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“We tell the stories that perpetuate the narrative or the myth we want, and we erase the others,” Chris Hedges states in this interview with Ray Nayler about his new book, “Palaces of the Crow,” which centers around four teenagers from varying backgrounds who struggle to survive during World War II. The war, Nayler says, fundamentally reshaped the world geopolitically, technologically and socially in ways that have profoundly impacted the environment in which we live today. Critical lessons from that moment in time are being lost, with media and governments covering up the deep and long-lasting wounds inflicted upon tens of millions of people. Nayler says that “We can’t move away from that time period before understanding it.”
During World War II people were trapped in unimaginably horrible circumstances and were forced to make difficult, and at times self-sacrificial, decisions. The story of the “ways in which people came together to protect their neighbors, to protect family members, to protect friends, to protect strangers” is rarely told, Nayler says.
In Nayler’s novel, crows play an essential role in the story. Like humans, crows are social animals. He describes the crows’ niche as the flock and the flock as a type of organism whose niche is the forest, much like the human’s niche is society and our society’s niche is the world. Contrary to their typical association with death and destruction, Nayler utilizes them as “a symbol of cooperation and group living and non-violence.” From this viewpoint, one sees that human connection, cooperation, nonviolence and mutual aid are fundamental to survival.
The theme of connection, “a primal sense of togetherness,” is central to the story of the four teenagers thrown together under hostile conditions. This connection allows people, and other animals, to find common ground and get along despite their different cultures. Civilization, which Nayler portrays as “being inside a painted box and trying to ignore what’s out there,” is an obstacle to connection that prevents us from recognizing reality. We erase the reality that humans are social, nonviolent, interconnected and caring beings at our own peril.
Host
Chris Hedges
Executive Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Margaret Flowers
Transcript:
Margaret Flowers
Crew:
Diego Ramos
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Transcript
Chris Hedges: Ray Nayler in his new novel, “Palaces of the Crow,” writes about four teenagers struggling to survive in the killing fields in Poland and Lithuania during the Second World War. Over a 12-year period, the Soviet and Nazi regimes killed 14 million people in an area that historian Timothy Snyder aptly names “The Bloodlands”. Of the 14 million civilians and prisoners of war who were killed between 1933 and 1945, more than half died from starvation. The teenagers find refuge in the forest with a flock of highly intelligent crows. They hide from German patrols, bands of Russian deserters, Polish partisans, and fascist Lithuanian police, along with bandits and outcasts. Nayler uses this violent landscape to ask fundamental questions about existence. Is our natural state a war against all, or is it, as Peter Kropotkin writes, grounded in mutual aid?
As Nayler does in his novel, “Mountain in the Sea,” he interprets our reality through the world of animals, specifically crows, who survive not as individuals but in flocks. The animal world, he argues, is capable of receiving and emitting emotions of kindness and reciprocity. He sets the humanity of the crows and the four teenagers, who protect each other, against the barbarity of those who wage war.
“The biological niche is a concept we most often get wrong,” he writes. Yes, we are built to survive in the environmental niche to which we are fixed. But the human niche is not niche, is not the world. It is human society. Just as the crow’s niche is the flock and the bee’s niche is the hive. Social animals are built to survive only among one another.
Joining me to discuss his new novel, “Palaces of the Crow,” is Ray Nayler. He lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. He most recently served as international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I have to ask you why you set the novel at the time period and in the place that you did?
Ray Nayler: I think the reason I chose to set a book during World War II is that I see World War II in some ways as the birthplace of our present moment and the world that we live in. I think a lot of the world that we exist in today was structured technologically and structured in the way that people relate to one another and even in the boundaries of national states by World War II. And I think our mentality toward other human beings in many ways was also restructured during World War II.
