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War

Der Erlkönig

· Beyond the Treeline ·

One of the most amazing pieces of music from the romantic period is a song written by Franz Schubert ((1797-1828), The Erl-King or Elf-King. It sets a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) to music, words that were based on a medieval Danish ballad, Elveskud. The narrative describes the night ride of a father carrying his feverish child on his galloping horse. The child fearfully tells his father that he sees the Erl-King, a metaphor for death, but is calmly and rationally told that it is just the wind, fog, trees and darkness that scare him. The Erl-King, after trying to lure the child with promises of toys and amusement, eventually threatens to take the boy by force, and the father gets increasingly anxious, realizing that the vision is not just a hallucination. When they arrive at home, the boy is dead in his arms.

Every school child of my generation had to learn the poem by heart, having no clue what it was all about other than a horror story. It contains many of the elements so important to the Romanticists: nature, death, the supernatural. Goethe certainly knew about fear of death as a youngster – he fought tuberculosis for two long years before he even turned twenty. Schubert’s composition manages to capture dread with changes in key and tempo, as well as introducing 4 distinct voices with different melodies, ranges and key changes alternating between major and minor keys. There is the narrator who frames the story at beginning and end, and then alternating vocalizations of the father, the kid and the Erlkönig. A fifth personality – the horse – is represented by the piano with a relentless, pounding rhythm throughout for the right hand (and the score specifies every single move the accompanist has to take, incredibly thought-out and rigid. The whole things comprises three or so minutes, a good thing too, otherwise your right hand would fall off.)

To this day I know very few pieces that embody dread, particularly the dread of an innocent child that senses death, as well as this song. It gave me goose-bumps as a child. Now the fear of being a helpless parent is more prominent – trying to distance yourself from the realization that horror lurks, and wanting to protect the child (as well as yourself) from that reality, to no avail.

The photomontage is an older one that I recently added to the series of images representing music that matters to me. It captures a torso of a young child surrounded by birches and alders (the “Erl” in Erlkönig is the German word for an alder tree: Erle. Unclear if Goethe ignored the Danish “Elven”, or it was a translation error. My speculation would be that he wanted to stage the eeriness of the moors where alders grow at the damp places. But what do I know.)

I photographed these very trees on the grounds of the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, a camp where so many Jewish children died of disease and starvation, as did their parents, eventually. (52.000 human beings, as a matter of fact, 13.000 of those after liberation of the camp, too starved to recover.)

How does a parent, themselves aware of the inescapability of potential death, protect the last weeks of their children? The history has renewed relevance for us, given the unrestrained rise in anti-semitism, both In Germany and here in the U.S. – an unrestrained rise fueled by unrestrained language encouraging violence against Jews, preemptively blaming them for election losses, and throwing out dogwhistles (serial numbers for to-be- deported immigrants was the latest in Floridian fantasizing, evoking tattoos of the Holocaust, and publicly welcoming fascist ideologues. Here is an overview article in The Atlantic about anti-semitism of the upper echelons of the American right wing. Read it and weep.

I weep also when I think of the mothers and fathers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon desperately trying to find some fashion of normal life for their children among the bombs and the hunger and the disease. It is they to whom the children turn, like the boy in the poem besieges his father, expecting comforting and protection. And it is they who cannot explain that all the laws we thought would protect us, have been cast aside, are ignored, or scoffed at, on all sides.

U.N. experts, for example, consider exploding pager and radios a terrifying violation of international law.

“Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities….Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said. Humanitarian law additionally prohibits the use of booby-traps disguised as apparently harmless portable objects where specifically designed and constructed with explosives – and this could include a modified civilian pager, the experts said. A booby-trap is a device designed to kill or injure, that functions unexpectedly when a person performs an apparently safe act, such as answering a pager. It is also a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians, including to intimidate or deter them from supporting an adversary,” the experts warned. “A climate of fear now pervades everyday life in Lebanon,” they said.”

