A Gogol reference recently showed up in Ukrainian war news so of course I jumped on it. It’s in connection with the secret service officials that Putin has had arrested. The reference appeared in a tweet by one Andrzej Koslowski, a Warsaw math professor who has been tracking developments. The FSB is Russia’s current iteration of the Soviet Union’s KGB:
As he always does, the phenomenal @christogrozev telephoned the FSB generals reported to have been placed under house arrest to see if they answer the phone. They didn’t pick up the receiver while others did. The arrests seem to be connected to literally billions that were spent by the FSB on recruiting […] in the Ukrainian government, military, security services, universities etc, to help with the coup that was meant to give Russia control of Ukraine. instead they bought “dead souls” and stole the money.
Dead Souls (1842) is about a conman (I’ve compared him to Trump here and here) who is buying dead serfs from Russian landowners. Apparently, landowners are taxed for the number of serfs they have working their land and, because the census is out of date, often they are taxed for people who are no longer alive. The scoundrel Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov figures that, once he buys a substantial number of these “dead souls,” he can take out an enormous loan against them and pocket the money.
If the Gogol reference is literal and Koslowski correct, then the people to whom FSB claimed to have paid to become Russian sympathizers were actually dead. While I don’t know if this is true, it’s consistent with other reports of Russian corruption we’ve heard—says, oligarchs siphoning off money from Russia’s military and other public trusts to purchase estates, yachts, foreign apartments, and other niceties.
In any events, the only Ukrainians cheering Russia’s advances would have to be dead souls since the live Ukrainians appears universally opposed.
All my thoughts these days keep returning to the horrors in Ukraine. Therefore, when I read today’s Gospel reading about Jesus foretelling his death in Jerusalem (Luke 13:31-35), I thought of Ukrainian cities becoming death traps for its civilian population. The passage also reminded me of a later passage in Luke that tells of Jesus weeping for the future of Jerusalem, whose death he also foresees. Finally, those tears led me to a Malcolm Guite sonnet that provides some comfort in these troubled times. You’ll see my thought process once you read the passages and poem.
The first Luke passage has certain Pharisees warning Jesus to flee and him replying, like Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that his place is in the capital city, regardless of the danger. Jesus becomes maternally tender as he thinks of his forthcoming death, and I love his sense of himself as a mother hen gathering her brood at a moment of danger:
Some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'”
The second passage has Jesus weeping over the future of the city. Rome, of course, would one day surround and destroy Jerusalem, just as the Russians are attempting to surround and subdue Kyiv:
As Jesus approached Jerusalem and saw the city, He wept over it and said, “If only you had known on this day what would bring you peace! But now it is hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will barricade you and surround you and hem you in on every side.”
Jesus’s tears catch Guite’s attention. Again we see a comparison of him to a careful mother calling her children. “Fatigued compassion” is something we will have to watch out for in our own case since Ukraine’s nightmares could “stalk the light of day” for months:
Jesus Wept By Malcolm Guite
Jesus comes near and he beholds the city And looks on us with tears in his eyes, And wells of mercy, streams of love and pity Flow from the fountain whence all things arise. He loved us into life and longs to gather And meet with his beloved face to face How often has he called, a careful mother, And wept for our refusals of his grace, Wept for a world that, weary with its weeping, Benumbed and stumbling, turns the other way, Fatigued compassion is already sleeping Whilst her worst nightmares stalk the light of day. But we might waken yet, and face those fears, If we could see ourselves through Jesus’ tears.
It’s been such a grim week that I feel the need to end it with some humor. I owe today’s subject to a couple of tweets referencing Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl.
