This week’s theme is all about Ukraine. The Ukrainian museum in Berlin depicted by the Guardian article ‘A living, moving exhibition’ is striking and I imagine, very vulnerable to walk into. It touches on some of the heartbreaking stories that characterises the horror of Russian attacks against Ukraine. The ‘Social Taxi’ attack in particular, places a focus on normal, regular every day jobs and people who are targeted for showing humanity, for doing exactly what their role in life is. Something that I thought was both unsettling and concerning was Hanna Maliar’s ending quote in this piece, “My advice to Germany is whatever you do, don’t get rid of your bunkers.” If that doesn’t say that things need to change, and the war needs to stop before it becomes cataclysmic for more than just Ukraine and Russia, then I don’t know what does. I actually think that an article like this, ending on that note, should have gained traction and propelled some sort of worldly peace conversation, it was published over a year ago. Did these conversations happen? If not, my question is, how do we get them to happen?
The article in the Kyiv independent, like Deb’s own fact file in the modules for class three, provides statistics for Ukrainian refugees and their settlement in Germany. One figure that astounded me was the 20 billion Euros funded into Ukrainian accommodation and integration. It goes without saying that that is a huge amount of money, I’d be interested in seeing what this lump sum looks like in action, in Berlin. Then we continue onto the next article and the picture becomes larger, in the second Guardian article we see that ‘Berlin reports rise in attacks on refugees amid surge in far-right crime.’ I’m not overly familiar with German politics but I can say for certain that the same anti-immigrant sentiment is shared by the unfortunate rise of the Reform party UK, which vows to prevent people from crossing the borders – even those who have a right to claim asylum. This rise of the far right in this sense, seems perpetuated across borders. It seems that people are displaying active efforts to prevent violence against asylum seekers and refugees, Jian Omar expresses this in the article “We demand a clear protection plan for refugees.” There is hope.
The podcast on Reuters about the drone war immediately brought to mind operation spiders web, which I had read a significant amount about in a journalism class I took last fall. Ukraine dispersed 117 modular FPV drones that targeted – not people – but Russian military aircraft, weakening their modes of attack. Note how it’s primarily defensive, not offensive. On the subject of drones, I saw a concerning article in the NYT the other day about Open AI gaining a sort of consciousness of its own, now that is frightening, especially when drones are now being powered by AI. It feels as though all those ridiculous fiction films or novels about robots taking over the world (The Terminator or Robopocalypse) is scarily becoming a reality. In the podcast, one of the presenters mentioned how AI drones don’t need to be programmed necessarily because they can “talk to each other” or communicate like a flock of birds. Perhaps it is not corrupt political leaders we should fear, but AI powered drones, or weapons. Just a thought. Moving onto Deb’s substack, will the volunteers who are guarding the skies now and shooting down drones, have the capacity to take down AI powered drones?
