realities of Putin's War Against Ukraine

BRIGHT SATURDAY: Re-SHARING: "Language": Fascinating Article connected to the many varied emotions & realities of Putin's War Against Ukraine: to Culture and NEW: Russian/Ukrainian/English Terms & Words

  Time:   Sat, 30 Apr 2022     

  From: Dan Everiss <oregdan@hotmail.com>

Yes, TRULY HE IS RISEN!

“LIFE EQAUALS CHANGE”, and thus, LANGUAGE CHANGES AS LIFE DOES….and that applies to ALL LANGUAGES EVERYWHERE.

FINALLY, I read this! THANKS FOR IT!

It is quite interesting, though I am not sure who to share it with-as how many in these very troubled and disturbing days are interested in linguistics: Russian-Ukrainian-English etc. -as influenced by current war and past historic events, etc. etc.

But  this article reveals  a lot about the depth of what is going on over there, and the degree of deep justified hatreds of the Ukrainians  against the, ONCE AGAIN!... invading/pillaging/murderous/conquering   “Russians”, now sent on them by KGB hangover, dictator for life, Vlad Putin.

I just now glimpsed a few minutes at the video of Putin (perfunctinaly,  for appearances, obviously) attending Paschal services in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, and he looked…not happy, very nervous, and as if he was physically sick and not comfortable being there- and he was very extra mechanical  each time he made the customary sign of the cross.

Could it be, that he was beginning to realize that he, a  blood-soaked mass murderer, did not belong in any church, EVER, and least of all, at Pascha?..and/or perhaps, that he  was afraid that someone, at any moment,  in the church would attempt an assasination on him?

We live now in very uncertain and dangerous and evil times!

Some predict that by May 9,-(the BIG  communist WWII Victory Over Nazi Germany Day CELEBRATION In Red SQUARE, MOSCOW)  if…. Putin’s army does not achieve, or appear to achieve… SOME!.. real or imaginary or exaggerated “victory in Ukraine”, BY THAT MAGIC DATE…. that then, he WILL play his final card-send nuclear missiles on….whom-ever.

He really has a similar fatalistic power-mad mindset as did Adolf Hitler, who when he was in his last days, in his underground bunker in Berlin, one of his generals is reported to have said to him: “My Furher, the German people are suffering terribly!”..to which Hitler coldly responded: “Good! they deserve to suffer!. they were never worthy of me!”

And alas, who in this world, is ‘worthy of Vlad Putin’?or his like?

Only God Himself knows exactly how many human lives, over his life time, that he has caused to suffer and die….rivers of blood.

Anyway: CHRIST IS RISEN! And DEATH IS NO MORE!  ALLELUIA!

Daniel in the thicket

Credit...CreditPhoto illustration by Pablo Delcan

By Timothy Snyder

• April 22, 2022

The City Council of Mariupol, Ukraine, was trying to make a point about mass death. Their city had been hit hardest by the Russian invasion, and thousands of corpses lay amid the rubble after weeks of urban warfare. After the revelation of Russian atrocities in Bucha and other cities in northern Ukraine, the elected representatives of the port city wished to remind the world that the scale of killing in the south was still higher. In dry and sober language, they described the fates of Mariupol residents. Occasionally, though, emotion slipped through: In passing, the council members referred to the Russian perpetrators by a term of condemnation that every Ukrainian knows, though it is not yet in the dictionaries and cannot (yet) be said in English: “рашизм.”

As Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv region, and photographs of the corpses of murdered civilians appeared in media, Ukrainians expressed their horror and condemnation with this same word. As I read about Irpin, about Bucha, about Trostyanets, of the bodies crushed by tanks, of the bicyclists shot on the street, of the desecrated corpses, there it was, “рашизм,” again and again, in comments sections, in social media, even in the official pronouncements of the Ukrainian state. As Russia renews its attempt to destroy the Ukrainian state with its Easter offensive in the Donbas, Ukrainians will keep using this new word. 

Grasping its meaning requires crossing differences in alphabet and pronunciation, thinking our way into the experience of a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire. “Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.” The aggressor in this war keeps trying to push back toward a past as it never happened, toward nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II. But Russian myths of empire cannot contain the imagination of the Ukrainian victims of a new war. National identity is about living people, and the values and the futures they imagine and choose. A nation exists insofar as it makes new things, and a national language lives by making new words.

The new word “рашизм” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview. Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade. Undistracted by Putin’s operational deployment of genocide talk,they have seen fascist practices in Russia: the cults of the leader and of the dead, the corporatist state, the mythical past, the censorship, the conspiracy theories, the centralized propaganda and now the war of destruction. Even as we rightly debate how applicable the term is to Western figures and parties, we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism’s revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation.

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The origins of the word “pашизм” give us a sense of how Ukrainians differ from both Russians and Americans. A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations. I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention. Once, while speaking Ukrainian on television, I stopped for a moment to quote a few words of poetry in Russian, a switch that was an effort for me. But Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.

