William T. Vollmann has a new essay in Granta. “Drones and Decolonization” is reportage from the Russia-Ukraine war, but in typically Vollmannesque fashion the essay is also about a lot of other things (Joseph Roth, Isaac Babel, language and names, food, monuments, etc. — at one point Vollmann editorializes on his own habits to let his projects swell: “all Granta had commissioned was 5,000 words, and I would exceed expectations by submitting 40,000 words, which they would only be able to cut down so much”).
Here is the opening of the essay:
Some of her was Austria once, and part of her had been Poland. Starved and tortured by Stalinists into Soviet Republichood, then raped by Hitler’s Reich, she finally became some version of herself, but then V. Putin thought to annex her back into another empire: Re-Russify her! Give it to her good and hard, then beautify the corpse with a mask of iron!
Her de-Russifiers fought back, and not only with drones and artillery: Amputate the occupier’s monuments! Ban his writers, no matter how long ago they lived; rename his streets . . . ‘Little Father is no more,’ cried that Ukrainian, Russian, Polish or maybe Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth. ‘Where is the czar? . . . What sort of world is this? A crooked world!’
I went to help her in my helpless way, with journalistic good intentions which sorrowed into love. From Berlin to Vienna I went, and then through the Czech Republic’s golden-red forests, which here and there burst into ultra-yellow blazes beneath an ever-darkening silver sky. I glimpsed long, gentle slopes of well-mown or -grazed green grass and I saw decrepit towns; then it was afternoon among Poland’s boarded-up brick buildings, with crew-cut young men lounging in packs while wearily beautiful old women dragged home heavy shopping bags. Passing through the town of Liszki I spied a church steeple graying in the twilight, and long after dark came the final border.
And I can’t help but share these lines from Vollmann’s conclusion (I do not think they constitute a so-called spoiler), which point out that our murder drones will one day come home to roost:
I knew that the American Empire in which I lived was approaching its imminent end, but I could not quite believe it. All those drones our corporations pimped out, when would they come to us to spread terror, agony and grief?
Biblioklept 