This past weekend three quarters of my family drove up to Minnesota to look at colleges for our youngest child. Killing time during the six-hour drive, on her cellphone my wife opened up a random list of the 100 greatest films ever made. I'm kind of a sucker for these lists for many reasons, not the least of which is they provide an endless source of discussion, controversy and argument, due to their sins of commission and omission.
For starters, the film I brought up in my last post was not to be found on the list. Do you really mean to tell me that the comedies This is Spinal Tap and Airplane, funny for their time but not nearly as much today as when they were made, are deserving to be among the 100 greatest films ever made, but the sublime Local Hero is not???
You know, that kind of stuff.
Frankly I could never put together a list like this as I don't think I've seen one hundred films in my life truly deserving of such a distinction. I mean, there are probably dozens of films by great directors like Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Varda and scores of others I haven't seen yet that simply have to be better than say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which might come in around number 100 of the top movies I have actually seen.
But in the end it's all subjective isn't it?
Well no, not really. There's a reason why certain films like Citizen Kane are always on these lists.
But not Casablanca, which some critics place at or near the top of their lists of greatest films ever made, while others like the authors of this list, don't think it even merits a spot in the top 100. I wasn't surprised by the snub as the 1942 Hollywood classic is somewhat polarizing; people either love it passionately or think it's overrated. Foremost among the latter group are the followers of the Auteur School of film criticism which places the worth of any film squarely upon the shoulders of its director, whom they consider the true author (auteur) of the work. Auteur criticism places a film within the context of its director's body of work and judge it primarily by whether it contributes to the particular vision and style of that director. Alfred Hitchcock would be a prime example of a director admired by the auteur critics as he has a unique vision and a definite visual and thematic style. *
Not so Michael Curtiz, who before directing Casablanca, already had dozens of Hollywood films and before that, many more in Austria and his native Hungary to his credit. Curtiz (an Americanization of his true surname Kertesz, a name familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the art of photography), made films in practically every popular genre at the time, from horror to mystery to film noir, from thriller to adventure, from love story to comedy to musical, including the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (probably the star's best film). Because of his tremendous output, Curtiz is often considered the ultimate Studio System director, one of many workers in the industry who were assigned films as much or more for practical reasons like his technical chops, his reputation for working within schedule and never going over budget, rather than for his personal vision.
And because of that, as his output was all over the place stylistically and thematically, most auteur critics feel Curtiz represented the studio's vision rather than his own. To them he is a craftsman rather than an artist. In less generous terms, some would call him a studio hack, albeit a very, very good one.
So where does Casablanca stand with the auteur critics? Respect, but often in the form of backhanded praise. This is from none less than Andrew Sarris, the American film critic who expanded upon the auteur theory from its origins in France:
...the director’s one enduring masterpiece is, of course, "Casablanca", the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory.
Not all of the detractors of Casablanca were subscribers to the auteur theory, here's Paulene Kael:
It's far from a great film but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism, and you're never really pressed to take its melodramatic twists and turns seriously.
Responding to that comment, in an essay for The Atlantic celebrating the 70th anniversary of the film in 2012, David W. Brown, himself a great fan of Casablanca writes this:
Nobody ever walked away from a screening of Casablanca and said, "Well I don't get it." Not with regard to its reputation as a great work, nor to the nature of its characters or plot. It's not a challenging work. But its universal themes and accessibility are inseparable from its place in the American film canon.
Therein lies the issue with the movie, it's a great film because its themes are universal, we all get it; it's less than great because it doesn't challenge us.
Brown points out in his essay that greatness of any work of art comes from either smashing accepted standards to bits to create something entirely new, or taking those established standards to heights never realized before.
Citizen Kane would fit into the first category, and Casablanca into the second.
If you've seen the movie, you might be interested in this shot by shot analysis of Casablancaby one of its greatest supporters, the late Chicago based film critic Roger Ebert.
Ebert does a nice job putting everything into place. What the auteur critics seem to ignore is that film making is perhaps more than any other art, a collaborative effort as anyone who has ever sat through the closing credits of a movie realizes. Without minimizing the efforts of Curtiz one bit, Ebert points out that the greatness of Casablanca lies in the efforts of everyone involved from its producer Hal Wallis who probably shaped the final product more than anyone else, through the writers, (Julius J. Epstein, Phillip G. Epstein and Howard Koch), the cinematographer, (Arthur Edison), the editor, (Owen Marks), the music director, (Max Steiner), the costume and set designers (Orry-Kelly and George James Hopkins), the rest of the technical staff and of course, the amazing cast all the way down to the extras, truly one of the greatest collections of talent ever gathered for one film.