This was a time in which 50 million people, on best estimates, lost their lives in a period of about six years. That number is vague because a lot of those people’s stories are just completely unknown. But I think that this cauldron of war, and also the technological results of that war – the atomic bomb, radar, the rockets – all of these things completely reshaped the world. And one of the other things that was reshaped, of course, was the United States, which had been less affected by World War II, rising as this dominant global power after the war.
But the particularity of that is not why I set it there. I really set it there because I think if we fail to understand what happened in World War II, if we lose an understanding of what happened, especially of what happened in The Bloodlands and in Poland and Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe during World War II, then we lose some kind of sense of history that becomes irretrievable. We can’t move away from that time period before understanding it.
Chris Hedges: Well, it was also the clash of the two totalitarian powers, the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. And I’m just wondering whether the rise of those two political systems and that clash was also an element that you wanted to use at least as a kind of backdrop.
Ray Nayler: I think one thing that’s sort of poorly understood about World War II here in the West is that it really was a battle not largely between the West and Germany, right, or the West and two different authoritarian states in Germany and Japan, but nine out of 10 German casualties were inflicted on the Eastern Front. And really this was a battle between two different styles of authoritarian state between which the people were trapped and had to make terrible choices as to who to ally themselves with. There was no good power to ally oneself with over evil. There was only bad and worse in many ways for many people.
And, also, they couldn’t see it with the clarity of history, right? They could only see in the moment what seemed to provide them with a way to survive or what seemed to provide them with some kind of tool that they could use against oppression in that moment. So yes, I think it’s interesting to me to examine World War II from those perspectives, from the perspective of the people caught, not between the West and some kind of totalitarian East Germany, but really between these two massive and crushing forces. And how do people survive that?
Chris Hedges: And the four characters, the teenagers that you write about, are all victims of either one of those systems, or the other. One is a Jew. One is a gypsy. One has been exiled to Siberia, to the Gulags. And the other character is just horribly maimed by war, doesn’t speak even. So, talk about what you wanted to do with those four characters.
Ray Nayler: Well, in a way, this book for me is a kind of response to a certain way of seeing human nature, right? I was very surprised when I found out that William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” was based on a real event. That there really was a group of shipwrecked boys who survived for a long time on an island alone. They all went to a boarding school, right? And their teachers were not with them, so they were forced to form a society on this island and cooperate and find some way through. The difference between the book and reality is that in reality, nobody died. The boys divided the chores up between themselves, set up housekeeping, and lived very peacefully on that island together in a state of mutual aid and cooperation.
But that’s not the story that gets told in Lord of the Flies, of course. The story that gets told in Lord of the Flies is one of the strong against the weak, and this sort of perverted miniature version of the society that William Golding perceived us as living in in his day. Golding responds to that criticism in an interesting way and, at the contemporary moment when he wrote the Lord of the Flies, he says, “Well this is not a story about those boys. This is a story about British schoolboys and how they would form a society on an island.” And I take that point, but at the time, I think, there’s so many books that are written about people destroying one another in times of adversity. And one of the things that’s forgotten about World War II, for example, is that probably most of the people involved in World War II tried to protect both themselves and other people around them. And many, many people in World War II actually sacrificed their lives to protect other people, knowingly gave their lives up in order to shield other people from oppression. And that’s a story that we don’t talk about, I think, enough about the ways in which people came together to protect their neighbors, to protect family members, to protect friends, to protect strangers.
There are many stories, even in Lithuania, which had less of this than Poland, of citizens taking children from the ghetto in order to keep them from being killed and fostering them for years, hiding their identities until long after the war was over. So, picking these characters who were all oppressed in one way or another and then putting them together and allowing their individual abilities to mutually support one another is sort of the core of the book. Watching how they fill each other in, right? There are certain abilities that each one has, and they bring those abilities to bear in protecting the others. And in the end, and this is not really a spoiler, but in the end, they’ll all make grand sacrifices for each other during their time in the forest.
