More information about World Central Kitchen - updated re deaths in Gaza

World Central Kitchen was frankly not on my radar screen of charities (most of my favorites being medicine- or education-related) until Putin's war on Ukraine brought me information about their refugee relief efforts.  I appreciate the comments about WCK added to that post by several readers, and today I found more information about the group at Bloomberg:

Within hours of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 25, the nonprofit disaster-relief organization co-founded by chef José Andrés [in pic above] started dishing out food. World Central Kitchen has now established kitchens at eight of Ukraine’s border crossings with Poland, and has created meal distribution centers in six countries including Romania and Hungary. In Poland alone, says Director of Communications Strategy Lisa Abrego, WCK has served more than 37,000 hot meals including chicken and rice and pasta; the total was nearing 45,000 late on Tuesday. Everyone from fire fighters to nuns has pitched in to help cook and serve food.

“There are many ways to fight. Some people fight making sure people are fed,” said Andrés via email. “Those are our people, and we will be supporting them.” The chef was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and has pledged a portion of his $100 million award from Jeff Bezos to address the current crisis.

Inside Ukraine, WCK has partnered with local restaurants to feed people who have chosen not to flee. The organization will expand its work in the country as more shelters are established...

Rather than cold meals or MREs (meals ready to eat), the organization focuses on the dignity inherent in eating a home-cooked meal—and taking immediate action.

More photos at the link.

Most readers will want to do something concrete.  A simple Google search yields 50,000 hits.  I'm going to focus on World Central Kitchen.  I made my second financial contribution today (click here) in memory of my antiwar activist sister. 

Update from WCK on March 13:

With bombs still falling day and night, millions of Ukrainians continue to flee the country or relocate west to the city of Lviv. In response, WCK is rapidly expanding our #ChefsForUkraine response to distribute food—including hot, fresh meals—in five countries. We've now opened a kitchen and food supply depot in Poland, right on the border with Ukraine, and have multiple warehouses active in Lviv where trucks are filled with food to head east reaching cities like Odessa and Mykolayiv. We are also supporting more restaurants to serve meals in Ukrainian cities including Kharkiv and Kyiv, which remain under active attack.

The new WCK Relief Kitchen is located in Przemyśl—a Polish city just a few miles from the border with Ukraine that is receiving tens of thousands of refugees every day. From this kitchen, our team has the capacity to scale up and cook 100,000 meals per day utilizing 12 massive WCK paella pans and 12 large ovens...

Within Ukraine, we are now working with dozens of chefs and restaurant partners across 12 cities to provide meals to those who remain at home or are escaping to other locations within the country. More families are now beginning to stay in Lviv rather than leave Ukraine. The UN estimates over 2 million people are already internally displaced, so the WCK team, alongside our partners in Lviv and other cities across Ukraine, are cooking more meals each day. We are delivering the freshly prepared meals to 50 locations in Lviv alone, and that number goes up daily.

I repeated my gift today.  You can support WCK by clicking here.

Reposted from last year because of the catastrophe in Turkiye.  Our family sent funds to World Central Kitchen via Paypal today.  It only takes two minutes.

Reposted to replace the old photo at the top of this post with this new video, which I received in an email from WCK today.   Our family is going to send another contribution now, and I would encourage those readers who have messaged me in the past suggesting that I should add a tip jar to this blog so that they could express their appreciation of TYWKIWDBI in a monetary sense to consider the simple expedient of your sending that "tip" money to World Central Kitchen instead of to me.  

Use this link to donate to World Central Kitchen

Reposted from 2023 to add information about the deaths of World Central Kitchen workers resulting from an Israeli strike in Gaza:

Several humanitarian groups said Tuesday that they would suspend their operations in Gaza after seven World Central Kitchen workers were killed in an Israeli strike, threatening already precarious deliveries to the aid-starved enclave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel carried out the strike Monday but said it was “unintentional.” He vowed the military would carry out a “transparent” investigation and make the results public.

The attack on the aid convoy killed three British nationals, a Canadian American dual national, a Palestinian, and citizens of Australia and Poland..

The organization said the team was traveling in a “deconflicted zone” in two armored cars with the WCK logo branded on the roof, to make them clearly identifiable from the air, and a third vehicle. Images from the scene showed a blackened hole on the roof of one of the vehicles, puncturing the nonprofit’s logo.

