The war in Ukraine rolls on, seemingly an endless aggression which seeks either a capitulation or the nation’s complete destruction. This morning a report that a hospital has been bombed killing 41 civilians and injuring dozens more adding to the already horrendous toll of lives lost. The hospital treats children for cancer and heart problems as well as severe injuries.
Meanwhile in Gaza more bombings causing more destruction and death as the number of fatalities on the Palestinian side climbs to 40,000, mainly women and children. This time a UN school where people were seeking shelter from the ongoing bombardment which is reducing the last remaining buildings in Gaza to rubble.
Both Russians and Jews have a history marked with violence and oppression.
Perhaps the answers lie in their histories.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace covers the period of the Napoleonic Wars and the threat posed to Russia as the invading army progressed its bloody march on Moscow in 1812. The defenders of Moscow decided it would be better to burn the city and retreat, leaving nothing for the invaders to capture and occupy, and then with the onset of winter see them retreat in the bitter cold. Whether it was the Russian resistance or the severity of the winter which defeated the invading forces remains an interesting question, but leaving no protection from the elements forced the retreat it appears.
Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment describes life in Czarist Russia as brutal. Life was hard, poverty was rampant, corruption and desperation were the orders of the day.
In attempting to gain a warm water port in the Pacific to support the growing of the empire and with Czarist Russia seeking to expand its empire to included Manchuria and even the Korean peninsula brought it into conflict with Japan in 1904 and resulted in two naval battles, both of which were losses to the Russians and came at a high cost in terms of lost shipping and personnel. These losses exacerbated tensions between the Duma (parliament) and the Czar. and laid the foundation for political changes and the Russian Revolution.
The Revolution of 1917 and the murder of the Czar and his family was the prelude for a bitter civil war as the Red and White factions of the Revolutionary forces battled for control and the lives of ordinary Russians were turned upside down: a new political orthodoxy complete with secret police and dissent harshly dealt with.
And then there were Stalin’s purges. It is estimated that over 1.6 million people died in the Gulag Archipelago (as the author Alexander Solshenitsyn named the Siberian Prison camp system where he was imprisoned and claimed that as many as “some 40 to 50 million people served long sentences” but figures released by Soviet historians in 1989 show the total was about 10 million. Many tried in closed courts, or many more just sent, accused of dissent, whatever that means).
The siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) by the German army from September 1941 till January 1944 saw about 1.4 million civilian casualties and more than a million soldiers killed, with the total fatalities somewhere in the order of 2.5 million people. Of the civilians, most were women and children. Russian casualties during WWII were over 20 million.
The aftermath of WWII saw Russian influence grow in Easter Europe with Communist regimes in Poland, East Germany, and through the Baltic states creating a Communist bloc, politically opposed to that of Western Europe which embraced capitalism and multi-party democracies. These states also came under the defence umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).
The fall of Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in Russia and its satellite states saw a number of inept governments formed and the rise of oligarchs who essentially plundered the economy, leaving the population essentially leaderless and destitute.
Along came Vladimir Putin to save the day, with a reform agenda which included rebuilding the Russian Empire, reinstating the Russian Orthodox Church to unify the nation and give a spiritual base for the restructuring of the national identity. The rebuilding of the old empire has been a centerpiece of Putin’s leadership, regaining Crimea and parts of Ukraine. The ambition to retake Ukraine has met with resistance leading to the current conflict. Most Russians agree with the concept of rebuilding Russia, a sort of Trumpian thing to Make Russian Great Again, and in a nation where personal freedom has never been idealistically promoted. The value of human life, both on the Ukrainian side and the loss of Russian soldiers is not so much cause for alarm as it would be in countries like Australia where personal freedom is valued.
The history of violence for Jews goes back a lot further; to Roman times where the restive people of Judah were not happy having the Romans ruling over them. Also, as part of a string of rebellious groups, Jesus of Nazareth emerged as a charismatic leader and teacher, and even after he was brutally killed, his followers just kept growing in number and became seen as threats to the religious culture of Rome. Many were killed in most gruesome fashions, crucifixions were a common form of punishment with corpses generally left rotting on the crucifix for birds to pick at, or in the arenas, coliseums, to be attacked by wild lions, or to fight gladiators to the death as public sporting entertainment.
The uprisings of about CE70 saw the destruction of the temple in the capital city of Jerusalem and the forced expulsion of the religious leaders and teachers; the beginning of the Jewish diaspora.
Over time, these leaders proselytised in the communities where hey settled, mainly through Eastern Europe and having strict rules of conformity lived alongside the traditional groups. The rise of Christianity through Europe in the ensuing centuries saw these people more and more marginalised. One major point of distinction was that the Jews were denied full participation on land ownership since they chose to not legally exist. Early church leaders kept the records of births, marriages and deaths, but recorded baptisms instead of births and only recognised church sanctioned marriages, the Jews did not legally exist since they circumcised male children instead of baptising, so their existence was not recorded, hence they could not own land which was the principle source of wealth.
Being educated – since all Jews were taught to read and write to learn from their religious literature – they developed skills which were useful in administration and business, and so became scribes and accountants, bankers and traders. When these activities proved successful, animosities arose and the Jews were expelled, to be reinvested into those roles when economies failed.
One of the consequences of this was the Spanish Inquisition established in 1478 to maintain a Catholic Orthodoxy. Essentially, the Jews were welcome to stay but must renounce their religion and become good Catholics. Failure to do so was penalised and neighbourhood watches were established to ensure compliance. Punishments were severe with new and exciting tortures invented to ensure that survivors would become good Catholics, renouncing their Judaism.
The movie Fiddler on the Roof is based on a story of the expulsion of Jews from parts of Ukraine between 1918 and 1921 and was part of a series of Pogroms. orchestrated throughout Eastern Europe and Russia which was a lead up to the holocaust of Nazi Germany.
The pogrom in Poland became one of the severest. The Warsaw Ghetto was established in October 1940 and was totally destroyed in May 1943. The area of the Polish city of Warsaw which was the Jewish centre was walled off and as many Jews as could be rounded up were sealed into that part of the city, an area of about 3.4 square kilometres. Up to 400,000 people were crammed into that space and as many as 92,000 literally starved to death. Over 300,000 were either killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Majdanek or were shot.
During the rule of the Nazi regime in Germany almost six million Jews were killed as an organised genocide targeting Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other non-conforming people.
I have skimmed through these histories to try to understand why the Russians in Ukraine (and earlier in Chechnya) and the Israelis in dealing with Palestinians both in Gaza and in the occupied West Bank have been unrelentingly brutal in the waging of those wars. And to some extent I can see that the long histories of violence and marginalisation has laid a foundation of fear but also a determination to survive, to the preservation of their ethnic identities. But I then try to balance that with the periods of reckoning which occurred after WWII with the forming of the United Nations and the work done, in the Nuremberg Trials and the writing of the Declaration of Human Rights as a consequence of the holocaust and the opportunities Russia has had to restructure after the fall of communism to consider a more open form of governance and a willingness for earlier national identities to re-emerge.
And the question which remains is which humanity is the most deserving?
The definition that best fits the ‘me’, or can we work to a more all-embracing definition which will include all humanity?
In the meantime, children starve in Gaza, families mourn the loss of lives and bombs keep flying. To what end? Till objectives have been met? Are those objectives complete destruction, dare we call it genocide in the case of Palestinians or in the case of Ukraine, complete submission to imperial overlords… again?
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