Black Sun: A Letter to a Brother

The most moving (perhaps because the most intimate) song that I've heard about the war.

From Valery Panyushkin, a Russian writer, posted on YouTube Thursday. It's beautiful and heartbreaking, and I very much regret that so little of its power comes through without the rhyme and meter of the language.

Still, here is a highly imperfect translation (adapted from one by Arik Kruglyak). Even if it doesn't work for you, please forward the YouTube link to any Russian speakers you know; I hope they were as affected by it as I was.

Will this letter some day arrive
To Kiev from Moscow?
Will the brother's letter reach his brother
Or at least his widow?
How are you in the basement? How are you, my dear?
They lit the black sun above us and they call the light darkness.

Listen to me, little brother.
Listen to what I will say.
I found your teddy-bear in the toys,
I hugged it and I'm just sitting like that.
I walked outside, I shouted, "no to war!"
But some brawny guys caught me and beat me up.
How are you in the basement? Can you see this:
They lit the black sun above us and they call the darkness light.

Do you ever get back up to the apartment?
Do you have clean underwear?
Say hello to your wife Irina
And Uncle Ilya.
How is your little troublemaker Lyonya?
How is your son doing?
Probably in the territorial defense forces,
If he is still alive.
And if ever he rises from this sea of fire,
Embrace him,
Embrace him,
Embrace him for me.
How are you in the basement? Can you see this:
They lit the black sun above us and they call the darkness light.

The future will not be,
Not the slightest hope exists.
Some people came to our house
To draw on the doors a "Z."
It remains to be wounded or killed,
An exile or imprisoned.
They reached the end of the alphabet
And beyond there is no language.

I will go open the door for them.
Consider the door unlocked.
I'll be a hero for a moment
And then the darkness will fall

How are you in the basement? Can you see this:
They lit the black sun above us and they call the darkness light.
How are you in the basement? How are you, my dear?
They lit the black sun above us and they call the light darkness.

Comments

[Jerry B.]

If these songs could win a war, Russia would have lost.

[DaivdBehar]

Enough of protecting Putin, lawyer scumbags.

[DaivdBehar]

Alina Kabaeva needs to be moved to Kyiv, along with the 4 children of Putin. Expel her from Switzerland and hand her and her family over to the Ukrainian secret police.

[Cal Cetín]

So, is the establishment going to promote war with Russia, or is all this promotion of Ukraine simply teasing – getting them excited up to the point of war, but not quite getting there?

(I wouldn’t call Volokh establishment because he has wrongthink on so many issues, but with the war he’s agreeing with the establishment.)

[Sebastian Cremmington]

Republicans are projecting—Bush invaded Iraq in order to keep 9/11 going and win re-election. Now Obama kept Gates on as DefSec because he didn’t want his domestic agenda to be undermined by a war he believed Republicans wanted to perpetuate. Republicans also make a big deal about Libya because of shame over Iraq and Afghanistan but Libya wasn’t a big deal and more in line with Yemen and Syria and Clinton’s use of military force. Only Bush invaded a country for political purposes.

[Cal Cetín]

Sure, Republicans are bad, they only look good in comparison to their competition.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

I guess Democrats deserve everything they are getting for cozying up the Liz Cheney and rehabilitating George W Bush.

One of the strange dynamics at play with this war is that Democrats’ opinion of Russia is more negative than Republicans’…and Republicans’ opinion of Ukraine is more negative than Democrats’.

What’s funny is Glenn Reynolds was just linked to by Volokh and The Federalist used a GR opinion piece as proof that the media carried Robby Mook’s water in 2016 as part of SpyGate/RussiaGate. So the Federalist had to characterize GR as mainstream media to further their narrative. But I saw that during the Hillary Benghazi/email scandal in 2015 when Chaffetz said that Russia most likely hacked her private server and then in 2016 when Russia came up during the campaign they stopped talking about Russia hacking emails. I guess Chaffetz changed his tune because that would have meant Russia was helping Trump?!? It’s hard to keep all of this straight!?!

[Cal Cetín]

I lost the thread of your discussion, could you draw me a diagram like Glenn Beck.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

That was my point. 😉

[Michael P]

It’s all on this corkboard over here, with strings showing the connections between pieces of evidence. There area lot of them, because EVERYTHING is connected to EVERYTHING ELSE!