The strike is the first of the war to kill foreign aid workers, but humanitarian officials say it is part of a pattern of attacks by Israel on relief convoys. Israeli limitations on aid deliveries, and its targeting of police officers that protected them, have put Gaza’s 2 million people on the brink of famine. The situation is especially dire in the north, where health officials say children have begun to die of malnutrition, and many families are subsisting on weeds and animal feed.

WCK said last month it had served more than 42 million meals since the war began and opened more than 60 community kitchens across Gaza.

A message from José Andrés and World Central Kitchen

"We are just several days away from it being five months since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, displacing millions of people, claiming tens of thousands of lives, and destroying thousands of buildings and entire communities. But these numbers only partially convey what the Ukrainian people have had to endure. Refugees fleeing—primarily women, children, and seniors—have embarked on long and arduous journeys, waiting up to 72 hours before crossing the border to safety. People remaining in Ukraine are living through the trauma of constant shelling and the threat of uncertainty as more and more residential areas are targeted seemingly at random. 

As the situation has unfolded, the war in Ukraine has also become a war on food. Activity at ports and borders has been disrupted, straining the food supply that feeds not only Ukraine, but the world. Since activating five months ago, WCK food cargo trains, and restaurant and farm partners, have been hit by missiles. Still, every single day thousands of WCK's Ukrainian Food Fighters show up to provide nourishing meals and food aid to families remaining in the country. Today, our incredible teams served their 100 millionth meal in response to invasion.

Since the first cold night in February when WCK began serving soup to families fleeing the attack at a border crossing in Poland, we've delivered 100 million meals in eight countries, at more than 6,000 different distribution points, including in over 1,000 cities and towns inside Ukraine. Today, our teams inside Ukraine continue to expand efforts reaching families under constant attack in eastern cities while still caring for refugees who have fled west. Between the preparation of hot, fresh meals and large grocery kits with ingredients for families to cook with at home, we are serving more than 1.7 million meals every single day—this scale of an emergency response is beyond what World Central Kitchen has ever seen before, and we will keep cooking. 

With the situation in many eastern cities intensifying and needs outside Ukraine subsiding, we’re scaling down our efforts in neighboring countries to focus on ramping up our response for the most vulnerable families. Working with the thousands of WCK team members across Ukraine, we will continue to reach as many people in need of hot meals and grocery kits as we can. 

WCK envisions—and continues to hope for—a world where we would not have to respond to senseless violence under these circumstances, but we are beyond grateful to stand alongside more than 4,300 brave Food Fighters who work tirelessly to ensure anyone in need is met with a hot meal. It is because of all the WCK team members, volunteers, and global community of supporters that our efforts in Ukraine and in seven neighboring countries have been made possible—thank you. Read more about how we built the largest humanitarian food relief effort in Ukraine."

Received in an email because of my previous contributions [boldface added].  The video has only 74 views as of right now, so I thought perhaps I could give it a little boost.  And they will get another contribution from me.

You can donate via this link.  And please share the video.

Reposted from last year because of the earthquake in Turkiye.  Chef Jose Andres sent out a call today for helpers with experience preparing food in that region.  I expect kitchens will be set up before the end of the week.

Ukraine before the current war with Russia

Probably very few of us paid much attention to Ukraine before the Russian onslaught affected gas prices, food prices, and revived fears of nuclear Armageddon.  So I found it interesting while reading back issues of Harper's Magazine to encounter a January 2021 article entitled The Armies of the Right: Inside Ukraine's extremist militias.  Herewith a few excerpts:

Ukraine is among the poorest countries in Europe and the closest thing the continent has to a failing state. It is mired in a smoldering conflict with Russian-backed separatists in its eastern provinces, and its state institutions have been almost entirely captured by competing oligarchs. Corruption pervades almost every level of government. Outside Kyiv’s metro stations, elderly women in head scarves and bedraggled war veterans beg for change, while nearby the streets are lined with luxury shops and petty gangsters run red lights in black SUVs without fear of rebuke. Millions have emigrated to Poland or Russia for work. The capital has the uncanny feel, at times, of a postmodern Weimar, where Instagram influencers brunch in cafés tricked out in the international hipster style opposite billboards adorned with the faces of Ukraine’s martyrs in the war against Russia.