Legal experts in the US disagree with each other whether law violations occurred with these booby-traps (Ref.), but nobody disputes that Israel defies the orders from the U.N. top Court to halt its military offensive in Gaza, after South Africa accused it of genocide.

Many argue that targeted attacks against the militants of Hamas or Hezbollah are justified in a war. Civilian casualties are seen as an inevitable side effect and within the boundaries of international law, justified by the warring factions in pursuit of their strategic goals. That cannot, however, count for actions that affect civilian populations most grievously and indiscriminately.

The Gazan children are starving. Over 50.000 children ages 6 months to 4 years are in urgent need of treatment for malnutrition. Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, according to our own government authorities, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.  

“USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.”

“Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.” (Ref.)

Secretary Blinken and President Biden disregarded the assessment, since it would have stopped us from sending bombs to Israel, per the law. Here are the details from an investigation by ProPublica published yesterday. Aid organizations across the world agree with the original plea by our agencies: CARE, Oxfam and multiple others warn about a humanitarian disaster because of Israel’s obstruction of aid: food, water, medicine. The U.N. General Assembly concurs. Here is the report of their special rapporteur.

What do you tell your child, all over the world, when the Erl-King calls and there’s not a morsel to eat?

Here is a different iteration of the song – above I had linked to Ian Bostridge, here is Fischer Dieskau.

Who rides at a gallop through night so wild? It is the father with his dear child.
He grips the boy firmly in his arms,
He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.

‘Son, why do you cower so fearfully?’ ‘Father, the Erl-king! Can you not see? The dreadful Erl-king with crown and tail?’ ‘My son, it is mist blown by the gale.’

‘You lovely child, come away with me, We’ll play together down by the sea; Such pretty flowers grow on the shore, My mother has golden robes in store.’

‘My father, my father, oh do you not hear What the Erl-king whispers into my ear?’ ‘Be calm, stay calm, it’s nothing my child But dry leaves blown by the wind so wild.’

‘My fine young lad, won’t you come away?
My daughters are waiting for you to play;
My daughters will lead the dance through the night, And sing and rock you until you sleep tight.’

‘My father, my father, can you still not see
The Erl-king’s daughters waiting for me?’
‘My son, my son, I can see quite clear
The moon on the willows, there’s nothing else there.’

‘I love you my boy, you are such a delight; And I’ll take you by force if you put up a fight.’ ‘My father, my father, he’s gripping me fast! The Erl-king is hurting! Help me, I’m lost!’

The father shudders, and speeds through the night, In his arms he holds the moaning boy tight;
At last he arrives, to home and bed:
In the father’s arms the child was dead.

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Music during Times of War

Less reading, more listening today. That is, if you’re inclined to follow me down the rabbit hole that opened up when I searched for sounds relevant to today’s images of the Pacific ocean at Malibu Beach, CA.

I came upon the field recordings of Sam Dunscombe, who mixes his music with environmental sounds collected across the world. If you click on the link, an album appears that has one track of forest noises and one of oceanic sounds.

The second one (O) is the one you want to listen to while perusing the photographs, oceanic sounds that calm (unless you cannot stop thinking about what a Tsunami or rising sea levels would do to the beach houses, or about the yellow line on the horizon that is light reflected in thick bands of pollution. (I know, can’t I just simply enjoy a sweet day at the beach? You know me.)

In any case, I read up on Dunscombe and encountered the musical concept of Just Intonation a phrase that sounded lovely. No worries, not trying to explain it, it’s too hard for my tired brain (here is an introduction, if you are curious.) Suffice it to say there is a community of researchers, composers and musicians who explore this specific way of notating music by giving pitches as fractions and focusing on pure, natural harmonics, and he is actively part of such a group in Berlin.

While trying to wrap my mind around it, I learned that this tuning system was used in medieval music that used melodies only, but proved impractical for polyphonic music that we’ve enjoyed for the last many centuries. Yet composers are aware of it, and that, in turn, led to a pointer that mentioned Benjamin Britten, who had written a piece that in its prologue and epilogue uses the horn’s natural harmonics. I had never heard this Serenade, and was bowled over while listening.

