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This was originally going to be one piece on comforts during war-times, but as I was writing, so many different separate sources on what I was reading and listening to were lining up in a way and were expressly making their own connections which I am attempting to set forth here. And as theologian Ellen Davis puts it: “In order to have hope - you have to see the depth and dimensions of the problem”. Think of this Part One as clearing the junk off the dining room table - the scattered bills and dirty plates and many partially filled water cups, the crumbs and torn bits of paper, the flowers wilting in stagnant water. The casualties and debris that gather in the day-to-day living and just trying to figure out where to put everything when you feel barely-there. Part Two will be a setting of the table. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————- A couple of days ago, after I had drafted most of this newsletter, I completely accidentally came upon a podcast episode that I cannot stop thinking about. I was searching for something on Balkan mythology to no avail, yet scrolled the episodes and came to a heading that said “Progress is just another myth”. It was from a podcast called “The Intellectual Dark Web”. I was intrigued. At this point, I’ll give a fair shot to any kind of reasoning that helps me make sense of all of this bedlam. Through all of our political turmoil in the States, election battles occurring so presently, and the deeper and deeper divide amongst us and the whisperings of a Civil War, I was seeking something that felt like the wider picture, the zoom-out. Along with my current readings and thoughts, it became crystallized in the form of this lecture from years ago by English philosopher John Gray that seems to speak so vividly to this moment. Apparently, Gray is sometimes seen as a doomsayer, or too pessimistic, but I don’t think he is and he doesn’t see himself that way either. What he is really trying to assert is that while we have “progress” in technological and scientific terms, human needs are inevitably unchanging and those needs or behaviors don’t really “progress”. That we cannot be surprised when we have abolished “slavery” - yet transfer it to sweatshops in Indonesia and for-profit prisons in the US. That we have abolished “torture” - but we have Guantanamo Bay and children separated from their families in literal cages at the border. We condemn genocide and are appalled at the Holocaust - yet we supply arms to foreign administrations that bomb its own civilians in a calculated attempt to cleanse the ethnic minority. But, you know, oil and allies. Even what we think of as our “Great Democratic Experiment” in the States, a “bastion of light” towards a “free” political society, cannot rightfully hold. And we shouldn’t be surprised that it does not hold up with age. Gray asserts that “freedom” is not actually the highest good for a society of people. People generally want other things beyond unbridled freedom - economic stability, for example. General stability. These are not accomplished with the pure principle of “freedom”. But Power finds new names with which to disguise itself, and sometimes in the camouflaged costume of “Progress” or even “Democracy”. We are entering, and rather have been continuously building up to, an inevitable clash of these ideals in the US. What I appreciate about John Gray’s viewpoint is that it is not States-centric. He has no investment in the games of American politics. He does not live here and he is an academic. He can explain cooly the state of our missteps and follies and eventual decline. He paints the overall global and historical picture of why he maintains that human needs are unchanging and different languages for the same types of power structures perpetuates this myth of progress that is more harmful than helpful when addressing the human needs that are going unmet across the globe. He holds a powerful critique of and rejection of regimes such as the Soviet Union. while holding a similarly and even more powerful critique of the Great Democratic Governments. About one month into the widespread lockdown, I was looking at free online courses to take to fill some of my time and to dive into subjects I didn’t have an interest in while at school. I decided to sign up for the class about War because I was interested in trying to grasp the narrative of how Power has worked throughout history. It is well understood that much, if not all, of that Power has been accrued through mobilizing civilians to become agents of War. Utilizing Nationalistic jargon to pledge allegiance to the State Power, or the State Ideal. Although I knew the lockdown didn’t mean “wartime” necessarily, it was the closest that our generation in the US has ever felt collectively to a sustained national crisis. America is really great at exporting. Exporting these darker sides of what makes our country’s wheels turn. Exporting our taxes. Exporting our own righteous democratic ideals. For my generation, growing up we didn’t even know that we were in a war for mostly all of it. It was abroad. It was “over there”. We were protected, we were privileged. While our peers over in the Middle East were becoming radicalized, angry that their homes and neighborhoods have been completely destroyed and occupied for their whole childhood and adolescence. We can’t admit that we did this because it betrays the myth of progress. Because our Great Democracy is “better” than that. So when this great Free country was forced to, like, not go out to restaurants for a week, and then maybe two, and then months and months, we got annoyed. I can’t even say angry because that kind of emotion shouldn’t be degraded by aligning with it the tantrum of a people who have never been asked to sacrifice parts of their “freedom” for the good of the whole of society. So inevitably there were the protests declaring mask-wearing and a lockdown as signs of impending Communist Regime. As encapsulated by the statement at the prologue by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s novel, set during the Biafran Civil War in Nigeria: “You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”