But perhaps Ukraine’s clearest departure from the standard model of European liberalism is its proliferation of armed far-right factions, considered by analysts and ordinary Ukrainians alike to be the secretly funded private armies of the elite oligarch class. They fought in the trenches outside Donetsk and now patrol city streets, enforcing a particular vision of order with the blessing of overstretched and underfunded police departments. In some regions, they serve as official election monitors...

Ukraine’s complex ecosystem of far-right militias and activist groups is populated by many other organizations that, while less influential than Azov, still play a major role in public life. A variety of them—including Tradition and Order, Katechon, Freikorps, Sokil, and Karpatska Sich—appear at demonstrations with Azov, though their branding differs. Some are more overtly Christian in their imagery; some tend toward neo-paganism; others are more openly fascist. The groups promote one another’s posts on social media, especially on the Telegram channels used for organizing, indicating that some share members with Azov and thus may act as front organizations for deniable activity, according to Oksana Pokalchuk, the director of Amnesty International Ukraine. More often than not, however, the groups are committed rivals, competing for the largesse of the Ukrainian state and primacy in the country’s increasingly heated street politics...

Although Azov does not formally subscribe to National Socialism, members are known to tattoo themselves with Nazi imagery and fly the swastika flag over their fortifications in the east, in what is either a genuine display of ideological loyalty, an effort to troll their Russian enemies, or both. Ukraine’s bloody twentieth-century history creates a certain confusion, as so many symbols of Ukrainian nationalism and the struggle for independence against the Soviet Union are inextricably linked to those who collaborated with the invading Nazi forces against Stalin, a moral and political ambiguity that groups such as Azov exploit to the furthest possible limit. Azov’s official logo combines the Wolfsangel rune of the “Das Reich” division of the Waffen-SS with the Black Sun symbol, first employed by SS commander Heinrich Himmler at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany. The group’s slick propaganda videos feature young recruits with shaved heads and beards marching in torchlit neo-pagan ceremonies behind a Black Sun shield—imagery as inspiring to disaffected young Ukrainian men as it is discomfiting to the country’s Western backers.

Much more at the link, which will probably be behind a paywall for you - but the hard copy will almost certainly be available in your local library.

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers"

"Leda Buzinna sits inside her home that was damaged by shelling overnight when two S-300 missiles hit the rural neighbourhood. Buzinna suffered facial injuries and her husband injured his leg when the missile hit their bedroom."  Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

The old African proverb would apply to Ukraine today.  Click pic for bigger.

The same people, 14 years later

And the same aggressor.  The five-cross flag you don't recognize is that of Georgia.

Originally a banner of the medieval Kingdom of Georgia, it was repopularised in the late 20th and early 21st centuries during the Georgian national revival... By late 2021, a newly-discovered coin of the King David the Builder with five-cross composition engraving now dates the Georgian flag to the 12th century. According to the State Council of Heraldry, the coin is of greatest importance and is an unmistakable proof for the history of the Georgian national flag being used during the reign of King David IV.

Putin can't match Hitler and Mussolini

Recent videos on the news show young Russian men fleeing the country en masse following Putin's announcement of a conscription of fighting-age men.  A columnist at Bloomberg opines that "Neither he nor Russia’s hard-core nationalists have come up with convincing arguments to persuade ordinary post-Soviet Russians to die in a discretionary conflict."

Putin can only dream of the volunteer numbers the 20th-century fascist regimes could raise. Months into the war, the combined strength of the volunteer battalions formed in the Russian regions was barely in the tens of thousands, and it was hard to say if many of the volunteers were motivated by patriotism in the sense Putin or the Russian far right understand it. Rather, the battalions’ main lure for able-bodied men was the promise of salaries they couldn’t count on in their home regions...

One could say Russians aren’t joining Putin’s war in Nazi Germany-like numbers simply because they fear for their lives, or because they’ve heard stories of how poorly equipped and commanded the Russian military was, or simply because Russia doesn’t appear to be winning. But one could also argue that a strong ideological motivation could push these concerns into the background. The ever-swelling Waffen SS was an all-volunteer force well into 1942. Belief in the superiority of the German Volk and the “Aryan race,” and thus in their final victory, prevailed for many months after Hitler’s armies ceased to be unbeatable.