I’m not up on all of social media’s forms so I need a little help in deciphering the tweets. First, however, here are Howl’s famous opening lines, in which the poet announces that the best minds of his generation are poets, jazz musicians, drug addicts, homosexuals, and other outcasts, who stand in stark contrast with what the Beats saw as America’s mindless conformity.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…
Jeet Heer and Molly Jong-Fast see today’s best minds as social media junkies fixated on the debates that whirl constantly on twitter, Instagram, ticktock, substack (independent media platforms), and other avenues of communication. As with so much of the internet, social media is both a boon and a curse. On the one hand, it allows kindred souls to connect with each other, debating ideas and sharing important information. But of course, it can also (like drugs) pull people into dark holes where they spend all their waking hours while losing any sense of reality. Heer and Jong-Fast are satirizing the latter, including themselves, in their Ginsberg allusion:
Heer wrote,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by debate club, starving hysterical naked, cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, dragging themselves through my twitter feed at dawn looking for an angry fix,
“Angry fix” is sadly accurate since, if you want to remain perpetually angry, twitter is a good place to go. For her part, Jong-Fast riffs off of Heer’s tweet:
I saw the best minds of my generation engaged in the discourse, starving, hysterical naked, cowering in substacks, tweets, fleets, Instagram stories, ticktocks.
Yes, at times social media sounds like an endless howl.
I’ve been following the twitter feed of retired Major Mack Ryan, who has been closely covering the war in Ukraine, and he recently quoted from a John Steinbeck novel that I read in high school and that could well become relevant. The Moon Is Down is about Germany’s occupation of Norway during World War II, and if Russia in fact manages to conquer Ukraine—no sure thing—then it will face a comparable insurgency. In fact, the Russian conquerors would probably fare even worse than the Germans did since the Ukrainians are better armed and have more outside support.
I quote an extended passage to capture the hell individual Russian soldiers can expect:
Now it was that the conqueror was surrounded, the men of the battalion alone among silent enemies, and no man might relax his guard for even a moment. If he did, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he went alone to a woman, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he drank, he disappeared. The men of the battalion could sing only together, could dance only together, and dancing gradually stopped and the singing expressed a longing for home. Their talk was of friends and relatives who loved them and their longings were for warmth and love, because a man can be a soldier for only so many hours a day and for only so many months in a year, and then he wants to be a man again, wants girls and drinks and music and laughter and ease, and when these are cut off, they become irresistibly desirable.
And the men thought always of home. The men of the battalion came to detest the place they had conquered, and they were curt with the people and the people were curt with them, and gradually a little fear began to grow in the conquerors, a fear that it would never be over, that they could never relax and go home, a fear that one day they would crack and be hunted through the mountains like rabbits, for the conquered never relaxed their hatred. The patrols, seeing lights, hearing laughter, would be drawn as to a fire, and when they came near, the laughter stopped, the warmth went out, and the people were cold and obedient. And the soldiers, smelling warm food from the little restaurants, went in and ordered the warm food and found that it was oversalted or overpeppered.
Then the soldiers read the news from home and from the other conquered countries, and the news was always good, and for a while they believed it, and then after a while they did not believe it anymore. And every man carried in his heart the terror. “If home crumbled, they would not tell us, and then it would be too late. These people will not spare us. They will kill us all.” They remembered stories of their men retreating through Belgium and retreating out of Russia. And the more literate remembered the frantic, tragic retreat from Moscow, when every peasant’s pitchfork tasted blood and the snow was rotten with bodies.
And they knew when they cracked, or relaxed, or slept too long, it would be the same here, and their sleep was restless and their days were nervous. They asked questions their officers could not answer because they did not know. They were not told, either. They did not believe the reports from home, either.
Thus it came about that the conquerors grew afraid of the conquered and their nerves wore thin and they shot at shadows in the night. The cold, sullen silence was with them always.
By shelling civilian targets, the Russians are hoping to grind the Ukrainians down, but Steinbeck points out that fear works both ways and that those whose homes have been invaded have the long-run advantage. As Ryan observes after quoting this last paragraph, “The Russians must grow very afraid of Ukrainians.”
