It's not that easy to answer this. We are, of course on the side of families. But the demonisation of a country or even one man is something else. Would America be relaxed about Russian missiles in Cuba or the Bahamas I wonder? NATO perhaps should not have co-opted the former Soviet Union satellite states, bringing their missiles up to Russian borders. I'm uneasy about Ukraine who provided SS divisions to the Germans in the last war and helped to carry out the Babi Yar massacre, while the men and women of the Red Army liberated Jewish survivors (and my POW father) from camps. Ordinary people and families are concerned about shelter, food, health and education of their children. When they are prepared to sacrifice these securities in honour of nationalism I wonder who benefits?
Thank you, Mr. Keillor, for using your writing gifts not only to amuse, but to speak the truth clearly. Of course you will get pushback, but I say “Amen!”
The atrocious Russian war in Ukraine has a precedent called Holodomor. That's the Ukrainian word for murder by starvation and refers to the 24-month period in 1932-33 when Stalin deliberately and willfully starved at least 5 million Ukrainian men, women and children to death. Several years ago when I called the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, IL to ask if they'd do a program on Holodomor, the person I spoke with agreed on the spot to do it and they held the discussion a few months later. We Jews talk about THE Holocaust but the Illinois Holocaust Museum instantly recognized that, sadly, there was more than one.
I guess if all countries and people eligible for the draft were willing to go to Ukraine tomorrow, the war would be over in a matter of the same amount of time and that would be it as far as Putin, except for being able to do whatever he wants with his own Russian people!
Thanks, Garrison, for that good and accurate statement about the situation in Ukraine
People say that Putin wants to recreate the old Czarist and Soviet Empires but most of the people of Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Kazakstan, etc. don't want to be ruled by Moscow. Putin likes to think that Russia is a great country, but it is actually weak economically compared to Germany and many of the European countries. It does not have the economy to support a large army that would be needed to conquer the countries that Putin would love to conquer.
Putin is like many of the right-wing folks who would love to live in a "golden" age of the past when things and people were/are "the way they are supposed to be."
Putin probably cannot conquer and hold Ukraine, so he is inflicting as much damage as possible and terrorizing the people by random missile strikes and killing. Putin does not want Ukraine to be a successful independent country -- which is what many of the Ukrainians want.
Putin and the right-wing folks don't want to face the reality that things and times change. The Europe and Russia of 2022 is a lot different from the Europe and Russia of Czarist times and of the 1930's, etc. Technology and economics have profound effects on how people live.
One tiny example is the telephone. When Garrison and I were small, there was a telephone on the wall or table, and it had a cord. When it rang, you went to it and picked up the receiver to see who was on the phone. You did not carry it with you and if you were out somewhere and needed a phone you looked for a pay phone.
Now everyone has a phone which they carry with them and it tells you who is calling before you answer. If you don't want to talk to the person, you just don't answer. Carrying the phone with you has had a tremendous impact on how people communicate, do business, etc. They say that over 50% of restaurant sales now are for takeout or home delivery. Ease of phone use has a lot to do with that.
Thanks for expressing my feelings about yet another ignominious display of human behavior. As long as two humans remain on earth, there will always be war, and the innocent will always suffer. Lousy state of things, but that's who we are. I want to remain optimistic that this will soon be over and the suffering will end, but I'm not so sure. As long as we allow Putin and those like him to hog the show, what chance do we have? I don't have the answer to how we can stop all of this. I just don't want to see Putin's ilk in this country get the chance to one-up him.
Photographs like that you describe, despite their power, are not just there to tell stories and tug heart strings. They are a crude, cynical commercial exercise in selling newspapers. I think of this now, just as I did a week before the present war started, when a fellow blogger and citizen of Karmiel, Galilee, Israel, wrote of another powerful NYT photo of child refugees. She felt sentimental, partly because she was a WW 2 refugee from Hungary. She forgot, like you, that despite its long-held Jewish 'governance', The Times's attitude towards Jewish immigration to the US and the modern State of Israel is nothing short of despicable.
I always felt that the takeover of Crimea wasn’t dealt with severely enough. Now the world watches a lunatic do the same thing over again expecting the same results. Perhaps he isn’t insane.
And the world whines about oil. Perhaps WE are insane.
I am an agnostic. Do agnostics pray? Yes, when confronted with a world gone mad .
I have this inexplicable affinity for the 1930's and 1940's and I often wonder what Americans thought of what was happening in Europe, to the people of Poland before we got involved in the war. What did the 1930's Americans think when Hitler came to power and began puffing and pounding his chest? What did we think when he invaded Poland? I'd ask my mother but she was only a little girl at the time and doesn't remember.