Russians don’t believe in anything of the kind, nor do they, en masse, hate Ukrainians. In August 2022, the Levada Center, one of the last pollsters still trying to obtain objective results in Russia, reported that 68% of Russians held a positive opinion of Ukrainians — down from 83% in October 2021, but still an overwhelming majority, especially given the realities of an oppressive regime. Many respondents would hesitate to tell a pollster — who might be a secret police official or some other kind of informer — that they like the folks the Russian military has been fighting for the last seven months...

An affinity for cash has been the Russian regime’s only true ideology throughout Putin’s rule. According to the latest wave of the World Values Survey, a plurality of Russians — 48.8%, compared with 37.9% in the supposedly more materialistic US — consider economic growth the country’s most important goal. Russians learned to be self-sufficient in the 1990s as the paternalistic Soviet state fell apart, and they reveled in this self-sufficiency as the country’s economy was gradually restored. “Every man and woman for themselves” has been the nation’s unofficial motto, first a survival refrain, then a recipe for well-being. So, when the regime needed something akin to the Mussolini- or Hitler-style nationalist, imperialist revival, the regime struggled to offer its volunteers anything more convincing than cash. 

More at the link.

Why Russia has not yet conquered Ukraine

Nearly five months into its senseless war against Ukraine, Russia has concocted a wild new explanation for why the Kremlin’s plans for a quick takeover fell apart so spectacularly—because Ukrainian troops were turned into superhuman killing machines during “secret experiments” in American-run biolabs, of course.

Never mind the myriad reports of Russian troops refusing to fight by the thousands, sabotaging their own shoddy equipment and even deliberately wounding themselves to abandon the war, Russian lawmakers claim the real setback for Moscow was “drugged up” Ukrainian soldiers.

That claim was made Monday by two Russian lawmakers heading up a commission to investigate “biolaboratories” in Ukraine, Kommersant reported...

“And we see: the cruelty and barbarity with which the military personnel of Ukraine behave, the crimes that they commit against the civilian population, those monstrous crimes that they commit against prisoners of war, confirm that this system for the control and creation of a cruel murder machine was implemented under the management of the United States,” Yarovaya was quoted telling reporters.../

The claims appeared to be a new take on the biolabs conspiracy theory that Russia’s Defense Ministry has routinely rolled out to try and justify the war.

While the conspiracy theory dates all the way back to the Soviet Union, it has been amplified more frequently by Kremlin figures after the Feb. 24 invasion, as Moscow’s initial claim that it invaded Ukraine in order to “de-Nazify” a country led by a Jewish president failed to gain much traction beyond its own domestic propaganda.

One almost has to admire the brazenness and audacity of these outright lies.  It sort of reminds me of.... 

Unutterably sad

"The mother’s hands were shaking when she started writing on her 2-year-old’s body. They trembled so much that she couldn’t write correctly on her first try, even though the information was second nature: Her daughter’s name, Vira, along with her birth date and their family phone numbers.

“I thought that if my husband and I died, Vira could find who she is,” the mother, Oleksandra Makoviy, recalled.

For Vira, standing in a diaper in their house in Kyiv, the writing on her back was a game. She didn’t know that the bombing had begun.

Ms. Makoviy’s desperate attempt to prepare her daughter for the possibility of being orphaned as the family attempted to escape the Ukrainian capital during the Russian invasion has become a wrenching symbol of the anguish of a nation of parents..."

The report continues at The New York Times.  Photo from the mother's Instagram.

The Holodomor ("Death by Starvation") explained

A riveting documentary about stuff I didn't learn in school.

Addendum:  This book was recommended by a reader -

It is a scholarly, detailed report on all of the political and financial maneuvering that culminated in the mass starvation.  Sobering reading.

New Ukrainian postage stamp

Approved but not yet printed.  Backstory at NPR.

This is my rental flat in Kharkiv, Ukraine

In a followup to my post from last week, after some brief research I did go ahead and book a rental unit in Ukraine with no intention of visiting, in order to test out this method of providing a modicum of support to someone there.

