Maidan

Jennifer,
I'd love to tell you, but I can't. The information came to me via a Western research team who really had no idea about how public I tend to be about these things. They are incoming again soon, and facing more than US$10,000 in airfare alone just to get back. They have been promised, in very clear terms, that if the location is made public, they will not be allowed to enter again, ever, and all outside aid efforts will be blocked.


Frankly, I am furious, absolutely livid, about having been co-opted into silence. This silence is the direct result of a long-standing, pre-revolution proppaganda scheme that my friends and colleauges on Maidan know about all too well. They fought it furiously, and by way of the Orange Revolution, finally began to break through.


But, for what? Where are you now, dear friends and colleagues? I notice that not a goddamned one of you have posted about this, and you all surely know perfectly well of these death camps for kids.


You KNOW. And you are silent.


For what were all your heroic efforts -- and they were truly heroic -- leading to and through the revolution, only to knowingly allow innocent, helpless children in Ukraine perish in another Holodomor?


Please, help. Consider this the one voice, the one plea, that these children have. Consider it them asking you, not me. It is striking that the ONLY people taking interest in this are ALL "foreigners."


Silence from the Ukrainian side is deafening. One venture in, one day, two hours, will get all the photos needed to change this entire horror to hope. We foreigners need help from only one Ukrainian who gives a damn, who will help get these photos past enforced barriers of secrecy that is killing these children. Just one Ukrainian. Just one. One. 1.


Is there one anywhere in Ukraine, who cares for your own as much as foreigners do? One? Just one. Not two. Not three. Not more. Just one, among all those revolutionaries who were fighting so long and so hard for something or other. I seem to forget now just what it was that the fight was about, given children in concentration camps NOW -- and YOU KNOW.

I'm ready to go, to travel immediately, if someone, anyone, will open just that one door, for just a couple of hours, in just one day. Ukrainian would be the logical choice, but given the apparent fecklessness and/or lack of concern among Ukraine's erstwhile revolutionaires and intelligentsia, is there anyone else? Anyone?


Anyone?

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Regarding use of "goddamned": in deference to the religiously sensitive, I understnad perfectly well the biblical prohibition against using God's name in vain.


Whether or not it was used in vain remains to be seen. I'll take my chances in this case.