I admire Ebert for his point of view and keen sense of observation but there are a few points he makes here that I have some issues with.
THE SCREENPLAY
It's no secret that Casablanca is probably the most quotable movie ever, at least in American cinema. In his analysis, Roger Ebert says the true sign of a successful screenplay is when the audience leaves the theater quoting lines from the movie. I'm not sure I agree, it's kind of like saying the sign of a great work of music is if you're able to hum tunes from it after leaving the concert hall. That would certainly disqualify most western classical music written after 1850.
Regardless, for all its memorable snippets of dialog, Casablanca also has more than its share of roll-your-eye inducing lines as well. Consider the following:
"Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?"
One would be hard pressed to write a cheesier line.
The
son of actress Joy Paige who played the young Bulgarian bride in the
movie, recounted in her 2008 obituary in the LA times that his mother,
in 1942 a high school senior with family connections to the film
industry, read an early draft of the screenplay but was not impressed. She told her son she felt it was "corny and old fashioned." Fortunately
for her despite her reservations, she got and accepted the role which turned out to be her one true shot at silver screen immortality.
You be the judge. The following is a transcription of the screenplay highlighting Page's one big scene in the movie where her character, Annina, is looking for some advice from Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). The action takes place in the dining room of Rick's Cafe Americain:
Annina meets Captain Renault, Chief of Police, in the hallway as she leaves the gambling room:
RENAULT: How's lady luck treating you?
Annina looks down.
RENAULT: Aw, too bad, you'll find him over there.
Renault points in the direction of Rick. Annina sees him and goes to his table as Renault watches her attentively.
ANNINA: Monsieur Rick?
RICK: Yes?
ANNINA: Could I speak with you for just one moment please?
Rick looks at her.
RICK: How'd you get in here? You're underage.
ANNINA: I came with Captain Renault.
RICK (cynically): Oh I should have known.
ANNINA: My husband is with me too.
RICK: He is? Well Captain Renault is getting broadminded. Sit down.
Will you have a drink?
Anina shakes her head.
RICK: No of course not, you mind if I do?
ANNINA: No.
Rick pours himself a drink.
ANNINA: Monsieur Rick, what kind of a man is Captain Renault?
RICK: Oh he's just like any other man, only more so...
ANNINA: No I mean, is he trustworthy, is his word...
RICK: Now just a minute, who told you to ask me that?
ANNINA: He did, Captain Renault did.
RICK: I thought so, where's your husband?
ANNINA: At the roulette table trying to win enough for our exit visa.
Well of course he's losing.
RICK: How long have you been married?
ANNINA: Eight weeks, we come from Bulgaria.
Oh things are very bad there Monsieur, the devil has the people by the throat.
So Jan and I we, we do not want our children to grow up in such a country.
RICK (wearily): So you decided to go to America?
ANNINA: Yes but we haven't that much money and,
traveling is so expensive and difficult, it was much more than we thought to get here.
And then Captain Renault sees us. and he is so kind he wants to help us...
RICK: Yes I'll bet...
ANNINA: He tells me he can get us an exit visa but, but we have no money..
RICK: Does he know that?
ANNINA: Oh yes.
RICK: And he's still willing to give you a visa?
ANNINA: Yes monsieur.
RICK: And you want to know...
ANNINA: Will he keep his word.?
RICK: He always has.
There is a silence. Annina is very disturbed.
ANNINA: Oh monsieur you are a man, if someone loved you very much so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world, and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her...
Rick stares off into space.
RICK: Nobody ever loved me that much.
ANNINA: ...and he never knew, and the girl kept this bad thing locked in her heart,
that would be alright, wouldn't it?
RICK (harshly): You want my advice?
ANNINA: Oh yes please.
RICK: Go back to Bulgaria.
ANNINA: Oh but if you knew what it means to us to get to America...
oh, but if Jan should find out, he's such a boy, in many ways I am so much older than he is.
RICK: Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out. You'll excuse me.
Rick abruptly rises.
ANNINA (tonelessly): Thank you Monsieur.
He quickly goes off, leaving Annina alone at the table. She remains seated, too demoralized to move.
And... cut.
Are you moved to tears by reading that? Probably not.
The sincerity Joy Page brings to the role of Annina kind of sort of pulls off all that wonky dialog ("The Devil has people by the throat" really???). But I'm afraid even a more seasoned actor could never take that claptrap beyond grade B level melodrama. Conversely, Rick's one-line responses, at least on paper, convey the level of indifference and snarkiness we've come to expect from his character up to that point, not much more.
You wouldn't know it just from reading the dialog, but this is the pivotal scene in the movie, there's a lot going on here.
