My Eyes Could See


When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved Ukraine,
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain,
So that the fields, the boundless steppes,
The Dnieper's plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar.
...
 -- Taras Schevchenko, The Testament, 1845

A formerly powerful Europen nation felt humiliated by its treatment at the hands of others. It lost territory, its economy was in shambles. And then a new type of a charismatic leader came to power.

He was admired by some and feared by others. He rewarded friends and persecuted and killed his enemies. Eventually, he rebuilt his economy and modernized his armies. Then he got into the habit of breaking all kinds of international norms and treaties and started talking and behaving in more and more aggresive ways.

But "the West" was worried about confronting him. There was political turmoil in their lands. People with radical thoughts on all sides were fighting with each other and their societies were politically at great odds. The countries' economies were not in a great shape and the governments were afraid (with a good reason) that any confrontation would be economically devastating. They still remembered their recent financial crisis and how bad things could really get. So instead, they traded with the dictator, which gave them some economic benefit and made the dictator ever so much stronger.

Some western leaders even admired him.

So he started looking for ways to expand his territories. He started with his neighbours' lands that were traditionally populated by ethnically and culturally similar peoples. "This land has been traditionally ours!," he proclaimed and some even believed him. "These are our brothers and they have been mistreated by their government and we need to help them!," he said to justify his incursions into their lands.

He took those lands and the West let him.

"We can't go into a war with him," said the West, "it would be even more devastating than the last one - and that one was terrible!". So he took more. Eventually, there was a war and yes, it was more devastating than the last one. But if only people were less selfish and petty and a little bit wiser, it could have been all stopped at much lesser cost. They weren't and it wasn't.

The year was 1938.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Gagarin, Software Engineering and Neutron Stars

Image
Today, April 12, is the   International Day of Human Space Flight ,   designated to be so by the UN, in 2011, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first human flight, by Soviet cosmonaut,   Yuri Gagarin.   Today it is exactly 60 years since that memorable flight.  It is also exactly 40 years since the very first   Space Shuttle   flight, on April 12, 1981. Russians know this day as   Cosmonautics Day ( День Космона́втики ) and still observe it as a big event. In the west, people with interest in space exploration sometimes hold a party called " Yuri's Night ". https://yurisnight.net/about/  Yuri Gagarin   was an extraordinary fellow.  His story is worth telling, so I will do that here. He grew up hungry and in abject poverty in a Russian village, Klushino , occupied by Germans, with his family enduring very rough treatment by the Germans. On the very first day, Germans burned down his school.  He learned to read from a discarde...
Read more

Happy New Year 2023!

Image
It is a new year, 2023. Happy New Year! It may be a wild ride, but let's hang in there! Note: I do know that we are already somewhat into the new year ... but I didn't find time (or willpower, perhaps) to put a new post together, so the timing is a bit weird ... In 2022, the scary Covid-19 pandemic became mostly an epidemic and is on its way to end up as an unpleasant endemic. The scary Russian imperialism became even scarier Russian imperialism, now mostly focused around the Black Sea but with more nuclear sabre rattling and genocidal flair. (I hope they lose.) The unreasonably low inflation and interest rates became an unreasonably high inflation (with interest rates somewhat catching up). As always, each year the dictionary people present their "word of t...
Read more

The Number is 42

Image
Today, April 2, 4/2, is a special day, because " 42 ", as some may know, is               the answer to life the universe and everything  This was pointed out in the   Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , which is a book very popular with the geeky computer crowd. In the book, its geeky, but cool author,  Douglas Adams , apparently chose 42 because, at the time the book was written,  n = 42  was the only number that defied the power of a supercomputer to: "find  x ,  y ,  z  such that  x ^3+ y ^3+ z ^3= n " (Note: there is more info and an erratum on the bottom of the blog regarding the actual origin of 42.) In the decades after that, with faster computers, after about a million hours of processing were spent on an open cloud of PCS's, the answer actually  was  found and is this:   42 = (-80538738812075974)^3 + 80435758145817515^3 + 12602123297335631^3 ...
Read more