The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31 is not just musically riveting in its marriage of tenor and horn, but the lyrics of the song cycle are also timely: six poems, ranging from an anonymous 15th-century writer to poets from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, describe aspects of the night: from serene setting to the horrors emanating from the dark. Written in 1943 during World War II, with bombs raining down, the darkness of night took on a different weight, and the sinister feelings are conveyed to perfection. Once again I am struck by how words depict, while music expresses, making the layers that are indescribable felt nonetheless.

This music transcends into our own time of war, even for all of us who sit in the safety of our homes, and it should help to raise levels of empathy. Night invoking sleep, the final sleep brought by war to its victims, their souls in flight, in contrast to those who profit from it in so many ways in broad daylight, unimpeded.

Here is one of the poems Britten used. (I picked William Blake, since I had just reviewed his work in these pages a couple of weeks ago.)

Elegy

     O Rose, thou art sick;
     The invisible worm
     That flies in the night,
     In the howling storm,

     Has found out thy bed
     Of crimson joy;
     And his dark, secret love
     Does thy life destroy.

William Blake (1757–1827)

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There will come soft rains

I meant to brighten your Thanksgiving weekend with imagery of beautiful nature, all kinds of appealing fauna I came across during my southern California sojourn. Alas, I can’t stop my brain and keep my mouth shut. Nature, its lasting beauty and seeming resilience, as well as its wrath, was linked to destruction in my war-preoccupied mind. Thus a poem and a short story derived from the poem, that depict post-apocalyptic nature with us humans no longer playing any relevant role, really any role at all. The way we’re going, that might not be too far in the future.

If you prefer the tranquility of a post-prandial daze, stop reading here and just look at the pictures! No offense taken. My gratitude on this day of Thanksgiving, however, extends to all those refusing to be indifferent.

“There Will Come Soft Rains”
(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

by Sara Teasdale in Flame and Shadows, 1920

Teasdale (1884 – 1933) was an American poet who won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, yet she was marginalized as a second-rate poet by next generations. Depressed, ill and isolated, she took her own life before she even turned 50 years old. The poet was highly educated and deeply influenced by reading Charles Darwin and thinking through the implications of his evolutionary theory regarding the centrality – or absence thereof – of human kind in nature. A personified Spring and the rest of nature’s representatives in the poem couldn’t care less if we self-obliterated.

She was also a pacifist, whose views had to be carefully phrased into the framework of a pastoral setting in her poetry. After all, this poem was first published in 1918, two months after the Sedition Act of 1918 was enacted. The law made it a criminal offense to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States.” It still theoretically exposed her to criminal prosecution – and if she had the courage to speak out against war, we should have the decency to bear witness.

Fast forward to the 1950s, we have Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) expressing his fears of nuclear war in a short story, August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains’, published in his Martian Chronicles. The setting is a house filled with technological gadgets that continue their daily routines and tasks, when the world and all its inhabitants have been wiped out by nuclear war. The house in Allentown, CA, and a badly maimed dog, are all that remains. There is cooking, cleaning, laying the table and reading a daily randomly selected poem to the extinct inhabitants – Teasdale’s poem, as you might have guessed. Random debris is pushed down the incinerator, called evil Baal, a reference to the praying at the altar of false gods, our belief in the gifts of technology that prove futile when they are made obsolete by even more powerful technological inventions like the atomic bomb.

Ironically, nature has the last word: a violent wind lights a fire in the house which burns it down, the last vestige of human habitation. Only a ticking clock survives.

The worry about nuclear arms has resonated across the media during the weeks since the war started. Really years, since it is a topic for both the ongoing war in Ukraine and the bombardment of Gaza by Israel. Focussing on the latter, I found that a recent essay by Roger Cohen in the NYT is required reading, spelling out some of the causal mechanisms that have led to the chasm now impeding any hope for peace.