Chris Hedges: I know from your wonderful book about the octopus that you probably didn’t make up anything about these crows. But set against this horror, and it is a horror that these four teenagers are attempting to hide from and survive through, is our relationship to the animal, to animals, in this particular case, crows. And one of the things I found interesting is that they kind of live in this underground shelter that had been previously occupied by a veteran of World War I and a hermit who had been very, very kind to the flocks of crows in the forest. And it raises that question of whether there was some kind of reciprocity. But I want you to talk about the use of crows that are a constant theme in the book. And at the end, I won’t spoil it, but I mean, there becomes a decision by one of them, I mean, to risk their life to save the crows that are trying to save her.
Ray Nayler: I think Corvids are fascinating. And crows, in particular, but other Corvids like ravens and rooks. One of the things that’s really interesting about them for me is that within the space that humans create, this very damaged space, urban spaces and suburban spaces and all of the spaces in which we’ve sort of invaded nature to some extent, many animals have been destroyed by that movement into nature by human beings. Crows, on the other hand, are one of the groups of animals whose numbers have increased along with humans and who seem very suited to taking advantage of our damaged liminal spaces.
I think we have a strong association with crows and negativity, right? We see their call as a sign sometimes of death, right? They’re associated with disease and war and all of these other things, but I think precisely because when humankind has gone into battle, historically crows have been there to take advantage of the food that we leave behind for them on the battlefield, right? And so, crows are creative and intelligent creatures themselves, of course. And these crows in this book are sort of an extension just of the tool use and intelligence that crows have. And crows are also an animal that has a direct weaving relationship with human beings. They’ve been with us as a symbol, probably throughout our entire history. We’ve, I think, learned a lot from them. And they learn from us. They watch us do things and imitate us. They exchange gifts with us. They remember our faces. They’ve clearly evolved alongside us for a long time.
I was on the beach with my daughter, and we were tide pooling and we were sort of standing there looking at some things. And I saw the crows come down off of the sea cliffs and start gleaning from the tide pools. And I asked the ranger what the crows were doing there because you don’t usually see crows right at the seashore. They’re usually driven away by gulls. And the ranger said, “Well, there was a student group here. There were children. It was a kindergarten group. And the crows know that when the children come through the tide pools, they’re not very careful about where they put their feet and they kill a lot of small animals and snails and things. And so, the crows watch from the forest above the beach, and they wait for children to come through the tide pools and then they go and they pick up what the children have left behind.” And I thought, that’s such a good summation of what much of the crow-human relationship has been historically. We make a mess. The crows take advantage.
But there’s also in the book, mutual care that emerges between the humans and the crows. And this is something that we see with human-animal relationships. And you see it with crows. People who treat injured birds, especially the more intelligent species like Corvids, will often find that they’ve gained a lifelong friend, right? And that bird will introduce them to other birds from their flock and soon they have a relationship with a whole group of birds. And so that thread of care that proceeds from the man who takes care of some crows and is kind to them, and then the children who come along and need help and the crows give it to them, and then later in the book, what the adults will do for the crows. All of that is for me a way of showing how care can move through species, through generations and build some kind of a system of care, right? Grow and grow, if it’s given that space to grow.
Chris Hedges: I once asked the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who baptized my youngest daughter, how he defined faith, and he said it was the belief that the good draws to it the good. And that seems, frankly, along with, I don’t want to impose biblical interpretations on your writing, but that along with resurrection seems to be at the core of what you’ve written.
Ray Nayler: I think that’s a great way of looking at faith in the world. The idea that the good or that right action or right activity in the world, caring about the other, brings care and builds care. I think I’ve always felt, and I finally only recently have been able to enunciate this, that everything that is successful and worth doing has to begin with care as its first step. First, you care and then you do a thing. And these are the kinds of actions in the world that seem to have the most benefit for everyone. It’s those actions that are initiated with a sense of care.