I had a sense of déjà vu while reading a recent Washington Post article about challenges currently being faced by the city zoo in Kyiv, Ukraine. That’s because I’ve read Haruki Murakami’s account of zoo animals under fire in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Apparently the Feldman Ecopark zoo is near a military installation and also directly in the path of the invading Russian army. Their facilities have already been damaged, and the zoo has reported some of the animals have been injured and some killed. The smaller animals are being placed in makeshift shelters, including a bird enclosure and an unfinished aquarium.
The larger animals, however, pose a special problem. Horace the African elephant is being given sedatives to deal with the shelling, but as the zoo director points out, the elephants and giraffes “have no space to hide or run. Once they’re out of the zoo, they have fewer options than any human. It’s going to be the streets with tanks.”
Murakami’s novel describes the final days of the Japanese occupation of Hsin-Ching, Manchuria. As he awaits his troops’ inevitable defeat at the hands of the advancing Soviet army—let’s just say “Russian army” to emphasize the Ukraine parallel—the Japanese lieutenant is told to kill all the animals in the zoo the Japanese have set up. He’s ordered to use poison but there’s not enough poison to kill a horse, much less the entire menagerie. We see him wrestling with what to do:
If possible, I’d rather not kill any animals, the lieutenant told himself, in all honesty. But the zoo was running out of things to feed them, and most of the animals (especially the big ones) were already suffering from chronic starvation. Things could only get worse—or at least they were not going to get any better. Shooting might even be easier for the animals themselves—a quick, clean death. And if starving animals were to escape to the city streets during intense fighting or air strikes, a disaster would be unavoidable.
Besides, if he doesn’t follow the order to kill the animals, he might face court martial. This despite doubts “whether there would even be any courts martial at this late stage of the war.” In the end, however, he decides that orders are orders: “So as long as the army continued to exist, its order had to be carried out.”
I won’t share the grisly passages of the animals being shot (wolves, lions, tigers, bears, leopards), just the soldiers’ reactions.
When the soldiers finally succeeded in extinguishing all signs of life in the bears, they were so exhausted they were ready to collapse on the spot….In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers seemed to be trying to mask their sense of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent shells were scattered about their feet like so many cigarette butts. The ears still rang with the crackling of their rifles.The young soldier who would be beaten to death by a Soviet soldier seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in succession, averting his gaze from the bears’ corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back the nausea that had worked its way up to his throat.
As in the Kyiv zoo, the elephants pose a special problem. One thinks of George Orwell’s famous essay “Shooting an Elephant” in the following passage:
In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became obvious that the beasts were simply too large, that the soldiers’ rifles looked like silly toys in their presence. The lieutenant thought it over for a while and decided to leave the elephants alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem—or perhaps it does not seem so strange—they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.
The elephant problem is solved by the hungry Chinese workers, who kill the elephants for food. In fact, they’re disappointed that they haven’t been able to do the same with all the animals. Then, a few days later, the Soviets swarm in and either kill or capture all the Japanese.
Animals may seem incidental in a war that is killing untold numbers of civilians, but their plight further dramatizes how the innocent are always victimized by the insanity of war.
Ilya Kaminsky, the Ukrainian-American poet whose poem “We Lived Happily During the War” I shared last week tweeted four days ago that a friend in Kyev was translating Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s poem “City,” even as the city was under bombardment. While the choice of the poem didn’t at first make sense to me, I put it in dialogue with an Adrienne Rich poem and now think I’ve figured out why the poet turned to it.
Cavafy’s poem touches on a choice that many Ukrainians are agonizing over at the moment: do I stay or do I leave? If “City” didn’t at first seem applicable to Ukraine’s current situation, however, it’s because the poem essentially makes the point that leaving for a better life will do you no good if you remain the same person. It’s a theme graphically explored by Milton in his Paradise Lost description of Satan that I wrote about yesterday:
…from the bottom stir The Hell within him, for within him Hell He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place…
Here’s the poem, which has been translated by Edmund Keeley:
City
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
While the poem is grim, I hear something else in it when I think of the Ukrainian translator turning to it. Perhaps the city being attacked and the people being attacked reminds him or her—let’s say her—just how precious she finds both city and life. Perhaps she considers staying because she is reconnecting with a heart that she realizes she has buried. The prospect of death can do that.
