Two years ago most people assumed Ukraine would fall to the Russian invaders. We should rejoice that two years on, Western heads of state (the photo shows Giorgia Meloni, and women in her entourage) are meeting in Kyiv.
I’ve had to replace the first Ukraine flag I hung on my house. Now I have two, one on the house, one on the barn, both made in America and strong enough to last till the war is over. Or so I hope.
When I first heard about the invasion, my first thought was, “Is this going to be a world war?” I’d spent a great deal of time reading about Lewis Mumford’s early attention to the rise of Hitler, and how Americans - including his best friends - did not want to take it seriously.
Mumford was not an easy man to be around or live with, in part because he was so often right and knew it. He urged US support for the European allies for years before we actually entered the war, and in the 1960s he was the first major US figure to denounce the war in Vietnam.
World War II changed everything for him and Sophia. Here’s something of the story I am writing about Sophia Mumford:
September 13, 1945 -- Sophie, who as a child rebelled against official holidays and prescribed anniversaries, faces this day alone. It is the first anniversary of the day her son Geddes disappeared at a remote outpost of the US Army, the probable day of his death at age 19.
It is four months since the Second World War ended, bringing the conflict that had hung over the world since the summer of 1932, when Sophie and Lewis made their last trip to Germany. Geddes died in the heat of the final 1944 push by Allied forces into northern Italy. It had been weeks after the first telegram - Missing In Action - until Sophie and Lewis knew for certain that their beloved son was dead, in the war they had worked so desperately to get America to participate in.
Their nephew Bob Fleischer, an Army reporter, had sought information about Geddes's death, and his last days. He finally found the grave, in a hastily dug cemetery on a rough mountainside in northern Italy. In those late, urgent days of war, bodies were buried quickly, not in coffins but in mattress covers. Fleischer was looking for something of comfort to convey to his aunt and uncle, but all he was conscious of was the smell that hung over the hillside, the insidious smell of thousands of decaying bodies. Later, when he visited the Mumfords and they pressed him for details he found himself at a loss. He could not bring himself to tell them what he would never forget.
When Sophie and I were working on this book, over 50 years after Geddes’s death, she felt that I was a little heartless in asking her to look back on those days. It took enormous courage for her to work on a book about her life at the age of 96. She had been dragged back through painful times before, during the writing of Lewis’s autobiographical books, and it was made possible by her inner drive to understand, her willingness - in the words of George Bernard Shaw, often quoted by the Mumfords - to Let Life Come.
She tried to comfort Lewis: “What saddens you this week is what laid me low last week; the tenderness of ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ headed it up, and the tears that yesterday’s speech by King George brought forth in torrents, have, like the fine spring wind of this morning, cleared my heart somewhat. I can only hope that some such thing happens to you. By now I know there is no shortcut through grief; it will sweep over again and again like the waves of the sea and sometimes the swell almost shuts out the horizon and then it laps softly and is for the moment bearable; but the swell is there, even though out of sight, and we must learn to live with that knowledge.”
This is what the people of Ukraine face.
I make a regular donation to the Kyiv Independent, to support English-language journalism from within the country - I want to hear what people actually living it have to say. They have a business newsletter, and the webinar discussions are really good. I listened to one this week about US politics and the war. It was sobering and scary, but also measured and rational. The speakers explained that Ukraine cannot and will not surrender, because if they were to do that they would die.
They also pointed out that the US economy, because we manufacture armaments, is a major beneficiary of aid to Ukraine. European countries, on the other hand, usually have to give their own stock to Ukraine, or buy it from the US to give to Ukraine. The speakers recognized that this fact might not be palatable, given that this means a build-up of the military industrial complex, but this is the reality of our moment in history.
I’ve just read the full text of Winston Churchill’s June 1940 speech (a year and a half before the US finally joined the fight). Thank the heavens for the European Union! (And how sad that the UK is no longer part of it.) Here is the well-known conclusion:
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. Read the whole speech.
It’s easy to set up a monthly membership of even a small amount. And here are recommendations from the Kyiv Independent team on where to donate and support Ukraine, as well as a list of all the organized events worldwide.
Finally, Lewis Mumford again, from his memoir of his son Geddes, Green Memories:
Paradoxically, our country was never so isolationist as it became in the nineteen thirties, when airplanes were beginning to girdle the globe in every direction, and when a dictator, with the courtesy of the radio, could instantly pour his poison into the ears of the peoples he had set out to enslave, with the consciousness that he would find them ready to absorb every drop of it, so long as they could absolve themselves, by their very acquiescence, by their ‘open-mindedness’ as it was called, of the necessity of making a stand and risking their properties or their lives. If the secret motto of the twenties in America was ‘purposeless materialism’ that of the thirties was ‘effortless security.1
From My Work and Days, page 383.
So interesting although heartbreaking. Thank you for this, Karen.
Thank you for having written about the importance of democratic nations' continued military and financial support of Ukrainian sovereignty and independence from Putin's colonialist and frankly genocidal invasion. I seldom use the term "genocide," but as an indicted ICC war criminal suspect Putin has tried to justify Europe's largest and bloodiest military invasion since 1945 as the reunification of Ukrainian "Little Russians" with Putin's own "big" Russians, whom he wrongly claims are both part of a single integrated nationality of Russians. A noted professor of Russian and Eastern European history in Rochester has succinctly fact-checked Putin's arguably genocidal claims: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/ukraine-history-fact-checking-putin-513812/
Another option for supporting independent Ukrainian journalists--instead of a monthly membership fee--is an annual membership fee to The Kyiv Independent. That way your credit card gets charged just once a year instead of every month--and you can cancel at any time if necessary.