My grandmother used to say when we would do things badly as kids – my grandmother was from Appalachia, so she spoke very bluntly – she would say, “Well, the first step is giving a shit. And then everything comes out of that. So, if you don’t give a shit, you’re never going to get it right.” Right? But I think what she fundamentally meant was that the first step is care. The first step is caring about the result.
I find that when I’m writing, for example, something that I always keep very clear in my mind is care for the reader. What do I want them to receive from me? What do I want them to get from the experience of reading and how can I bring that to them? And if you don’t care about that, I don’t know why it’s worth writing at all. If it’s done without care, if it’s done just for some kind of profit or something like that, I’m not sure why anything is worth doing. So yeah, I think things that are engaged in with care build care in the world. Things that are engaged in without care have a tendency to do the opposite, right? They build adverse material, sort of obsessive profit-seeking behaviors that decrease the amount of care that’s possible in the world.
And so, there’s a constant battle, I think, between those two things because while it’s true that we’re perfectly capable of compassion, care, and mutual aid, it’s also true that we’re perfectly capable of destruction, of abstracting other people to the point where we feel fine taking advantage of them, et cetera. So, both of those things are true. I just tend to feel, and call me optimistic, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s realistic. I think that the mutual aid, compassion and care and the amount of it in the world outweighs the other stuff in the end. Although maybe not in any particular moment.
Chris Hedges: Well, Kropotkin was a naturalist. I mean, he evolved his theory of mutual care by observing very, very closely the natural world and, in particular, species that created herds or flocks in order to survive.
Ray Nayler: This is absolutely true. And I think that there’s something that’s worth touching on when we talk about Corvids and birds in general. And that is that we human beings are very strange apes. And one of the strangest things about us is actually – and you know in our violent present moment, it sounds strange to say, but it’s true – that we are the most nonviolent of all of the apes. We are able to restrain our violence and cooperate in large groups in a way that none of the other great apes can. But, it is something that birds can do. Birds, millions of years before we figured out how to do it, learned to live quite peacefully in very, very large cooperative flocks. And that’s something that was of great advantage to them. It allowed them to basically evolve into a species, as you were mentioning at the beginning of the interview, a species that has a niche that is the flock. And then the niche of the flock is the forest or the world, right? So, the flock is the organism that survives in the world. And the crow or the bird, the flamingo, whatever bird it is, is an organism that only has to survive in the flock. Its existence is cushioned by its cultural relationship to other birds. And they did this long before human beings did, but we’re very much like them in that sense.
There’s a great book, “The Parrot in the Mirror,” and I don’t remember the author’s name right off the top of my head, but what he says is, if you put 300 chimpanzees on a 747, and you flew them across the North American continent, when you took them out on the other side, almost no one would have all their fingers and eyes, right? They simply can’t be in that kind of proximity to one another for that long. If you did the same with a flock of parrots, they would come out on the other side perfectly fine. They’re perfectly capable of being in these kinds of groups. And so, that’s another reason why I chose the crow is because it really is a symbol of cooperation and group living and non-violence, right?
And I think what Kropotkin says… he was a naturalist and specifically he was a naturalist that worked a lot in Siberia. And in Siberia you have this summer of great abundance in which the land just suddenly becomes incredibly fertile and rich with resources. And I think what Kropotkin really learned from animals is that so long as they have resources that they need to survive, they will cooperate and work in mutual aid with one another. The only time that Kropotkin says Darwin’s theory really makes sense is when resources become scarce, then competition sets in.
But not even always then. Still, there can be cooperation in these animal groups, even in adversity, even within resource scarcity. But he does make the point, and I think this is why he also seeks so much in his life, to make the alleviation of poverty a material task, right? He talks about bread constantly and its importance, bread and will, right? Because without bread, there can be no will, right? There can’t be any change. No one is capable of cooperating with their fellow person when they are starving, right? And when they’re being crushed under the heel of adversity. And so, I think he sees this in the massive Siberian herds of caribou and the massive Siberian flocks of migratory birds. And he realizes that if you can create a society of abundance, you can create a society of total mutual aid and cooperation as well. And the two things are closely tied to one another, but that mutual cooperation can even survive under some of the more adverse conditions.
