Something More Than Human

On love notes and war

Last autumn, my soon-to-be-husband and I started writing love notes to each other. I tend to work best in the evenings, which means I often go to bed later than he does. He on the other hand has a job that has him leaving early in the mornings, meaning we often do not see each other before he heads off to work.

It’s a neat ritual—love notes wishing the other a good morning. I write mine before I go to bed, he writes his before he leaves for the day. Sometimes there are reminders of things, like the need to get more coffee. More often, they’re full of compliments we know will make the other smile.

This morning’s note from him was a bit unusual, as he’d just learned about the Russian attacks in Ukraine.

I guess others are finding out through social media or new sites. I long ago stopped perusing those at part of any daily habit, since it was all rotting my brain, filling it with things I didn’t need to know as a consequence of my attempts at finding out something I thought I should know. And as he needs to know certain things for his work, and the Ukraine situation affects some very large cultural events he has organised, he found out and passed it along to me.

I’m narrating in this way for a reason. The love notes my partner and I write to each other, our daily schedules, other details of our lives—this all might seem irrelevant to military conflict and the potential for a much larger war. It isn’t, though, as it’s all human.

Forgetting human things is what’s been our collective societal nightmare for most of the modern age, or really since the birth of factories and capitalism. Alienation from ourselves, from land, from nature-as-body and self-as-body, alienation from our labor, from our agency, from our ancestors and our currently-living family: this is all now our collective state of being and relating.

And now there’s the potential for war, and war’s been something we especially fail to relate to as humans. Cities and individuals can be targeted by remote bombs and drones guided through interaction from screens, like it’s all just a video game. Decisions leading to the potential death of thousands or even millions are made by technocrats sitting at desks who will never meet the people their choices affect.

Right now in the Ukraine, there’s probably a man thinking about the love notes he reads each morning from his girlfriend, or wife, or partner, wondering if the one he read this morning will be the last. And maybe he’s thinking about all the other men and women in other places who’ve had this same thought over the last hundred years, and all those who tried not to let their tears stain the ink forming the final words they’d ever read from someone they loved.

Of course, there are other human ways of relating to this all. Putin is acting quite human, as is Biden. They’ve each got their human concerns, and their human families and human friends. But what they’ve also got that others don’t is insane wealth and access to unimaginable power, both of which come with their own concerns and their own demands.

This morning, I re-read a recent article about Biden’s family’s business dealings. No, it’s not Russian propaganda, which is what anything criticizing Biden is accused of being these days. You can find it on Politico here, and here’s a brief excerpt about Joe’s son Hunter’s relationship to Ukraine.

…Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board in 2014, despite a lack of prior experience in the energy sector, which came while then-vice president Joe Biden oversaw U.S. policy in Ukraine.

Burisma was awarded valuable licenses for natural gas production while its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, served as Ukraine’s minister of ecology and natural resources under the Russia-aligned administration of Viktor Yanukovych. Both Zlochevsky and Burisma were under suspicion of corruption while Hunter Biden sat on the board.

While serving as Obama’s ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, a career State Department official, singled out Zlochevsky in public remarks about corruption, saying millions of dollars of the mogul’s “illicit assets” rightfully “belonged to the Ukrainian people.”

Another career State Department official, George Kent, has described Zlochevsky as an “odious oligarch.” He testified that a top Ukrainian official told him of a $7 million bribe Zlochevsky allegedly paid to other Ukrainian officials in 2014 to end a corruption inquiry, according to a report by Senate Republicans.

But Kent testified to congressional investigators during the Democratic-led 2019 impeachment inquiry that he was rebuffed by the vice president’s office when he tried to raise concerns that Hunter Biden’s hiring could be seen as influence-buying.

Joe Biden has said he did not discuss Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings with him. Hunter Biden has said that his last name likely played a role in his hiring at Burisma and that taking the position showed “poor judgment,” while maintaining he did not engage in wrongdoing. In his memoir, he praised Zlochevsky, describing the businessman as an “energy wonk” and “a listener” who “doesn’t suffer fools lightly.”

If you have trouble following all this and don’t have time to read the entire Politico article, here’s a summary. Joe Biden’s son was on the board of an energy company in Ukraine whose founder later absconded with quite a lot of money (he’s now hiding in Cyprus, it is believed). Hunter didn’t have any qualifications to be on that board (with a $50,000/month salary) except that his dad was the Vice President of the United States (and of course is now the president).

