On the death of friends and the fleetingness of life

I hate social media. If it wasn’t for that damned, demonic invention, I wouldn’t have found out that a friend of mine, whom I knew for almost 25 years, has suddenly died at just 40 years of age. True, I hadn’t seen her in almost 5 years, but that was because I no longer live in Brazil and rarely visit. The last time I was there, at the end of 2019, just before the corona pandemic, I thought of visiting her. But she lived in another town, and I did not have many days in the country, so in the end I didn’t go. I regret it now. Soon after, Covid regulations made travel to Brazil all but impossible for almost two years, and now she’s gone.

Gone! I still cannot bring myself to believe it. Cancer, apparently, although I had no idea she was ill. In some of her last pictures in social media she appeared with short, dyed hair, which somehow didn’t seem to suit her. When I met her for the first time, in 1998, she was a pretty young woman of 17, and for years she sported such beautiful long hair. But now I think: chemo. It was probably chemo. Although she looked healthy in the pics, and her hair wasn’t completely cut, just short, so I don’t really know.

I cannot even imagine her as an ill, dying person. She seemed so full of life. She had always a smile on her face and was one of those people who seemed to exemplify the idea of “living for the moment”. She seems to have had different boyfriends during her short life but I think (I could be wrong) she never officially married, and had no children. She was an actress, and a very talented one at that, but she worked sparingly, having appeared in only a few plays in her life, and, as far as I know, only in one short movie. Here she can be seen at 2’09” in her only scene in the short movie “Novembrada”, from 1998 — the year we met, at a film workshop taught by the director of that film. I think once I told her that, one day, I would direct a film with her in the main role, and of course I never did — but then again, my own career as a film director seems to have fizzled out for the most part.

I have several memories of her and her family — both of her parents were well-known local visual artists, very interesting people in their own right, and they lived in a house with a large garden near the beach — but even all those memories are fading fast now, and I struggle to picture the exact surroundings of the house. I vaguely remember a living room full of art objects of all kinds; I remember more clearly a backyard full of trees and quite a few dogs and cats always roaming around. And while the house was not on the beach, you could reach the sea by crossing through a vacant lot behind the backyard.

I saw her for the last time almost twenty years after our first meeting, in or around 2017. That’s when I went with her and family and friends to a trip to the mountains in her native state. I seem to have lost all pictures of that trip — or perhaps it didn’t really happen, and it was just a dream? And yet I remember having taken lots of photographs, but now in my computer I find tons of useless random photos from decades ago, bot not a single image of that trip. It as a wonderful but also slightly melancholy moment, or perhaps it just seems so now in retrospect. The death of friends, especially if they are younger than us, make us aware of our own mortality, and of the general ephemeral quality of life. Here today, gone tomorrow. “Don’t ask for whom the bells toll, they toll for thee.”

I’m not sure if she knew that line by John Donne, but she liked to recite poems, and I always remember a line of a poem that I wouldn’t have known were it not because of her, by local poet Rodrigo de Haro: “Somos todos crianças que o tempo separa”.

We are all children whom Time separates.

Another favorite of hers (and mine) was Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and so it seems apt to end this melancholy memoir with a couple of his poems, that, as usual for his heteronym Ricardo Reis, is a reflection on the fleetingness of life. “Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio” (Come sit with me, Lidia, by the riverside) is perhaps the most famous one, and one that I’m sure I must have heard her recite at least once. But I offer you, dear, unknown reader, another one below, in Portuguese and English, which seems to suit the poignancy of the moment:

Ao longe os montes têm neve ao sol,
Mas é suave já o frio calmo
         Que alisa e agudece
         Os dardos do sol alto.

Hoje, Neera, não nos escondamos,
Nada nos falta, porque nada somos.
         Não esperamos nada
         E temos frio ao sol.

Mas tal como é, gozemos o momento,
Solenes na alegria levemente,
         E aguardando a morte
         Como quem a conhece.

* * *

Snow-leaden peaks shine by sunlight, afar,
But it feels soothing by the calm chill air
Which tightens and tapers
The darts of the high sun.

Today, Neera, let us not hide ourselves; –
We lack nothing, for we are nothing.
We have no expectations
And feel cold by the sun. –

But, such as it is, let us seize the day, –
Solemn in joyfulness, delicately,
And kindly waiting for Death
As if for an old friend.

P. S. On a happier note, did I tell everyone that the new Geist magazine is out? Buy it, read it, share it. Thanks.

Birth rates are abysmally low in Europe due to COVID, war, and digital technology

I just finished editing a new documentary, “Childless in Europe” (you can watch it it here), but almost all of its footage was filmed before COVID and of course before the current war. Now the situation is even worse, as the lockdowns and other measures have further decreased birth rates in Europe, and inflation and the incoming economic crisis (partly but not wholly caused by the war sanctions) will probably further reduce them.

I actually started to think about this issue because of the war in the Ukraine. See, the Ukraine has 48.5 million people in the year 2000, in its first census realized since its independence. Since then, because of outmigration, lower birth rate and a high number of abortions, it started a depopulation spiral. (In the early 2000s, it seems to have become the place to go to buy stem cells from aborted fetuses, used by the pharmaceutical industry.)

