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Monday
Last week the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his Orwellian titled “commissioner for children’s rights,” accusing them of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of 10,000 children from occupied areas of Ukraine. According to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Ukrainian officials are investigating more than 16,000 incidents of forced removal, which is a war crime. As I thought of the country losing its children, the image of the heartbroken sea captain in Moby Dick came to mind. Like Ukraine with Putin, Captain Gardiner finds himself pitted against a monomaniac.
The kidnapping of Ukraine’s children is part of Russia’s genocidal mission with regard to the country, a campaign that so far that has seen rape, torture, mass executions, and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. According to a Washington Post article that cites Kremlin sources, Maria Lvova-Belova, the “children’s rights” commissioner, “has worked with colleagues to hand dozens of children from Donetsk over to Russian families and coordinate the transfer of children in orphanages in Donetsk and Luhansk, in occupied eastern Ukraine, to the custody of Russian citizens.” Lvova-Belova, described as a “religiously devout mother of 22 children who openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities,” has adopted an orphaned teenage boy from Mariupol herself. In a self-revealing and chilling comment, she apparently has informed people that the boy “had to change his Ukrainian ways.”
In Moby Dick, the captain of the Rachel has lost his boy overboard and begs Ahab to help him search for him. Despite his pleas, which are seconded by the Pequod’s crew, Ahab stands “like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.” Speaking “in a voice that prolongingly molded every word,” he declares,
Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.
To capture the full tragedy of Gardiner’s loss, Melville has invoked the slaughter of the innocents episode from Matthew’s gospel (2:16-18):
Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more.”
Gardiner’s fruitless search is similarly pitiable:
But by [the ship’s] still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
Ahab’s mad and inhumane quest eventually brings destruction upon his crew, his ship, and himself. Putin’s mad quest may be on course to do the same. In the meantime, Ukraine weeps.