Be skeptical, and think afresh…

Flying Fish Services Ltd.

The Editor of The Ironist has long asked me for my views on the war in Ukraine. For me it is a long way to Europe – let alone across the Atlantic – as I haven’t left the Black Sea. But sturgeons live longer than humans, and the speed of our lives is slower. Also, we don’t have their egos. Nor do we fish have the savagery lurking below the surface that humans have. This gives us a different perspective.

Also, we may be smarter. Swimming in the ‘wine-dark sea’, we have a greater opportunity to think clearly, and in more depth, than humans. Afterall, 70% of the earth’s surface is water, and the depths of the oceans are quiet. Storms are on the surface – where humans are.

Perhaps humans, having to wander up and down hills, and amongst the trees and fields, bothered with the weather, are constantly forced to let their minds wander, randomly. It might explain why humans forget quickly and can change their opinions at the drop of a hat – and forget what they have learned. Conversely, or perversely, humans sometimes cannot change their views even when presented with irrefutable truths. In fact, humans have an expression, “up and down like a toilet seat.” Well, in the sea, we don’t worry about fiddly toilet seats, do we? If we ‘have to go’, well, we go. Just think of the effort humans go to in trying to manage their waste – toilet seats, flappers, o-rings and overflow tubes, etc. – but it is typical of humans with their needlessly complicated lives. Humans choose to complicate things. Life could be simpler – maybe that would be a place to start.

Perhaps this mentality reveals more about humans. Both humans and sturgeons have the choice to act or not to act. Choice provides consequences. My first choice was to swim into the fishbowl Ekaterina Porakishvili offered me as a small fry near Oni on the Rioni River. My newly-hatched brothers and sisters swam away. I made a good choice: my saviour – and teacher – was the wife of Georgia’s wealthiest wine and brandy merchant, David Sarajishvili. She and her husband had no children, and chose to educate sturgeons, patronize artists and writers, and donate to social democratic causes – the moderate Mensheviks, rather than the extremist Bolsheviks. My second choice, upon outgrowing the fishbowl, was to swim into her aquarium, where my education began in earnest and I learned to breathe on land, talk and write. I received my secondary school certificate – the Baccalaureate – just after the Soviets invaded.

Hindsight suggests my adoptive parents’ choice of supporting the Mensheviks, who were non-Leninists, was not the best. The Bolsheviks’ capture of Tiflis was the end for them – and for my life with them. They lost everything. I remember the day, 104 years ago, as I took the picture on Chavchavadze St. with my Leica at the top of the page.

In the picture, you can see the white pantheon where Stalin’s mother is buried on the mountain behind, and that dog in the picture chased me down a drain just after I took the pic. I was young then, and more agile – I dropped the camera, and slipped down a drain and swam to the Kura River, only a few hundred metres away. I lost the camera, and the Bolsheviks never paid me the twenty Tetri, either, for my picture.

I mention this as our glorious country Georgia gave the world the worst tyrant and mass killer it has ever seen. But we did not choose him. He chose himself. I had seen him as a teenager, a nasty bully and thug. His mother chose the career of a priest of God for him, and he chose to create a path to Hell – what irony. Joseph Stalin chose terror – and got away with it, dying peacefully in his sleep. His people chose not to rebel.

You know of Stalin’ crimes – but you did not watch from the riverbed as I did: the collectivization of agriculture, his purges and show trials, the murder and famine from Ukraine to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. I have haunting visages of people, dead, upon earthen roads, eyes open, bony fingers clawing for air in that last gasp before death, mouths frozen open, skin shrunken, voiceless in agony.

What is it about humans? Let me direct my questions to the readers of your periodical: is it the ‘show’ you like, the appearances, not the substance? You want dreams; you choose to believe empty lies? You clearly want them; you seek them; you believe them. Below is propaganda for the recent election campaign of Donald Trump, a satirical song promoting, ironically, the suitability of Putin as the great Tsar of the people, and a photograph of the secular leader Zelensky, flanked by large pictures of himself, in a holy place, presumably leading his people onto victory….

History states time and again that politicians do not deliver on their promises. Surely Americans do not believe they will solve their social problems of unequal education, or its uneven delivery of medical services to its citizens? America is a dream, and the myth that its streets are paved with gold lives on – as humans choose to believe it. There is no debt problem; just keep ‘regime change’ going and threaten the rest of the world. “We are the biggest bullies and can do what we want!” is the mantra. Russia, on the other hand, still believes Ukraine is part of Russia. In the song about Putin, he is trying to catch a fish with a hook – oh! what cruelty! – a powerful symbol of control. Ukrainians choose not to understand that not all Ukrainians look westward…and that many prefer to speak, and to be, Russian.

In this recent war, there is little talk of the dead, the maimed, the country that is destroyed, the widows, the suffering. What we hear is the pettiness of who is in power, who wants power, who stands with whom – all blaming others and pushing their own agendas, while smiling at the camera, professing great motives, ambitions – they ‘CARE’, you know! Still, none of these leaders have spent a night shivering in a trench, fearing the morning’s light and the high-pitched buzzing of a kamikaze drone above…

The Answer

Humans need to choose sympathy, and to compromise. The belligerents do not have the answers, as none of them know or understand all of the issues. Rise above savagery and vengeance. Magnanimity is required. Stop, and have a ‘sober second thought.’

Think more deeply – be more skeptical. Do not believe everything you are told. What you already know is not complete. There is someone with an agenda that wants to mask his or her lies with propaganda. Find out what the agenda is before you react. Don’t respond immediately with a ‘knee-jerk response.’ Fish don’t have knees – we are flexible. We can bend our bodies side to side, as we think. There is a reason why we spend a lot of time stationary in the water, weaving, thinking. An instantaneous reaction is not necessary – and is usually wrong.

It is because, as Santayana and Marx said, humans cannot learn from the past that they will be condemned to repeat it again and again. And while the first time (say, with Stalin), was a tragedy, this time it is a farce with a price far too high to pay.

Choose to be skeptical, and choose to think afresh, before replying or acting – and remember, think outside of the fishtank.

Contributed by Zarinaya Hagana