave and separating the north from central and south Gaza, with the intention of removing the remaining Palestinians and re-colonizing the northern district with Israeli settlers. Recall that the Netzarim kibbutzniks, mentioned earlier, were the last to leave the enclave in 2005. Wanna bet who’ll be first in if Israel’s resettlement plans start to gel?

 

2. Heated discussions between Washington and Tel Aviv have forced concessions on the part of the Netanyahu government with some food aid entering northern Gaza, a “trickle” according to UNRWA officials. And it is to be noted that aid “…is at its lowest level in months, and both the north and south of the enclave are at a ‘breaking point’, UN humanitarians said on Friday.” NOTE: There has been no aid entering Gaza since the October 1 missile attack on Israel by Iran. Deliberately withholding, or stopping altogether, necessary food and medical supplies from reaching a captive population is a war crime. It’s called “collective punishment”, and it occurs when civilians/non-combatants are kept from the necessities of life by one or the other combatant in a conflict.

 

3. QUESTION: “ALEXA, is UNRWA’s HQ a waterfront property and, if so, when can I buy a condo timeshare there?”

 

4. Israel has every intention of recolonizing the entire Gaza Strip using the tried-and-true methods of confiscation of Palestinian lands, settler re-developments, breaking up the enclave piecemeal and absorbing it bit by bit as they have done, and continue to do, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. As for the Gazans who live there, it’s a choice between submit, move or die. Or fight. What would we do if in the same situation? Just sayin’.

 

5. Well, the letter actually says that the U.S. Zionist State Department will do an “assessment” as to whether Israel is in compliance with strictures put in place for using U.S. weaponry in its wars in the Levant. I guess that means dropping a couple dozen two-thousand-pound, U.S. made, “bunker-buster” bombs on an apartment complex in Beirut to kill one Hezbollah leader, or deploying its snipers to shoot children in the head are no-nos. The letter is a cynical ploy attempting to bring back into the Democratic fold those under-30 voters who are appalled at the brutality and war crimes they witness daily on social media, war crimes that are aided and abetted by the current Democratic administration. “Genocide Joe” and “Killer Kamila” can preen and cluck and point to the letter and say: “See, we’re trying to stop the dying.” Liars, of course. Because all politicians lie, particularly around election time. They’re doing nothing and after November 5, all bets are off. The letter can then be discarded and shredded along with the bodies of tens of thousands Palestinian children torn up by Israeli bombs and buried under the rubble in Gaza.  

 

6. I think like a lot of people I am dumbstruck by the utterly feckless and appallingly inept leadership across almost the entire American political class, (and really Western leadership as a whole). We have never been this close to a broader regional war in the Middle East, with the real possibility of an escalation to the nuclear level. There is also the potential for an equally dangerous escalation in the Ukraine conflict if we do not tone down the rhetoric and hostility towards Russia (and China), and demand of our elites that they reacquaint themselves with the necessary art of diplomacy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of us, today, are being driven full bore in the clown car known as Western Civilization straight into that brick wall known as the End of History.     

 

HERE IS a short and inspiring (or damning, depending on your point of view) video recently put out by the Türkiye government.

 

 

QUOTES: ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

 

    ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

 

 

 

MOVIE REVIEW: COME AND SEE.

 

I WATCHED A REMARKABLE MOVIE the other day called Come and See. Often cited as one of the greatest anti-war films ever made, this 1985 motion picture, directed by Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov, is set in what is now Belarus, during the German invasion of Russia in the Second World War. Using mostly non-professional actors and local villagers, Klimov presents movie audiences with an unflinching view of war and the effects it has on combatants and civilians alike. The story centres around a young boy named Floyra who is anxious to join the partisan resistance fighting against the invading Germans. Because he is so young, the militia leader Kosach leaves him behind to guard their camp while the rest go off to fight in the war. It’s here that Floyra meets the lovelorn Glasha and the two teens bond in a brief interlude that is at times both playful and erotic. Glasha, who was Kosach’s lover, taunts and teases the adolescent Floyra and then in a serious moment says to him, in a speech referencing the movie’s title:   

“Why don’t you say something? Why can’t you see me? I’m right here. I exist. Here I am…You’re not living. You don’t hear birds singing. You’re deaf and blind. Here I am. Here.…I want to love. I want to have children. Do you hear?” (Glasha to Flyora.)

 

BUT, their youthful idyll is soon interrupted by the invaders’ bombs and bullets. German advance-guard troops enter the woods where the teenagers are hiding. The soldiers are calm and methodical as they search for the partisan camp. Their demeanour is casual and businesslike. They walk with confidence, occasionally firing their weapons and passing within feet of the terrified teens who hide under debris in a bomb crater. After the soldiers move on, Flyora and Glasha flee, first to Floyra’s village, where he discovers his family and many of his neighbours have been murdered by the advancing infantry. They then flee to a local marsh where survivors from Flyora’s village are hiding.* The two become separated when Flyora goes on a failed mission¹ in search of food for the desperate villagers. He is subsequently aided by a farmer and taken to another village. Eventually the Germans arrive, and he is put in a barn with everyone else. BY THIS POINT, Flyora knows they are doomed. He has seen how the Germans treat their captives and he tries in vain to warn the villagers of their peril.