This all feels so inevitable and honestly I feel a strange type of comfort in knowing that we are not exceptional. We have been in denial for so long that our Experiment can hold and never be re-examined. That our Sacred and Divine text of the Constitution is perhaps neither Sacred nor Divine. But rather a text written by men a couple hundred of years ago in reaction to a different kind of specific governing. It needs to be examined precisely within the context of our current and standing society, and the context of global history. Which is why the newest Supreme Court nomination is so scary to me, not just for her supposed position on Roe v. Wade, but because she, in complete ideological opposition to her predecessor, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but exactly like her intellectual predecessor, Justice Antonin Scalia, is an “Originalist” -someone who holds the Constitution, essentially, as a Divine Text. And holding that kind of attitude of infallibility towards a governmental document can produce all sorts of unintended consequences. ***** “Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult...Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.” -Erich Fromm
***** I started off the first draft of this original newsletter when I received Slavenka Drakulić’s book of essays, The Balkan Express, which she wrote over the first 2 years (1991-1992) of the Yugoslavian Civil War. I ordered the book in July in pursuit of gathering fragments of a distant ancestral history which I’m trying to sort out my relation to and it only just arrived last week, in a timely manner it seems. The term Civil War in regards to the US has been thrown around, and not altogether lightly as of late. In fact, you can just google “civil war” and in your own little personalized algorithmic search results within the first two pages there will be a thought piece or assertion that we in the States are heading in this direction. And not just being written by out-there conspiracy theorists or extremists. This was also a fear heard whispered with real gravity by the Big Tech players interviewed in the recent Netflix documentary, Social Dilemma. Researching thought pieces on a new American Civil War isn’t likely going to tell you anything you don’t already intuit or know, and it might leave to some unpleasant rabbit holes, so I would advise to just leave that alone. But I perhaps glancing at past “civil wars” can tell us more about the nature of where we are and how, as John Gray had put forth, humans haven’t really “progressed”. As I am writing this, my dear friends who have ties with Armenia brought to my attention the current week-old, yet historic conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan about a historically and culturally Armenian territory - Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh) that is “technically'“ within the “internationally recognized borders” of Azerbaijan. I say “technically”, though this is not true. A closer look at history reveals that Nagorno-Karabakh declared its independence on September 2, 1991 and Azerbaijan declared its own independence only one month later. The territory of Artsakh was “gifted” by Stalin to Azerbaijan before the collapse of the Soviet Union. So “technically” Azerbaijan as an independent country doesn’t have valid legal claim to the land. Even if you can’t quite follow all of the technicalities of that, it sets the stage and is an important relevant example as to the question of what really is a “civil war” and wwho gets to “own” what territory? A bombing occurred in Artsakh about a week ago, and both sides claim the other provoked it. They are anticipating a quick escalation as different sides are backed by larger powers, like Turkey and Russia, who have other vested interests in mind. The casualties have already been devastating - ancient cathedrals decimated and civilians homes targeted and destroyed. It is hard to read Slavenka Drakulic’s recollection from 1991 and not feel like the global attitude then applies to this current conflict, as well as so many others: War also heightens your awareness of the outside world. Astonishment gives way to anger, then resignation at the way Europe perceives this war - ‘ethnic conflict’, ‘ancient legacy of hatred and blood-shed’. In this way the West tells us, ‘You are not Europeans, not even Eastern Europeans. You are Balkans, mythological, wild, dangerous Balkans. Kill yourselves, if that is your pleasure. We don’t understand what is going on there, nor do we have clear political interests to protect.’ -Slavenka Drakulic
As I was trying to read a little more about Balkan conflicts and wars, I came across this article from the Washington Post written in 1993 regarding the Serbian fight for Kosovo. Kosovo can be referenced to as “the Jerusalem for Serbians”. It is their Holy Land and they have been disassociated from it for 600 years, mainly as a political tactic to quell an anticipated Serbian uprising: Consider the recollections of one of the young Serbian soldiers in those wars when he was told that his unit would liberate Kosovo: "The single sound of that word -- Kosovo -- caused an indescribable excitement. This one word pointed to the black past of five centuries. In it exists the whole of our sad history . . . . Our mothers lulled us to sleep with the songs of Kosovo, and in our schools our teachers never ceased in their stories of it . . . . We feel strong and proud, for we are the generation which will realize the centuries-old dream of the whole nation: that we with the sword will regain the freedom that was lost with the sword."
