WHAT WAR IS
Maybe someday they’ll decide to write a textbook
only we won’t be invited to contribute
because others always know better what war is
because others always know better
okay
but just one chapter
give us one chapter
you won’t find any supplemental material anyway
this will be a chapter on silence
whoever hasn’t been in war doesn’t know what silence is
but to the contrary, they know
that we don’t know
the way fish don’t know about the water that sustains them and the oil that kills them
the way a field mouse doesn’t know about the dark that hides it from the hawk but
it hides the hawk too
let us write this chapter
i know you’re afraid of blood so we’ll write it with water
the water the wounded man asked for when he could no longer swallow and just
looked at it
water that seeps through a shelled-out roof
water that can replace tears
yes – we’ll come to you with water
we’ll leave no permanent marks
on your slogans and values that we’ve so flagrantly misused
that you can’t even show them to your children anymore
these will be our few pages
and only a few will know they aren’t empty
Timothy Snyder introduced us to this poet and poem on Monday, the three year-anniversary of the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The words speak for themselves. Will we heed them?
The poem is contained in Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, published by Academic Studies Press (Boston, MA) and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Cambridge, MA). It is available at bookshop.org, or your local bookstore. (As a reminder: this Friday, February 28th, has been dedicated to buying or paying NOTHING, a nation-wide economic boycott to protest the new administration and the businesses raising prices because they can. Put gas in the car and get your groceries on Thursday…)
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Two recommended long reads that you might want to pick up:
Aisha Ahmad, Political Science Professor at the University of Toronto, writes about the consequences of a potential war with Canada.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and writes about a way to think about the current President and his posse’s approach to governing, relating back to a term originally coined by Max Weber: Patrimonialism.
“Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.”
Today minimalist music. The Book of Sounds was composed by Hans Otte between 1979 and 1982. Played here by Carlos Cipa, himself a contemporary classical composer and pianist.
2023 photo montage series about war and nuclear proliferation.