Twenty years later, in 2019, even before the war, the population had decreased to 37.3 million. Now, with the still ongoing war with Russia, it may have lost at least an additional 10 million. Worse, most of the refugees that left are young women and children, while many young men are being killed in the war. All this will of course further reduce the population in the future. This war is a tragedy for the Ukraine, and that’s why NATO policies to keep the war going are incomprehensible in this context.

But of course, the rest of Europe is not in a much better shape in that regard. Countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain are also in depopulation spirals, and, while it is not so extreme as in the Ukraine, it is also a bad sign for the future. In Italy and Spain, whole villages are disappearing or becoming “ghost towns”, as people move to big cities or to other EU countries.

The COVID lockdowns in particular seem to have been a disaster for Europe. In 2020, Italy’s fertility rate decreased from the already low 1.3 children per woman in childbearing age, to 1.2, a historically low record. It has not recovered yet. And of course, current inflation and economic problems are making it even harder for young people to think about having children. How can they think about having children, if many don’t even know if they can support themselves?

Economic worries, however, are just on of the problems, and probably not the most serious one. In fact, poor people usually have more children than rich people. There is something else about the modern age that reduces population growth. And I think perhaps the problem is not so much one of birth rates, but of relationships. People are not marrying, or marrying late, or marrying and separating shortly, which is not good for stability or for children. It has become very difficult, as of recent, in particular for young men, to establish long-term relationships with women leading to a family and children. Dating apps and modern technology, in that regard, have been a disaster for young men. They may lead to short-term hookups (only for the most attractive ones), but rarely to long-term relations.

Another problem is urbanization. Right now, 72% of the European population lives in big cities or suburbs. Only 28% live in small villages or in the countryside, and most that live there are old. As I mentioned before, many villages in Italy and Spain are disappearing, but the phenomenon can also be seen in some regions of Germany and France. Living in cities is more expensive and, probably because of psychological reasons due to the perception of lack of space, leads to a further decrease in birth rates. (Historically, people living in the country had more children, simply because children could help with farm work, but I don’t think that’s the case with machine-based modern agriculture).

The incoming of a large number of immigrants and refugees from other countries to Western Europe, instead of solving things, seems to further exacerbates the problem, creating more competition and lower wages. And of course, even if the birth rates rebound, many will be from a different population than the native one, which creates a whole new set of problems and conflicts, as we can see in countries such as France.

Some also blame secularization and the decrease in religious attendance for the lower birth rates — perhaps people had more children when it was something “ordained by God”. After all, raising children is hard. In Germany, most people have one, two or at most three children. The only couple I met who had more was a very religious Catholic couple — they had 10 children. No one else I met came even close. They said people looked at them as odd or even as irresponsible. “Who has 10 children in this day and age, with climate change and so on?”

The problem is global, not just European. The situation in East Asian countries is even worse. And even the United States, supposedly a still more religious or more “birth-friendly” country, is going in the same direction.

What are the solutions? No one knows for sure. Some countries have tried offering incentives and benefits or directly paying couples to have more children, but it doesn’t seem to have helped much.

It is not wrong for individuals to choose not to have no children — and actually, in many or even most cases, it is not even a choice, but just a result of current bad circumstances. Many people would probably prefer to have children (or to have had them, for those to whom it became too late). It’s just that, for a large number, it’s become impossible. Biological, economic, familial or relational issues just make it very hard to consider the prospect of having children, let alone a large number of them.

Not everyone has to have children. For centuries, many European men and women who chose a religious life as priests or nuns did not have children, but the rest of the population more than made up for that. The problem happens when it becomes a massive collective issue affecting all of society, and even threatening its future.

It is not as if European people will disappear from one day to the next, but in a context when at some point the number of those who will be old and retired may outnumber the younger ones, it can become a huge social problem (as it already is in places with even lower birth rates such as Korea and Japan). As the economy worsens, and if destructive policies such as the “lockdowns”, “digital passports” and other attempts of political control and social engineering keep being mandated by governments, things will keep worsening.

My documentary ends on a hopeful note, observing that History in general is made of cycles of death and rebirth.

Perhaps it is still not too late.

And only now they tell us …

I had a nightmare yesterday: I dreamt that Covid restrictions were back on, all over the world, and that they were even harsher than before. You could be arrested if you didn’t have a face mask on, and to go anywhere, besides a “vaccine passport”, you had to be scanned, as in the airports, by a special machine that could detect if you had a specific mRNA code in your blood. I woke up with a bad sensation. It was only a dream — or was it?

Recent data, from the WHO none the less, shows that despite being very light on lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine passports — in fact not even doing a real lockdown — Sweden had a much lower rate of excess deaths from Covid than a lot of other countries that had. The conclusion of the media is that “harsh restrictions were not the key to beating the virus.”

And now they tell us! After two years of annoying measures and forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do, causing a lot of mental health problem and business closures, some people even led to suicide, now we find out that the laissez-faire Swedish approach was the right way to go… Well, they could just asked me, I knew that from the beginning.