Hunter was there during a crucial political moment. In 2014 there was a coup against the government because the president had, despite promises to the contrary, decided not to sign an economic agreement with the EU and instead accepted a deal with Russia for development funds and cheaper gas. That president was supported by people in the south and the east of Ukraine (including the two breakaway provinces recognised a few days ago) but unpopular in the Western and Northern regions. Those folks see themselves more as European, while the other areas identify as Russian (they speak Russian).

Hunter might have gotten that position to help push the government toward alliance with Europe and away from alliance with Russia. Or he could have just been there because it was a lot of money (more than half a million a year), and he didn’t even have to really show up to work, and all he had to do was just be Joe’s son.

Regardless, being there definitely helped give the impression that the US was actively trying to force Ukraine to take a hostile position against Russia. That’s probably what was really happening, but what matters most is that Putin derives a lot of his justification for those military strikes from the appearance of US manipulation. It also doesn’t help that some of the $650 million US dollars of military aid to Ukraine in the last year has been distributed to the far-right, ultra-nationalist Azov battalions (who are part of the Ukrainian military, not a paramilitary group):

What the authors call a “Ukrainian Azov Battalion,” where they add a description of it as “a paramilitary unit,” is, in fact, a Special Operations Detachment “Azov”—a regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard that is part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This means that Azov is neither a paramilitary unit nor has any independence from the state, but that it is an integral part of official structures and that it follows orders given by the Interior Ministry. (source)

That’s a photo of some of the Azov, by the way. The guy in the front is sporting a patch depicting the Wolfsangle, which would normally have American Antifa sorts screaming, as it repeatedly appears on their lists of fascist symbols. They’re oddly silent about all this, though, because what’s really going on according to the Woke is Putin’s white privilege:

Thanks to the person who directed me to this.

Of course, these people are all having very human experiences, too. I’m sure the communications director for the Woke consulting firm that wrote that analysis is also quite human, and regardless of the ideological knots she’s obviously trapped in, I hope she gets to read love notes every morning like I do.

In fact, all of this is so excruciatingly human, and that’s terrifying. Biden’s likely to make very human decisions that will turn Putin’s early overtures into a full-blown war, despite the fact that only 25% of the US supports such a thing. Pelosi’s already on board, or rather foaming at the mouth:

"Putin is a master of KGB, KGB, KGB, KGB," Pelosi said, pounding the podium. "His orientation is misrepresentation, and he's effective at that, unless we inoculate against it, unless we make a case against it so that the Russian people know the truth."

I’m sure you noticed the word she used there, inoculate. This is where we’re at now: COVID and vaccination have become our new political metaphor. I imagine the additional half-billion in US military funds the Democrats proposed before Putin’s move—along with probably much more that will be proposed—will be described as boosting Ukraine’s immune system against the virus of Russia. And increased US military presence via NATO in Europe will probably resemble the military vaccination and testing centers already set up throughout these nations (there’s one next to my gym here).

I’ll be honest here, because I am also human: I’m a bit terrified. Besides now actually living on the continent where this is all happening, something that Americans maybe cannot understand, I’m particularly worried that there’s no third power here to intervene. I doubt we’ll see large anti-war protests here and I’m sure we’ll definitely not see them in the US.

Two years of governments disciplining their citizens through fear and constantly-shifting regimes of mandates and restrictions, keeping them from congregating together and thus increasing their sense of alienation—regardless if it was really to protect them or not—succeeding in putting us all in the sense we were already at war. We became even more alienated from many of the things that make us human: from ourselves, from each other. And then we became more like other things that make us human, the unpleasant things, the nasty things, the fearful and hateful things.

The mask mandates in many places were just now finally going away, but now there’s another reason for people to fear each other, fear the future, and hope vainly that the people with all the wealth and power maybe also have a tiny spark of wisdom and that other part of humanity left within them

Because I’m a bit terrified, because I’m human, I’m going to be doing the only thing I know to do. I’m surrounded by forests, and in those forests are trees that that have seen hundreds of years of war yet nevetheless survived. The oak outside my house was already ancient when the Nazis rolled through this village. Beyond it is a catholic shrine to a saint of thunder that sits on a plateau where Attila the Hun camped, built upon the ruins of an older shrine to the Frankish god of thunder, Dunor. Not far past that shrine in a stone grotto is one even older, never christianized, where druids of the Celtic Treverii performed their rites.

Because I’m a bit terrified, because I’m human, that’s where I’ll be. I’ll be in these forests, and by these oaks, and at those shrines. This is all so fucking human, and I think we need something more than human to remind us how to be that other sort of human again.

And I’ll also keep writing these love notes, because love is is what reminds us not only that we are human, but that others are, too.