Day 581
Tough, cynical, hopeless
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you got the story wrong, correct it, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of getting it right the next time. On no account brood over your fuck-ups.
In hindsight, I and we today see a lot of the signs we missed [in 2014] and should have paid more attention to. Had we done so, we, being journalists, maybe the collective West, that is, our leaders in the West... Maybe there are things we could have done to have, um, stopped Russia's full-scale invasion…. — RFE/RL interview with Christopher Miller about his book, The War Came to Us.
Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. Journalism also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as — or at least analogous to — the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse is as undesirable in relation to bad journalism as it is in relation to bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. So, we’ll chalk up this part of Christopher’s interview to a confession. And move on.
Да, погиб, погиб… Но мы то ведь живы!
Да, взметнулась волна горя, но подержалась, подержалась и стала спадать, и кой-кто уже вернулся к своему столику и – сперва украдкой, а потом и в открытую – выпил водочки и закусил. В самом деле, не пропадать же куриным котлетам де-воляй? Чем мы поможем Михаилу Александровичу? Тем, что голодными останемся? Да ведь мы-то живы! — Page 25, The Master and Margarita by Mykhailo Bulgakov.
Practicing philosopher Volodymyr Pastukhov recalls the above passage in a pessimistic Telegram post.
The point is not even that the war will be long. The war will be different. Two years is the cut-off point beyond which the attitude of the “masses” towards the war begins to change. Death becomes a natural part of life, and life becomes just a part of war. People get used to both death and war as something natural. In place of those who cannot calmly eat their croissant, because somewhere people are suffering in the war, there will come those who, precisely for this reason, will gulp down two croissants and go about their business without blinking an eye. Do you remember from Bulgakov: “Don’t let the chicken cutlets go to waste? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? The fact that we will remain hungry? But we’re alive!” We are on the eve of a very different war than the one we saw during the first two years. Tough, cynical, hopeless. And there will be others, until the blood turns into the vine of some obscene world.
In other news, Ireland has announced that it will dole out EUR 1 billion to accomodate Ukrainian refugees. About 90,000 have sought shelter on our island so far.
According to UN data, as of August 2023, the largest share of registered refugees are in Russia - 1.27 million, including including those forcibly deported (21%), Poland - 16% (970,000 people), Germany - 18% (1.08 million), Czech Republic - 6% (about 360,000) and Great Britain - 3% (210,000). About 2.3 million Ukrainians have found refuge in other countries in Europe and elsewhere.