If you look at the graph published in the article listing excess deaths, and reproduced also below, Sweden is down at the bottom. Peru, at the top. It is worth remembering that Peru was one of the countries with some of the harshest measures and one longest lockdowns. A friend of mine, who was living in Peru at the time, told me that for a while people were required to wear not just one, but two face masks. One on top of the other. If you wore only one, you could be fined. I am not sure how the police checked that, but that’s how it was.

Now it’s almost June and the whole thing seems just a bizarre nightmare, pretty much like the one I had last night. It is hard to believe that even just months ago we could not enter into shops or restaurants without a monstrosity called “vaccine passport” and a mask covering our face.

And yet, I’m not sure if the lessons will be learned. Yes, now it’s summer in the northern hemisphere and things are pretty free, but I wonder if restrictions will come again next winter, as there are lockdowns in Shanghai and Beijing right now, and this may later spread to other countries — and I’m not talking about the virus, but about the restrictive measures. I am not sure I and most people (even those who believed it all) could go through it all again.

I suppose they got most of what they wanted — a vaccine basically forced onto millions (billions?) of people, a test for new authoritarian measures of population control, a push for digital cash. Hopefully, they will leave us in peace now?

Transcription of a debate about Donbass, Nagorno-Karabakh, and other wars.

This is the transcription (translated by me from French to English) of a recent debate on April 6, 2022, for a French TV show, with documentarist Anne-Laure Bonnel, director of the war documentaries “Donbass, 8 years of war” (2016, English subtitles), and “Silence dans le Haut-Karabakh” (2020, French only). The original French transmission can be seen here. I apologize for any possible mistakes, French people love to talk over each other and sometimes it was hard to hear… I’ve been interested in Anne-Laure Bonnel’s work since I saw a video of her in Donbass, and then I watched her documentary. This is a debate with her presented at the French show “Touchez pas mon poste”, some kind of sensationalist, trashy talk show which is not that great, but the things she says are interesting nevertheless.

PRESENTER: You say that you refuse to be called a journalist, why?

ALB: So, a little nuance–

PRESENTER: It starts well.

ALB: Because everything is a question of nuance. It’s not a question of hierarchy, it’s good, or not good, it’s that I don’t do news, I go to the field and make documentaries. Like Paul Moreira, he calls himself a documentarist. My job is to make documentaries. It’s different from being a journalist.

PRESENTER: For you, journalists, are good, or do they create misinformation–

ALB: Not at all, there is this great guy who [crosstalk]. There is Renaud Girard, for example, who knows well how to express things, he’s covering there now since I got back, and I’m going to be very honest with you, I turned off my TV, because I didn’t want to see the news, because when you come home from three weeks of bombings, having seen shredded bodies all over, there’s blood, it stinks, it’s violent, we were shot at, we received death threats.

At some point you just need silence, only silence. And especially, to get away from people.

Really, I don’t sleep much, I said, at this moment I can’t sleep [crosstalk]. You know, one does not come out unscathed from a conflict, and I think that all those who cover it, feel the same. So that’s why I turned off my TV, it’s that the noise… still sensitizes my ears a little.

PRESENTER: In 2014, pro-Russian separatists declare the independence of Donbass, Ukrainian territory where the inhabitants are mainly Russian-speaking, the Ukrainian army and the separatists start a war. You were in the Donbass, how many times?

ALB: Three times.

PRESENTER: Three times.

ALB: But if I may say something, because I see there’s not much time, I would just ask you, once, Cyril, a favour, I came here yesterday, I could not express myself, I would like just, because the time is short, just to be able to express myself on some things I could not say, to say them now, and afterwards I can answer all your questions, as I said yesterday to your team.

PRESENTER: Ok.

ALB: Thanks so much. So before talking about this conflict, that is a disaster, a butchery, I will never endorse a war, I did not endorse it in Nagorno-Karabakh, I did not endorse it anywhere, neither in Yemen, anywhere.

But to understand this conflict, and Sergey, I would like to come back to this, because I listened to one of your interviews with that young man that I didn’t quite understand, but what you need to know and what I would have asked, is why, since 2014, there were “bugs”. “Bugs”, all I want to say, “bugs”. On December 2, 2014–

PRESENTER: Bugs?

ALB: What I mean is Russian and American interferences. You said, in the area which has been bombarded for eight years, Donetst and Lugansk, there were Russians, but there were also Americans, and I have proof.

I would just like to state it. Colleagues have spoken about it, but it was not released. This investigative work was done beforehand.

So I continue. On December 2, 2014, Natalie Jaresko, an American national, is placed as Finance Minister of the Ukraine. The Ukraine granted her the Ukrainian nationality on the day of her inauguration. The Ukraine also benefited from the assistance of the American government through the visit to the Ukraine of the CIA director John Brennan, in April 2014. I invite you to fact-check all that.

So the problem of Ukraine, Mr. Sergey, is that the US and Russia were there since the beginning, and also NATO was there, we know there were military trainings since 2014, also Russian instructors, I’m not here to take the Russians side, I am not anti-Ukraine, or pro-Russian, or anti-Zelensky, or anti-Kiev. or anti-Russian, I’m here simply to balance this debate because it is leading to a butchery, and a terrible butchery, war is awful. When you live it, when you see bodies torn to pieces, but all of the Ukraine is in pieces.