My dad was just a young boy growing up in Germany at the time and he remembers riding his bicycle on the way to school around bomb craters. He remembers families around him being pulled out of their homes by German soldiers and taken away but they never came in their home. I came to learn later my dad's father was a member of the party. He told us of a day when they came home from church one Sunday after an air raid to find there was nothing where their home used to be. I have a picture of my fathers sister standing on a beam over the basement and there was no house around her. My grandmother was English who married a German and she had dual citizenship between the two countries. My grandmother told us how she, my dad and aunt walked through deep snow to the train station or what was left of it and got on a train with soldiers from some other country to escape the madness happening around them in Bremen. The other soldiers gave them food and water on their journey. They tried to go back to England but were denied entry and eventually ended up back in Bremen. When the war ended, she worked for the US Army documenting German citizens but for what reason we don't know but we assume it was to just know who was who and she did that up to 1948. Then they all came to America.
My grandmother died in 1999 at the ripe old age of 100. Before she died we would write letters to each other and she'd tell me of her life in England and Germany. But she kept a lot secret and what she told us was minimal, mostly about their home, her dress shop, the city and surroundings. Never about what was going on politically or what they knew politically. My dad was also quiet about many things, only uttering small things about home and where they lived. But they lived. They knew things were going on but they didn't speak of it. They went about their daily lives like they always did. They didn't speak ill of their soldiers or their government, but she did say that Hitler was after more land for his people, the German people.
Grandma K, as we called her, grew up in England during WWI and her father..... oddly enough, was German and they lived in London. When WWI broke out, he was taken by the military and put into an interment camp where he later died. Grandma K told us that before WWII ended, her husband was captured and died in a Russian salt mine. For years, that is what we were told. After she passed I received a box full of papers and documents, photos and keepsakes that belonged to her. Photos from Germany, documents with the Nazi stamp on them, all in German of course.
Years passed and then through the use of Ancestry.com, I was able to learn a great deal about that side of my family. The most striking was that my grandfather did not die in a Russian salt mine. He came to America by changing his name slightly and went to Santa Barbara in the early 1950's. Grandma K up and moved from New Jersey to Santa Barbara in 1956 and we weren't told why but now I know. In 1959 when I was just 1 year old, my father, my mother and I drove out to Santa Barbara and remained there for a year before coming back to New Jersey. I later learned that my dad's father died in 1959 right around the time we were there.
My dad rarely spoke of what happened to their family in Germany. He had no opinions of what was happening to the people in France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the other countries Hitler invaded. His family was more focused on their own survival. My grandmother told us that then the opinions of the Americans was it wasn't their fight but they'd help if there was a threat to them. But when Hitler declared war on America, she knew they were going to be in for some hard times.
News back then was all newspapers and whatever we would hear on the radio. There was no social media unless if you counted the news reals during the movies. But things are way different now. Everyone is a political analyst, everyone is military strategist and everyone is has an opinion on what should be done, who is at fault, who should receive blame and ridicule. Images of war ravaged communities and destruction bring back memories of the photos we'd get of what was happening in Vietnam. The naked girl, burn marks all over her body with her arms outstretched running in the street toward the camera. Vietnam was the attempt to stop a land grab and still America was to blame for the atrocities.
Russia is now committing their own atrocities and if you read your history you will learn that Russia has killed just as many of its own people as it has those they fought. Now they continue with Putin's new land grab and for some reason I'm getting the impression that some think that America is to blame, or republicans, because the land grab is allowed to continue. Suggesting we should get involved frightening. It should be frightening, especially to the people of the Ukraine and the countries around it. Ground zero I believe they call it and it would be significantly worse than what my father, aunt and Grandma K experienced.
To ask whose side I'm on is simple. The side of my family and my country. I feel bad for the people of Ukraine and the people of Russia for that matter but the best we can do at this point is hope the sanctions work and we don't send boat loads of soldiers and equipment to that area. I applaud the people of that country for taking up arms and giving the middle finger to Putin. However at some point, like Hitler did, Putin, when he's had enough of the pushback, will send a larger more powerful invasion into that small country without concern for the people of the Ukraine or his own people. Russia has always been and always will be the aggressor.
I believe the sentiment of most Americans in this case is similar to that of WWII. We know it's bad over there, and we feel for you, but right now we have to figure out how we're going to pay for the gas to put in our cars so we can get to work and pay our mortgages. Selfish? No, taking care of our own. But do not, under any circumstances, point a muzzle at us lest you want a size 10 boot up your a**.