First, Rick is defining for us his complicated relationship with Renault (Claude Rains). He knows full well that Renault is a scoundrel as his snide comments suggest. The conversation is rapid fire, both actors starting their lines before the other has a chance to finish, except for one time not indicated in the script. When Annina asks if Renault will keep his word, Rick pauses only for a second, but it seems much longer. For the first time in the scene, he speaks without irony:
"He always has."
Rick and Renault share a mutual admiration, even affection, yet neither would hesitate throwing the other under the bus if it were necessary. Here Rick withdraws his glance from the young woman as if to wash his hands of the sordid affair. He tells the young woman in not so many words that yes Renault, a man of his word, will indeed grant her and her husband the exit visas, after he fucks her. The way Bogart delivers that line, he conveys both fondness for the man, and contempt.
Talk about complicated.
Then Rick exposes his vulnerability in the middle of Annina's sad confession about her dilemma.
His face changes from an expression of compassion to anguish when her words hit close to home as she talks about a woman loving a person so much she would do anything to make him happy. Rick has just been reacquainted with the love of his life Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the arms of another man. He allows himself a moment of self-pity when he responds: "Nobody loves me that much."
Then fatalism sets in as he crushes Annina's dream of a better life by advising her to just give up and go back home.
After some more mushy words from the poor girl, Rick abruptly gets up and leaves her in the lurch, telling her dismissively that everybody's got problems in Casablanca, so leave me alone and have a nice day.
Same old Rick sticking his neck out for no one.
At least that's what we're led to believe as the scene shifts to another part of Rick's place where back to business, he welcomes Ilsa and her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) back to his nightclub. This scene is so filled with tension between Rick and Ilsa that we forget about poor Annina.
But not Rick. In the subsequent scene Rick enters the gambling room where Annina's husband Jan is sitting dejectedly at the roulette wheel. The croupier Emil (played by the great French actor Marcel Dalio in an uncredited role) asks Jan, who is only holding a few chips, if he'd like to place another bet. "I'd better not" he says, those chips probably representing the last of the couple's savings. Rick, looking over his shoulder says: "have you tried 22?". "I said 22" he repeats a little louder, speaking to Jan but looking at Emil who gets the message.
Of all the memorable lines from Casablanca that are quoted endlessly, the last one Rick says to Annina before darting out of the room...
Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out.
... is not one of them. But it dawned on me after having seem the film for the umpteenth time this week that it should be. When he says everyone has problems in Casablanca, perhaps he is referring to his own. Thinking of it in those terms, in his mind he is first diminishing his own suffering by empathizing with another person's pain. Doing his part to help ease that pain is step two.
In that gesture at the roulette wheel, coming at no small cost to both Rick and his business's reputation, he solves Annina'a dilemma, much to Renault's consternation. And there in one fell swoop, the pathologically guarded Rick at last reveals who he really is for all to see, including himself.
That seemingly dismissive line to Annina foreshadows the greatest line of the film:
I'm not good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.
Screenwriters provide the architecture of a film, not just the dialog. They don't write for the printed page any more than an architect designs for the blueprint. They depend on the cast, the director, the cinematographer, the editor, and a whole cast of characters to make their words come to life. That's the magic of cinema.
Watch this clip of the two scenes involving the Bulgarian couple to see what I mean. Pay close attention to Bogart's physical reactions to Joy Page and especially to his exquisite timing. If you doubt what a great film actor he was, you have the script, give it a go yourself.
Unfortunately, the middle scene has been edited out of this clip. Better yet, watch the whole movie, watch it again if you've already seen it.
Do I consider this great screenwriting despite its not always stellar dialog?
You bet I do, along with great acting directing, cinematography and you name it.
VICTOR LASZOW
Roger Ebert claims in his analysis that Casablanca is a near perfect movie. Then he points to some small issues such as continuity errors and the many parts of the story that challenge one's suspension of disbelief, all of which he admits, don't really take anything away from the film.
I agree.
It seems Ebert's main objection to the film is the performance of Paul Henreid in the role of the unassailable resistance hero, Victor Laszlo. Laszlo, a Czechoslovak with Hungarian name**, is a continuous thorn in the side of the Nazis. He has escaped from a concentration camp and found his way to Morocco, then part of unoccupied France.*** From there he hoped to obtain two official letters of transit that would permit him and his wife Ilsa to leave the country for neutral Portugal, then on to the United States, where he could continue his work in relative safety.
If you've seen the movie you can skip the next paragraph. If not and you're interested in how Rick got involved in all this, read on:
FOR THAT WE MUST GO TO FLASHBACK, cue the harpist...
