The year 1890 saw the release of Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives, a photo-journalistic work exposing the rat-infested, malnourished, inhumane trauma of New York City's tenement housing. I often think of this work when reading about the wretched plight of today's Gaza and Ukraine, whose citizens, like those impoverished New Yorkers, suffer greatly through no fault of their own.
The only difference between the fin de siècle hell of Ghetto NYC and the contemporary hells of the two foreign lands is that bombs weren't falling on the immiserated New Yorkers. On occasion we wonder at the world's rate of progress over the intervening 134 years. This is one of those occasions.
"If the situation continues, you may see people dying [of starvation] in the streets," said a 40-year-old, father-of-five Gazan to The Washington Post. In agreement is a "U.N.-backed international consortium" that reported a month ago that 93% of the father's fellow citizens were facing "crisis levels of hunger." They were the lucky ones. Another half-million Gazans were facing "catastrophic hunger and starvation."
The World Food Program agreed as well, saying "the scale and swiftness of this crisis is unprecedented in modern times." And should "current predictions continue, we will reach famine by February." The food program's spokesman was wrong. "They" have already reached it. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees said Tuesday that "570,000 Gazans are classified as having food insecurity equivalent to famine levels."
All lies, of course, according to Israel’s Defense Ministry. Employed there is, ahem, a gentleman by the name of Elad Goren, a colonel. He says "There is no starvation in Gaza, period." He went on, even inflating the lie: "You can see pictures from the Palestinian media, not that the IDF is publishing, about the markets ... with vegetables and fruits and bread." Why yes, a veritable Xanadu. Mighty strange, however, that he noted the IDF (Israel Defense Force) doesn't publish these photos of plenty. No doubt Jacob Riis also concealed the fabulous truth about NYC's slums.
As for those bombs dropping on the immiserated of Gaza, the body count is now up to about 26,000, mostly women and children. That's the count. That is, the number authorities have been able to count. Still uncounted are thousands of Gazans lying dead under the rubble. Another 64,000 have been wounded — such as babies with both legs blown off, a militarily overaggressive obscenity far grislier than the word "wounded" might imply.
Roughly 2,000 miles north of Col. Goren's Xanadu lies another country despoiled by invasion, cruelty and almost unbelievable inhumanity. Its citizens are also undeserving of ceaseless bombings and drone strikes; they're as innocent as Gaza's women, children and most men. Yet unlike that tiny strip of Palestinian land, Ukraine has an army. And its "citizens" are enduring a replay of the First World War's ghastly trench warfare.
Because the West has failed to suitably arm Ukraine, its counteroffensive against the barbaric Russians in turn failed to accomplish what otherwise was perfectly possible: the wholesale ejection of the Kremlin's invading hordes. The result: a front-lines stalemate, one virtually identical to the "Great War's" deadlock of soldiers separated from enemy soldiers often by mere yards. Both sides are dug in, consigned to filthy, frozen, uninhabitable trenches.
Both sides are also entrenched in a rat and mice infestation. "In World War I, the rat population swelled when the conflict stagnated," writes CNN. Regrettably, rodent behavior hasn't changed since, and neither has human behavior. In the front-line trenches it's every rat for himself, seeking food, warmth, and spreading disease. Ukrainian intelligence reports the enemy is getting the worst of the latter, but seeing how their situations are identical, Ukrainian soldiers are undoubtedly suffering the same.
The disease is called "mouse fever," which, as diseases go, perhaps sounds relatively moderate in effect, unpleasant but not particularly threatening. But it is. Humans contract the scourge "by inhaling mouse feces dust or by ingestion of mouse feces in food." That alone is hideous enough, but next come fever, rashes, low blood pressure, hemorrhaging of the eyes, vomiting, "severe back pain and problems urinating." I'm pretty sure I'd have problems ever eating again too.
This is but one romantic glory of war, as well as a history lesson. Reports from the Russia-Ukraine fronts, continues CNN, are "reminiscent of those from World War I, where the putrid pileup of waste and corpses allowed 'trench rats' to breed rapidly." Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been filming their torment; on social media they have shown "mice pouring forth from a Russian mortar turret like bullets from a Browning.... Mice and rats are seen scurrying around under beds, power generators, coat pockets, pillowcases and backpacks."
@zaraza199308 #нерек #украина #оборона #миш #миші😎 #багатомишей #🔥 #угар #украина #понадусе🇺🇦 ♬ Hell To Pay - Five Finger Death Punch
A Ukrainian servicewomen told CNN she guessed there were "around 1,000 mice in her dugout of four soldiers." In short order her count may be a nostalgic one. As winter intensifies "it will get colder and colder, and [the rats and mice] will go into the trenches more and more. The situation will not change until they all go through this," says Ihor Zahorodniuk of Ukraine’s National Museum of National History.
For the finest, most literate and deeply insightful writing on life in the trenches, then and now, I'd suggest poet and novelist Robert Graves' 1929 autobiography, Goodbye To All That. I'm stealing the book's promotional blurb: "[Graves] depicts the horrors and disillusionment of the Great War, from life in the trenches and the loss of dear friends, to the stupidity of government bureaucracy."
I stole the line out of more than laziness. Striking one word, Graves depicts "the stupidity of government" as war's culprit, says the publisher. But government is a poor substitution for humans. Stupidity arises not from abstractions but from humans of limited imagination, and too often from humans altogether unoccupied by humanity. The world witnessed both in the British, the Germans, the Russians, the French and others in WW I. Today the culprits aren't nearly as diffuse and they're easily specified: Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin.
Jacob Riis was left to blame "society" for how the other half lived — an impossible abstraction if attempting to subdue injustice. How much easier his work as a social reformer would have been if he'd had only two men to confront. The modern world does. Nevertheless, these two inhuman monsters have managed to subdue the world instead.
We are a strange species. Rather than removing from power the malicious stupidity of Netanyahu and Putin, we'll allow the extraordinary suffering of tens of millions of Gazans and Ukrainians to persist. Could be, the tyrants aren't the stupid ones after all.