SEEMINGLY ON A WHIM the invaders allow anyone who has no children to exit the barn. It is a callous ploy, a cynical game to see whether parents will abandon their children to save themselves. However, only a terrified Flyora climbs out to be taken prisoner by German soldiers who continue to pour into the area.  A child is passed through a window into a woman's waiting arms  only to be tossed back inside by the guards. The woman is then dragged by her hair past a line of laughing soldiers out to where she will be gang-raped (as is Glasha) during the long hours of that fateful day.

 

WITH HORROR and FASCINATION, we “see” a bizarre, lunatic spectacle unfold before our eyes. This is the movie’s centre. It is where Klimov draws us to from earlier scenes where the only evidence of the advancing Germans are overflights by a reconnaissance plane, distant explosions, a small squad of storm troopers in the woods, reports from scattered refugees, sporadic nighttime gunfire until, at last, the main body of the invading army arrives. Now the invaders are everywhere. And what we (and Flyora) witness  can only be described as a carnival of the damned.

IT IS A LONG SCENE, comprising most of the final third of the film, yet it depicts events spanning barely more than a day. And it is relentless in its portrayal of the brutality and madness of war. I WAS REMINDED of the parade scene at the end of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini’s 8½, or The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman where Death dances as he leads the doomed away from the land of the living. Klimov’s depiction of the destruction of the village and the torture and murder of its inhabitants is no less surreal. Indeed, it resembles in tone and intensity the wild antics, the fun and frolic of a carnival—at least for the Germans. Yet, it is also a place where DARK PSYCHES are unbound. It is where we watch the soldiers corral and trick the villagers into one location. Everything is in motion, a chaotic flurry of loudspeakers shouting announcements, music blaring, trucks and armoured vehicles arriving, orders and directions given, and demonstrations of what happens when they’re not obeyed quickly enough, namely a bullet to the brain. Klimov’s camera moves throughout the area, capturing rape and murder and, perhaps most disturbingly, many instances of casual, almost indifferent, cruelty and violence. 

 

YOUNG FLYORA witnesses it all and is temporarily made mad by the chaos and depravity surrounding him. And because he is so young and physically unimpressive, and so obviously cowed into a state of near catatonia by all he sees—at the utter incomprehensiveness and unreasoning madness  around him as his world is torn apart and upended—the German soldiers treat him as little more than a whipped cur, not worth bothering about, harmless, hardly noticeable. THE FILM’S ICONIC IMAGE is of Flyora, a gun to his head and a finger-pull from death, kneeling in front of several German soldiers who use him as a prop for a group photo, after which they cast him aside as not worth the expenditure of even a single bullet. Like his name, which derives from the Latin flora (“flower”), Flyora is merely a decoration for the invaders, as uninteresting to them as vase of wilted flowers. It’s his passivity that saves him, that and being seen as an object of little worth or interest. For the viewer, of course, the boy’s name connotes fragility, innocence, and beauty, and his worthiness is seen in his humanity, something that he manages to keep throughout the movie.

 

THERE IS AN INTERESTING earlier scene where Flyora and Glasha come upon a group of villagers hiding in a local marsh on a small islet.¹ At one point around dusk, the villagers perform a ritual where they march slowly behind a man carrying a kind of scarecrow made with a human skull and dressed as a German soldier. Afterwards, the same villager, a partisan fighter, carries this strange object with him as a kind of totem to guard and guide his group of scavengers (which includes Flyora) in their quest to find food for their people. Like a scarecrow in a farmer’s field, the macabre figure is meant to ward off or frighten the Germans. It doesn’t, of course, but the fact that he and the villagers adopt such rituals and “magical thinking” is in keeping with their experiences. For them, the invading Germans and their barbaric cruelty are incomprehensible and beyond their understanding. For all intents and purposes, they are demons or devils, and are to be treated and feared as such.  

LATER IN THE VILLAGE, the scene comes to a horrible climax as the German troops open fire on the barn packed with villagers, shooting their weapons until there are no more screams to be heard inside. They then set the structure alight, and we watch Flyora’s face frozen in a grimace of horror and disbelief as flames soar into the night sky, then over the passing hours fade to embers and ash and burnt timbers in the dark of early morning. From dusk till dawn the boy watches the barn burn, while around him the soldiers rape and pillage, drink, and gamble, and take photos of themselves as if they were on holiday. They hide their criminal acts behind masks of bravado, neither acknowledging their complicity nor feeling any compunction about covering up their crimes afterwards by eliminating any witnesses. Had the exhausted Flyora not collapsed into unconsciousness and appear to be dead, he would surely have been shot by the soldier who rides by on his motorcycle kicking the boy to see if he is still alive. Throughout that terrible day and night, the soldiers act with an almost demonic glee, their sense of proportion and decency gone, lifted from them as if the bonds of society and humanity were never part of them to begin with. Other soldiers--the officers--watch and evaluate, they give orders, change tactics, keep everything on schedule, ensuring their deadly assignment is a success. They seem almost sane. 

