{"id":10164,"date":"2022-02-25T14:39:31","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T22:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=10164"},"modified":"2022-02-26T09:21:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-26T17:21:07","slug":"nukes-or-keys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=10164","title":{"rendered":"Nukes or Keys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a> Kateryna from Odessa builds art out of bits of polished sea glass: everything from beetles to jewelry cases to horned human skulls. I don’t know<\/em> her, exactly. We’ve never met. But she’s a fan, and when I visited Ukraine a few years back<\/a> she sent me one of her creations\u2014a little stained-glass egg\u2014via a friend who was attending the Lviv International Book Forum. Since then we’ve struck up a bit of a correspondence. I’ve purchased an extra object d’art or two; we bonded over our shared love of cats (she has three). Three weeks ago she bought a giant carrier, big enough to hold them all, in case they had to evacuate (“hopefully it would never come to this”, she wrote).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I write this, they’re all still okay. By the time you read it, who knows?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serhiy and Anastasia of Kyiv: professional translators, childhood sweethearts, took me under their wings and fed me and showed me all Lviv’s best graveyards. Serhiy’s also an artist; my t-shirt drawer is stuffed with his short-sleeved tributes to The Thing and Aliens and Nineteen Eighty Four. Three days ago Serhiy was still posting ads on Facebook, so I can at least assume they were okay as of then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eugenia\u2014the lady who brought me Kateryna’s glass egg, and who introduced me to the world’s most incendiary subterranean coffee mine\u2014had been off my radar for years (Kateryna hasn’t heard from her for a while either). But just two hours ago she posted her first Facebook entry since 2018, demanding that NATO move a bit beyond minimally-effective sanctions and and actually, you know, fucking do something<\/em>. So she’s still out there. I don’t know about Ihor (aka, “Toad Bird”) who along with his friends introduced me to the cartilaginous gustatory horror known as “Pork Ears”. He hasn’t posted for a few weeks now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such are the people I might presume to call “friends” of a sort, though I knew them for only a few days. There are others I didn’t spend even that much time with, though enough to think them all awesome: Justina Dobush, the amazing ambidextrous journo; Maria Kalmykova, the Woman Who Does Not Sleep; fellow author Svitlana Taratorina; Sofia Cheliak, the mastermind behind the whole event (or at least one of them); my publisher Oleksiy Zhupansky. All are still active on social media, still kicking, still furious and anxious and doing the best they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It won’t last, of course. How can it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2014 I spent some time in<\/a> Russia<\/a>, serving as GoH for something called the “Fiction Assembly” just outside St. Petersburg. There were readings and panels and discussion groups. There were honey-filled footballs made of bread. There was a Q&A\u2014during which someone in the audience asked me, point blank: “do you in the West regard us as the Forces of Evil?”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I couldn’t speak for “The West”\u2014hell, I can barely even contemplate<\/em> “The West” without wanting to set fire to something\u2014but I hastened to answer the question for my own part. “Of course not. Back in Canada, our government[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> is so anti-science that they’re not only cutting essential environmental research to the bone, they’re literally burning scientific documents<\/em> so that even if future governments get their priorities straight, there won’t be any baseline data to compare new findings to. I have publicly mused about assassinating Canada’s prime minister, described that prospect as a Good Thing. Right now, I utterly loathe Canada as a political entity. But I would also be hugely offended if anyone suggested that I, as a Canadian, were a force for Evil, even though our government kind of is.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I looked around the room. There was the kindly gentlemen who would, just a day hence, clear his throat after I’d spent a couple of minutes shitting all over economists to admit that he actually was<\/em> one. There was the guy who’d co-written the screenplay for “Letters from a Dead Man”, a relentlessly bleak movie about nuclear holocaust that made “The Day After” look like an episode of the Care Bears (admittedly not a huge stretch). There was Nikolai, my translator, who got fired by the publisher after they’d actually had a chance to read this Blindsight<\/em> thing he’d talked them into buying (and who was then rehired by the same publisher after Blindsight<\/em> turned out to be a hit). None of these people, by any stretch of the imagination, could be regarded as Forces of Evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Now, Putin<\/em>,” I added, just so there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding, “I think Putin<\/em>‘s a murderous stone-cold psychopath.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