And we have to say that the responsible are not the civilians, but they are the ones who pay the price. It’s the government there. It’s the government there, and the United States that were not playing fair.

Is that you find normal, or can we even imagine, that the French appointed an American as Minister of Finance? Would that be possible? And even someone who was the CEO of a private company.

SERGEY JIRNOV [Former KGB spy]: So what are you saying?

ALB: [crosstalk] Simply that the Russians and the Americans… I think it’s clear [crosstalk]

PRESENTER: What is the cause of that war for you?

ALB: I think there are geopolitical and energy issues, also the Ukraine is badly located, it is like a buffer zone, between, uh, the Eurasian continent and Europe. And today I have the feeling, but it could be just me, that we are witnessing a showdown between new alliances that are particularly worrying, Russia, China, India, versus Europe or the West, and that can end very badly. I don’t think one makes war for charity. Unfortunately. And I’m sorry for the victims, because I know. Because I filmed the victims, I filmed them in many countries, and for a few months I was, I was in Nagorno-Karabakh, and I can tell you that it was so savage there, I still can’t sleep now.

When you see living people having their throats cut, you don’t sleep, believe me, Cyril, you don’t sleep.

So what I mean is, it’s that, there are things that go beyond, beyond just this war, there are other issues behind it. there are other issues, and now we are plunged into a conflict under an American subservience, that since 2014 is not very clean, not very clean, and I regret that we don’t have a [PM Dominique] De Villepin, like in 2003, to say, yes, it’s unacceptable what’s happening.

Even if we can’t find other means to stop this conflict, but the Minsk Agreements, after 8 years, could have avoided this butchery?

PRESENTER: [crosstalk] Wagner, that, how can you explain that?

ALB: How do I explain it, it’s very simple. I discuss a lot with, in general my sources are French generals, and besides that there are American sources and NGOs, I don’t see any Russians, OK?.

PRESENTER: Okay.

ALB: Okay, thank you. So how can I explain, to do investigative work, in a war zone, Sergey, it takes a long time, it’s slow and we don’t know what’s going on. Mr. Gomart, the former director of a French military think tank, he explained to me that, for Bosnia, to find [evidence of] war crimes, it took more than 6 years. So for the moment I say caution, be careful of the media, because you know– I want to say [crosstalk], I say, watch out, because we are running straight into a wall.

PRESENTER: A little digression about this, there is also a massacre in Mali, about three days ago and I would like that we talked about it a little more on the media– because there were a lot of civilians massacred in Mali, I think that we should also move quickly for Mali because it’s very worrying, and we don’t talk about it, we can’t compare to the media war in the Ukraine, but we have to talk about–

ALB: Allow me to say that there are no hierarchies for me [crosstalk]

PRESENTER: We need to talk about everything, it is important. Sergey, when we hear from your side that Anne-Laure, she says here that… That what she, you complain, it’s that, that the European media say that Russians are always to blame, for you they are not to blame?

ALB: No, no, listen to what I have just said, the blame is shared, what I reproach the media—

SERGEY: The Americans and the Russians, it’s that?

SOMEONE ELSE IN TABLE: And the Ukrainians also, the Ukrainians.. [crosstalk]

ALB: Sure, the Minsk agreements were not respected. I sent you videos. I remind you all the same that even if there was or not Russian influence at Donetsk and Lugansk, a president who, with combat helicopters, shoots point-blank on its own people, that right there is a war crime.

I informed French intelligence in 2014, there is a war crime there. There were bodies shredded, a woman still talking, with no legs. You have seen these images.

Is that normal? I am not defending anyone, I am the first to say that the Russians share a responsibility, I am open about it.

SERGEY: You are saying it tonight.

ALB: And I said it before, and if people had done their work, I mean Libération [newspaper], thank you, Libération. I announce to you that I am suing for defamation, because all that they said is false. Everything, everything, everything. Know that if you read the articles that I put on Twitter, I also accused the Ukraine of being corrupt, and even Yanukovich, I never defended him, but that was never put in the media.

It’s as if they did everything to discredit my words, and to make my work, which is neutral, to be passed over in silence.

Just know one last thing, Sergey, in 2015, I left with an Ukrainian woman of French origin. This dossier, you ask me if it concerns you, and no it doesn’t, I wouldn’t dare do that to you, I still have professional ethics, but you know, the person who accompanied me, and that’s not related to, the French Army is not involved, but it’s to answer the accusations by Benoît Viktine, who said, oh, this young woman must have been hired by the Russian Ministry.

SERGEY: Well that’s what we heard.

ALB: Well, then look with whom I went there, sir. Sergey, sorry. I went with a former member of the French Army, so I think that in terms of information, the French army knows how to do their job. So you can look, you can fact-check.

PRESENTER: We are not here to do your trial.

ALB: It’s not a trial but it’s normal to make things clear, because Vitkine said that I had been manipulated, but it’s false.

PRESENTER: Excuse me, we are not on the social media. On social media, on Libération, it’s all very nice, but here we are an hour of time and [inaudible].

ALB: OK, so now I answer to the questions.

PRESENTER: Ok, it’s good, you have specified your positions, and that’s fine. Sergey. About what Anne-Laure said.

