The Unraveling of the World

Tom Kando 

The Russian attack on Ukraine is presenting us with a terrible dilemma. We are subject to two impulses that are difficult to reconcile: 

1. We feel deep outrage over Russia’s savage and unjustified attack on its innocent and peaceful neighbor. The barbaric, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, children, pregnant women, schools and hospitals. There are no words to describe Putin’s cruelty. 

2. We fear that this conflict could escalate into global nuclear Armageddon. 

In other words, there is widespread moral agreement, but disagreement about how to respond. 

What Can the Civilized World Do? 

Generally agreed upon are: Strong expressions of moral outrage, solidarity with the Ukrainian people, the provision of humanitarian assistance, exposure of Russian lies, hospitality and assistance to the millions of victims and refugees, economic and military aid to Ukraine short of direct NATO-Russia confrontation. 

The next step is where divergence arises: 

The two key elements of risk assessment are (1) the probability of a risk occurring, and (2) the magnitude of the risk. The greater the magnitude, the lower the probability should be. The probability of humanity committing nuclear suicide is such a risk. This is not a gamble we want to take, no matter how low its probability is. 

Beating back the Russian war machine would require more than speaking out and providing hospitality to refugees. It would require waging war against Russia, with possible escalation to nuclear World War Three. 
There are hawks and doves. Neo-liberals tend to be more hawkish: They are willing to take more risks than the doves. A dovish example is the FiveThirtyEight podcast of an interview of James M. Acton by Galen Duke. Acton is the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Russia, Ukraine and the Risk of Nuclear War.”https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/russia-ukraine-and-the-risk-of-nuclear-war/ 

Acton presents a game-theoretical metaphor: Think of a chess game, where both sides have a button underneath the chess board, which, if pressed, blows up everything including both contestants. The most desirable outcome of a chess game is one where the winner’s victory is not so overwhelming as to lead either side to press the blow-up button. 

Few wars end with one side’s complete annihilation (the US Civil War and the Punic Wars were exceptions). Most wars are won by one side in such a way as to allow the losing side to survive and to recover. And a key to this outcome is that it is based on negotiations. 

To the Leaders of the Free World

by Madeleine Kando

I am old, 6 years past the average life expectancy of most countries in the World. My life spans from the end of World War 2 to the present year of 2022. Like most old people, I am not aware of how old I am. Until now, that is.

The War in Ukraine that started in February 2022, made me realize that my life was spent during a time when the Western world, my world, was protected from the worst that can happen to human society. It was a time of relative peace and stability. Yes, during that time (which now spans almost a century), there were wars, conflicts, terrorist attacks and injustices done in many parts of the world.

But the rule of law and other basic principles on which the world order was built, protected us from what we now realize has metastasized into the most dangerous and lethal attacks on a way of life that I took for granted. All of that might soon be a thing of the past.

There is a concerted attempt to destroy that which made my life worth living. It was not without personal and social conflict. I am one of those ‘liberal intellectuals’ that many of you out there have a problem with. I am sorry for that. I am not a politician. Just an ordinary wife, mother and grandmother who now weeps when she watches the atrocities taking place in Ukraine. I am sorry that I have been hiding under a rock, suffering from the general delusion that what matters in life is happiness and peace.

The truth is that complacency and a sense of entitlement has brought Armageddon to the doorsteps of the Western World. We just didn’t pay ATTENTION! Is it too late? Do we have to keep whining about higher gas prices? Do we not understand that what is coming down the road is a tornado, gas prices be damned?

If memory serves, it happened before. The Roman Empire destroyed itself as much as it was destroyed by the invading Huns, Goths and Visigoths. It was weak, corrupt, unstable. It had lost its edge, so to speak. Did it deserve its own fate?

World War Two: My Aunt Ica’s Death, and my Parents’ Courage

 Tom Kando 
 My extended family and close relations spent the winter and spring of 1944-45 underground on the shore of Hungary’s Lake Balaton. That is when our family suffered one of its worst tragedies:

My aunt Iça was a sixteen-year brunette with blue eyes. One could describe her as having that attractive Eastern European look. I remember her well. For one thing, it was her job to give me a periodic bath and help me get dressed afterwards. We had a banged-up old metallic tub which we dragged along with our other possessions and occasionally filled with hot water.

