Today, on the one-year anniversary of Russia’s attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people and the elimination of their land, their culture and their heritage, let us reflect on how deeply connected their fight is to our own and much of the world’s struggles. There is no doubt that Russian aggression is partially motivated by empire and economics. The satanic Russian s—t, also known as putin, wants the land that does not belong to him and the economic potential it holds. He also wants to burnish his name as one of the world’s great tyrants, like his idol the equally satanic Stalin, who “returns Russia to its former greatness.”
It’s all a myth, a depraved idea of leadership and legacy. What is not a myth, however, what is a harsh reality is Ukraine’s genuine struggle for survival. It is an existential battle but also more than that. It’s about an ancient people and culture retaining its distinctive features, its own character. It’s not about just surviving. It’s about being, in their case, being Ukrainian.
Identity in the United States
In the United States, we have also been fighting for and about identity. Our internal battles are not really about the evil one, trump, or his mini-me, DeSantis, or Republican or Democrat. There is of course an aspect of our divisions that is about power and economics because these are staple features of politics. More fundamentally, however, it’s about who is American and what it means to be American. It’s about being American.
It was not mere chance that during the evil one, trump’s, era we saw Muslim-Americans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans and others asserting their rightful claims as American. (Please continue to do so. It’s a simple but important act of resistance.) For a time, time like the lifespan of a fruit fly in the long context of human history, being American meant being white. As we can now see with the passing of a few centuries, or is it mere decades, this was all a myth. It was what white people told themselves on stolen land so that they wouldn’t feel like the thieves they actually were.
Before the white colonists, there were people living on this land that we now call the United States of America and on this continent called North America. Note that both the country and the continents, North and South, are named after an Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, from the city-state of Florence. Italy was so fragmented during the Renaissance period that it did not exist as a country, leave alone, the once vast Roman Empire. Instead, “Italians” of this time fiercely identified with and defended their respective city-states.
We call the people original to both continents, North and South America, native/indigenous people as if they were a monolithic group. In reality, they were groups of people who had their own distinct characteristics. They had their own languages and cultures, but we obscure their rich diversity because we are focused on distinguishing them as a group from the stark contrast of the white invaders but also because their distinctiveness has been treated as unimportant by the dominant white colonialists, who viewed them as inferior and sometimes didn’t even view them as fully human.
The Nature of Identity
At its core, identity isn’t about power or money. It isn’t actually about this world. Identity is about how we reflect the gift of freedom and independence that God granted us to the world. When another person or another country tries to subdue our distinctiveness, we instinctually want to defend it because it is our birthright as children of God. Even if we don’t understand this consciously, we understand it subconsciously. To destroy identity is to make slaves of God’s free people, and it is an act of war against God.
Identity in India
In India, the horrific Hindu caste system is the institutionalized slavery of human beings that has lasted, by reasonable estimations, at least two millennia. The caste system, like all systems of slavery, modern and ancient, is an act of war against God and identity. Like Americans and others, Indians have been preoccupied with their own battle for identity. Many white people assume that everyone wants to be white since, at least subconsciously, they often think of themselves as superior. The irony is that, in the land of colorism, although Indians often want to be “fair,” (exactly what shade of light brown is that, could someone please specify?), they don’t want to be white. However, the reason doesn’t really have much to do with skin color and everything to do with identity.
Indians want to have indisputable claim to Indian soil. A fierce battle has been raging since what should have been an esoteric academic paper became fodder for political propaganda by Hindutva. The academic researchers presented genetic evidence for the migration of the people from the Steppe region into India, which supported the established linguistic research that described a similar migration. This scientific evidence, however, posed an inconvenient truth to the Hindutva who want to claim that Hinduism and their genetic lineage are native to the land of India.
It is more difficult to argue that to be Indian is to be Hindu if Hinduism isn’t original to the ancient Indus Valley civilization, which was contemporaneous with the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations, that had existed in India prior to the invasion by the foreigners of the Steppe. The satanic modi, much like other dictators and wannabee dictators around the world, did what they all do when faced with such inconvenient truths. He lied. They all try to rewrite history in their own image. However, it is just another myth, in this case, one that rewrites Indian history, lineage and identity to favor the dominant Hindu religion and maintain its institutionalized slavery, the caste system.
Slavery Strips Identity
Slavery is to take a human being, who has an inherent value in God’s eyes and was made free by God, and to render the person nothing but an object stripped of agency to be used and disposed of as the oppressor chooses. Kevin Bales’s classic book on modern slavery is called “Disposable People.” People who are treated as disposable, whether indigenous, African, Indian, Ukrainian or other European, are not treated as people any longer. Let us not forget that slavery, in its myriad of forms, has plagued the European continent and Europeans, as it has every corner of the globe, since human beings have existed. Their white skin does not exempt from becoming enslaved, which is exactly what the evil ones, trump and putin, want to do,
The War on Ukrainian Identity Is Genocide
Russian terrorism is intended to subjugate the Ukrainian people, to eliminate them as a distinct group of people who have forged their own culture with their God-given uniqueness, and to force them to become slaves to their Russian masters. It is meant to erase their identity just as slavery in the United States erased the identities of the people brought from Africa. Terrorism is a barbaric method intended not just to sow fear to subdue resistance, but to use fear to force human beings to surrender the self and to extinguish their divine spark. Russia’s war in Ukraine is an act of war against God and Ukrainian identity.
Let us lay bare the truth of the age we’re living in. It is a period of fierce fighting over identity, yet, simultaneously, complete confusion about the nature of identity. It is a period of brutality cloaked in the soft modern language of politics. To seek empire, although discouraged by the international post-war order, can be contextualized as part of the perennially problematic quest for global domination, for power and money. To seek the erasure of a group’s identity, that is genocide, however, is abhorrent to our modern sensibilities, as it should be if we are to live as children of God. Let us not deceive ourselves. The latter is what the despots seek, in Ukraine, in India, in the United States and elsewhere. They are all engaging in an act of war against God and identity, and the world needs to act aggressively and decisively to eliminate them before they eliminate us.