SERGEY: Already, at most, if you had said that for eight years, we might not be here studying your story. Because in fact it is absolutely unclear from what I saw in the media, you clearly show that you are pro-Russian, that you are manipulated by the Russians, you work for the Russians, and you accuse the Ukrainians. You spoke of 13,000 dead in the conflict, and you presented that as 13,000 dead produced by the Ukrainians, when it’s both sides, and–

ALB: Mister, allow me, I never said that, and all the viewers that saw my YouTube channel…

SERGEY: [crosstalk] Listen to me.

ALB: Please, I recorded my talk with newspapers Libération, Le Monde, I told them everything you say, and they wrote things which contradicted everything I said, that’s why I’m suing for defamation, listen to that again, and it’s a shame that–

PRESENTER: Ok, we want to talk about the situation now in Russia, and you want to have your view, we’re not here to say if it’s pro-Russian or not, we want to know what’s happening, and what’s your view.

WOMAN ON ROUND TABLE: First of all, it’s good to hear you, when we look at your work we see how you can’t sleep, because I have seen your documentary on Nagorno-Karabakh, and it’s very traumatic, everyone has to see it, because it’s about the horrors of war. That said, I hear you, Ok, very well, the conflict, the geopolitics, who’s to blame. Today, concretely, there is Russia that invaded Ukraine. There are four million refugees. There are mass graves, abuses, horrible scenes. I don’t know who did what, but overall, it’s a horror. Concretely, how do we do? That is to say, do you agree, do you think Putin should stop? You mentioned the Minsk Agreements, the cease-fire, but the Ukrainian people are sovereign, there are 44 million people in Ukraine that want, who voted for Zelensky, 73% in the second round, and they do not want to be under Putin’s yoke. So what do we tell them, “well, it’s like that”? See what I mean?

ALB: So I don’t do politics, but personally, what I think is that we have to try diplomacy, to listen again to Védrine and Villepin who talked about it and who are much more informed than I am, to put back on the table people who try to find solutions, to say, “this is not acceptable”, I agree, and I say it.

WOMAN: But, how to do it?

ALB: You have to listen to the specialists. Hubert Védrine is a specialist. De Villepin is a specialist, Renaud Girard is a specialist,

WOMAN: And Ukrainian people are not the specialists in their own fate?

ALB: Yes, but how can you say [crosstak, inaudible]. You have to make diplomacy work, because you know that when diplomacy doesn’t work anymore, then the cannons command.

PRESENTER: But diplomacy has never worked with Putin. He never wanted it. [crosstalk]. But in Donetsk and Lugansk, it was a problem between Ukrainians and Ukrainians.

ALB: Excuse me, but if we had not had a De Villepin, we could say that diplomacy [crosstalk]

PRESENTER: We are off topic.

WOMAN: Do you criticize the Russian intervention on Ukraine?

ALB: Listen, I condemned the bombings [crosstalk], obviously, and I condemn all bombardments, and the— [crosstalk]

WOMAN: Putin is a dictator or not, in your opinion?

ALB: It’s an authoritarian regime, clearly.

SERGEY: You talked about the American who was appointed minister in the Ukrainian government. Is that you find it normal that in 2004, Putin comes to Ukraine, a sovereign country, to propose them their president, Yanukovich, and say, here, you must vote for this person, and I, the president of a neighbour country, I bring you this person, elect him.

ALB: I don’t find anything normal in the world today. There are few things I find normal. [crosstalk] But when I give interviews, they are cut, edited out.

SERGEY: But you have your channel, you have your blog.

ALB: So now I have to correct everything? I’m not going to [crosstalk]

SERGEY: In Donbass and Lugansk, it’s not the Ukrainians against Ukrainians. It’s the Russians, it’s the Russians! Yetkin is an officer of the FSB. The Minister of Defense in Donetsk is an officer from the FSB. From 1996 to— [crosstalk]

ALB: There were American officers, since 2014, there were also American instructors…

SERGEY: It was the Russians!

ALB: …Americans training Azov. The Americans and the Russians want the war [crosstalk]. I want to say, there are the Russians, and the Americans, we need to say that the Americans are there— [crosstalk]

MAN IN ROUND TABLE: I have a question about Bucha. We saw the images, the world is horrified about Bucha. There are humanitarian organizations, Human Rights Watch, who say there are apparent war crimes in areas controlled by Russians, like Bucha. And you tell us all the time that one needs expertise, that it takes years, we must investigate…

ALB: Remember Timisoara [crosstalk]. Mister, we need investigations. You may not like it, but it’s the reality.

SERGEY: Bucha is Russia’s responsibility, that’s what shocks Anne-Laure Bonnel!

ALB: This is absolutely not what I said…

MAN: You said it will take years to find out. That’s how you continue to remove Putin’s blame! [crosstalk]

ALB: No, what I said… Is that, in times of war, lies and propaganda and rumours are what’s most harmful.

MAN: So the Bucha massacre is a rumour?

ALB: I didn’t say that, I… Listen…

MAN: Do you recognize Russian–

ALB: You keep changing my words, so I prefer not to answer you.

MAN: There you go.

PRESENTER: So, do you have any last words to say?

