Closing out Spring Polaroid week with a pair of matched M1900 6-inch guns from Battery Gunnison on Sandy Hook. Again, obsolete, but a reminder that Ukraine needs heavy weapons. They're starting to get them, finally. At some point, a victorious Ukraine will be able to place their guns in a park as a monument too.
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale. He writes popular history books about the history of Eastern Europe. I've read several. They're very good.
In 2017, he wrote a short book called "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century". He describes it as a pamphlet, kind of a throwback to the days of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". In it he suggests ways for everyday people to fight back against tyranny, things like "Don't Obey in Advance". Last week, he released an updated version of the book with 20 new lessons specifically about Ukraine. It's only available in audiobook format. In it, he attempts to place the war in Ukraine into historical perspective. He makes the case that Putin's case is based on a baptism from a thousand years ago and that there was significant divergence in the futures of Rus (Ukraine) and Muscovy (Russia). He posits several types of politics: the politics of time (nostalgia), the politics of inevitability (this is bound to happen), the politics of eternity (this is how things always were and will always be), the politics of catastrophe, and the politics of possibility. Russia is at war with Ukraine, but really Russia is at war with democracy. This war will decide the outlines of the 21st century; will this century be dominated by autocrats or democrats? There's also a convincing case made that the war is the fallout of the failure of empires, the failure of the nation state, and that the EU represents a new alternative to empire that Russia finds threatening. It's no coincidence that the 2014 invasion started right after the Revolution of Dignity where Ukrainians rose up to insist on their right to join the EU. (continued in next post).
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Fri Apr 29 2022