Comparing the poem with Rich’s makes clear how much one has a choice, even in the most adverse of circumstances. Here’s Rich’s poem:
Prospective Immigrants: Please Note
Either you will go through this door or you will not go through.
If you go through there is always the risk of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen.
If you do not go through it is possible to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes to hold your position to die bravely
but much will blind you, much will evade you, at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
Unlike Cavafy’s poem, Rich’s deals specifically with people leaving the country under external duress. Somewhat like Robert Frost in “The Road Not Taken,” Rich notes that it’s not clear which decision is better: each has a cost. One might think that, if one’s life is threatened, the choice is automatic, but Rich notes that this is not so:
If you do not go through it is possible to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes to hold your position to die bravely
And in fact, I’ve seen interviews with Ukrainian women choosing to stay (fighting-age men do not have a choice). They may realize that, even in the face of death, they can live worthily, maintain their attitudes, hold their positions—and if they must die, die bravely. If, before the invasion, they felt they were wasting their lives, this threat to their independence has restored perspective. Recalling that freedom is worth fighting for and even dying for can help people rediscover a purpose to their lives.
Further note: Just yesterday Kaminsky tweeted again that a friend—perhaps the same one—was translating Seamus Heaney’s poem “Casualty,” which is about 13 Northern Irish Catholics who were shot in a 1972 protest march. Kaminsky wrote,
A friend in besieged city of Kyev is translating Seamus Heaney right now, while there are explosions outside: “It was a day of cold raw silence, wind-blown” And that is how it is this afternoon.
The entire stanza is only too relevant as it describes the coffins emerging from a church and of the mourners bonding “like brothers in a ring.” Here it is:
It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown surplice and soutane: Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water. The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring.
My Dante discussion group, which is now discussing Milton’s Paradise Lost, has slowed to a crawl since we’ve had so much to say about the first four books. As we read the passage where Satan, in the form of a cormorant, gazes from his tree hiding place at Adam and Eve, we couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin eyeing Ukraine. “Make sure you write about this in your next blog,” my friends counseled me.
While Ukraine is not the Garden of Eden, it is a democracy, however imperfect. I subscribe to the theory that, as such, it poses an existential threat to the autocracies around it, especially Russia and Belorussia. After all, if word gets out that one of the former Soviet republics is thriving after having slipped the grasp of Russia kleptocrats and their puppets, then the people in other republics (Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia itself) might start getting ideas. Therefore, Putin must pull Ukraine back into the fold, even if that means destroying it utterly.
Satan has similar plans for Adam and Eve. When he first looks down at them, he is struck dumb by their beauty. But because he has forfeited Paradise himself, he is tortured by their happiness and so determines that they will share his misery. First, his envy:
O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold, Into our room of bliss thus high advanced Creatures of other mold, earth-born perhaps, Not Spirits, yet to heav’nly Spirits bright Little inferior; whom my thoughts pursue With wonder, and could love, so lively shines In them divine resemblance, and such grace The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured.