 

AND AT SUNRISE the soldiers climb aboard their jeeps and trucks and armoured carriers, their mission of mayhem and murder complete and the village destroyed. Now they are free to move on to the next one.² So it goes.

 

AND, OF COURSE, in that same theatre of war, some seventy years later, the dogs of war are once more let loose, and we are fortunate if we are watching from the sidelines as armies march and bombs fall. But I think that we don’t really see what is happening. IMAGINE you are forced to flee as tanks and troops move into your town. Your house is destroyed in a missile attack, your life and livelihood blown to smithereens in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t matter which side did it. Your life is changed in that one instant. As are the lives of your neighbours and everyone you know. If you are lucky no one you love has been killed.

 

I’m reading PERHAPS THE STARS, Ada Palmer's final volume in her Terra Ignota science fiction series. The narrator, “[anonymous]”, is tasked with chronicling the events leading up to the world-wide “civil war” that launched its opening salvos at the end of book three. Our narrator composes and posts online an essay they have written about how faith in our own “rightness” can have terrible consequences and how, in the pursuit of so-called  righteous goals, we can all too easily leave behind our humanity, like the Germans in Come and See. Then they say:

 

“Then I wrote an essay ‘On Fanaticism’ (based on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique portatif) in which I argued that war’s atrocities hatch, not from any inhuman machine of war, but from human hearts when we let conviction turn into fanaticism. We are all in danger of dying it this war, but we are all also in danger of becoming authors of atrocities. The first danger we cannot avoid. But the second is entirely in our power, since each of us alone can choose whether we let fanaticism fester in us, or keep our hearts havens of Reason, Reasonableness, and Humanity.” (Perhaps the Stars, 18)

 

HISTORY doesn't have an off-ramp. We can’t circle around for another try. Events like war and violence and unnecessary death mark us as surely as tree rings mark the passage of time and the vagaries of the climate. And we can only hope that with each new ring we move further away from the one that has been so obviously marked by the madness of war.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

____________________________________________________

 

* ON THE ISLET, Flyora learns his village was targeted by the Germans as a pro-resistance enclave because he and a friend were observed by the German reconnaissance plane scrounging for weapons leftover from an earlier battle. Many from his village were executed as a result and their bodies piled against the side of a barn, including Flyora’s mother and his sisters. He goes mad with guilt and despair until he recovers himself with help from his neighbours and Glasha.     

 

¹ IN THE EVENING, Flyora and some men go in search of food for the families hiding in the marsh. Under the cover of darkness, they attempt to bring a cow back but are fired upon by unseen German snipers. We see tracer bullets whizzing overhead as the group scrambles for cover in a gully. But their mission is a failure when the cow is killed, leaving Flyora the only survivor. Note: we never see the Germans firing on them. We only see the muzzle flash of their guns and hear the whizzing and pinging of bullets. I think Limov does this to portray the German soldiers as a kind of mysterious, all-seeing ‘force of nature’ who dominate any people or landscape they encounter, even from a great distance. The soldiers don’t investigate to see whether Flyora and his group are dead or wounded, suggesting a level of arrogance or indifference that is chilling—they simply can’t be bothered. 

It’s interesting to note Klimov uses live ammunition for this scene. Real bullets were flying scant inches above the actors’ heads! And the cow is actually killed. The creature’s grizzly death adds a further tincture of harsh reality to the movie.

THE NEXT MORNING the boy is taken to another village by a friendly farmer and disguised as one of his children until that village is in turn overrun. There seems to be no escaping the advancing Germans. And it is here Flyora witnesses the “carnival of the damned”, nearly losing his sanity as a result.

 

² As terrible as it seems, this incident is based on historical fact and survivor accounts. During WWII, in Soviet Byelorussia (today’s Belarus), over 600 villages were similarly destroyed when the German army marched into Russia. Today, for those who don’t take seriously Russia’s concerns about the current government and military in Ukraine having neo-Nazi members who openly display Nazi insignia and paraphernalia and who have undue influence in their country’s politics, those skeptics would do well to consider that, given such a history, perhaps such concerns are relevant and need to be considered when assessing Russia's current intervention in Ukraine. [See: “Azov Battalion” and “Bandarites”.]

 

AND On A Grimmer Note: The movie’s title, Come and See, besides echoing Glasha’s life-affirming plea for love and fecundity at the start of the movie, also references a famous biblical quotation from the Book of Revelations. 

IT IS SOBERING to realize we are closer than we think to breaking open the seal and unleashing forces that might all too easily spin out of control. One of the problems with free will is that the choice, inevitably, will be ours:

 

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see!" And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” (KJ Bible, Rev 6. 7-8.) 

 

 

 

The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments in the King James Version. Thomas Nelson Publishers, New York, 1984. Print

Palmer, Ada. Perhaps the Stars. Tom Doherty Associates. Tor Books. Macmillan Publishing Group, New York, NY, 2021, Print.

 

 

    "WTF?!"

 

 

 

 

 

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