There were of course lots of places available via airbnb; I opted for a unit in a city rather than a guest house in the country, and chose a low-priced one on the assumption that the funds would go to an individual or family rather than to a hotel or corporation.  I messaged the host to suggest they could offer the room to an internal refugee or use the funds for whatever they need.  I did receive a nice thank-you reply:

Thanks for the support. None of the refugees will want to stay in this flat - people are fleeing from such apartments. Therefore, the money will go to the purchase of the most necessary: food and medicine. Thanks again.  --Дмитро

Update: A brief video shows why residents and refugees are not staying in Kharkiv.

Refugee

"A portrait of a young girl, taken after she fled from Ukraine to Romania, following Russia's invasion, at the border crossing in Siret, Romania, on March 7, 2022."  

Credit Clodagh Kilcoyne / Reuters.  One of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic

Note:  today I added Ukraine as a new category in the right sidebar of TYWKIWDBI, and incorporated some old posts dating back to the conflict with Russia in 2014.

One Ukrainian refugee's story

There are (literally) a million stories now.  Here is one of them -

I’m a Python programmer and I work for a German company, and they helped me leave Ukraine for Poland. We left Kyiv in a small Peugeot 307 car. There were nine of us, me, my mum, my sister, our two husbands, four children and two big dogs, including an elderly German shepherd. It was impossible to move inside the car. We drove for 16 hours to a village about 140km from Kyiv...

Near the border with Poland there were a lot of cars and we couldn’t stay in the car for the next three – or five – days, so we decided to walk the last 17km to the border. We left at 4am – it was minus seven degrees... 

My dog is 12 and a half and she struggled to walk and fell down every kilometre or so and couldn’t stand up again. I stopped cars and asked for help but everyone refused; they advised us to leave the dogs. But our dogs are part of our family. My dog has experienced all the happy and sad moments with us. Mum’s dog is all she has left of her former life. So my husband, at times, carried our dog on his shoulders...

My husband couldn’t cross the border because of his age and the mobilisation order. He has gone back to the village to look after his mother and grandmother... All of them are in one little house without water. There’s no shop, no pharmacy, no water or food in the village and he and my sister’s husband are using firewood to heat the house.

My plan is just, I don’t know...

Her story continues at The Guardian.  Image (credit Alisa/Guardian community) cropped for size from the original at the source.

Kseniya Simonova - Ukrainian sand artist

 

The winner of Ukraine's Got Talent "recounts Germany conquering Ukraine in the second world war. She brings calm, then conflict. A couple on a bench become a woman's face; a peaceful walkway becomes a conflagration; a weeping widow morphs into an obelisk for an unknown soldier. 

Simonova looks like some vengeful Old Testament deity as she destroys then recreates her scenes - with deft strokes, sprinkles and sweeps she keeps the narrative going. She moves the judges to tears as she subtitles the final scene 'you are always near'." Consider also that she performs her art within the time constraints of a mix of prerecorded music. Very impressive. 

Additional performances here and here, and others searchable on YouTube.

Reposted from 2009.

Russian TV staff walk out after saying "No to war"

As reported in The Guardian:

Two Sundays ago I wrote in the Observer about the last remaining Russian independent TV station, Dozhd (“TV Rain”), and the irrepressible spirit of Natalya Sindeyeva, the woman who pioneered and ran it. Keeping the station alive had cost Sindeyeva her home and her marriage and her health and her security. A dozen years ago when she launched Dozhd she had been a vivid Russian celebrity, a “dancing queen” of Moscow’s elite party circuit, now her mugshot is posted on street corners as a “foreign agent”. The defiant struggles of Dozhd to stay on air and to continue to report the truth in Russia despite years of intimidation and sanction from the Kremlin were the subject of an inspiring documentary, “F@ck This Job (Tango with Putin)”, made by London-based Vera Krichevskaya, which was released in the UK last week and broadcast on the BBC.

