Will Smith

Today everyone has been talking about how Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars for disrespecting his wife. This is a complicated matter involving a bad joke, violence, spousal loyalty, etc. What if, for example, the actor telling the disrespectful joke had been a white man? Would Will Smith have slapped him? I'm thinking Peter Dinklage. 

Doonesbury

At best I read "Doonesbury" once every two years, but on Sunday I did look at it and learned something new. Garry Trudeau pointed out that tRump claims he has been elected president twice.

Therefore, he's ineligible to run again. 

Appreasing Putin

The generation that defeated fascism is gone, which means that it's our turn. But Russia is a nuclear power. 

For the last 700 years, Russia has nearly always been an authoritarian  state. That is their normal. Putin, the current dictator, now talks about rebuilding the Czarist Russian Empire, an unfortunate ambition in the 21st century. And he's killing Ukrainian civilians by the thousands. About 250,000 Russians have fled their country, sickened by the brutality. 

Putin has made it clear that he loathes Europe and America. 

On television one deep thinker says that our best choice is to appease Putin. But doesn't history tell us that appeasing fascists makes them more ambitious?

Stephen Gale

When my wife was serving a term on a troubled Democratic County Central Committee, Stephen Gale chaired the meetings and coped with the discord. Later he became my Facebook friend. Everyone liked him. He died this week--he will be missed by many people.

Gentile Jokes

Probably the only people who tell Gentile jokes are Jews, and they do it to make fun of themselves. Non-Jews often don't get what is funny. For example:

A shoe salesman walks into a bar and sits down on a stool. The bartender says, "Lester, how's business these days?" And Lester says, "Fine."

The Chinese Ambassador

The Chinese ambassador was interviewed, kind of, on FACE THE NATION today by Margaret Brennan. She would ask a question, and after the ambassador had managed about half a sentence, she would interrupt him with a sharper question. He would try to formulate a better answer in English, but she usually would stop him before the end of his sentence. She peppered him good; I guess that must help in her ratings.

I wanted to hear what the ambassador had to say, but no luck. I erased the recording and took FACE THE NATION off the list of shows I record. 

Why We Believe

For some 21 years I've attended a weekly forum where old people sit around a long table and talk about issues. This week we discussed the war in Ukraine; we discovered that one of our members believes that the media is manipulating us into a dislike of Putin.

I don't know why the member believes that. He is not a Fascist. But for a while we all talked about how we know things. Epistemology. 

This came the same day that I saw on French television a row of dead bodies that had once been people standing in a breadline in Ukraine. Machine-gunned by Russians.

It took the forum a while to get into gear, but our conclusion was that each of us lives in a sea of related sources and memories that join to give us convictions about issues.

My view of Ukraine comes from time, from years of books about Putin, from Russian friends, the New Yorker, my local newspaper (The Corporate Democrat), NPR, Amy Goodman, CNN, TV news programs from Germany, Japan and France, MSNBC, a quote from Mila Kunis, etc. They all say the same thing about Ukraine. In a sense everything comes together like one ocean in which I float. 

Of course, there are other oceans with other outcomes, but from the outside the pro-Russian ocean looks more like a shallow pond. 

Genocide

The earliest recorded genocide, which supposedly took place at Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, may be a fiction. It makes a good story and a better song if you can overlook the part about grandmothers and children being hacked to death with swords. 

The Roman obliteration of Carthage in 146 BCE is a documented early genocide (genocide is the deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, of a racial, religious or national group).

In World War Two, both sides deliberately bombed civilian neighborhoods. That is genocide. The British had pioneered civilian bombing in the 1920s against the Kurds in the Middle East. They defeated the Kurds, who fought on horseback.

The most recent genocides are taking place in Yemen and Ukraine. Putin used genocidal attacks, including lethal gas on civilians, as a tactic in several earlier wars.The general idea is that if your military kills enough grandparents, mothers and children, the other side will lose heart. It's an old idea, and sometimes it works. 

Don Trump argued that NATO no longer has a useful function. Apparently the 30 NATO countries today disagree. I have to wonder how long NATO will stand around and watch Ukraine die. I do applaud prudence, but. . . . 

Yemen

Why do we care a great deal about the tragic war in Ukraine but pay little attention to the tragic war in Yemen?

Over 12,000 civilians, including children, have been killed in Yemen, many from a Saudi-led bombing campaign. The United States Congress voted to end support for the Saudis in 2019, but the bill was vetoed by Don Trump. President Biden froze arms sales last year, but exactly how involved we are today is secret. America may remain the main source the Saudis have for bone saws. 

My hypothesis is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And the media attention. 

Ukraine is European, and a majority of Americans are (still) of European descent. In culture, Ukraine apparently resembles American culture. My wife's grandparents came from Ukraine. We  can identify with Ukrainians. 

The war in Yemen is between two versions of the Moslem culture, which is not of much interest to American media or most of its viewers. 

All of this--Ukraine and Yemen--is getting to me.

Russia's Veto

In the past the USSR held one of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council. The USSR had a veto. When the USSR disbanded, the UN legal council summarily granted the seat and veto to one section of the USSR, Russia. The legal council did this without consulting the General Assembly. He was just one guy sitting in an office.

Is it time now for the General Assembly to vote on Russia's Security Council permanent membership and veto?

The Rus

Knowing nothing about Ukraine, I did an hour's worth of research.

Archeologists say that Kiev, the major city in Ukraine, was founded about 27,000 years ago. The founders were Slavs, Finns and Scandinavians (the Rus).  Around the year 800 the Rus moved east and helped found Belarus and Russia. 

Ukraine is the largest nation in Europe.

The President of Ukraine is a Jew whose family lost members during the holocaust.

There are Fascists in Ukraine; they ran a candidate for president in the last election who won 2% of the vote.

During the Soviet famine of 1932, 15% of the Ukrainians starved to death. During World War Two, 20% of the population was killed. But those who lived kept fighting.