Tonight, as the Russian soldiers being their assault on Kyiv, I thought I should stop thinking about abstractions like the "Pax Americana" or the importance of the "international order" and turn my thoughts to the forty four million people, suddenly upended by one megalomaniac's obsession.
My father's family fled Czechoslovakia just ahead of the Nazi invasion, just as many Ukrainians are doing today. The family escaped to Sweden, and my father to London. He arrived with no English just on one trunkful of belongings, working as a technician at the London Hospital during the day, with the Germans bombing the city at night. One of my aunts moved to new York, taught arts and crafts at the Braerley school, studying at night to become a psychoanalyst. My other aunt and her husband moved back to Czechoslovakia after the war. In 1968 they saw Russian tanks on the streets of their home town, Prague. My my family is well acquainted with the trauma of having to flee before an invading army and of having to endure Russian occupation. So I am filled with great sadness and empathy for the people of Ukraine. We are, as a species, no better now than we ever were. The progress we may have made in material things has not been matched by progress in stemming our greed, our thirst for power, our capacity for indifference and cruelty.
And so, as I sit here in the comfort of a warm home without having to worry whether I will die tonight from enemy bombs, or have to leave the place I call home with little more than I can carry, I am grateful. And I wonder how we could have let this happen again? How could we have thought that diplomacy and non-military means would stop an autocrat bent on war? How did we delude ourselves that tanks and troops on the Ukrainian border were not there for the exact purpose for which they were built? How is it that somehow we failed to learn from history?
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