PARIS-1940: It turns out that while Victor was in Nazi captivity, Ilsa mistakenly learned that he was dead. Thinking herself a widow, Ilsa met Rick in Paris, fell in love with him, hears the first of many "here's looking at you kids", yadda yadda yadda, then in march the Nazis. Rick, himself no friend of the Third Reich, decides to skedaddle, but not before Ilsa finds out that Victor is very much alive, has escaped from the concentration camp, and is back in Paris. She can't face Rick with the news so instead of joining him on the last train out of town, she sends a note with Sam (Dooley Wilson, more on him later) telling Rick without explanation that she can never see him again, have a nice life.
So back to the present and Victor and Ilsa end up unbeknownst to them at the club of Ilsa's lover and now we've got ourselves one barnburner of a love triangle.
So what's wrong with Henreid's performance according to Ebert? There's no chemistry between Victor and Ilsa, he claims. I believe at one point Ebert says that Henreid is too stiff, apparently not realizing the mixed message that term sends.
Anyway, stiff or flaccid, it hardly matters, the character of Victor is all about his work. He certainly loves Ilsa, we know that because he says so, even if Ebert is not convinced. Ingrid Bergman always said that when they were making the film, she asked director Michael Curtiz which character Ilsa was supposed to really be in love with. He reportedly told her to dole out the loving equally between the two and that they'd sort it out at the end of the story, which legend has it, was not determined until the day they shot the final scene.
But it's clear to me in the final cut that Ilsa worships Laszlo (perhaps more like a father), but loves Rick.**** That is what defines her conflict. Had there been more "chemistry" between Laszlo and Ilsa as Ebert and others suggest, and all else had been the same, she would have chosen her husband in a heartbeat without all the drama.
Not a very interesting ending.
AND SPEAKING OF THAT ENDING (spoiler alert!!!)
If you've read anything about the making of Casablanca, you know that the filmmakers were flying by the seat of their pants, making everything up as they went along. At times it is said, any given day's shooting could have included dialog that was written that very morning and rushed over to the set. As I mentioned above, Ingrid Bergman didn't know which man she was supposed to be in love with. Some suggest even the screenwriters had no clue which of the two, Laszlo or Rick, she would end up with in the end.
Roger Ebert points out quite logically that there is no way Ilsa could have ended up with her lover Rick rather than her husband, as it would have been strictly forbidden by the enforcers of the extremely conservative Motion Picture Production Code, the self-regulating moral police force better known as the Hays Office. With its intimations of extramarital goings on, and even a not too subtle suggestion of latent homosexuality, (remember this is 1942), Casablanca was already pushing the envelope, and the producers had to do several end-runs around the censors to get the more titillating scenes on the screen. But an ending where Ilsa leaves her husband for her lover and not getting her comeuppance for it would have been a non-starter in 1942 Hollywood, strictly on moral grounds. *****
But there is a vastly more profound reason why Ilsa got on that plane with Victor and not Rick. It would have made no sense insofar as the trajectory of the story.
For decades, Casablanca has been described as a love story set to the backdrop of war. But the war was not a backdrop, it wasn't even the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room. World War II was the story. Without it, the film would not have been Casablanca, it would have been Paris, Oslo, Prague, New York, Berlin, Sophia and all the other places the characters escaped from to end up in Casablanca. In other words, without the war, there would be no Casablanca the movie because nobody in it would have met each other.
More important, the film was made during the war. When Rick in a perplexed drunken stupor cynically asks Ilsa how the story of their love triangle ends, she responds, "I don't know, the ending hasn't been written yet." That response has a double meaning clearly not lost to the people who were watching the film at the time of its release. On the surface she's saying she doesn't know which man she'll end up with. In a much deeper sense, she, everyone watching the film in 1942, and for that matter anyone alive all over the world at the time, had no idea how the only important story of the day would turn out. It certainly wasn't looking good at the time for those who preferred freedom, justice and democracy to fascism, tyranny and genocide.
By the time the film was released, the United States government was demanding sacrifice from every single American, Tragically and unjustly, Americans of Japanese descent were forced to sacrifice more than any other group. The government was drafting American sons (the daughters went voluntarily), asking of them the biggest sacrifice of all.
Imagine an ending where Ilsa and Rick, both it turns out with skin in the game, throw away all their commitments and values to run off together and live happily ever after, while the rest of the world was sacrificing, suffering and dying.
Preposterous.
What most people who have written about Casablanca for the past fifty years or so seem to miss is its unmistakable role as a propaganda film.
As usual, I've gone on much too long, so we'll save that part of our story for another day.
Stay tuned, les jeux sont faits.
NOTES:
* There's definitely an auteur theory bias to this list. For the record, three Hitchcock films made the list but surprisingly none are in the top ten. Stanley Kubrick has five including number one, 2001: A Space Odessey.