I am trying to be on the side of truth and not just truth as one party sees it. To some degree it's a judgement call. A combination of what my eyes tell me and what I hear and read. There is so much a person can learn by doing that. Knowing some history can be helpful. I have prayed before asking god to allow me to see the truth. There is the great saying that the Truth shall set you free. Not so much in Russia I'm afraid. I see so many good, hard working folks that have invested in a party where the truth seems to have been lost but they charge forward, still echoing past lies that that were long ago called out with the Orange man at the helm of a million lies and more to come I'm sure if he is allowed an audience.
Putin's Russia is built on lies and the death's of people who stood in the way of his lies. But now for the world to accept what he is doing, his lies must be believed, accepted or ignored. It's hard for a people that who have the option of believing the truth and who aren't totally self absorbed to accept what he is doing and I'm thankful for that. Whatever the parents or grandparents of the present Ukrainians have done, these are still people that are experiencing the most horrible types of suffering. They are being treated like vermin by the Russians. Those who can't feel their pain I also feel sorry for as surely their soul has left them.
This type of unmerciful killing by Russia says volumes. If they are successful in Ukraine will they stop with Ukraine? What lies will they tell that will allow them to attack other countries or the US in the same fashion. I know the US and others are supporting them and I am so thankful and I hope we can do more yet as I feel like in part they are fighting the good fight and in some way's protecting us. If Ukraine succeeds in their fight, Russia will be stopped their and we will be less likely to have to deal with them again in the near future.
I suspect that you thought long and hard about writing such a serious column, as you usually say that you are not political pundit. But, you wrote with your heart and I can only thank you for putting our recent petty (in comparison with bombing and death) issues in perspective and rightly declaring that our futures depend on a unified commitment to democracy. Mr. K, your writing becomes more powerful with every column. Thank you for giving me hope.
It's not that easy to answer this. We are, of course on the side of families. But the demonisation of a country or even one man is something else. Would America be relaxed about Russian missiles in Cuba or the Bahamas I wonder? NATO perhaps should not have co-opted the former Soviet Union satellite states, bringing their missiles up to Russian borders. I'm uneasy about Ukraine who provided SS divisions to the Germans in the last war and helped to carry out the Babi Yar massacre, while the men and women of the Red Army liberated Jewish survivors (and my POW father) from camps. Ordinary people and families are concerned about shelter, food, health and education of their children. When they are prepared to sacrifice these securities in honour of nationalism I wonder who benefits?
So powerfully and awesomely said, GK! We must stand with our Ukrainian sisters and brothers! Our lives depend on this!
Thank you, Mr. Keillor, for using your writing gifts not only to amuse, but to speak the truth clearly. Of course you will get pushback, but I say “Amen!”
PS, no one is demonizing Russia. The evil sits squarely with Putin.
THANKS .war is hell...you may quote me. //Was it Ma Kettle that said "I'm aginit"?
https://soundcloud.com/mebarscott/invocation?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing My wife Bar Scott’s musical response to the war and events of this world. Peace be with We of the world
Write on Mr Keillor. You channel our concerns, grief, and prayers.
The atrocious Russian war in Ukraine has a precedent called Holodomor. That's the Ukrainian word for murder by starvation and refers to the 24-month period in 1932-33 when Stalin deliberately and willfully starved at least 5 million Ukrainian men, women and children to death. Several years ago when I called the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, IL to ask if they'd do a program on Holodomor, the person I spoke with agreed on the spot to do it and they held the discussion a few months later. We Jews talk about THE Holocaust but the Illinois Holocaust Museum instantly recognized that, sadly, there was more than one.
I guess if all countries and people eligible for the draft were willing to go to Ukraine tomorrow, the war would be over in a matter of the same amount of time and that would be it as far as Putin, except for being able to do whatever he wants with his own Russian people!
Thanks, Garrison, for that good and accurate statement about the situation in Ukraine
People say that Putin wants to recreate the old Czarist and Soviet Empires but most of the people of Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Kazakstan, etc. don't want to be ruled by Moscow. Putin likes to think that Russia is a great country, but it is actually weak economically compared to Germany and many of the European countries. It does not have the economy to support a large army that would be needed to conquer the countries that Putin would love to conquer.
Putin is like many of the right-wing folks who would love to live in a "golden" age of the past when things and people were/are "the way they are supposed to be."