This narrative of re-claiming land of ancestral inheritance, it is familiar. It is cyclical. It is complicated. It is heart-wrenching to hear a people fight for historic land and lose to Power Plays and War. Yet that line: “that we with the sword will regain the freedom that was lost with the sword” is eery and also an inheritance that gets passed on. Because the next line in the article points out this very real and complicated fact: “Unfortunately for Serbian interests, the Kosovo that they liberated on the eve of World War I was not the same territory they lost 600 years earlier. Over the centuries it had become home to a very large population of Albanians.”
Because over years and as is natural with time, the displacement of people through wars and natural disasters and refugees fleeing, places change. The cultural and “ethnic” identities of places change. I personally find it a hard factor to cope with - desiring to preserve a cultural and physical heritage, and the reality of shifting landscapes. If you go to “Civil wars” on Wikipedia, you will see a list of recorded wars and conflicts, some more familiar than others. “The Latin term bellum civile was used to describe wars within a single community beginning around 60 A.D.” - starting with the Roman civil wars. Since 1945, the term is generally used to describe a conflict within a single “country” or region. I use all of the quotations because talking about “countries” and “ethnic” groups of people requires just that - disclaimers, clarifications, distinctions, endless nuance and re-evaluations of sources of information. Across the globe the casualties of colonialism and a failed Communistic State have defined for people what their new “tribes” are, what their new “country” of allegiance is. It is easier for those disassociated from these conflicts to use generalizations, so in the re-telling of histories these details get conflated. A “civil war” can more-so likely be qualified as a conflict amongst peoples in a close geographical location, usually exacerbated and stoked and escalated by Powers with vested interest. Whether it be an oil pipeline, tax revenue controls or simply expansive claim to territory. Governments have been baiting citizens with nationalistic language since the dawn of time to gauge loyalty and arm forces to retain or conquer land and resources. It is nothing new. Nothing new at all. “...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came. If this is hatred, then it is very young. It has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.” - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun
The irrational that dwells in each of us is being unleashed from its chain and nobody can control it anymore. Nobody is secure. In what way am I, a Croat, less threatened and in less danger than my acquaintance, a Serbian, who is now moving back to Eastern Bosnia? In no way, because the demons in us have already made people perceive themselves as nothing but parts of the national being. ‘The Serbs must be slaughtered,’ says a twelve-year-old child from my neighborhood playing with a bread-knife. His mother slaps his face, while the other grown ups around the table lower their eyes, aware that they are to blame for his words. The boy, of course, is only playing. At the same time, children his age in Belgrade are probably not playing cops and robbers anymore - they are also playing at what should be done to Croats. If there is any future at all, I am afraid of the time to come. A time when these boys, if this lasts, might do just that. - Slavenka Drakulic
In the US, 2020: My youngest sister told me how just a couple of months ago she was spending time with a 7 year old girl who, without provocation, told her to “be careful when she goes back to the City because the Rioters are going to get her”, and that “Yes we took the Native American’s land but they need to learn to forgive because that’s what the Bible says”. The inheritance of language and rhetoric has not progressed. ***** The first essay in The Balkan Express takes place in April 1991, the “start” of the Yugoslavian Civil War, the year I was born and 58 years after my great grandmother left her home island of Vis, Croatia to immigrate to San Pedro, California because of a different war. In all of my own small and limited readings on war times, there is a pervasive theme: On a personal level, it is gradual. In the middle of reading Slavenka Drakulić’s own observations on the dawning of a civil war, I paused to read through a newsletter which happened to link an article recently written by Sri Lankan journalist Indi Samarajiva which touches so exactly on that theme. It felt like these two voices from completely different time periods and wars and cultures were echoing the very same sentiment. His very first sentence is: “I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.” “This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.” -Indi Samarajiva
I hesitate to use the word war, which has recently become tamed and domesticated in our vocabulary like a domestic animal, almost a pet… But war is not a single act, it is a state of facts and minds, a head-spinning spiral of events and a gradual process of realization… War is a process: we, in Yugoslavia, are now witnessing this. That is why it is hard to say when it started, who started it and who exactly is the enemy.