**The writers probably thought a truly Czech name like Jiři Dvořák would be too hard to pronounce. Ebert could have commented on Henreid's Austrian accent too, but like the inappropriate name, that didn't seem to bother him either. Fortunately, none of the actors in the international cast bothered to fake an accent to mimic the nationality of the character they were supposed to be playing. I guess having any kind of foreign, i.e. non-American accent was enough to lend the film a hint of authenticity, at least to the American audience. The one exception is June Page, one of only three Americans in the credited cast, (Bogey and Dooley Wilson were the other two). Given the diverse accents in the film, Page's American accent is a little off putting when she says she's from Bulgaria.
***A little history lesson. Roger Ebert claims one of the biggest inaccuracies in the film is the idea that Victor Laszlo, an enemy of the Third Reich, could arrive in French controlled Morocco and not be immediately arrested by the Gestapo as by this time France was occupied by the Germans. This is not quite so. While the northern portion of contiguous France, including Paris was occupied by the Nazis, the southern part of the country and its North African colonies were governed by l'État français (The French State) better known as Vichy France, named after the city which was its capital. While Vichy had signed a peace treaty with Germany and collaborated with the Nazis, it was still an independent state at the time the film takes place, and the Germans despite their influence, would have had no official jurisdiction there. Of course, to paraphrase Carl (S. K. Sakall) the ex-pat German waiter at Rick's: "being Germans they would have taken him anyway."
**** All the chemistry on screen may have been between Ilsa and Rick, not Ilsa and Laszlow, but in real life, legend has it that Ingrid Berman and Paul Henreid had an affair, while she and Humphrey Bogart barely spoke to each other off the set. I guess that's why they call it "acting."
***** The Hays Office did let another moral transgression slide, in our day a far greater sin, the sex crimes of Captain Renault. I'll get to that in my next post.
That post was about a story centered around the American singer Pete Seeger that has been circulating around the web for a bit. The story has Seeger defying the authorities in Francisco Franco's Spain in the early seventies when they demanded he not sing a number of his songs at a concert planned for Barcelona in front of an audience of over 100,000. So he didn't sing any of those songs. Instead he invited the crowd to sing (as the authorities never mentioned anyone else singing them), while he accompanied them on his banjo.
It would be a terrific story if only it were true.
I so wanted it to be true that for a while I ignored my original doubts about its credibility, namely that Seeger, a long-time critic of the Franco regime, would have been allowed to perform in a massive venue during the regime in Spain in the first place. But those doubts got the better of me and I found out from reliable sources that could be backed up, that Seeger did perform in Spain during that period, only to much smaller crowds. And not in Barcelona where his performance there, planned for a small college, not a soccer stadium as the story claims, was shut down by the police.
After the death of Franco and his totalitarian regime, Pete Seeger returned to Barcelona where he did perform in front of many tens of thousands of people.
And it's very likely that he did at some point in his career, in defiance of some authority or other, invite his audience to sing his banned songs instead of him.
So the story while itself not true, was woven together with bits of pieces of actual facts.
Then I summed it all up by saying in the big picture, at this late date it hardly matters. No harm, no foul, the story only contributes to the legend of a remarkable man.
I ended the post with this bit of a cliff hanger: "on the other hand..."
END OF SUMMARY,
Here is the other hand:
Our world is coming apart at the seams helped in great part by false narratives,
misinformation, and outright lies. The cause of the criminal insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year was the outright lie of a president who insisted without evidence, that an election was stolen
from him. More devastating, Vladimir Putin has the support of much of the Russian people because of the lie he created surrounding
his invasion of Ukraine.
Much like the Pete Seeger story,
Putin's lie weaves together disparate facts in order to create a false narrative.
Here are some indisputable facts:
Ukraine was once part of Russia and later, the Soviet Union.
Ukraine has shown great interest in joining the European Union and NATO.
There are Russians living in Ukraine.
There are Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine.
The United States supports Ukraine in its current struggle against Russia.
And here is Vladimir Putin's narrative based upon these facts which he is selling quite successfully it would seem, to the Russian people:
Ukraine is not a legitimate independent nation with a culture of its own, but a historic, integral part of Russia.
As a member of NATO, Ukraine, bordering Russia, would be a threat to the security that country.
The minority Russian population living in Ukraine is oppressed by the "so called" Ukrainians.
Ukraine is under the rule of Nazis.
Since The United States supports the government of Ukraine, it follows that the United States is supporting Nazism.
Therefore,
Putin's war, (not "special military operation" as he insists on calling it), according to this reasoning, is not an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, but a
mission to first, give back to Russia what is rightfully theirs, second, to remove a direct threat to the national security of Russia, and third, to
liberate the oppressed Russians living in Ukraine from U.S. backed
Nazis. Depending upon whom Putin is talking to, not necessarily in that order.