ALB: I hope, and I am sorry for the pain for all Ukrainians. What’s happening is a disaster. No war is clean. All wars are massacres, and I condemn them, and all my work, be it in Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, and in Russia, in the Donbass, and Yemen, and Libya, I could spend all my time denouncing abuses, I’m against that. I’ve always been on the side of the civilians. I am, I’ve been against the first Yellow Vests, who went to the Champs Elysées to protest, and destroyed– [crosstalk, inaudible]

SERGEY: …Russians!

ALB: But I am explaining to you, what interests me is the civilians. Only the civilians. Because while everyone is fighting, the jet setters, all the people with money have already left. In all wars this happens, but tomorrow, it can happen to all of us.

Already 40 years ago…

As the war in Ukraine drags on, I’m reminded of another war: the Falklands War, between Argentina and the UK for the control of the Falkland/Malvinas islands. It started almost exactly 40 years ago, in April 1982, when I was 8 years old. I was born in Argentina, even if I haven’t lived there for decades now. But if had been 18 then, just ten years older, I might have been drafted and sent to fight. Military service was mandatory at the time, and there was conscription.

I don’t remember much of the war, except occasional flashes from the television news, and children making jokes or commenting about it at school. I remember that my parents were against the war; and in retrospect it seemed like a reckless adventure, perhaps the last attempt by the current military junta to remain in power. In fact, less than a year after the war was fought — and lost — the government fell and democracy returned to Argentina.

Many people in Argentina are still bitter about it, and the islands are occasionally used to rekindle nationalistic sentiment. Even recently there was a protest.

Me? I never really cared.

Jorge Luis Borges said memorably at the time that the war reminded him of “two bald men fighting for a comb”. Is there anything of value in the Malvinas? Well, perhaps it is a strategic location, and I suppose that’s why the British wouldn’t let go of them. But, other than that, it doesn’t have much in terms of natural resources, except for a few sheep, and lots of penguins.

Besides, the few people who live there seem to be of British origin and have consistently voted to remain under British rule — and, in a way, who can blame them, given the disasters that most Argentine governments, including the current one, have been?

I know it is unpopular to say it, but there is an easy way for the current war in the Ukraine to end — the Ukrainian government just needs to surrender the Donbass region, the area that declared independence and that is pro-Russian. Why don’t they do it?

Well…

I suppose that, besides the obvious nationalistic pride, the Donbass is a mining region which appears to be rich in all kinds minerals, and so it’s of interest for the Ukrainian government to keep it. Unfortunately, a minority of Russian-speaking people live there, and that explains why their independence was not granted and why they were bombed for several years. For those who think that the war started yesterday for no reason, here is the French documentary “Donbass: Eight years of war”, made in 2016 by French journalist Anne-Laure Bonnel.

Basically, there was a civil war going on in Ukraine since 2014, and more recently Russia entered on one of the sides. Unfortunately, that turned a local conflict into a much bigger thing. But, even if Russia hadn’t entered the fray, it’s unlikely that the violence would have completely stopped, at least in the disputed region.

The Ukraine is very divided. Given that people in the pro-EU West and in the pro-Russian East appear to hate each other, separation seems a sensible course, at least to me. But then again, I also didn’t care very much about who owned the Malvinas- Falklands.

The Falklands War started on April 2, 1982, and lasted for 74 days (Argentina surrendered on June 14). The current war in Ukraine has already lasted 55 days. Let us hope it doesn’t last much longer.

Price increases of 20%-50% are not very nice.

I went to the supermarket today and the cheapest pack of 10 eggs, which costed € 1.69 on Friday, is now costing € 2.29. News sites inform us that there are food price increases of 20-50% in German supermarkets in many other products, and this not mentioning the increase in electricity, gas, etc. Of course, increases in fuel cause increases on the transportation cost of food, so it’s all related.

There are already protests against the government in several towns, in Germany, France, Spain, Italy. The current sanctions seem to have affected more Western Europeans than Russians, from the look of it, although I don’t know how things are in Russia right now, and there are other reasons besides the war behind the rising inflation, including the hidden economic cost of all those lockdowns.

Incidentally, today was the first day in months that people didn’t need to use a mask anymore in the supermarkets in Germany, but either because of ignorance or habit, most people were still using them, so it was difficult to see if they were shocked at the price increases.

Meanwhile, some Danish politician said that Europeans need to “help the Ukraine” but taking shorter showers, and afterwards saying “take that, Putin!” I kid you not. Many European politicians are completely out-of-touch, when not actually insane. They live in a bubble and are not affected by the crazy rules that they impose on their own population.

Even though mask mandates and vaccine passports were — for the moment — lifted or reduced in many European countries, including Germany and Italy, they may come back pretty soon. In Quebec, Canada, mask mandates were not even lifted yet (they are supposed to end on April 15) but some politicians are already talking of extending it, due to the “new wave” (how many are there now?). I wonder if with the growth of protests due to price increases, news of a “new variant” will have to be anticipated? After all, social distancing help to stop protests too.

In any case, things seem to be getting harder and harder for the common people, everywhere. Even if this war in Ukraine ends (hopefully soon), and even if the harsh and arbitrary “Covid rules” do not come back (here’s hoping, but I doubt it), the economy is going and will continue to go south. And it hurts most when people’s pockets are hit.