-Slavenka Drakulić
1991 was also the same year the Gulf War happened. It was the first war that had televised broadcasts from the frontlines and became an entertainment obsession in the US. Reality TV is our favorite past time; a strange fantasy of a threat we never actually experience on our own soil. My grandfather has inextricably linked my birth to the tv war coverage. I am told time and again that the doctor exclaimed “Welcome to Long Beach, sweetheart” while real-time bombs went off in Kuwait in the background on the boxy hospital TV screen. US troops landed back on home soil two months later at JFK airport, leaving all of the casualties and damage abroad. Nearly at the same time, Slavenka Drakulić stepped off the plane at the same airport to have her “Dinner at Harvard” - which is the first essay in her collection about the Yugoslavian War. The situation seems symbolic: in a rich people’s club, with soft background glissandos on the harp being played by a fragile-looking lady of uncertain age, over coconut ice-cream decorated with raspberries and weak, decaffeinated coffee, my hosts nod their heads over the Balkan tragedy. Of course they understand what it is all about, but their understanding - as well as everybody else’s - reaches only a certain point… At that moment I can easily imagine the face of a Bush or a Mitterrand, a Kohl or a Major, at first eagerly paying attention to the report given by an expert consultant who comes from this part of the world over the plate of clear bouillon and then perhaps some light plain-cooked white fish, only to shake his head wearily at the end of the dinner, lifting a silver spoon of slightly quivering creme caramel, admitting that he cannot understand, not fully, that madness, the Balkan nightmare. The consultant - a man tied to the war-plagued country by duty or by birth - feels that he is faced with a lack of understanding not only across the table but somehow across time. And while Mitterand thoughtful sips his Cointreau and then gently wipes the beads of perspiration on his upper lip with a napkin, the consultant or minister realizes that his thoughts are already somewhere else and that his indifference unmistakably accounts for his exceptional, almost excessive politeness. -Slavenka Drakulić
***** Towards the end of his lecture, before he answers questions, John Gray notes that solutions to our governmental and societal problems aren’t achieved by one Big Solution. In fact, he warns against buying into the One Solution idea. Look at the Soviet Union with Communism, look at The United States with its Regime of Late Capitalism. He contends that it will be many small solutions. This requires refinement and creativity, but also attention to history, especially to the history of human patterns. In the US, we are a country of mostly voluntary immigrants. Most of our ancestors of this land have successfully squelched out any semblance of the peoples before us, relegating them to paltry pieces of land and to fend for themselves. We don’t necessarily have historical ethnic divides which reach back centuries. We have the politically manufactured and enforced division of Race - but not all White folks are okay with the continued oppression of Black folks and not all Black folks acknowledge a systemic problem. What we have is Left and Right. We have what we may think of as “Progress” versus “Preservation”. We have rhetoric which stems from political ideology - one might even say political myth. The myth that we as The United States of America are not only exceptional, but better. We are undoubtedly arrogant. So what does a Civil War in the 21st century here actually look like? I’m really not sure. Curious, I have asked those around me what they think it would actually physically look like? Rural militia coming into cities? Sustained chaos in urban centers? Those things are already happening. So perhaps just continued escalation of that. What I do know is this: Civil War begins with language. It begins with stripping nuance away from conversations. It begins with generalizations of whoever the perceived “other” is. It begins with moments of forced identities and blind allegiance to a pre-crafted ideal. It begins with families so divided and chomping at the bit to hurt each other. So, it has already begun. ****** In Balkan Express, at the start of this war, Slavenka Drakulić grapples with the feelings of recognizing the beginnings of a shifting world: As the war goes on you create a parallel reality: on one side you neurotically cling to what used to be your everyday routine, pretending normality, ignoring the war. On the other side you are unable to deny the deep changes in your life and yourself, the shift in your values, emotions, reactions and behavior. (Can I buy shoes, does it make any sense? Am I allowed to fall in love?) - Slavenka Drakulić
That question - “Can I buy shoes, does it make any sense? Am I allowed to fall in love?” is a pervasive notion for all of us right now. It’s a recurring thought which shows up in all of the recollections from those during war-times. It’s not entirely easy to answer, but ultimately I don’t believe it requires an “answer”. It requires a living. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Part Two will pick up with this sentiment. Exploring various ways others have grappled with “normalcy” and celebrations during times of war and turmoil, and why you shouldn’t feel bad when you turn off the news every once in a while and wear a plushy robe when you can.
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