In effect, we will now watch a race between those attempting to forge a negotiated settlement in Ukraine—and the prospects for this look good once again—and the collapse of the Kiev government precisely because the European powers are now forcing it to accept such a settlement. You tell me who is going to break the tape.
Before I go any further, there is an aspect of this new phase in the Ukraine crisis that needs to be noted right away. The narrative advanced over the past 18 months by most Western media—and all corporate American media, without exception—is coming unglued before our eyes. This is going to make it even more difficult than heretofore to understand events by way of our newspapers and broadcasters.
Already we see the kind of contorted reporting always deployed when our media have to cover their tracks after long periods of corrupt, untruthful work. Per usual, the most consequential offenses occur in the government-supervised New York Times.
Example: Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, now confronts “Ukrainian nationalists” over plans to decentralize power because Vladimir Putin forced this upon him, “with a metaphorical gun to his head.” This we read in Tuesday’s paper. And here we need a trigger warning for the faint of heart, because I have two strong words for this report, written with deliberation.
Outright lies. We are beyond lies of omission now. These are the real thing.
One, these are not “nationalists.” France’s Front Nationale is nationalist. The U.K. Independence party is nationalist. The majorities on Capitol Hill are nationalist. These are black-shirted ultras who vote with explosives and assassins’ bullets. You deserve to know this, and it does not change simply because Washington backs them covertly and John McCain—ask him—does smiling photo ops with Oleh Tyahnybok, their openly fascist leader.
Two, there is no accounting at all for the “gun to his head” bit, but Putin’s view that federalization is the sensible solution to the Ukraine crisis is (1) plainly the sound way to hold the nation together while addressing its differences and (2) vehemently endorsed by the French and German governments. Chancellor Merkel, with no gun to her head, made this plain Tuesday, when she insisted that autonomy legislation now pending in Kiev must be acceptable to the leadership in the rebellious eastern regions. You deserve to know this, too.
Chronology is all if we are to understand the events of the past week or so. You have not seen a chronology, because this is the very worst time, from the official and media perspectives, for you to understand events. A brief sketch of the errant timeline, which will do for now, looks like this:
As opposed to Germany—the current gold standard in this regard—a country of 80 million, which has agreed to take in 800,000, which is one per every 100 current citizens.
And it’s not as though we here in America couldn’t afford to be much more generous than we are being. Just look at Detroit, for example, a city in an area with an already well-established Arab community, which has lost more than 60 percent of its population over the past few decades and features a housing stock with literally tens of thousands of abandoned homes and lots. Couldn’t Detroit stand to take in a good hundred thousand, and our country as a whole at least as many Africans and Syrians and Iraqis as Germany (a country with one-sixth our population) has managed to do. One thing the Germans seem to understand is that far from cratering the local economy, hardworking and taxpaying immigrants often propel it forward. (Just look at the borough of Queens, which is veritably leading the current upsurge in New York City’s economy.)
The wider point, though, is that what we are seeing this year is not going to prove an especially unusual crisis in terms of the decades ahead. Indeed, what with the predicted increases in global warming effects in coming years (no matter how effective global leaders prove in their efforts at the coming Paris conference), we may soon look back on 2015 with honeyed nostalgia.
And how should we begin to think about these widening, cascading crises—the new normal. Of course one might imagine that the age-old maxim “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (the dictum at the core of almost all of the world’s faiths and philosophical systems) might offer a good guide. But it seldom seems to.
Perhaps, though, the time has come to recast that maxim. Not so much, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” as “Do unto others as you hope that they or someone like them may soon have the option of doing unto you.” For the key thing to realize about global warming is that we are in fact, as has been noted, looking at a future of global climate weirding. We can expect all sorts of unexpected and unpredictable calamities: hurricanes and tornadoes where they never occurred before, droughts of unprecedented duration (here’s looking at you, ever so nativist Phoenix), floods in the heretofore mildest of climes, water wars and other resource conflicts. Iceland, for its part, for example, may yet have to deal with a collapse or rerouting of the very Gulf Stream that currently makes the place inhabitable. In that context, it is gratifying to note that common Icelandic citizens, in their thousands, are bucking their government’s example by offering up rooms in their own homes for many of the currently tempest-tost. Alas, nothing similar is yet happening here in the United States (here’s looking at you again, Phoenix).
It is time, it is past time, for a deep conversation about our obligations to our fellow humans, if nothing else in the context of our hopes for ourselves and our own children: the roots of high selflessness intertwining at long last with those of basest self-interestedness. The new normal, indeed.
Lawrence Weschler, director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities, is the author among others of "Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative" and, forthcoming next spring, "Domestic Scenes: The Art of Ramiro Gomez."
Eleven people were killed, including two jawans, and over 30 injured in August in ceasefire violations by Pakistan. South Carolina state prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty for Dylann Roof, the 21-year old white man charged with gunning down nine black worshippers in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina.