Meet the Little Russians

It is not comfortable to have Ukraine as an ally. It does not make any historical sense to demand it be reunited with Crimea. History does not support the idea that Ukraine is embracing western values, at least not the western values that we want to have embraced. Ukrainians twice greeted German invaders with bread and salt, then promptly set about murdering Jews.

Political Ukraine is in fact a creation of German despotism.

On the other hand, we must feel sorry for the Little Russians, a people who, along with the White Russians, have suffered as much as any ethnic groups over the past century.

Considering that we are now fixated on the country, it is remarkable  how little we know and have ever known about it.

Ukraine first entered the consciousness of Americans and western Europeans when it fell victim to a terrible famine engineered by the tsarist bureaucracy in 1892. That led to the creation of one of the first international efforts to succor a starving population.

That step into modernism has been almost completely forgotten, leaving even so well educated a person as Skipper unable to find a report of it on the Internet. Which goes to show the advantage of having a library of real books printed on paper.

I'm still opening the boxes of books from our move from Hawaii and I just found my copy of Chambers Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge published in 1889, before the famine, before the large immigration of Little Russians to the United States and before the world had any special reason to care about these Russian provinces more than any others.

Following is the entire article in Chambers. It isn't long it and  does not mention the important fact -- never mentioned in the context of today's disputes -- that Ukrainians and Russians do not share a religion.

If Americans know anything about Ukrainians, it is that they paint over-the-top Easter eggs, and if they think about it perhaps they imagine that Ukraine is like Great Russia in its obsession with rituals with Easter rituals.

So it is, but there is a religious divide nevertheless. In the western provinces including Lwow the majority of the population adheres to the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church which is in union with Rome. The membership today is something over 5 million, small in a state with 44 million inhabitants.

The eastern districts, the ones being invaded by Russia, are generally Russian Orthodox now.

 It is not only a national war, a cultural war and an ethnic war. It is a religious war.

Here is all that Chambers had to say:

UKRAI'NE (Slav. a frontier country or March),  the name given in Poland first to the frontiers towards the Tartars and other nomads, and then to the fertile regions lying on both sides of the middle Dnieper, without any very definite limits. The U. was long a bone of contention between Poland and Russia. About 1686 the part on the east side of the Dnieper was ceded to Russia (Russian
U.); and at the second partition of Poland, the western portion (Polish U.) also fell to Russia, and is mostly comprised in the government of Kiev. The historic Ukraine forms the greater part of what is called Little Russia (a name which first appears about 1654), which is made up of the governments of Kiev, Tchernigov, Poltava and Kharkov.

Book Review 413: Soul by Soul

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, by Walter Johnson 283 pages, illustrated. Harvard, $98.32.

In every slave state except one, slaves were personal property and when bought or sold left no more traces in the legal records than the sale of a mule. In Louisiana, slaves were real property and transactions had to be recorded by a notary.

That combined with the fact that New Orleans was the largest slave market left a large body of evidence about what day-to-day life in the slave pens was like.

All slave states had a sort of lemon law -- called redhibition -- that allowed buyers up to a year to force a seller to take back a defective slave or pay compensation for a dead one. Louisiana's redhibition law with more favorable to buyers than most, generating another mass of legal papers, especially in appeals to the state supreme court.

These along with other evidence including slave narratives constitute the evidence for Walter Johnson's "Soul by Soul", a history that treats the slave trade as a "technology of the soul."

In another arresting image, Johnson repeatedly describes slave owners is being "made by slaves," and he provides plenty of evidence that this was so. People who participated in the trade were categorized by society by how they did so.

Buyers claimed to have good eyes that would detect hidden injuries or diseases or bad attitudes like "propensity to run away." Buyers also needed to be able to detect the tricks of the traders.

They were also judged by the kinds of slaves they sought to acquire, whether field hands, house servants or drivers to conduct a carriage and four. A man with no slaves announced his intention to move into a new level of society when he acquired one slave; and if he said he did so to relieve his wife of daily chores, that was a signal that she was to move into a more genteel realm.

Despite the increasingly frantic defense of the propriety of slaveholding as the 19th-century wore on, the business of slave trading continued to have a low social status. Genteel slaveholders often pretended to have nothing to do with it even if they needed to acquire or dispose of slaves. Johnson exposes this pose for the sham it was.

Everyone possessing slaves participated in the trade in some way, including women who were never seen inside the slave pens  -- buildings with blank brick walls 30 and even 40 feet high..

The black laborers themselves were desperate for information with little advantage in acquiring it. Johnson shows that slaves did exchange information, on their home farms, during the long journey south and in the pens in New Orleans. They needed to know the character of who was thinking of buying them, where he was taking them and what he intended to do with them. Work in the cane fields was virtually a sentence of death.

To some extent slaves were able to manipulate buyers, as by showing a propensity to run away if they were destined for a remote plantation and preferred to remain in the city. Sometimes they were able to prevent the breakup of their families, although not often.

There were 4 million slaves in America and in the National Period (1800 to 1860) about 2 million changed ownership with 600,000 entering the trade, which was almost entirely from the declining agricultural states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky to Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, east Texas and the parts of Louisiana that had not earlier been given to sugar.

The hunger for slaves in those districts was inexhaustible and what was wanted most were prime field hands -- healthy, strong young men to clear the land. It was a smaller market for trained house servants -- cooks, laundresses, seamstresses, hairdressers and the like; and a much smaller market still for the most expensive slaves, "fancy girls" sold as sex toys.

Some of these beauties went for more than $5,000 when a prime field hand fetched something over $1,000.

Children were hardly wanted that all even though it was usual to put them to work at age 4 or 5. It was thought that they did not repay the cost of feeding and clothing.

It was an information society before the Internet. Traders in the pens attempted to present slaves as individuals, marketing one as a good driver or another as an experienced hairdresser, but their long supply chain forced them to come up with a grading system that was entirely impersonal.

In some court cases, expert witnesses claimed to be able to assess the value of a slave they had never seen simply on the basis of a grade that had been given by some trader who they also had never seen.

The slave pens in New Orleans were an irresistible magnet for visitors from the North, from other parts of the South and from overseas who left pen portraits, watercolors, sketches and oils of what they thought they saw. It may be doubted how well they understood. Even the people in the trade seem scarcely to have understood what was going on, with the slaves in the worst position of all to know.

In "Soul by Soul" at least part of life of the trade has been recovered.

A candidate for fragging

About 35 years ago I had a job interview at the New York Times. I was asked what I admired about the paper and what I disliked.

I said I thought it devoted way too much space to East Side socialites and that I most admired the reporting of Tom Friedman. I was thinking of his work from Lebanon in those days.

No one said anything, but when I brought up Tom Friedman's name there were scowls on the faces of my interviewers. Later a friend at the times told me that the managing editor who asked the question wanted nothing more in the world than to become a member of East Side society.

I wasn't offered a job there.

In the '90s Friedman wandered off into areas that did not interest me and I have not paid much attention to him in a long time, but he had column in the Times today that was absolutely right.

 How can Pompeo think he’s got what it takes to make the hard decisions needed to lead a nation as president, and send soldiers to war, when he can’t make a clear-cut easy decision to protect one of his own diplomats from being smeared by people acting outside our system.

It is a good thing that Mike Pompeo did not graduate at the top of his class in 1969 the way William Taylor did. Had Pompeo commanded an infantry company in Vietnam in those days he'd have had a grenade thrown into his tent.

The wheels on the bus go round and round

I went to pick up my grandchildren from school today. There was a long line of yellow buses out front, and at the end of it was a sodden pile of blue gabardine. A closer look revealed it to be Rudy Giuliani.

Where's Rudy?

If Alexander Chalupa did the things that Republicans are accusing her of, why isn't she being prosecuted?

Release the kraken!

At today's hearings on impeachment rightwingers made much of their demands to call their own witnesses, demands largely rejected by Chairman Schiff.

It was not the most carefully thought out attack on the inquiry. Claire McCaskill, onetime Democratic senator from Missouri, asked why aren't they demanding to hear from Rudy Giuliani?

Zing!

Panem et circenses

I don't recall anything the least bit entertaining about the Clinton and Nixon impeachment scandals.

The Clinton one was stupid and sordid from start to finish and no one could have been anything but disgusted by the typical bicycle seat-sniffing Southern Baptist sex creep Ken Starr. Anyone who grew up among Southern Baptists, as I did, knew he would eventually be exposed although it took nearly 20 years.

I cracked a smile then.

As for Nixon, the only opportunity to smile came when some bright young thang with a microphone in her hand asked Sen. Sam Ervin if he didn't think that Nixon's offenses were the greatest crisis the nation has ever faced. Sen. Sam's eyebrows danced as he said that, no, he thought the Civil War was more serious.

The Trump impeachment, though, is a laff riot.

We have Rudy Giuliani the influence peddler masquerading as a cyber security expert butt dialing reporters and locking himself out of his iPhone.

The sanctimonious Jim Jordan being exposed as another Republican sex creep.

And Michael Flynn's new wrinkle on the insanity defense, in which he tells the judge: "Your Honor, my lawyer is crazy."

And so much more. My sides hurt from laughing.

Shoah 'nuff down South

Heckler's veto.