If you buy into that argument, you might have a credible case for Russia's grievances, if not the war, and certainly not the barbaric actions of its soldiers that we've seen in the recent weeks.
However the first two bullet points I listed of Putin's can only be called pure nonsense, I dealt with them in a previous post. And to the best of my knowledge, there is no credible evidence of point number three, that the Russian minority living in Ukraine is in any way oppressed.
Much of the world is scratching its head in incredulousness over point four.
Volodymyr Zelensky the president of Ukraine is Jewish, therefore how can Ukraine be led be Nazis?
While also not true, this is where it gets a little tricky.
My
guess is that like my original skepticism over the Pete Seeger story,
this paradox is not an obstacle so much as a rhetorical speed-bump
in the minds of most Russian people.
I don't think it's too much of a reach to say that if the average non-Jewish Russian today thinks about The Holocaust at all, he or she would put
it in context of the Russians' own suffering. In other words, the number of Jews who died during the Holocaust, roughly six million people, is less than one quarter the
number of Russians who died during World War II. One may argue that the Russian casualties are not quite the same as they were casualties of war and not the result of a deliberate act of genocide. This is a naive argument. Hitler had a "final solution" in mind for the Slavic people of Eastern Europe as well, he just never had the opportunity to carry it out.
Small wonder the
Russians call World War II, "The Great Patriotic War."
Given that, it should come as no surprise that the accusation of "Nazi", is particularly triggering to
the Russian people, just as it is to the Jewish people.
Ukraine's
relationship with the Nazis is more complicated. Ukraine which had been under the hegemony of various countries for centuries, became a part
of the Soviet Union in 1922. In the thirties, a great famine, known as the Holodomor, spread through the Soviet Union, and Ukraine was hit particularly hard, losing up to five million people due to starvation. To this day there is not a consensus among historians as to whether that disaster was caused by a combination of bad weather and horrendous decision making in regards to food distribution by the higher ups in Moscow, OR a deliberate attempt by Joseph Stalin to eradicate the troublesome Ukrainians. If the latter is true, which it may very well be, then it would be counted as one of the gravest acts of genocide in history.
As some say: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," so it's probably not surprising that when the Germans marched into Ukraine in 1941, they were met by many of the locals as liberators.
Across the years, German soldiers recall
those first weeks of the invasion as a halcyon time ...when villagers in the Ukraine - an
intensely nationalist, even separatist, region - came out with bread and
salt in the traditional Slavic welcome.
It was on the outskirts of Kyiv days after its capture by the Germans in September of 1941, where one the most horrific single atrocities of the war, (that's really saying something), took place. It is known as the Babi Yar Massacre.
Shortly after the Germans took Kyiv, Soviet secret police bombed several buildings occupied by the Germans in the city. The Nazis used that act as a pretext to slaughter the Jews of Kyiv. The executions took place in a ravine just outside of the city, called Babi Yar. Nearly 34,000 Jews were shot and buried there over a period of two days. Once the Jews of Kyiv were gone, those killing fields continued to be put into service for the disposal of people with mental handicaps, the city's Roma population, Russian prisoners of war, and other human beings the Nazis declared undesirable. After the Russians retook Kyiv from the Nazis, they estimated the total number of people killed at Babi Yar to be 100,000.
To be sure, the massacre was the act of the Nazis, but its horrific efficiency could never have been accomplished without the cooperation of numerous Ukrainian collaborators. The same can be said unfortunately about similar atrocities that took place in other countries occupied by the Nazis.
The most inconvenient truth of all is that hardly any country in the world, including the United States, (who built its own concentration camps to deal with some of its citizens), has clean hands in regards to grievous abuses of human rights committed during those terrible times.
Much of the three quarters of a century that followed World War II has been devoted to a reckoning of what was done and what was not done during that conflagration, and every nation involved in that struggle has had to come to terms with its own acts of commission, omission, or both.
Along with the fervent chant of "never again" heard out of the mouths of the civilized world, the term "Nazi" has for good reason, come to symbolize the absolute worst the human race has to offer.
Consequently, most Americans of that particular mindset, kept it to themselves, lest they be the subject of derision and worse, ridicule.
But the last administration declared open season on the public display of hatred and racism, and since then a significant number of individuals came out of the woodwork to publicly proclaim their devotion to Adolph Hitler and his degenerate cause. Symbols of hate groups such as the Nazis and the KKK began to pop up regularly in the United States, and people were no longer laughing.