St. Petersburg, last night.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I think it’s telling that St. Petersburg has proven to be the location of the largest anti-invasion demonstrations in Russia (along with, perhaps, Moscow), even though Putin’s goons are trying valiantly to arrest anyone who happens to be holding a placard. It’s easy to forget, over here where a bunch of braindead yahoos can drive into the nation’s capital with their semis and their saunas and just shut the place down for weeks at a time (well, if they’re white at least). In Russia, opposing the regime gets you jailed and\/or poisoned. In Russia, holding up a protest sign is a criminal offense. And yet there they are: thousands of them. This is no holiday outing, this isn’t just an easy way to blow off steam; these people are putting themselves in physical danger. Almost two thousand arrests so far, and climbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mother Russia didn’t just give birth to Putin. She also gave birth to Pussy Riot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the rest of us do fuck-all. We go around the circle and Strongly Express Our Disapproval. We shower Ukraine with thoughts and prayers and not a whole lot else. Kyiv is in danger of falling within hours and we impose piecemeal economic sanctions that will take months to do dick-all. Here in Canada our vacuous PM bobs and weaves every time anyone asks if Canada will be sending troops to Ukraine; down south, Biden at least looks us straight in the eye and says No<\/em>. And so Putin has probably won already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can it be otherwise? On the one hand you have a regime perfectly willing to use massive military force to invade a sovereign nation; on the other, you have a world completely unwilling to use military force to defend against such incursions. This has probably been inevitable ever since Putin invaded Crimea back in 2014, then watched while the world tut-tutted and forgot about it. (The international community has always been rife with cowardice. Back during the Rwandan Genocide the US resolutely refused to use the G-word because that would legally obligate them to intervene; France essentially collaborated with the Hutu.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re only brave enough for wrist slaps. Boast about freezing the bank accounts of Russian oligarchs? Loudly and repeatedly. Shut Russia out of SWIFT? That would make things too uncomfortable for the rest<\/em> of us. Send hardware for the Ukrainian military to use? Sure. Send soldiers, or close Ukrainian airspace? We can’t do that; that would put us<\/em> at war with the Russians. And the Russians, apparently, would kick our asses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing of it is, though, that cowardice might be the least of the available evils.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin has clearly stated that if anyone gets in his way, he will escalate. His description of such a response as “unprecedented in history” strongly suggests he’ll escalate all the way up to nukes. So this is the choice which faces the world: either give the stone-cold murderous sociopath everything he wants, or be ready to watch the world blow up. Nobody (well, nobody except Putin) thinks that a world ruled by Putin is going to be any kind of Utopia; but is it worse than a lifeless radioactive hellscape and a decades-long nuclear winter? Should we just hand over the keys to the planet now and be done with it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Which is not to suggest that Russia has ever had a monopoly on Mutually Assured Destruction. I’ve recently been told\u2014by someone recently retired from the US Military, who has allegedly seen the relevant documents\u2014that even now, the Pentagon’s mission statement describes the protection of American interests “up to and including the destruction of the planet”. Perhaps we can take some comfort from the fact that the generals are at least clear-eyed enough to explicitly acknowledge the potential consequences of their action plan. Even if they don’t regard Ukraine as sufficiently important to kick it into gear.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Usually I can shake my fist at our idiot rulers and rant about what they obviously (to me, anyway) should be doing, if only they had the brains\/foresight\/courage. Right now, though, I’m lost at sea. Perhaps the world’s best hope, the only option that doesn’t end in nuclear war or global dictatorship, is a domestic insurgency within Russia; perhaps Putin’s own subjects can topple him somehow. But given that the mere act of public assembly is enough to get you shit-kicked and jailed, it’s difficult to see how such a movement could gain any sort of momentum without being simply gunned down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as I type these words, I learn that Ukraine is now seeking to “open talks” with Russia about “peace and a possible ceasefire”. Although it would probably be easier to just say “surrender”. So maybe we won’t be seeing the “Letters from a Dead Man” scenario playing out any time soon. Maybe Putin’s got his first new set of keys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That would be nice, in a small way. I’d always hoped we could hang in at least long enough for climate change to wipe us out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n
  1. This was during the Harper administration, which was vitriolically hostile to science. As opposed to the current administration, which is merely vacuously opportunistic about it. \u2191<\/a> <\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Kateryna from Odessa builds art out of bits of polished sea glass: everything from beetles to jewelry cases to horned human skulls. I don’t know her, exactly. We’ve never met. But she’s a fan, and when I visited Ukraine a few years back she sent me one of her creations\u2014a little stained-glass egg\u2014via a friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10164"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10172,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10164\/revisions\/10172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}