“Almost forgotten are the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition in 1993 of Israel’s right to exist in peace, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s determination to pursue that peace, a decision that cost him his life in 1995 at the hands of an extreme right-wing Israeli assassin who said he acted “on the orders of God.”

These were the ephemeral glimmerings of shared humanity, soon quashed.

In the intervening decades, Hamas and the ultranationalist religious Israeli right have each extended their influence. The conflict now involves fundamentalist religious ideologies, distinct in critical regards but equally convinced that all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River has been deeded to them by God.

A political and military struggle between two national movements for the same land can be resolved by compromise, at least in theory. France and Germany settled their differences in Alsace-Lorraine. Peace came to Ireland. But absolutist claims of divine right to territory appear impossible to reconcile.” (My emphasis.)

I am citing at length because the religious fervor is something we regularly underestimated and are increasingly facing at home as well. But I also want to mention some other facts: an Israeli minister, Amihai Eliyahu openly stated that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was an option. (He was suspended from Cabinet meetings, and later claimed it was a metaphorical statement. Israel has not confirmed or denied its nuclear capabilities.) Nothing metaphorical about the bombs that have been dropped, though. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, as of three weeks ago already, Israel has confirmed that it bombed over 12,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, with a record tally of bombs exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual. That is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (absent radiation.)

“Due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb. This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Euro-Med Monitor said, noting that the area of the Japanese city is 900 square kilometres, while the area of Gaza does not exceed 360 square kilometres.”

1200 human souls lost their lives in Israel, indiscriminately slain by Hamas attackers, with over 200 hostages taken – 36 of them children! – , and women violently raped. As of now, 14.500 human souls indiscriminately killed in Gaza, with over 5000 children ! among them (and that is not counting the lives lost in the Westbank over the last months.) Food, water and fuel cut off, preceding likely epidemics. The report of the World Food Program of the United Nations is shocking with its implications of starvation.

Sick and wounded dying for lack of medical treatment, the former not even making it into death by war statistics. All this without even the ability to flee for a civilian population, given that the borders are closed on all sides, by Israel and Arab nations alike. Flight is, however traumatizing, at least a possibility for Ukrainians – current estimates vary that between 6 and 8 million people left their homeland to escape war, of a total population of 36 million in Ukraine.

No end in sight. Certainly no guarantees that this will make Israel safer. A heightened chance that war will regionally spread. No obvious solutions for a longterm arrangement either, since both the two-state solution or a unified non-ethnocratic state seem to be relegated to fantastic wishful thinking given the conditions on the ground.

And, for that matter, no “gentle rains” either, since we’ve managed so thoroughly to wreck climatic conditions on this planet that there will be violent storms and deluges instead, not yet known to either Teasdale or Bradbury, once human suffering has been terminated for good. Or by evil, as the case may be.

It’s easy to feel depleted and paralyzed. Let’s practice hope, though, starting with being consciously grateful for all the privileges and blessings we enjoy on this particular day. May they strengthen us to face what we have to do in days to come.

Music set to the words of the poem.

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Days of Mourning, Days of Clinging to our Humanity

I had driven down to Los Angeles anticipating glorious times among family and Southern Californian wonders, plant life included. Instead my head is filled with disbelief and grief about the atrocities unleashed upon the world.

Mourning for civilians of all ages massacred in their homes, at festivals, in the fields. In numbers that, relative to population, would amount to over 40 000 here in the US in a matter of two days. Not counting the wounded. Not counting the innumerable ones left behind, having lost children, parents, siblings, friends. Not counting the trauma that will cling to the survivors for ages. Not counting the disillusionment of the idea there would be one safe place in the world for Jews.

Mourning for civilians of all ages with almost half of them under the age of 14, exposed to white phosphorus bombs, deprived of food and water, told to leave their homes within a 24 hour window, with no place to go, all border crossings remaining closed. A population that has seen the last election in 2006, when 1 million of them were not even born, under the thumb of fanatic Islamists whose goal to destroy any Jewish state includes the knowing sacrificing of their own people. Bent on undermining rapprochement between parts of the Arab world and Israel.