I recently watched the film “For the Children of Donbass“, which is a very interesting short documentary by an Italian filmmaker about the conflict in Donbass, that started in 2014 and in many was was a “prequel” to the current conflict involving Russia and the Ukraine. I recommend that everyone watches it — I added English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. It’s only 30 minutes, and the filmmaker, being Italian, adds a certain neutrality or outsider’s view, so it can’t be dismissed as a mere propaganda piece. At least, I don’t think so.

I thought it was pretty well done, and even moving at times. It’s not really historical, or political, and doesn’t really explain what the conflict is about. It’s mostly about children and their parents living in what was basically a small-scale war zone for years. But at least it gives you some perspective. It’s not as if Russia just invaded the Ukraine out of nowhere. These people were being bombed by the Ukrainians, for years, and no one was doing much about it.

(Of course, what is going on now is in many ways worse, so we will have to see how this all ends… Hopefully, not with nuclear bombs.)

I do have some sympathy for Russia, even in the midst of all the current “russophobia”, but it’s a far-away sympathy, like the one I feel for, say, Japan. I have never been to Russia, just as I have never been to Japan, and I have never met many Russian people. Well, I have met a few of them in my life, but no one who was very close — when I lived in Italy, I met a couple of young Russian artists who were very nice. (I think they are anti-Putin and against this war, for all it matters). But that’s about it.

However, I was a great fan of Russian literature in my youth. I think it was Borges who said that everyone should read Dostoevsky in his teenage years, as it is the quintessential youth reading. When I say “youth reading”, I don’t mean Harry Potter or juvenile fantasy literature, I mean that there is, or perhaps there was, when I was growing up at least, a certain subset of young people who used to read high literature, which I suppose is something very rare these days. But I did read Dostoevsky when I was 15 or 16 — “Crime and Punishment” and “Notes from the Underground” were my favourites. Then I read a lot of Chekhov. His short stories (he wrote so many of them), are great, and so are his plays (he wrote only a few). Tolstoy too, but I haven’t read him as much as the others — I confess I never finished “Anna Karenina” or “War and Peace”… However, I still remember a few great of his short stories, such as “The Death of Ivan Iylich” and “How much land does a man need?”

That’s all old stuff, of course. Who reads such books these days? And I don’t know much about Russian pop culture, old or new, but one thing I find interesting is that for many decades, Russia (or in fact, the whole Soviet Union, which included the Ukraine), for good or bad, was mostly isolated from the general Western culture, and vice-versa. So they had something else going on, which we did not know about — except for perhaps a few great exiled artists, such as Solyenitsin or Tarkovsky — but little else reached us in terms of a more general popular culture.

In the documentary about the children of Donbass, at one point a girl plays on the piano the song “Wonderful Future”: “Future, wonderful future, don’t be so cruel with me”. This is actually a song from a 1980s Soviet TV series, “Guest from the Future”about a child that comes from the future to a Moscow school. It seems to have been very popular in the Soviet Union, but, like most things produced there, it never reached the West.

From what I could gather, it seems to be just a normal teen series. For all their censorship, I have the feeling that Soviet culture was less dogmatic and propagandistic than, say, modern Hollywood. Nowadays, every American film seems to be about a certain “issue” — race, or sex, or sexual identity, or whatever is the problem of the moment, and of course always with an extremely diverse cast, sometimes to the point of absurdity, such as, for example, Sherlock Holmes played by an Asian woman. Mind you, some films can still be entertaining, but many of them just feel tiresome or propagandistic, or maybe it’s just me.

And yet, I remember watching a Soviet cartoon (I guess I know a bit more about Soviet animation, having studied it a bit) from the 1950s, a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, and it was pretty good, and with little if any “Communist brainwashing.” The only change, perhaps, was that the original fairy tale ends with the grandmother quoting a line from the Bible (“Except you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”). That was removed, I suppose because atheism was the official Soviet policy. (I suspect Tarkovsky’s problem with Soviet censorship also had to do with his religious views, as he wasn’t a very political filmmaker.)

As for the Ukraine, to my mind it was a sort of cultural subset of Russia, I guess because during most of my life it was just part of the Soviet Union, which included also Georgia and Belarus and Kazakhstan etc, so I cannot really say much about it, but I am sure it has its own culture and things to be proud of. One of the worse things that the current war is causing is the worsening relations between Russians and Ukrainians, two people who should really be brothers. However this all ends, it doesn’t look that they will be able to remain very friendly going forward. But we can hope.

From Covid to Russia, these are bad times to be an artist

First the lockdowns hit hard all types of artists and artistic venues. As art and culture are considered by most governments as “non-essential”, they were the first things to close down. Many artists and performers were unable to find work for months, or had to turn to other activities in order to make any money. Music, painting, cinema — almost everything was dead, for months.

Then, the vaccination campaign also hit them. Several artists who decided not to be vaccinated were also cancelled or were unable to perform, act or sing due to the vaccine mandates or the “vaccine passports” required in many Western countries.