 
Living under hellish conditions, people’s nerves were frayed. There were frequent arguments. One bleak winter morning, my grandmother, Iça and her fiancé Robi were shouting at each other. Iça was crying. She finally said to Robi: I am going to the library in Szekesfehervar. I heard that they are about to burn all their books. Let’s go get books and bring them back while there is still time.”

 
Robi didn’t like the idea. Szekesfehervar was twenty kilometers away, there was a shooting war going on, unexploded land mines, wild roving soldiers and assorted other dangers. Nevertheless, Iça left, Robi ran after her followed by another young couple. 

Suddenly there was a huge explosion, followed by screaming and then deadly silence. My father went outside and walked carefully across the field, following the foursome’s footsteps. All the adults understood instantly what had happened. The group had stepped on a land mine buried in the snow. I did not truly understand, but I began to cry. 

Years later, my mother described to me the carnage my dad saw in the snow that day. Iça had been blown to pieces, probably never realizing what hit her. The other couple died a more painful death. Robi was the only lucky one. He lost a leg, but survived. 

During most of the bombing raids, I was being carried and protected by my mother and by my grandparents. Both my parents were very active in the resistance and my father was often gone. No one knew when or under what circumstances he would barge in. He would suddenly arrive at noon or at midnight, and there would be a great commotion. He would be carrying a bunch of mysterious packages, the women of the house would alert each other, saying, “Jules is back!” and scurry around the house to help him. My mother would ask him, “How on earth did you manage to get through? Thank God you are alive!” He’d smile and tell a long story about how he had used this or that trick, stories which I could hear, but not understand. I had nothing but admiration for my great, tall, handsome father, a father who never showed anger or fear, always laughed and encouraged those around him by his calm and benevolent demeanor. I didn’t know what my dad was doing out there, but I knew that there was a war and that my heroic father was somehow doing very brave things. 

From My Diary of the War in Ukraine

by Madeleine Kando

It is a cold and grey day in late February 2022. We are visiting our friends in Northern New Hampshire. They live on a 300 acre piece of land, their house at the end of a mile long drive way, invisible to the world. There is a lot of snow up here. Snow, pine trees and rolling hills. It’s beautiful.

We have known the Kaufmans for half a century, which tells you how old we all are. But that is what reinforces friendship – we stuck it out this long and will remain friends until all of us turn to dust.

It is a peaceful place, not a single human sound is heard, just the occasional howling of a passing band of coyotes, the long distance shriek of a lone hawk and the loud chatter of the countless blue jays invading the porch, which Janice covers with black sunflower seeds to attract these noisy but beautiful birds. We toast, eat and watch a movie, then go to bed early.

February 24th, 2022

It is a sunny morning. Marty makes his famous breakfast omelet. He looks pale and gaunt. He tells us that Russia has invaded Ukraine and that a war has started in Europe. It seems unreal, impossible to comprehend in this pristine environment. Why? How? The day is spent following the hourly news as the snow begins to accumulate outside.

Marty is a third generation Jewish immigrant. He has deep emotional ties to that part of the world, since his family had to flee Ukraine at a time when Jews were mercilessly persecuted.

We watch the news on CNN. A mother with two small children is interviewed. She is huddled together with hundreds of Ukrainians in a subway station turned into a bomb shelter. She is crying, asking questions: ‘why? Why is this happening?’ She doesn’t understand. Nor do we, up here in the snowy, peaceful Great North Woods of New Hampshire.

February 25, 2022

The snow is accumulating fast. It gets harder to walk down from the pool house, where we are staying. There are snow shoes next to the door, which we tie on to our snow boots. Walking in snow shoes is not easy for novices like us, but we eventually survive the 100 yard distance to the main house, where a warm cup of coffee awaits us.

The conversation revolves around what should be done, could be done, is not done and what will come next. What else is Putin going to invade? There is talk of excluding Russia from the Swift international payments system, instating a no-fly zone, sending more military aid to Ukraine..