Mourning for the peacemakers on all sides who have been out-gamed by religious zealots on all sides who scorned compromise or political solutions.

Mourning for the consequences of an all-out war for those who will be killed and maimed and traumatized. A war that will create displacement, re-enacting the Nakba, the catastrophe for Palestinians expelled from their lands in 1948. Consequences that will also include fuel to the fires of anti-Semitism, when the extent of suffering of a civilian population trapped in a 140 square mile strip becomes visible to the world, a world that historically preferred to ignore the plight of the Palestinians. Mourning for the Jewish civilians who will then be victimized in the next cycle of violence, in Israel and across the world. As Steven C. Beschloss wrote:

“It’s a stunning, heartbreaking moment on so many levels: The violent horror for every individual and family involved. The grim fact that this will escalate not only as a result of Israel’s retaliation and effort to recover hostages through urban warfare in a densely packed city but possibly also by increasingly triggered neighbors. The tragedy of a Mideast region in which war not peace, conflict not calm, has defined its modern and ancient history. The terrible reality for people who continue to confront a world where enmity is a central fact of life.“

Mourning. But also determined to cling to our basic humanity and acknowledge the suffering of all victims caught in this maelstrom. That does not imply justification of terrorist actions, or excusing potential military defiance of the laws of war. It does not mean political analysis – time for that comes later. It means empathy with the barrage of sorrow unleashed upon this world.

Here is a poem by German Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko who fled Nazi Germany to exile in the U.S and then Israel. It reminds us of the compounded trauma that exists and has been triggered again.

Music today provides a ray of hope, but also tears.

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Thoughts about war, again.

Walk with me, on a hot day of wispy, white clouds and lines of dry grasses.

It was sparse in the bird department, because I unwittingly managed to pick a day at the refuge where landscape restoration was in full progress, chainsaw noises and large number of workers driving them into hiding. Or maybe the smoke from the nearby wildfires had displaced them, the smell still lingering.

For every missing bird there were about ten dragon flies and a hundred mosquitoes, at least in the more wooded areas of the Columbia River Delta.

There were butterflies galore,

but the real magic came from the air – it was filled with wisps of cotton seed and thistle down, flying about like snowflakes, in literal clouds drifting before a soft wind and getting caught on the vegetation eventually.

Seeds clung to plants, thoughts clung to seeds. In particular, the effects of war and greed on the seed repositories of the world. How will the increasing temperatures due to the climate crisis affect the Swalvard Seedbank, assumed to be safely storing humanity’s survival crops in permanent frost? You can now take a virtual tour of the vault here, by the way.

How will farmers recover their seed stocks when war manages to destroy seed banks and generally disrupt food production? Think of seed banks this way:

Seed banks represent genetic reservoirs of adaptive traits. By knowing the conditions under which the seed’s ancestors had developed, botanists can identify characteristics signaling where else a plant might thrive.For instance, wheat from regions getting only a few rains a year might point to some form of inherent drought tolerance. Similarly, strains of legumes that offer bounty crops when others succumb to blights might signal natural disease resistance. Those that fruit early may prosper where growing seasons are short. Those whose fruits ripen in cool to cold environments might survive high altitudes. And those with deep roots may anchor erodible hillsides.

As climate changes or communities begin extending a crop’s production into new areas, growers may need to find existing cultivars that match their current environment–or breeders may need to develop news ones by crossing varieties with a mix of desired features.

For each case, calls to the regional library of genes, a seed bank, may be in order. (Ref.)

