Tuesday
Bertolt Brecht is my go-to political poet for moments when the world spins out of control. Today’s poem applies to Russians who continue to support Vladimir Putin, especially those who should know better. Even with Putin’s propaganda, it takes a special kind of self-deception to ignore what is going on in Ukraine.
Similar self-deception is Brecht’s target in “War Has Been Given a Bad Name.” By 1945, when Brecht wrote the poem, reports of the concentration camps had gotten back to America. The exiled Brecht calls out those Germans who had enabled Hitler. The enablers, he writes, want to separate the war itself from “the extermination of certain peoples” and the “bloody manhunts.”
War Has Been Given a Bad Name
I am told that the best people have begun saying
How, from a oral point of view, the Second World War
Fell below the standard of the First. The Wehrmacht
Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected
The extermination of certain peoples. The Ruhr industrialists
Are said to regret the bloody manhunts
Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers. The intellectuals
So I heard, condemn industry’s demand for slave workers
Likewise their unfair treatment. Even the bishops
Dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short the feeling
Prevails in every quarter that the Nazis did the Fatherland.
A lamentably bad turn, and that war
While in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the
unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman
Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been
Discredited for some time to come.
I’m sure Russia’s oligarchs, who supported Putin in exchange for wealth, would just as soon that Russia was not committing atrocities in Ukraine. They might still own their yachts if that were the case. Perhaps the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who loves Putin’s gay bashing, would prefer that the war were not forcing him into ethical jiujitsu. (Two days ago, in a service for Russian soldiers, he announced, “We absolutely do not strive for war or to do anything that could harm others. But we have been raised throughout our history to love our fatherland. And we will be ready to protect it, as only Russians can defend their country.”) I’m sure announcers for Russian Television would prefer not to have to contend that the dead civilians in Bucha, Mariupol, and elsewhere are actually crisis actors. I’m sure that Russian diplomats would prefer not to have to defend the indefensible.
In other words, thanks to Putin’s Ukraine invasion, war, as Russians see it, has been given a bad name. How much better if Ukrainians had greeted Russian troops as liberators and cheered as they paraded down central Kyiv.