A few days after “F@ck this Job” came out, on Friday, the decade-long defiance of Dozhd was silenced, at least for a while, by a brutal new law, passed unanimously in the Russian parliament, which bans news organisations from reporting anything except state approved press releases (it is now illegal for any broadcaster to call events in Ukraine, for example, “a war”). The new legislation, which has also caused the BBC and most other news organisations to suspend its reporting in Russia, will see journalists and media owners who contravene it jailed for up to 15 years. BBC director general Tim Davie said the law “appears to criminalise the process of independent journalism”. Its most chilling effects have been felt among the few surviving liberal Russian media outlets like Dozhd and Novaya Gazeta, whose editor, Dmitry Muratov, winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, announced that the paper’s website had been forced to remove all of its material on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “there is no doubt that the threat [of prosecution] will be realised”...

For their last broadcast Sindeyeva joined the entire news team in front of the camera to say goodbye to viewers. “No to war,” she said, as a farewell, with a bleak smile. The station then cut to some old footage from the ballet Swan Lake, an ironic gesture to the films that Soviet state television had once routinely broadcast when news was censored...

All the talk between journalists, Elovsky said, was how to effectively erase media histories from phones and computers in light of the new law. “It feels like an iron curtain is returning,” he said.

Much more at The Guardian.  Shame on Donald Trump and all U.S. politicians who support the autocratic rule in Russia.

Support for Ukraine in Boston

This morning Trinity Church in the City of Boston offered special support to the people of Ukraine:

This Sunday, March 6, we are honored to welcome the Ukrainian Cultural Center of New England (UCCN) and all those Ukrainians, Ukrainian-Americans, and friends of Ukraine from greater Boston and beyond that they have invited to join them and to join us for our 10 am worship. When our liturgy concludes, a Peace March will start from Copley Square and move down Boylston to the Boston Common. At 12:30, a rally will begin at the Parkman Bandstand. The day’s program intends to show support for the independence of Ukraine and its territorial integrity; to provide opportunity for speaking out against the war in Ukraine; to ask for donations for the people of Ukraine and for humanitarian aid; and to express thanks for all the countries, organizations, and people around the world for their support of Ukraine.

We have coordinated with organizers to offer special prayers for Ukraine and for our world, and our loose offering at all services this Sunday will go toward Sunflower of Peace, an organization delivering medical and humanitarian aid to Ukrainians. Following the Dismissal, we will offer support for guests, and invite all those in our congregation who would like to participate to join the Trinity clergy in the Peace March.

At the conclusion of the Holy Eucharist, the Ukrainian participants were invited to come forward to be recognized as the combined communities sang the Ukranian national anthem:

It was quite a touching moment.  A recording of the livestream is available here.

This may be a great time to book a vacation stay in Ukraine

Seriously.  Learned about this today from an article at NPR:

Some people have found a novel way to get money to Ukrainians as their country is under attack from Russia: booking immediate Airbnb stays they don't intend to use.

Airbnb hosts are paid 24 hours after a guest checks in, so people abroad are booking stays and letting hosts know that it's a gesture of solidarity, and they don't plan to appear.

The idea spread over the last few days, and Airbnb is waiving all host and guest fees in Ukraine for now. On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 61,000 nights were booked in Ukraine from around the world — bookings that grossed nearly $2 million, Airbnb tells NPR.

While this phenomenon appears to have developed in a grassroots manner, Airbnb also has its own initiative to provide housing to those in need. The company will offer short-term housing for free for up to 100,000 of those fleeing Ukraine. People can go to Airbnb.org and sign up to host refugees or donate to the cause.

I'm going to look into this this weekend.  Certainly if a Ukrainian family depended on renting rooms to supplement their income, that source of support must have vanished during the war.  I much prefer to assist people as directly as possible rather than through large aid organizations.  I've never personally used Airbnb, so I'd appreciate any suggestions from readers re avoiding scams. 

Addendum:  One of my friends has already "booked" a week's stay and received this reply from the host -

Followup: My friend received this message from Airbnb several days later:

It looks like you might have booked a reservation in Ukraine to support a Host. We’re reaching out because at least one of your reservations has been canceled, and we want to share more about what’s happening. 

Why your reservation was canceled.  Your reservation was canceled because it was booked with a listing that is no longer able to receive payments. 

That could reflect something as prosaic as an inability to access a financial account - or it could be more ominous.

How to help the people of Ukraine

There is currently a massive worldwide effort to help the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Putin's aggression.  Countries are contributing weaponry, companies are shutting off commerce, and the world's financial institutions are aggressively imperiling the Russian economy.  

