 |
| Peace doves, Catherine Park, Moscow. Victory Day 2015 |
 |
| WWII in 24 minutes, from origins to aftermath. Screenshot from video World War II Summary on a Map. |
Last week we observed the 80th anniversary of V-E Day.
Ten years ago, Russia's version of Victory in Europe Day, May 9, occurred on the day Moscow Friends met for our weekly worship. We met that day in a theater not far from Moscow's Dostoevsky Museum, and afterwards we visited the Victory Day celebrations in progress at nearby Catherine Park. That's where we saw those peace doves, pictured above.
 |
  |
| Victory Day in Elektrostal, Russia, 2010. |
A lot can be said about Russia's Victory Day observances—both the enduring importance of remembering the human cost of that victory for practically every family in the former USSR ... and also the exploitation of Victory Day by Russia's current leadership, particularly as they now portray the war in Ukraine as a continuation of that sacred struggle against Nazi forces.
World War II has a deep fascination for me, too. My mother lived in Japan from her birth in 1929 to her family's expulsion to West Germany in 1948, the result of a U.S. policy that expelled all resident Germans from Japan. As I found out during our visit to Japan in 2018, her father joined the Nazi party in 1934.
In what became West Germany, my mother began her university studies in Heidelberg, but then went as an exchange student to Northwestern University in the Chicago area, where she met my father, who was an exchange student as well. He came from the University of Oslo. His father had been an officer in Norway's resistance army, fighting the German occupiers, so his parents' surprise at their son's choice of bride was understandable. (Their other child, my father's sister, married an American soldier in Oslo.)
It's just about impossible to take in the total human cost of that war—the cost in lives and limbs, the grief among survivors, the destruction of housing and workplaces in many places, and the displacement of whole populations. My own peculiar origin story is part of that sweeping narrative: my parents might never have met if my mother and her family had not been evicted from their adopted homeland.
One of the questions I can never answer satisfactorily is what lessons our species has learned from that war. The postwar international institutions that the WWII victors set up have seemingly prevented wars of a similar scale since 1945, although a tacit part of the deal was that the USA took over much of the imperial role that the UK was forced to relinquish. As a country, we've had a hard time accepting criticism for our less-than-perfect stewardship of global power. Even so, there was an undeniable portion of idealism in those postwar arrangements, much to the apparent distaste of the USA's current leadership.
I've also meditated on the micro scale: what must it have been like for my mother to grow up as a child and teenager in the Nazi sphere of influence and then in total warfare? On this last Mother's Day, I gave a sermon at Silverton Friends Church, in which I mentioned the importance of these meditations for my slowly growing capacity to "honor my father and mother" despite the violence and "master race" mentality that we children witnessed in our family's life. When I was comforted by those who told me that "your parents did the best they could," I used to get irritated. Why did alcohol seem so much more important than us kids? Now I am learning to allow for factors in my parent's lives that I've never had to experience personally: total dictatorship and total war, starting in childhood. I owe it to them—and myself—to consider their own share of World War II's global tragedy, and grow accordingly in compassion. If they had not made certain decisions in favor of life, I would not exist.
Some of my other posts on World War II and related themes:
- The Storm of War
- Other people's patriotism
- Over fifty million
- Bloodlands, part one
- How the Grinch stole Hiroshima
- Idealism and reality, part two
- Your obedient servant
Kristin Du Mez: For certain Christian followers of the U.S. president, there is no corruption.
Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian: new rules for travelers entering the USA.
A lifeblood of Quaker community: Brian Drayton on Friends traveling in the ministry.
Scot Loyd: "Jesus didn't die for our country—he died because of it."
Jeremy Morris (commenting on recent research on Russians' sense of stability and satisfaction): on being happy in a Mercedes and on "the ludicrous optimism of minimal expectations."
The socially galvanizing effect of war short of rally-round-the-flag is what I call ‘defensive consolidation’. Fears and foreboding are real and remain massively underacknowledged in research, but the sense of ‘the world is against us, so we have to find sources of satisfaction in the now’ in consumption, in leisure, in socially meaningful work, in geopolitical resentment even, is also palpable.
My tiny rebellion as a high school student: in TV production class, making a video on a risky subject, using a track from an album I wasn't allowed to play at home:
I went down on 31st Street just to buy me a drink of alcohol
I went down on 31st Street, buy me a drink of alcohol
Told the man to put in some water but he wouldn't put in a drop at all.
Then I was drinking my straight alcohol, went wobbling on down the street.
Drinking my, drinking my straight alcohol, went wobbling on down the street.
Yeah, but my head got so heavy, my eyes couldn't take a peak.
Yeah, but my baby said, "J.B., J.B., you ain't no good at all."
My baby said, "Hey, J.B., J.B., you ain't no good at all.
She said, "You ran around on the West Side, and then drank too much alcohol."
No comments:
Post a Comment