Chris Hedges: He was a socialist. I mean, it’s not even abundance, it’s just a kind of equality. And that’s in your book with the crows, which I’m sure, knowing you, is probably true, but when they have broken wings or they can’t fly anymore, the other crows will come and sustain them and feed them.
Ray Nayler: You know, again, crows are an interesting species. They can be cruel. They can seem cruel to us. They certainly have these famous moments of having trials of other crows and for whatever reason deciding to kill one of their number and it’s completely unclear to us from the outside. No biologist can tell you why this happens, what has been done, because we don’t understand what their culture is and what the violation might have been. But crows show concern for one another, for the injured, for the weak, and they will protect a wounded crow. They will protect a fledgling fallen from the nest against predation. Crows will band together to drive off predators, even when those predators are not a direct threat to them. They will do it just for the sake of other crows, of other members of their group. And they risk their lives to do this. Driving a hawk off is a dangerous activity and it puts one at risk. And so, to do that as a crow, not for the sake of oneself, but for the sake of the flock, really shows the sort of mentality that exists. And I use that word in that exact sense of mentation and a sort of vision of the world or a picture of the world. In the crows’ picture of the world, it is worth risking one’s life for the other virtually at all times.
Chris Hedges: Well, in the book, they risk their lives for the children.
Ray Nayler: Yes. And I think that the implication is that in some way they’ve been able to extend this care out to the children because they have formed a relationship with one of them, Neriya, who has for many seasons been playing with them and interacting with them and building a kind of friendship with them. And so, on that foundation and on the foundation of the relationship that they had with this man before, they have a reason to extend that care to an interspecies level.
Chris Hedges: You begin your chapters with these supposed passages from – what is it called – Diary of a Burnt Village, if I remember correctly? Just before I ask you some specifics, what were you trying to do with that?
Ray Nayler: I wanted to show how we speak through writing with the dead. And there is this way in which so long as we are not forgotten, we’re able to kind of inscribe ourselves on other people. You know, there’s a way too in which each one of us is just a collection of all of the voices that have come before us, right? And all of the inscriptions that have been made on us. And so, this was a way for me of showing how it was possible for that man who’s nameless in the book to somehow survive and pass on some of his ideas to the children who will take them up in their own ways.
For me, the way that writing works in general… I mean, it amazes me every time, for example, that I pick up Thucydides and find that someone can speak to me clearly and as if they were completely modern from a time so long ago and a context so completely different from my own. And that kind of clarity that writing allows, that ability for the dead to speak and be alive in the world with us, I think, is also one of the core elements of human existence. One of the things that makes us extraordinary and the things that give us great power is that intergenerational ability to engage in exchange with other minds in a very direct way through reading and writing. And now, of course, through other means of recording and things like that.
We, as a species, are able to access the knowledge of people who disappeared from the face of the earth thousands of years ago. And if we can sustain interest in those exchanges, it has the ability, I think, to make us extremely wise about the decisions that we make in the world. We can continue to learn and amass knowledge in a way that other species really cannot. That is something that we have that other animals really do not have, is writing and inscription beyond just DNA and immediate physical culture and that kind of thing.
Chris Hedges: What’s interesting, Hannah Arendt, when she writes about what constitutes absolute evil or the capacity to commit evil, says it’s rootlessness. It’s the loss of any connection with the past at all, a kind of willful illiteracy.