[Sebastian Cremmington]

Except the Federalist linked to GR and took him out of context to further their phony narrative. Remember when you thought George W Bush was the greatest president in history?? U r a nitwit. 😉

[Eugene Volokh]

Or maybe it’s human beings empathizing with, and admiring, other human beings who by all accounts are defending themselves with great courage and against terrible odds.

Sometimes that empathy leads to calls for providing various kinds of help (arms, sanctions, etc.), short of actually entering into the war. Sometimes (though as best I can tell quite rarely among people in the U.S.) it leads to calls for outright participation in the war (e.g., by shooting down Russian planes). And sometimes it leads to sharing words that seem to capture something telling or moving about the situation.

I see no reason to be silent about what is going on, even if I think that some people’s reactions to the war would take things dangerously far.

[Cal Cetín]

It’s a fluid situation. “Aid short of war” can become war.

The media really ought to apply the equivalent of a *cold shower* to this war enthusiasm, showing the possible consequences – nukes, U. S. budget already in crisis, economy in general, fighting for a country we left out of NATO even in a time of that outfit’s expansion…

It’s not as if we always rush in to stop Russian or other aggression. Hungary 1848-49, Hungary 1956, for instance. We were accused of being teases in 1956 with the Hungarians…whipping up their enthusiasm for resistance but not actually helping lest a nukefest begin.

And think of all the wars of liberation we’ve passed up on – North Korea, Burma, etc. Not because we love these countries, or were bamboozled by their propaganda, but because we don’t want a land war in Asia or a nukefest.

Now, why does the establishment push this particular war? I don’t know, but I, personally, think we can rule out disinterested benevolence.

You’re not among the woke, but for those who *are* woke, consider the Eritrean attack on Ethiopia some years back. Aggression according to an international commission, but no clamor for intervention. Let the woke explain the difference.

We can sympathize *from a distance* as long as we focus on keeping our distance – and so long as establishment sources dampen expectations for intervention among the U. S. and Ukrainian populations. But that’s not the emphasis of the coverage or, with respect, of the war songs you posted.

[Eugene Volokh]

Dude, I post songs about the war because I think they’re interesting / beautiful / potentially enlightening about some facet of the conflict. No-one is going to go to war over them. No-one is even going to be more sympathetic to the Ukrainians than they are just from seeing the news. Not everything is about your hobby-horse.

[Cal Cetín]

I must take exception to “hobby horse” and even to “dude,” rhetoric which makes you sound like you’re one of the regular commenters (not a compliment).

I happen to have an interest in keeping clear of this war – though I’m not nearly as obsessive about it as one might think given the stakes. While I keep promising myself to quit posting on social media where it can’t do much good, it keeps pulling me back in. But to be fair, I have quite a variety of hobby horses and haven’t posted on Ukraine every time you do a song.

One outlet, or one blog, won’t make much difference, sure. But in the context of media saturation with Ukraine, with comparatively little attention to the downside of war – a sober-minded blog (which this one *often* is), without even giving up the songs, could from time to time administer a few cold showers.

There was a blog entry, for instance, about the U. S. taking on Russian POWs. I didn’t see much analysis of how this might trigger certain obligations under the Geneva Conventions (I learned about *that* from other commenters). Not really a cold shower, more like ratcheting up involvement – again, teasing. I’d be interested in taking in some Russians, *after* we get an official legal opinion on what that entails.

Now I got a Google ad about not believing Kremlin propaganda. I know Russia’s the aggressor, but I also know Ukraine is not in NATO (which is too big anyway).

Again, I may reduce my commenting – not because I dislike the site as a whole but because it can be a time-waster. But I don’t mind having registered my “antiwar” views. That way, if the *&^% goes down, I can at least say “I told you so.”

[Cal Cetín]

Also, if Google thinks that wanting to be neutral makes me a Russian useful idiot, maybe that’s an argument not to share my views.

So to get Google off the scent, I’ll just say Russia bad, Putin bad, like Nicholas I suppressing the Hungarians (though we sympathized, we didn’t go to war for the plucky Hungarians).

Putin is bad, naughty, bad, and not in a good way (“I’m bad”) but in a bad way. Like, he’s a bad person.