Putin probably cannot conquer and hold Ukraine, so he is inflicting as much damage as possible and terrorizing the people by random missile strikes and killing. Putin does not want Ukraine to be a successful independent country -- which is what many of the Ukrainians want.
Putin and the right-wing folks don't want to face the reality that things and times change. The Europe and Russia of 2022 is a lot different from the Europe and Russia of Czarist times and of the 1930's, etc. Technology and economics have profound effects on how people live.
One tiny example is the telephone. When Garrison and I were small, there was a telephone on the wall or table, and it had a cord. When it rang, you went to it and picked up the receiver to see who was on the phone. You did not carry it with you and if you were out somewhere and needed a phone you looked for a pay phone.
Now everyone has a phone which they carry with them and it tells you who is calling before you answer. If you don't want to talk to the person, you just don't answer. Carrying the phone with you has had a tremendous impact on how people communicate, do business, etc. They say that over 50% of restaurant sales now are for takeout or home delivery. Ease of phone use has a lot to do with that.
Best wishes to one and all.
Thanks for expressing my feelings about yet another ignominious display of human behavior. As long as two humans remain on earth, there will always be war, and the innocent will always suffer. Lousy state of things, but that's who we are. I want to remain optimistic that this will soon be over and the suffering will end, but I'm not so sure. As long as we allow Putin and those like him to hog the show, what chance do we have? I don't have the answer to how we can stop all of this. I just don't want to see Putin's ilk in this country get the chance to one-up him.
Photographs like that you describe, despite their power, are not just there to tell stories and tug heart strings. They are a crude, cynical commercial exercise in selling newspapers. I think of this now, just as I did a week before the present war started, when a fellow blogger and citizen of Karmiel, Galilee, Israel, wrote of another powerful NYT photo of child refugees. She felt sentimental, partly because she was a WW 2 refugee from Hungary. She forgot, like you, that despite its long-held Jewish 'governance', The Times's attitude towards Jewish immigration to the US and the modern State of Israel is nothing short of despicable.
The waste of humanity chills.
I always felt that the takeover of Crimea wasn’t dealt with severely enough. Now the world watches a lunatic do the same thing over again expecting the same results. Perhaps he isn’t insane.
And the world whines about oil. Perhaps WE are insane.
I am an agnostic. Do agnostics pray? Yes, when confronted with a world gone mad .
I have this inexplicable affinity for the 1930's and 1940's and I often wonder what Americans thought of what was happening in Europe, to the people of Poland before we got involved in the war. What did the 1930's Americans think when Hitler came to power and began puffing and pounding his chest? What did we think when he invaded Poland? I'd ask my mother but she was only a little girl at the time and doesn't remember.
My dad was just a young boy growing up in Germany at the time and he remembers riding his bicycle on the way to school around bomb craters. He remembers families around him being pulled out of their homes by German soldiers and taken away but they never came in their home. I came to learn later my dad's father was a member of the party. He told us of a day when they came home from church one Sunday after an air raid to find there was nothing where their home used to be. I have a picture of my fathers sister standing on a beam over the basement and there was no house around her. My grandmother was English who married a German and she had dual citizenship between the two countries. My grandmother told us how she, my dad and aunt walked through deep snow to the train station or what was left of it and got on a train with soldiers from some other country to escape the madness happening around them in Bremen. The other soldiers gave them food and water on their journey. They tried to go back to England but were denied entry and eventually ended up back in Bremen. When the war ended, she worked for the US Army documenting German citizens but for what reason we don't know but we assume it was to just know who was who and she did that up to 1948. Then they all came to America.
My grandmother died in 1999 at the ripe old age of 100. Before she died we would write letters to each other and she'd tell me of her life in England and Germany. But she kept a lot secret and what she told us was minimal, mostly about their home, her dress shop, the city and surroundings. Never about what was going on politically or what they knew politically. My dad was also quiet about many things, only uttering small things about home and where they lived. But they lived. They knew things were going on but they didn't speak of it. They went about their daily lives like they always did. They didn't speak ill of their soldiers or their government, but she did say that Hitler was after more land for his people, the German people.
Grandma K, as we called her, grew up in England during WWI and her father..... oddly enough, was German and they lived in London. When WWI broke out, he was taken by the military and put into an interment camp where he later died. Grandma K told us that before WWII ended, her husband was captured and died in a Russian salt mine. For years, that is what we were told. After she passed I received a box full of papers and documents, photos and keepsakes that belonged to her. Photos from Germany, documents with the Nazi stamp on them, all in German of course.