Ray Nayler: That sounds right to me. I would say that rootlessness, the inability to perceive oneself as connected to the rest of the world, is what creates the psychotic map of the world that is evil. When one sees the world as a place from which to draw exploitatively for one’s own benefit and thinks that that is a structure worth following, then one becomes capable of doing great evil. I call it ‘extractive individualism’ in some of my work. It’s this sense that you as a self are capable of drawing from the world without consequence. There is no limit to what you can take and there is no responsibility really to give back. And when you start structuring things that way, you get things like the structure of corporations that limitlessly take from the environment in the name of profit and many other structures that are poisonous to life on earth. So yeah, I agree. Rootlessness -you could call it disconnection from the other, from the past, from the world. Any sort of misinterpretation of just how incredibly mutually dependent everything is will lead to wrong choices and evil.
Chris Hedges: You just describe the pathology of Donald Trump and almost everyone around him. I want to read this passage and have you comment. “Animals have smell, sight, hearing, all the senses we have, but also senses we do not. Ways of knowing we humans have no name for. Senses we have lost or neglected. Senses we never had.” You honor those senses, those customs, the whatever you want to call it within the Crow community, which are finally to us mysterious.
Ray Nayler: I was having a recent conversation about this too. There’s this Thomas Nagel essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” And it’s a famously misread essay in many ways, because many people have summarized this essay as saying, “You can’t know what it’s like to be an animal that finds its way through sonar. And in the dark, it’s impossible to place one’s mind within the sensory apparatus of the other and experience the world like that.”
But the interesting thing is that essay has become one of these things that nobody reads but everybody quotes from, right? And in fact, that essay, interestingly enough, says that there is a way to partially access what it’s like to be a bat and that blind people do this, that they actually use sound to locate objects in a space. And that even people who are sighted, if they pay close enough attention, can begin to have this sense from the way that sound waves move in a space of where things are, even in the dark. And therefore, we can start to approach, not a perfect understanding of what it’s like to be a bat, but some kind of an idea, a starting place of finding mutual ground with what that might be like. I think that this is actually what all communication is to one extent or another, right? I don’t know what you are thinking right now. I haven’t experienced what you’ve experienced in your life. And I can’t quite understand what my words and my presence, my appearance, all of those things, really mean to you because you’re an individual and as an individual, you can’t be completely like me. But using my empathy and my sense of what is mutual between us. I can find common ground with you and be confident that we can have a conversation and find mutual understanding.
And the same is true with, let’s say, moving away from human relationships, animal relationships, or humans’ relationships with animals. People say, “We don’t understand what animals are saying. We can’t speak their languages.” But human beings who own dogs and cats know that you do speak a language with them, communication happens. They understand you. You understand them. You exchange information about your condition. You exchange care and love and all of these things with them. You have a rich communication with them. And so, while it might not be possible for you to know what it’s like to be a dog, for example, you know when your dog is happy and you know when it’s unhappy. You know when your dog feels loved and when it needs a bit more love from you. You know when it’s hungry and when it’s thirsty, when it needs to go outside and go to the bathroom. You know these things. And people who work with horses intimately know the moods of horses, right? And people who work with any animal come to perceive what the animal perceives in the world very well, to interpret and translate it across that gap of perception.
And I think to be fair to how hard it is to understand animals, we need to also remember how hard it is to understand one another and just how difficult human communication can be. When “The Mountain and The Sea” came out, some people were disappointed with how difficult it really was to communicate with the octopus, right? And I remember having this conversation with someone saying, “I really wanted there to be this breakthrough moment at which we suddenly come to understand everything that they’re saying.” And I said, “Well, I mean, you can’t even understand what your own mother is saying half the time to you, right? So, how are you going to understand what an octopus is trying to tell you?” We can’t even understand what we’re saying to one another half the time. Sort of coming back to that idea, we’re always in the dark to some degree with other people, other animals, other beings in the world. But we can find something in common with them and we can move to having some kind of a communication with them. It’s perfectly possible and we do it all the time. We just neglect to think about how much we do it.