This was written 10 years ago when the Afghan seed bank was destroyed by thieves. (To add insult to injury, the robbers took only the plastic and glass containers, emptying seeds, collected for decades, indiscriminately onto the floor, making them unusable.) Not having cataloged seeds that indicate their usability for a certain region is particularly dire in a country where so many farmers were displaced due to the war, and now have to work in regions unfamiliar and without seed starts that would flourish or at least survive there. How will Afghan farmers, now fully back under Taliban rule, get the seeds that were provided by NGO’s for the last decade, now barred from the country? I had written at length about a comparable situation not so long ago, if you recall, in regards to Syria, where at least scientists managed to save some catalogued repositories, smuggling them to safer countries.

I was reminded of it all due to this week’s report on Ukrainian losses from the Russian invasion. Last year Russian missiles destroyed part of an enormously precious Ukrainian herbarium at the University of Kherson. It served a vital role in the study of species extinction, invasive pests, and climate change The collection held specimens that can only be found in Ukraine and that are now at the brink of extinction. After all, about a third of all protected Ukrainian areas have been destroyed by bombing, burning, and military maneuvers. According to the non-profit Ukraine Nature Conservation Group (UNCG, whose Logo I adore, ) Russian troops have scorched tens of thousands of hectares of forests and put more than 800 plants at risk of extinction, including 20 rare species that have mostly vanished from elsewhere. And because they mined large swathes of land, scientists won’t be able for decades to see what can still be rescued, should this war ever stop.

What was left of the herbarium was rescued under somewhat harrowing circumstances by two devoted botanists this January, and moved to a different university in the country, some 1000 km away – also not entirely safe under war conditions. You can read about the efforts here.

I am usually not a fan of Eliot A. Cohen, but his deliberations on the West’s need for admitting Ukraine to NATO, a step severely curtailed by the U.S. and Germany during the recent summit, strike a chord with me. As he wrote in The Atlantic yesterday:

The only security commitments that can give Ukraine some prospect of peace are those that guarantee the active and effective support of Europe and the U.S. in the event of a renewed invasion. Bilateral guarantees, however, simply take the burden off America’s NATO allies and are hostage to the vagaries of American domestic politics. Far better to achieve the same result by bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. Let it be remembered, too, that in the three-quarters of a century it has existed, NATO has had a 100 percent success rate in deterring conventional Russian attacks on its members, including postage-stamp-size Estonia and other states that, like Ukraine, were once subject to rule from Moscow.

The noise of the chain saws stopped during lunch break and the quiet was noticeable, encouraging the deer to emerge, close enough to where I was resting in the shade that I could see the hair in their ears.

I was thinking about how war changes both, the soundscape of the environment and the way people are listening, with silence often more threatening than actual sounds, heralding an anticipated attack, the moment before the (fire) storm. It was interestingly an aspect of war that both of my parents were willing to talk about (in contrast to abiding silence on many others), from the perspective of living in Berlin during bombing raids (my mother) and the battlefield (my father.) There is a fascinating literature emerging on the issue – you can download an edited volume about the Sounds of War and Peace published a few years ago, of interest to me in its relation to memory research. A groundbreaking book by Joy Damousi, Sounds and Silence of War, is on my list to read about the topic from a cultural historian’s perspective. And now we have artists and historians record the sounds experienced in Ukraine, during the war, at very different locations and occasions. I am linking to the description of the project here, and it is worthwhile reading the essay. Some of the links to the sounds (found in the bolded titles) are working, others not so much, I believe the acoustics.net server might have limited capacity. Worth a try, though.

Here is music by a young Ukrainian composer. One of her new scores was chosen to be among the ones played by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra for the 2023/24 season after an open call for scores this January.

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Ecocide

In February 2022, Russia blockaded Ukraine’s Black Sea ports through which all Ukrainian bulk exports were being shipped, part of an ongoing attempt to wage war on global food security in the context of its invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the ports, through which mostly grain is exported, were mined. The Atlantic Council estimated then that globally about 47 million people were threatened with starvation due to these actions.