Then, almost like a cartoon villain, he rubs his hands together and promises to bring hell down on their heads. Imagine Putin similarly chuckling when he gave his own troops the order to advance, little envisioning the resistance they would encounter:
Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh Your change approaches, when all these delights Will vanish and deliver ye to woe, More woe, the more your taste is now of joy; Happy, but for so happy, ill secured Long to continue…
Satan is no more impressed with Eden’s defenses than Putin was with Ukraine’s, describing Eden as “ill fenced”:
[A]nd this high seat your Heav’n Ill fenced for Heav’n to keep out such a foe As now is entered…
Then, sounding like Putin insisting that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, Satan promises a similar friendship with Adam and Eve. Note his gloating sarcasm:
…League with you I seek, And mutual amity so straight, so close, That I with you must dwell, or you with me Henceforth; my dwelling haply may not please Like this fair Paradise, your sense, yet such Accept your Maker’s work; he gave it me, Which I as freely give; Hell shall unfold, To entertain you two, her widest Gates. …[T]here will be room, Not like these narrow limits, to receive Your numerous offspring…
For Ukraine, this is like being invited to join the wide expanses of autocratic Russia rather than settle for its (relatively tiny) democracy. In his “invitation,” Satan uses a rationale very much like Putin’s. Putin is eager to restore the vast Russia of the Soviets or the czars, in which imperium Ukraine (especially Kyif and Odessa) has always had a special place. Satan, meanwhile, blames his butchering on the demands of empire. Milton calls this “the tyrant’s plea”: to excuse his actions, Satan must say he’s carrying out his leadership responsibilities. He claims he will hate inflicting misery on the pair but must do so because it’s his duty to enlarge his kingdom, thereby evading personal responsibility:
[Y]et public reason just, Honor and empire with revenge enlarg’d, By conquering this new world, compels me now To do what else though damned I should abhor.
So spake the fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.
Satan’s next move is to figure out which animal he will inhabit in order to start corrupting the pair. Although he will eventually choose a snake, at first he considers lions and tigers, which was Putin’s choice. After all, why use snake-like subtlety when you (or so Putin thought) can just reach out and grab your prey by force?
A Lion now he stalks with fiery glare, Then as a Tyger, who by chance hath spied In some purlieu two gentle Fawns at play, Strait couches close, then rising changes oft His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground Whence rushing he might surest seize them both Gripped in each paw…
Satan’s tigerish ways will win in the short run but lose in the long. That’s because, with Jesus’s resurrection and the promised second coming, Sin and Death will be no more. Likewise, while Ukraine may yet prevail, it will suffer much suffering and heartbreak before the forces of democracy win out.
Lent is a time when, taking my cue from poet priest Malcolm Guite, I immerse myself in an extended work of poetry. Guite says that Lent is a good time for poetry since, through poems, we can arrive at “clarification of who we are, how we pray, how we journey through our lives with God and how he comes to journey with us.” Guite draws on Seamus Heaney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to make his point:
Lent is a time set aside to re-orient ourselves, to clarify our minds, to slow down, recover from distraction, to focus on the values of God’s Kingdom and on the value he has set on us and on our neighbours. There are a number of distinctive ways in which poetry can help us do that…
Heaney spoke of poetry offering a glimpse and a clarification, here is how an earlier poet Coleridge, put it, when he was writing about what he and Wordsworth were hoping to offer through their poetry, which was
“awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”
In the past, I have spent various Lents reading the collected poetry of George Herbert, John Milton’s Paradise Regained, the religious poems of T. S. Eliot, and Dante’s Paradiso. This year I am immersing myself in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
I’ve just been introduced to Red Cross Knight, whom Spenser, purposely using an archaic form of English to sound like Chaucer from 200 years earlier, describes as follows:
And on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore, The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead as living ever him ador’d: Upon his shield the like was also scor’d, For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had: Right faithfull true he was in deede and word, But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad; Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.
Like Dante, Red Cross (along the Lady Una, who stands for the one true Church and whose cause he has taken up) finds himself lost in a dark wood and will soon be battling the monster Error:
They cannot finde that path, which first was showne, But wander too and fro in wayes unknowne, Furthest from end then, when they neerest weene, That makes them doubt their wits be not their owne: So many pathes, so many turnings seene That which of them to take, in diverse doubt they been.
The tangled wood of theology and disputed dogma is indeed daunting, so that even the most well-intentioned souls can find themselves lost. I’ll report from time to time on how Spenser’s various adventurers handle it. Stay tuned.
As commentators reflect upon Russia’s Ukraine invasion, a number of them—both Russians and non-Russians—say they should have realized the threat Vladimir Putin posed to the world years ago. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, but it’s also true that experts like former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul have been pointing out Putin’s evil for decades. In any event, when I heard these observations, a passage from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings came to mind.