I hope that works. I would happily recommend Google to anyone.

[Sarcastr0]

I hear this from some leftists as well – no, expressing support for the Ukrainian side in this conflict does not require wanting the US to go to war with Russia.

[Absaroka]

“consider the Eritrean attack on Ethiopia some years back. Aggression according to an international commission, but no clamor for intervention. Let the woke explain the difference.”

1)I think EV gave a pretty good answer a couple of days ago.
2)I’m pretty doubleplusunwoke. I confess I don’t really understand a lot of people’s position on the Russo-Ukraine war, which do seem to contrast with previous positions. And I worry people aren’t being sanguine enough about intervention.
3)All that said, here are some thoughts:
-I may just miss a lot of bad things. For better or worse, I’m not really up on who is or isn’t the good or bad guys in Eritrea or Nagorno-Karabakh. There might be a clear cut right and wrong side, or it might be a case of two sides both of which are wrong. I’m sure there are bad guys beating their wife all over town. That doesn’t mean I am indifferent to a clear cut case of wife beating when I am aware of it. And Russia invading Ukraine is, IMHO, a conflict with a pretty clear cut right and wrong side. Saddam invading Kuwait is a similar example, and you may recall the US took a fairly big interest in that conflict.
-a war in Eritrea is, just bluntly and selfishly, very unlikely to affect me here in Main Street USA. That’s not the case for wars next door to NATO countries. My sense – and you may disagree – is that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he will start looking at the Baltics, Poland, Romania, etc. And if he attacks them, that means America is at war with a major nuclear power. To put it another way, war in Eritrea doesn’t really have a path to me seeing mushroom clouds here on Main Street. War in Ukraine, OTOH, has a fairly short path to that outcome, and so selfish me is more interested in Ukraine.

[bernard11]

Good points.

[Currentsitguy]

That’s pretty close to my position. There are those who say “We aren’t or cannot be the world’s policeman”. They are absolutely correct, even if we have the will, we certainly don’t have the ability. We do, however, have the means and responsibility to involve ourselves in places that directly affect our security and ability to live quiet and peaceful lives, and to frankly involve ourselves in the sort of stupid, petty arguments so often characterized right here on this blog.

You cannot be a leading world power, economically, militarily, politically and diplomatically and not have vital interests outside of our borders. “Fortress America” is simply not a viable position in a global interconnected world.

Call me nuts but I have this crazy belief that a full thermonuclear exchange just might have a way of messing up your day. That being said to paraphrase Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” Simply sitting back and saying that since Putin has nukes we can’t do anything that upsets him because he’s crazy and heaven knows what he is capable of means we are tacitly giving him a free hand to do whatever he wants scott free.

Anyone who asks what is Putin’s territorial goal should look at his map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Territorial_Expansion_of_Russia.svg

Leaving aside Alaska for the moment note the areas shaded in purple. Those are all today sovereign nations, many of which are NATO members.

Giving Putin a get out of jail free pass in Ukraine WILL result in further expansion into areas that will trigger an automatic Article 5 response. Russia is militarily weak in comparison to NATO and particularly the US. They would have to fall back pretty quickly on their nuclear offensive capability. I personally don’t think that such a thing as a “limited nuclear war” is possible.

If you sit down to a game of poker and fold every time your opponent raises you are going to lose every single hand. You’d have been better off just leaving all your money on the center of the table at the beginning and getting up to shorten the pain.

Sometimes you have to call the bluff to see the hand.

So long as Biden, and all the other NATO leaders take the position that there is nothing Putin can do that will trigger a response that will put us in direct conflict we may as will stop all aid now, because we have already handed him victory on a silver platter. Just admit Ukraine is the 21’s Century’s Sudetenland. Just remember how that turned out in the end.

[Frank Drackman]

(eventually) a free Czech republic and Slovakia? seems like it worked out pretty well.

[Ridgeway]

One thing that pricks my ears up is the reference to a “black sun.”

I am not someone who finds nazis under every stone, but the black sun is apparently a popular symbol with genuine neo-nazis (including some of the more unsavory groups fighting in the Ukraine). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(symbol)

It may be a coincidence, but I’d be curious if there is more to that song than meets the eye/ear.