There is this comedienne, I believe it’s Judy Lynn Tenula, known for her whimsical and bawdy personae of the “The Love Goddess” all the while improvising discordant tones on her accordion. One of her funnier shticks is a routine in which she gags, “I hate people who just don’t get it!” It’s always funny to me. But there is a caveat in that humorous line, ceaselessly drifting from past to present.
Of late, Georg Hegel’s dictum, “The only thing we learn from history is we don’t learn anything from history,” sounds witchy reminders across the world stage as we witness the present unpleasantries being unleashed upon the Ukrainian people defending themselves with nothing more than pride and will in the teeth of unwonton Russian aggression.
And yet, I’ve come to find myself somewhat conflicted even as I so dearly bleed hope for Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government.
The images of Blacks fleeing Putin’s bombs, war planes and bullets only to be turned away at the borders by Ukrainian soldiers is simply jarring. And there are stories of beatings, and pet dogs and cats being allowed on disembarking trains while denying passage to Blacks. It has been amply reported that the lucky few who are finally allowed to refugee across the borders are finding entries into Poland barred by bayonets and grim, gun-toting Polish officials. No doubt, these are the sons and grandsons of those who defied Hitler’s shelling during the Warsaw uprising in WWII.
Now mind you, this is Ukraine of the Khazars, homeland of the world’s Ashkenazi Jews. What history buff doesn’t know of their sufferings under Herr Hitler’s aim of implementing his hellishly conceived “final solution” against European jewry? Fleeing the Nazis, how harrowing come the stories of rust-laden junk boats barely sea-worthy, crammed with desparate jewish refugees hailing from Poland and Ukraine, standing in dismal harbors for days, weeks even, because no country would allow them entry, even the United States.
So here we go…again.
There is a special kind of bigotry, isn’t there, borne of a people having lost the ability to see the whole picture, treating war like was some zero sum military exercise whose only aftermath is victory and hubris, that allows the “greatest generation” to unleash the dogs of war upon a racist nationalist regime like Adolf Hitler’s no less, only to go home, back to the shores of America, and continue this venomous disregarding of Black folk as having “no rights by which a white man is bound to respect.”
Don’t get me wrong in the least. By heart and soul, I am supporting the Ukrainian people, their molotov cocktails, their grandmothers and fathers practicing marksmanship with wooden guns, and their turning plowshares into weapons of war. But damn, I hate it when people just don’t get it.
Jim Terry
Columbus
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