It occurs during Elrond’s council in Rivendell as the “fellowship of the ring” comes together. The elf lord informs the gathering that, in the early days, men and elves failed to recognize the danger that Sauron posed:
Then all listened while Elrond in his clear voice spoke of Sauron and the Rings of Power, and their forging in the Second Age of the world long ago. A part of his tale was known to some there, but the full tale to none, and many eyes were turned to Elrond in fear and wonder as he told of the Elven-smiths of Eregion and their friendship with Moria, and their eagerness for knowledge, by which Sauron ensnared them. For in that time he was not yet evil to behold, and they received his aid and grew mighty in craft, whereas he learned all their secrets, and betrayed them, and forged secretly in the Mountain of Fire the One Ring to be their master.
In our case, perhaps it was Europe’s eagerness for Russian oil and natural gas that ensnared them. Or his claim that, when he was leveling Chechen cities, he was actually leveling Muslim terrorists. In any event many ignored the warning signs. Fortunately for the elves, there was a Michael McFaul in their ranks:
But [elf lord] Celebrimbor was aware of him, and hid the Three [rings of power] which he had made…
There are two stages in the battle against Sauron. In the first, there is “the last Alliance of Elves and Men,” which temporarily defeats Sauron and seizes the ring of power. But instead of throwing it into “Orodruin’s fire” (Mount Doom) then and there, King Isildur takes it for himself, which gives Sauron a chance to come back. Some blame Putin’s rise on NATO’s expansion following the collapse of the Soviet Union, regarding it (similar to Isildur) as a quick grab for power.
My own thoughts on the subject, however, are that Sauron was going to Sauron, regardless of what America and western Europe did. If those border countries applied for NATO membership, it was because they knew only too well Russia’s long history of territorial expansion. There’s a reason why even Sweden and Finland are now considering NATO membership.
Whatever the cause of Sauron’s rise, it takes Frodo, with his western and Christian values, to take the tyrant down a second time—just as western democracies must come together in their own fellowship to stop Putin. The outcome is still in doubt and, in the meantime, Russian forces are (for those of you who know your Tolkien) trying to turn Minas Ithil into Minas Morgul.
I’m referring here to the once thriving Gondorian city that Sauron’s minions transform into a place of desolation and evil. Faramir, serving as a guide for Frodo and Sam, describes what happened to the city once it fell under enemy control:
As you know, that city was once a strong place, proud and fair, Minas Ithil, the twin sister of our own city. But it was taken by fell men whom the Enemy in his first strength had dominated, and who wandered homeless and masterless after his fall. It is said that their lords were men of Númenor who had fallen into dark wickedness; to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they were become, terrible and evil. After his going they took Minas Ithil and dwelt there, and they filled it, and all the valley about, with decay: it seemed empty and was not so, for a shapeless fear lived within the ruined walls.
Later Frodo and Sam get a view of the city, which reminds me of some of the bombed-out apartment complexes we are seeing in Ukraine:
A long-tilted valley, a deep gulf of shadow, ran back far into the mountains. Upon the further side, some way within the valley’s arms high on a rocky seat upon the black knees of the Ephel Dúath, stood the walls and tower of Minas Morgul. All was dark about it, earth and sky, but it was lit with light. Not the imprisoned moonlight welling through the marble walls of Minas Ithil long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and radiant in the hollow of the hills. Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing. In the walls and tower windows showed, like countless black holes looking inward into emptiness…
The resemblance between Putin and Sauron, incidentally, is not entirely accidental since Tolkien had Hitler and Stalin in mind when he was composing his trilogy while Putin models himself on both men. In fact, the attack on Ukraine resembles both Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Stalin’s invasion of Finland.
We don’t know how our story will end. In the novel, however, we know that Sauron will eventually make his way to the Shire if he isn’t stopped earlier.