The Ukrainians have not been laughing at neo-Nazis for much longer. The ultra-nationalist, populist right wing party Svoboda (Their official name in Ukrainian: Всеукраїнське об'єднання «Свобода») was founded in 1995, not long after the breakup of the Soviet Union. They are against immigration, free trade, globalism, and a slew of other issues close to the hearts right wing extremists across the globe. Recruitment of skin heads and their use of Nazi iconography early in the group's history led many to rationally surmise that the party was neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic to the core. Although of late there have been attempts to soften the group around the edges by kicking out avowed Nazis, Svoboda (which means "freedom" in most Slavic languages) still espouses extremist right wing-nationalist views.
As does the Azov Battalion which to this day does little to hide its ideology, including their official symbol which bears an unmistakable resemblance to that of the Waffen SS. The ultra-nationalist Azovs came to the forefront in 2014, the beginning of the current hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, fighting against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. The group has been financed in part by Ukrainian oligarchs, including some of Jewish descent. As quite the effective fighting force, the Azov brigade has been controversially integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
Until Putin's most recent invasion, Svoboda, the Azov Battalion and other groups of a similar mindset, had been most conspicuous during the celebrations of the birthday of Stepan Bandera, one of the most controversial figures in Ukrainian history. Bandera was a staunch nationalist and leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a terrorist group that collaborated with the Germans against the Soviets at the outset of the Nazi occupation of the USSR. In addition to being sympathetic to the German invasion as a means to liberate Ukraine from the Soviet Union, the OUN under Bandera's influence also shared the Nazis' views on the Jewish people as the prime instigators of Bolshevism, and were active participants in the persecution and murder of the Jews of Western Ukraine.
The group hoped to set up a German-friendly, independent Ukrainian state with Bandera as its leader, something along the lines of the Vichy government of France. But the Germans had no interest in an independent Ukraine and when the OUN's usefulness waned after the Jews had been wiped out, they arrested Bandera, sending him for a brief time to a concentration camp, only to release him in 1944, hoping that by doing so they could again garner support from the Ukrainians as they were retreating from their massive defeat at the hands of the Soviets.
Bandera survived the War and settled in Munich where he continued his work against the Soviet regime including working for a time with British intelligence. He was assassinated by the Soviets in 1959.
In Ukraine, Bandera in some circles is celebrated as a great patriot and national hero, while in others, denounced as a fascist war criminal. The parades that celebrate his birthday where celebrants display their full regalia of Nazi inspired paraphernalia, have been condemned the world over, as well as by President Zelensky.
They also provide fodder for Putin and pro-Putin commentators, including those on the extreme American right, to prove the influence of Nazis in Ukraine.
Another inconvenient fact, while ultra-right-white supremacist groups represent the views of a small portion of the Ukrainian population, they are nonetheless on the front lines, currently fighting to save their country along-side their countrymen who find their views repugnant.
So why would President Zelensky condone the presence of these groups in positions of power in his country?
Well think of it this way, if your house was on fire, would you weed out firemen who arrive at your doorstep based upon their political ideology?
Putting it another way, virulent ultra-nationalists who are willing to kick ass and even die for their cause are kind of good to have around when your country is being ruthlessly attacked. Perhaps in the future when the war is over, everybody can get together and work out their differences, or not. But in Ukraine, there may be no such future. There is only the present.
If it weren't all so tragic, it would be laughable that Putin and people like his valuable American mouthpiece Tucker Carlson are denouncing neo-Nazis in Ukraine while Putin's army is currently committing acts of depravity against Ukrainian civilians that would make real Nazis quake in their boots.
But the tragedy of Putin's criminal war doesn't stop at the Russian-Ukrainian border. Look at this photograph:
Leonid Savin with his family. Photo provided to the New York Times by his brother.
Countless photos like this exist everywhere in the world, documenting a family sending one of their own into military service and an uncertain fate. As such these families are filled with pride that their loved one will be bravely serving their country, yet trepidation that they may never see him or her again. You can see all those emotions in the faces of Leonid Savin and his family in the picture. This particular family probably had less trepidation than most as their son and brother who was conscripted into service, was to serve on the biggest, baddest ship afloat in the Russian Navy, its flagship, the invincible missile cruiser Moscow, or if you prefer, Москва, (Moscva).
If you remember, the Moscow was involved in one of the first salvos of the war. On the first day of the invasion, February 24, the Moscow and a patrol boat attacked Ukrainian territory, tiny Snake Island on the Black Sea, population 30, protected by 13 border guards.
Russian sailors aboard the Moscow radioed the guards demanding they surrender in return for their safety.
Silence.
Again, from the Moscow in what sounds like a quite literal translation:
Snake Island, I, Russian warship, repeat offer: put down your arms and surrender, or you will be bombed. Have you understood me? Do you copy?