“Pашизм” is a word built up from the inside, from several languages, as a complex of puns and references that reveal a bilingual society thinking out its predicament and communicating to itself. Its emergence demonstrates how a code-switching people can enrich language while making a horrific war more intelligible to themselves. Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them. 

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A billboard in Kyiv in March calling for Russian soldiers not to become murderers.Credit...Yuliia Ovsyannikova/Ukrinform, via Getty Images

Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic, and so pausing upon “рашизм” in this, its original form, will help with the mental calisthenics required to apprehend things the way the Ukrainians do. Seeing those six characters, you might be tempted to begin by making them Latin ones. But languages work together in a complex way, especially in the minds of people who speak more than one of them natively. As Rimbaud and the Hasidim (who came from Ukraine) knew, each letter has magic. We have to go slowly.

Those six Cyrillic letters contain references to Italian, Russian and English, all of which a mechanical, letter-by-letter transliteration would block. The best (if imperfect) way I have found to render “рашизм” from Ukrainian into English is “ruscism” — though not what the standard protocol of transliteration would suggest, this gestures at both the word’s origins and its meaning. When we see “ruscism” we might guess this word has to do with Russia (“rus”), with politics (“ism”) and with the extreme right (“ascism”) — as, indeed, it does. A simple way to think about it is as a conglomerate of the “r” from “Russia” and the “ascism” from “fascism”: Russian fascism. This is barely the beginning of the story, but it starts us down the path toward the linguistic playfulness that makes the word possible, and toward the accumulation of meaning drawn from each sound.

I have had to spell “рашизм” as “ruscism” in English because we need “rus,” with a “u,” to see the reference to Russia. In losing the original Ukrainian “a,” though, we weaken a multilayered reference — because the “a” in “рашизм,” conveniently, allows the Ukrainian word to associate Russia and fascism in a way English cannot.

But wait: How can the “ra” (written “pa” in Cyrillic) suggest Russia in Ukrainian? You might guess that “Russia” in Ukrainian also has an “a” in the first syllable, but it does not. It’s spelled with an “o”: Росія. You might remember that Ukrainians also know Russian, and guess that perhaps the word for “Russia” in Russianis spelled with an “a.” It’s not: In Russian, too, the word has an “o” as its first vowel. But the guess puts us on the right track. We are about to see that Ukrainians can play with Russian in ways that Russians cannot — that a Ukrainian word can contain within it a reference to Russia that Russians themselves would never catch.

If you don’t know either language, you might think that Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. They are pretty close — much as, say, Spanish and Italian are. If you know one, you have a tremendous advantage in learning the other. But you do still have to learn it. Russian grammar is similar to Ukrainian — perhaps a tad closer than, say, Ukrainian and Polish — but the semantics are not that close. From a Russian perspective, the false friends are legion. There is an elegant four-syllable Ukrainian word that simply means “soon” or “without delay,” but to a Russian it sounds like “not behind the bar.” The Ukrainian word for “cat” sounds like the Russian for “whale,” while the Ukrainian for “female cats” sounds like Russian for “intestines.”

Russians do not understand Ukrainian, because they have not learned it. Ukrainians do understand Russian, because they havelearned it. This fact has battlefield implications. Ukrainian soldiers often speak Russian, though they are instructed to use Ukrainian to spot infiltrators and spies. This is a drastic example of a general practice of code-switching. President Volodymyr Zelensky generally used Russian as a comedian and almost always uses Ukrainian as a politician — except for when he might switch, midspeech, to using Russian to address Russians, in the full knowledge that Ukrainians will follow along. 

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressing the United Nations Security Council via video link on April 5.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

To switch back and forth between kindred languages requires a lively knowledge of the differences between them. One difference between Ukrainian and Russian has to do with that “ah” sound, which appears more often in Russian. In both languages, the vowel “a” consistently generates this sound. In Russian, though, a written “o” can do it, too. A salient example is the Russian word for “liberation” — “освобождение.” This is transliterated the way it looks, as “osvobozhdenie,” but sounds more like “asvobazhdenie,” with each “a” pronounced as an “ah.” To a Ukrainian ear, this is a very Russian word. The Ukrainian counterpart — визволення, vyzvolennia — sounds completely different (though it is almost identical to the Polish wyzwolenie).

The Russian освобождение is also laden with decades of Soviet usage, since it was applied relentlessly to describe every action of the Red Army, including ones where the people in question did not believe that they were being “liberated,” as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. This is the word now used by Russians to describe their invasion of Ukraine, and it carries with it decades of mendacious use. To Ukrainians it can sound both absurd and sinister; when Russians use it earnestly, Ukrainians might consider it a sign of “zombification,” зомбування, a word they use rather a lot. One Ukrainian explanation for the use of the letter Z by official Russia as the symbol of the invasion is that “the other half of the swastika was stolen in the warehouse,” a joke about the logistics of the Russian Army — but personally, the Z makes me think of “zombie.”