Chris Hedges: There’s another passage, you write: “They had not been children, any of them, and they had not been adults. They had been the kind of human survival makes, an ancient state of being in which they were bound to others for heat, food, shelter, and safety in ways the modern human had stopped recognizing. Bound together in the old ways with every moment one of total reliance on the other. Bound in a way in which words like friend or family made no sense. Child, adult, friend, family, those were the modern words made for a modern world. For civilization, what really meant a world carved out of nature, like a little dollhouse. An artificial world, with the natural painted and papered away, where each person lived in their own decorated box of a room, where distance from one another was possible and true relationship fell away.” I love that but just explain a little bit the thoughts behind it.
Ray Nayler: I think we should remember that childhood and adulthood are modern inventions. These are modern concepts that we have pretty arbitrarily, and differently in different societies, applied to human beings There’s really no such thing as a child in the same way as there’s no such thing as an adult. We are simply people, learning and growing at all stages of our lives, and there’s no moment when we’re let’s say in our late teens or early 20s when suddenly we know what we need to know to survive and we can go out on our own. We continue to learn over our lifetimes. And children also have capacities that they don’t have to exercise in the modern world but they’re perfectly capable of exercising. Children used to work on farms and do the kinds of labor that we would think only adults capable of. They, I would say luckily, no longer have to do. We’ve carved out a space for childhood, but we’ve also carved up the human experience into these little boxes. And we’ve gotten away from a primal sense, you might say, of togetherness that isn’t cut up into arbitrary relationships like friend or family or these kinds of things and labeled. And I think sort of when I was writing this in this moment, I was thinking about the difference between human beings many thousands of years ago huddled for warmth in a space of shelter together and how they would have thought of all of those faces around them, around the fire and what those relationships were like. I don’t think those relationships were anything like our modern relationships. They were relationships of total trust and total dependency with one another in which every day’s survival relied on all of those faces around them in that circle around that hearth.
And they must have, of course, had their disagreements and all of those things, and certainly sometimes violent ones. But they knew that they had to be together and they had to rely on each other. And in the forest, these children are returned to that state of having to be totally reliant upon one another and together with society and civilization stripped away from them, the wallpapered room. You know, I think about some of these lonely farms when I think about civilization. I think about a farmhouse. Let’s say a Victorian farmhouse, right, with the wallpaper in all the rooms and it’s very pleasant and they’ve got glass in the windows and all these things. And they’ve moved it all by like train out to the middle of nowhere. And all around them is this vast and eternal prairie, completely wild still and unexplored. And it feels to me like that still really is what civilization is. It’s this kind of being inside a painted box and trying to ignore what’s out there. And when you can’t ignore what’s out there, if you don’t have the technology to cut it off from you and create this artificial space of civilization, you also can’t ignore how reliant you are on everyone around you, all of those people around the fire.
Chris Hedges: There’s one last passage I want you to comment on. “And as with people, so with whole nations, the Soviet Union fought the Nazis off and then slammed the door shut across all of Eastern Europe to keep their enemies out. Then they got to work weeding out from their collective memory all the things that were hurtful and inconvenient to official history, tearing up by their roots the memories of the stetter lach, of the the pale, of the millions of prisoners of war, of the nations who allied themselves with the Nazis, willingly choosing Hitler’s sadistic, genocidal terror over Stalin’s murderous repression and brutality. They rooted out the memories of the incompetent Soviet leadership that led millions to the slaughter, the generals brought back from the gulags, their hands shaking, their teeth rotted by famine, to take over the command of shattered armies. After the war, their story, the story of what happened in the forest would become just one of many stories that could never be told. And on the other side, in the West, she was sure they were doing it too, hollowing out the war so they could fill it with a more convenient story, something with more convincing heroes and more inhumane villains and the people who lived through a completely different kind of war, the real war, grew more and more silent.”
Let me just say, as someone who has spent a lot of time in war, you totally nailed it.