To which the response, in a more liberal translation was:
Russian warship, go fuck yourself!
True to their word the Moscow opened fire on the island. It was originally reported that the guards were all killed in the strike, but it has since been revealed that they survived the attack, (putting to rest more misinformation), captured, then later returned in a prisoner exchange.
But the phrase, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself", has become the mantra and rallying cry for the Ukrainian people in their time of anguish.* Ukraine even issued a postage stamp with the image of the Moscow at sea in the background, while in the foreground, a solitary soldier gives the ship the one finger salute.
Another bit of joyous news to everyone who like me is on the side of Ukraine in this most stupid of wars: today, the mighty Moscow, pride of the Russian Navy, sits at the bottom of the Black Sea, most likely the victim of a Ukrainian missile attack.
On the flip side, and there is always a flip side in war, Leonid Savin and an unknown number of his crewmates went down with that ill-fated ship.
The Kremlin reported that the entire crew of the Moscow successfully abandoned ship before it sank. But families of the crew, desperately awaiting news of the fate of their loved ones, were given conflicting information. According to the New York Times article I linked to above, in the case of Savin's family, a crewmate originally contacted Leonid's mother and told her that he saw her son perish as he was helping another crewmate escape the flames. The same crewmate later changed his story and said Leonid was caught in an explosion. A third communication came from the sailor who, said, never mind, no one knows what happened to Leonid, he's just missing.
Like all pathological liars, Vladimir Putin instinctively lies, even when it is not necessary and does not serve his purposes. The official Kremlin explanation for the loss of the Moscow was that a fire aboard the ship ignited an ammunition magazine, setting off several explosions. They denied that the ship was hit by Ukrainian missiles, a vastly more likely scenario. Now I suppose admitting a successful enemy missile strike would expose a vulnerability in the Russian Navy's defense capabilities. But claiming the catastrophe was self-induced, exposes a much more serious vulnerability, gross incompetence and negligence on the part of their commanders, and a grave failure of the fundamental operational and architectural design of their fleet.
We've been told the reason why so many Russian people are behind this war is because they have been force-fed misinformation, false narratives, and outright lies coming out of the Kremlin, while having all news from outside sources blocked from them. The truth is there's no way of knowing how many Russians support the war or indeed if any of them do. Imagine living in a country where you can be sent to prison by simply suggesting that Mr. Putin's "special operation" is a war. Then you get a call out of the blue from a stranger who says he's "conducting a poll" on people's opinion of the situation in Ukraine. Need I say more?
The Russian people are nothing if not suspicious, skeptical and cynical by circumstance, and given that many Russians are publicly livid, demanding revenge on Ukraine for sinking their battleship, it's pretty clear they're not buying all of Putin's lies, just the ones they choose to believe.
Meanwhile the families of the crew of the Moscow are still looking for answers as are the families of the estimated 40,000, (40,000!) Russian service members who have been killed, injured, captured or are MIA in Putin's latest war.
Every one of those casualties of course has a story to tell like Leonid Savin, who for his part didn't believe in this war and in his last letter to his family, expressed deep concern for the palm tree he planted in his family's garden before setting off on his final journey.
Those soldiers, sailors and their families deserve a full account of what happened to them and why. Obviously, so too do the people of Ukraine whose country has been raped, pillaged and plundered by Russia under Putin. But Putin has neither the will, the balls, nor the decency to be accountable to his own people, not even to those whose loved ones gave up their lives in his name, let alone to the people of Ukraine.
Which makes me grateful to live in a society where our leaders are held accountable for their actions, at the very least every four years at the ballot box.
As Winston Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." We may or may not be willing to fight and die for our democracy, but if we care about it, the least we can do is completely reject misinformation, false narratives and lies, even, check that, especially the ones that appeal to us, as they are the enemy of democracy.
Furthermore we must do our utmost to stick to reason, good judgement, critical thinking and especially facts, even if they happen to be inconvenient ones, as they are the mortal enemy of so called "strongman" dictators like Putin and all those who want to be like him.
Most likely, accountability for Vladimir Putin won't come until the day someone, perhaps he himself, puts a bullet through his head.
Our system is better.
Sorry to be so blunt.
But goddamnit, Leonid Savin was only twenty years old, a year younger than my son whose face I see every time I look at that picture of the young sailor.
So yeah, it's kind of personal.
* After publishing this I learned that the phrase "Russian Warship, go fuck yourself" has been adopted by Russians as well. I learned this from the latest episode of the NPR program "This American Life", created, produced and hosted by Ira Glass. You can listen to the episode here. The portion in question is "Act Three: Alyona and Oleg" but I highly recommend listening to the whole episode.
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