Now it’s the Russians’ turn. Worldwide famous Russian soprano Anna Netrebko had her season at the NY Met Opera cancelled and has since then self-cancelled from all her engagements, since they would probably be cancelled anyway — “taking a time to think”. A performance by the 20-year old Russian pianist Alexandr Malofeev was also cancelled at the last minute by the Montreal Symphonic Orchestra, even though he had publicly declared to be against the war and against Putin. He was already in Montreal and had to fly back.

A literature course about Dostoevsky was cancelled for a while at a University in Milan — it was later reinstated due to protests, as Dostoevsky has been dead for quite a while now and it is not clear if he would have supported Putin or not.

Several other Russian artists of all fields are in the process of having their previous engagements cancelled just on the basis of their nationality.

What is going on?

This is clearly a case of demonization or dehumanization of the “enemy”, as it happened with the Japanese in America in World War II. However, the U.S. or Europe are not at war with Russia — at least, not officially. It’s only Russia and Ukraine.

It is not very clear what those sanctions against artists are trying to achieve. The economic sanctions are bad too, but at least they do have a twisted purpose to make the country suffer economically — even if they are a bit suicidal, as they are having a negative impact on the West too, and in particular in Europe, which depends on Russian gas. But the cancellation of Russian artists, many of whom are not even pro-Putin, is baffling. I don’t remember this happening before, although perhaps it did happen with German and Japanese artists during WWII?

The most worrying aspect of all this is that it might not stop with Russians. Sure, it’s Russians today, but tomorrow it can be the French, or the Guatemalan, depending on which other conflicts happen, or simply people who have the wrong political opinions, or anyone who said any politically incorrect thing twenty years ago, as it already happened in some cases.

And of course the Covid and the vaccine passport thing is probably just taking a rest while the Ukraine war goes on, as people can’t concentrate on hating a virus and hating Russians at the same time, but it will probably come back a few months down the line, and the first ones to be inconvenienced are going to be, again, artists and those who love art and culture.

Besides, in our increasingly interconnected and digital world, where Big Tech companies control most speech and will control the flow of money too if digital cash becomes the norm, it is possible to completely remove an inconvenient artist from any platform, be it a payment platform such as PayPal or Patreon, or publishing platforms such as Youtube or social media.

However, I want to end on a positive note, and since my last post was about Andrei Tarkovsky, I’d like to mention that he suffered censorship and difficulties for most of his life, and in fact he only managed to complete 7 full-length films during his whole career — and the last two had to be filmed outside of his country as he became a dissident of the Soviet Union, living in exile, and could not even see his own son for years. And yet he never stopped believing in the transformative power of art.

So I finish with a quote of something he said, which I think is interesting:

“I believe… that an enormous task has been entrusted to art. This is the task of resurrecting spirituality. To me, man, in his substance, is essentially a spiritual being and the meaning of his life consists in developing his spirituality. If he fails to do so, society deteriorates. Art should be there to remind man that he is a spiritual being, that he is part of an infinitely larger spirit to which he will return in the end.”

A world on the brink of nuclear war…

Since there is talk of Russia and nuclear war, I have uploaded a copy of Tarkovsky’s film “The Sacrifice”, filmed in Sweden in 1986 and about a world facing nuclear extinction. This was in the context of the Cold War but I suppose is as valid now, as we seem to be retreating into the past…

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most celebrated Russian film directors. My favourite film by him is certainly the semi-autobiographical “The Mirror”, followed closely by “Andrei Rublev”, about a Russian monk and icon painter, then the science-fiction ones “Solaris” and “Stalker”. His exile films, at least for me, are not as good as the previous ones filmed in Russia. This one feels like Tarkovsky trying to do a Bergman movie, even having Sven Nykvist as the cinematographer and Erland Josephson as an actor. Still, it is an interesting film. Slow, as anything by Tarkovsky, but with many striking scenes and reflections about the modern world and the meaning of sacrifice.

Many people think that the film was filmed in the island of Fårö, the island made famous by Ingmar Bergman, but in fact Sweden did not allow Tarkovsky to film there, so it was filmed in the nearby large island of Gotland, in an area called Närsholmen. But it is, I think, a bit similar to Fårö, with sparse vegetation (more like a savannah or a marshland) than with very dense forests, as there are in other parts of Sweden.

About that Cold War thing — it is odd that, in some ways, things appear to be inverted, with the U.S. and Russia trading places. Russia is no longer the communist Soviet Union, while the U.S. in the last decades have invaded and bombed different countries “for democracy” with hardly any opposition by the Russians (except in Syria). And yet here we are, with Russia and the U.S. again playing mortal enemies, and Europe stuck in the middle.

Now, in the movie, nuclear war is just an excuse for the theme of apocalypse and redemption, and it is not even clear which war is happening or where. In fact there are hardly any “war” scenes, except for the sound of jets passing nearby, and the film is oddly anachronistic, with costumes and props that certainly look older than the 1980s. In fact, it doesn’t look like an “1980s” movie at all. Which in many ways is good, I suppose…

Here is a recent review of the film by a Russian critic. For a more intellectual analysis of the symbols and religious imagery used in the film, try this essay by Elena Dulgheru.

P.S. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that there will be a nuclear war over this issue, but the economic crisis derived from the sanctions and the escalation of the conflict will probably last for a long time.