Ray Nayler: There’s an amazing essay by Lee Sandlin called “Losing the War” about World War II and about the silence of the people who fought in World War II. There’s an amazing moment in that essay when he realizes that as children, they had gone running around the neighborhood playing army, shooting at each other and falling down and pretending to get killed and all of these things right outside the windows and under the noses of the men who had fought in the trenches of World War II and who would have been traumatized, probably, by seeing this, some of them, right? And Lee Sandlin has this sense of us losing the real World War II in favor of the story of World War II that we had been aggressively telling ourselves for a long time. It’s a brilliant essay.
But it also reminds me of this personal experience that I had in Turkmenistan, which is: I was in a city at the time called Türkmenbaşy after the authoritarian president of Turkmenistan, but originally it had been called Krasnovodsk, “Red Water”. And it was a city on the Caspian Sea. And I was in a taxi and admiring the stone train station of the city. And he said, “Ah, you like that? That was built by the Japanese. And so was this road. And so were all the apartment buildings in Krasnovodsk.” And I said, “What do mean?” He said, “They were all built by Japanese prisoners of war. They lived here for decades after World War II and they all died and they’re buried in the cemetery up on the hill.” And I said, “Well, can you drive me to the cemetery?” And he drove me there and there was a monument in the cemetery, relatively new, all in Japanese.
And so, when I went back to Ashgabat, I went to the Japanese Ambassador, and I asked him about it. And he said, “Yes, there were many Japanese soldiers from the battles in Manchuria, who were swept up in the latter days of World War II by the Soviet Union and then worked to death as slave labor all over Central Asia. And recently, there was a group of Japanese women who belonged to an NGO that goes around and collects the bodies of the dead from World War II, the Japanese war dead, burns them in situ and brings their ashes back to Japan so that they can be buried on Japanese soil. And they are the ones that put the monument up.”
And I thought, I have no idea what World War II was like. Like, this doesn’t fit into any of the narratives of which I have any knowledge. I had no idea, and I was a well-educated person who had actually read many, many books about World War II, that there had even been a battle in Manchuria against the Soviet Union, and that so many hundreds of thousands of people had been captured by the Soviet Union, and that none of them had come home. That they had all been worked to death, and some of them didn’t die until the 1960s, right? And I got this sense that this this colossus, this colossal event of World War II was slipping away in some way and that we were losing the substance of it and replacing it with something that was much more interpretable and convenient because I had never met anyone who had even spoken about any of this. And then I started sort of talking to other people in different ways about World War II. And I discovered that a lot of my friends who were from Siberia knew Germans after World War II who never went home, who just were prisoners of war and kept in Siberia for the rest of their lives. Rounded up at Stalingrad or other battles on the Eastern Front and never saw home again. So, I really got this sense of the gigantic and unknown, largely lost story of this war and the deep wounds that it had caused that no one was even willing to speak of anymore.
Chris Hedges: Well, we tell the stories that perpetuate the narrative or the myth we want, and we erase the others.
Ray Nayler: Yeah, there’s really no, I guess, advantage to anyone of remembering those Japanese soldiers, right? And so, it took just a small NGO group to go and find them and put up a memorial. But that memorial, I’m sure, by now is largely forgotten as well 20 some years later. I doubt that very many people in Krasnovodsk would be able to tell you why that’s there even, right? Because they’re part of the World War II story. It doesn’t have anything heroic or sustaining of a national narrative about it at all, right? And so, it’ll be lost.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, well my uncle fought in the South Pacific, came home and drank himself to death because what the Japanese did was horrible, but what they did to the Japanese was just as horrible. That’s why all of our movies are Saving Private Ryan.
Ray Nayler: Yeah, I remember Audie Murphy, his quote where he said, “If you train a dog to fight, and then you want to bring that dog home, and give it to your children, you need to untrain it. You need to take the fight out of it. But they didn’t do that for any of us. They just said, ‘Well, now you’re done. Go home.’”
Chris Hedges: Well, that’s what the story of The Odyssey is about. That’s what Odysseus has to overcome. That was great, Ray. It’s a wonderful book. And I want to thank Diego and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.
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