For the individual wishing to do more than stand on the street with a blue and yellow sign, the easiest way to provide tangible assistance is through a financial contribution, but that means navigating a minefield of spurious organizations trying to find ones that are legitimate.  

Charity Navigator now has a page devoted to the Humanitarian Response to the Ukrainian-Russian Crisis.  One of my cousins searched Charity Navigator and decided to donate to World Central Kitchen, which is providing food to the fleeing refugees [noninteractive screencap above].  World Central Kitchen's Charity Navigator score is a perfect 100.

I forwarded that suggestion to an old high school friend living in Washington D.C., who works with NGOs; he responded that he had just donated to World Central Ktichen.  That convinced me, and I made my contribution to them this morning.

"Have some sunflower seeds"

A civilian woman confronted a heavily armed Russian soldier and offered him sunflower seeds... so that flowers will grow where he dies on Ukrainian soil.

The rest of her rant is recorded in this brief video (caution: profanity).

Image credit

Relevant:  Just learned that sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine.

"The narcissism of small differences" explained

Late in Democracy in America, in a chapter lavishly titled “Why the National Vanity of the Americans is More Restless and Quarrelsome than That of the English,” Tocqueville observes that national pride in public affairs takes on the social character of the upper classes:

In aristocratic countries, great men possess extensive privileges to sustain their pride without any need to rely upon those smaller advantages which accrue to them. Those privileges, having reached them through inheritance, are regarded to some extent as a part of themselves or, at least, as a natural and inherent right. They have, therefore, a quiet sense of their own superiority; they have no thought of boasting about privileges obvious to everyone and denied by no one.

On the other hand, in more democratic states, “when class distinctions are not very great, the smallest advantages gain in importance,” he continues. “Pride becomes demanding and jealous; it latches on to wretched details and guards them stubbornly.” A quarter century before the birth of Freud, Tocqueville identified the narcissism of small differences.

More at the linked Harper's essay.  See also the Wikipedia entry, and this awesome National Post essay by Christopher Hitchens:

In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who — to most outward appearances — exhibit very few significant distinctions... The partition of India and Pakistan, for example, which gives us one of the longest-standing and most toxic confrontations extant, involved most of all the partition of the Punjab. Visit Punjab and see if you can detect the remotest difference in people on either side of the border. Language, literature, ethnic heritage, physical appearance — virtually indistinguishable. Here it is mainly religion that symbolizes the narcissism and makes the most of the least discrepancy.

I used to work in Northern Ireland, where religion is by no means a minor business either, and at first couldn’t tell by looking whether someone was Catholic or Protestant. After a while, I thought I could guess with a fair degree of accuracy, but most of the inhabitants of Belfast seemed able to do it by some kind of instinct. There is a small underlay of ethnic difference there, with the original Gaels being a little darker and smaller than the blonder Scots who were imported as settlers, but to the outsider it is impalpable. It’s just that it’s the dominant question locally.

Likewise in Cyprus, it is extremely hard to tell a Greek from a Turk... In his book The Warrior’s Honor, Michael Ignatieff spent some time trying to elucidate what it was that made soldiers in the Balkan Wars — physically indistinguishable from one another — so eager to inflict cruelty and contempt upon Serb or Croat or Bosnian, as the case might be... Of course, here again there are latent nationalist and confessional differences to act as a force multiplier once the nasty business gets started, but the main thing to strike the outsider would be the question of “How can they tell?”  In Rwanda and Burundi, even if it is true, as some colonial anthropologists used to claim, that Hutu and Tutsi vary in height and also in the delimitation of their hairlines, it still doesn’t seem enough of a difference upon which to base a genocide...

One of the great advantages possessed by Homo sapiens is the amazing lack of variation between its different “branches.” Since we left Africa, we have diverged as a species hardly at all. If we were dogs, we would all be the same breed. We do not suffer from the enormous differences that separate other primates, let alone other mammals. As if to spite this huge natural gift, and to disfigure what could be our overwhelming solidarity, we manage to find excuses for chauvinism and racism on the most minor of occasions and then to make the most of them. This is why condemnation of bigotry and superstition is not just a moral question but a matter of survival.

The photo embedded at the top is of a street scene in Moscow (credit AP, via India.com).