I realize how little I know about Ukraine. I learn that Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe after Russia. Marty has a large globe gathering dust in his living room. We lug it onto the dining room table and squint our eyes as we try to decipher the tiny letters. Which countries that are now independent were part of the USSR? There are 15 of them. That, together with the satellite countries that are now part of the EU, Russia lost a third of its landmass in one swell swoop, when the USSR collapsed. No wonder Putin called it “The greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.”

Going Underground During World War Two

Tom Kando  

Once again, major war is raging in the world, and it is taking place in the same region where I experienced World War Two - Eastern Europe. 

I come from Budapest. My family spent part of the war hiding “underground” by Hungary’s Lake Balaton. For two reasons: (1) We are Jewish (on my mother’s side) and (2) the war was intensifying in Budapest. By 1944, the city was being bombed nearly daily, and the Battle of Budapest raged during that year’s winter. The battle pitted the German Wehrmacht aided by the pitiful remnants of the Hungarian army vs. the Soviet Red Army. 

The Soviet forces reached Hungary in the fall of 1944/5. Budapest fell to them in February of 1945. The war’s last year (1944-45) was exceptionally gruesome. The Battle of Budapest lasted nearly two months. The Russians (actually the Ukrainians) besieged the city from Christmas 1944 to mid-February 1945. At the end of the siege, the city had been reduced to rubble and ashes, looking like Dresden, Rotterdam, Hamburg and other bombed cities. There wasn't a single bridge left connecting the two sides of the city - Buda and Pest. The battle killed about 100,000 German, Hungarian and Soviet soldiers and about 40,000 civilians, 7,000 of them executed.(Siege of Budapest) 

My family decided to evacuate the city and go underground somewhere on the shores of Lake Balaton. That is where we spent the winter of 1944-45, one of the coldest on record. I turned four that year. On a snowy winter morning, a large group gathered outside our house on Budapest’s Hill of Roses, and we began the trek to the lake, about two hundred kilometers away. We would look for an area that was already under Soviet control. The group included me, my parents Ata and Jules, my grandparents, my twin sisters Juliette and Madeleine, my aunt Iça and her fiancé Robi, some other toddlers, and several Jewish friends traveling as gentiles with false papers. We all moved to the South shore of Lake Balaton, where we spent the entire winter and the following spring. 

My Bedtime Betty Adventure

by Madeleine Kando

My lifelong search for a good night’s sleep led me to a dispensary in the town next to mine. Cannabis products are legal in my state and the industry is booming. This particular store was BIG. It sold many types of weed, there was a section just for paraphernalia and it even had a fireplace with a cozy seating arrangement.

The young salesman gave me a bag full of candies called ‘Bedtime Bettys’ and I took one before going to bed. It’s a cannabis sleepaid, carefully composed of several ingredients that are supposed to make you fall into a blissful sleep. It has the active ingredient called THC, the one that gets you high.

I was lying in bed, rigid as a board, waiting for the magic bullet to hit me. Nothing happened. I mentally cursed Bedtime Betty, telling her that she shouldn’t impersonate the sleep fairy, since she didn’t deliver on her promise. I was lying there, teeth clenched, eyelids squeezed shut, neck muscles spasming, blaming my own naivete and the young salesman who had convinced me of the power of Betty over insomnia.

I tried to get back to my ordinary, outdated and inefficient technique of knitting a sweater in my head. That’s what I do to try to fall asleep. A kind of knitting meditation. It didn’t work, of course. I was a frustrated knitter, a frustrated Bedtime Betty consumer and a very frustrated insomniac.

Suddenly, without any warning, my head started to fill with all sorts of strange and wonderful images. I was floating in a sky filled with foam, like the blanket of clouds that an airplane dives into when approaching an overcast city.

Whenever I focused on one cloud, another one was begging for my attention. I was a butterfly, fluttering from one wonderful thought cloud to another. This was a strange experience. I am usually more like a moth with OCD. I circle a thought, like a moth circles a light bulb, around and around, until they burn themselves to death.

It felt wonderful to be a butterfly for a change. Some were good clouds, others were not. There were clouds that contained toxic material about dying, others that contained instructions on how to knit better mental sweaters, others yet that revealed the ‘multiverse’ theory to me on a quantum level. In plain English: I was STONED!