Years passed and then through the use of Ancestry.com, I was able to learn a great deal about that side of my family. The most striking was that my grandfather did not die in a Russian salt mine. He came to America by changing his name slightly and went to Santa Barbara in the early 1950's. Grandma K up and moved from New Jersey to Santa Barbara in 1956 and we weren't told why but now I know. In 1959 when I was just 1 year old, my father, my mother and I drove out to Santa Barbara and remained there for a year before coming back to New Jersey. I later learned that my dad's father died in 1959 right around the time we were there.
My dad rarely spoke of what happened to their family in Germany. He had no opinions of what was happening to the people in France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the other countries Hitler invaded. His family was more focused on their own survival. My grandmother told us that then the opinions of the Americans was it wasn't their fight but they'd help if there was a threat to them. But when Hitler declared war on America, she knew they were going to be in for some hard times.
News back then was all newspapers and whatever we would hear on the radio. There was no social media unless if you counted the news reals during the movies. But things are way different now. Everyone is a political analyst, everyone is military strategist and everyone is has an opinion on what should be done, who is at fault, who should receive blame and ridicule. Images of war ravaged communities and destruction bring back memories of the photos we'd get of what was happening in Vietnam. The naked girl, burn marks all over her body with her arms outstretched running in the street toward the camera. Vietnam was the attempt to stop a land grab and still America was to blame for the atrocities.
Russia is now committing their own atrocities and if you read your history you will learn that Russia has killed just as many of its own people as it has those they fought. Now they continue with Putin's new land grab and for some reason I'm getting the impression that some think that America is to blame, or republicans, because the land grab is allowed to continue. Suggesting we should get involved frightening. It should be frightening, especially to the people of the Ukraine and the countries around it. Ground zero I believe they call it and it would be significantly worse than what my father, aunt and Grandma K experienced.
To ask whose side I'm on is simple. The side of my family and my country. I feel bad for the people of Ukraine and the people of Russia for that matter but the best we can do at this point is hope the sanctions work and we don't send boat loads of soldiers and equipment to that area. I applaud the people of that country for taking up arms and giving the middle finger to Putin. However at some point, like Hitler did, Putin, when he's had enough of the pushback, will send a larger more powerful invasion into that small country without concern for the people of the Ukraine or his own people. Russia has always been and always will be the aggressor.
I believe the sentiment of most Americans in this case is similar to that of WWII. We know it's bad over there, and we feel for you, but right now we have to figure out how we're going to pay for the gas to put in our cars so we can get to work and pay our mortgages. Selfish? No, taking care of our own. But do not, under any circumstances, point a muzzle at us lest you want a size 10 boot up your a**.
I am trying to be on the side of truth and not just truth as one party sees it. To some degree it's a judgement call. A combination of what my eyes tell me and what I hear and read. There is so much a person can learn by doing that. Knowing some history can be helpful. I have prayed before asking god to allow me to see the truth. There is the great saying that the Truth shall set you free. Not so much in Russia I'm afraid. I see so many good, hard working folks that have invested in a party where the truth seems to have been lost but they charge forward, still echoing past lies that that were long ago called out with the Orange man at the helm of a million lies and more to come I'm sure if he is allowed an audience.
Putin's Russia is built on lies and the death's of people who stood in the way of his lies. But now for the world to accept what he is doing, his lies must be believed, accepted or ignored. It's hard for a people that who have the option of believing the truth and who aren't totally self absorbed to accept what he is doing and I'm thankful for that. Whatever the parents or grandparents of the present Ukrainians have done, these are still people that are experiencing the most horrible types of suffering. They are being treated like vermin by the Russians. Those who can't feel their pain I also feel sorry for as surely their soul has left them.
This type of unmerciful killing by Russia says volumes. If they are successful in Ukraine will they stop with Ukraine? What lies will they tell that will allow them to attack other countries or the US in the same fashion. I know the US and others are supporting them and I am so thankful and I hope we can do more yet as I feel like in part they are fighting the good fight and in some way's protecting us. If Ukraine succeeds in their fight, Russia will be stopped their and we will be less likely to have to deal with them again in the near future.
I suspect that you thought long and hard about writing such a serious column, as you usually say that you are not political pundit. But, you wrote with your heart and I can only thank you for putting our recent petty (in comparison with bombing and death) issues in perspective and rightly declaring that our futures depend on a unified commitment to democracy. Mr. K, your writing becomes more powerful with every column. Thank you for giving me hope.