The likelihood of a hunger catastrophe has now stratospherically increased because of what happened in the early morning hours of June 6th, 2023, concurrent with the start of a Ukrainian offensive to push back against the Russian invaders: the Nova Kakhovka dam at the river Dnipro and connected power stations were exploded, leading to a flood of biblical proportions. For the last 15 months Russia have been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying civil infra-structure. At the time of the explosion, which could have only worked fron the inside of the physical structure, it was in control of the dam. Destroying it brings only advantages to the Russians, not the Ukrainians – either to block a Ukrainian offensive or to cover up a retreat, or progress to a strategy of scorched earth. The desire to wipe Ukraine off the map, whether by occupation or destruction, has been expressed often enough. Locals reported an unusual accumulation of Russian troops directly adjacent to the dam and the power station the night before.

It is a war crime, and one of epic proportions. Tens of thousands of people are threatened right now and need to be evacuated, with longterm damage to their towns and villages, some irreparably ruined, and no clean water for years to come. It is not just the flooding, and the flooding with water that contains poisonous chemicals (they expect up to 400 tons of engine oil from the plant alone are mixed in the floods), there are also mines carried by the floods that now dot the landscape.

It would already be a disaster of major proportions in peace times. Ukrainian forces and international rescue organizations are, as I write this, evacuating people in the affected region under ongoing Russian shelling. Some 80 villages with almost 1000 houses are already submerged. Further South, the grain basket of Ukraine will not only be flooded – watering systems will be destroyed that leave the land parched for decades to come, making agriculture impossible. Almost half a million people will potentially lack water that is safe to drink in addition to the effects on their livelihood, agriculture.

About 150 km upriver is the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which relies on cooling water from the now emptying reservoir. So far the IAEA says there is no immediate concern for a melt down, but the danger has to be assessed on an ongoing basis.

As so often, some small details captured my attention that really made the tears flow. It was not the mention of all of the animals (but the swans and ducks) drowning in the Kherson city zoo. Rather one environmental report stated that it is the worst time for animals in the wild to have been exposed: countless spring-born rabbits, foxes, fawns were too young to escape the flood wave of 11.5 feet (3.5. meters) and ground nesting bird nests were destroyed by the water. It is truly apocalyptic, comparable to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Maybe it is because you can imagine a drowning fawn and the compactness of that moment of death for a whole region, literally thousands of fawns, while your mind refuses to wrap itself around starving children across the continents, little by little dying from hunger. Refugee waves from hunger zones that will be accosted and returned at the borders if their faces are not white enough. A small country, Ukraine, that lost a high percentage of the generations actively involved in military defense. A country that will be flooded by maimed soldiers for decades to come. The trauma of Ukrainian children who have been growing up under constant threat of death all around them not just the battle fields.

There is historical precedent. In 1941 the Red Army exploded the Zaporizhzhia dam to stop the advance of Hitler’s army. At the time a wave several meters high descended on the Dnipro valley, killing 10.000s of people, some say over 100.000, even though the Zaporizhzhia lake contained far less water than the Kakhovka reservoir today (it had more than the Salt Lake in Utah.) The disregard for life, human or otherwise, from flooding or starving a people into submission, like Stalin did with the Holodomor, a man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, is just incomprehensible. Let us not forget, though, that the U.S. is no stranger to those actions. According to the Times of Israel, on March 6, 2017, a covert United States military unit reportedly targeted a massive dam (Tabqa Dam) in Syria controlled by the Islamic State with some of the largest conventional bombs in the army’s arsenal, despite the levee being on a “no-strike list” given that flooding could put the lives of tens of thousands at risk. Apparently a catastrophe was avoided because some of the bombs did not explode.

Looks like similar luck did not extend to the Crimea and the poor people of the region and city of Kherson.

Music today: The Ukrainian anthem is called ‘Ukraine is Not Yet Dead’, composed in 1863 by Mykhailo Verbytsky to a patriotic poem by ethnographer Pavlo Chubynsky. It was the short-lived anthem of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1917 and restored as such after the restoration of independence in 1992.

I VERY much recommend listening to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s lecture series the Making of Modern Ukraine which is an analysis that puts the daily horrors events of this war in a historical context.

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