Scribo, Ergo Sum by Umberto Tosi
I had just read Death and the Penguin , a surreal mystery novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov , when Russian despot Vladimir Putin stepped up his Big Lie that Ukraine doesn't exist as a country or culture outside of Mother Russia. He might as well have said that Ireland doesn't exist because the Emerald Isle spent so much of its history under British rule. No surprise here: Lies are the mother's milk of tyrants, actual and would-be. This long-of-tooth American, for example, has oft lowered a Quixotic lance at waves self-serving, authoritarian lies washing over so-called land of the free incessantly as polluted tides. Meanwhile, inconvenient truths are gagged and spirited away. The Russian bombing of Mariupol differs little in its mass-murdering savagery from those of Guernica, Rotterdam, London, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiorshima, or more recently, Aleppo. George Orwell's rule holds true: "The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate how ...