David Gibney reviews our cover story book this month: Billy No-Mates by Max Dickins, and it certainly sounds like a timely work. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends” is the dying regret of a growing number of men. And just why is it that men are increasingly socially isolated? For Dickins we’re barking up the wrong tree if we adopt the approach of the “the Vulnerability Industrial Complex”. For them men simply aren’t feminine enough; they need to learn to talk more about their emotions. David Gibney expresses relief at finding a writer who is prepared to shun the all too common tendency to see masculinity (as in “toxic” masculinity) as the root cause of male friendlessness. For Dickins however, the answer doesn’t lie in more feminine type conversation, but in more masculine type action, for this is what has always bound men in friendship: doing things together: “For men, talking to their friends makes absolutely no difference at all. Literally zero. What stops the friendship from declining is making an effort to do stuff together.”
Everyone knows that men are in trouble in the Western world, especially from the point of view of mental health and education, and a book like Billy No-Mates is pointing towards at least part of the solution. Next month David Gibney will discuss a most interesting book looking at how boys are failing for want of father-figures. The book is the much talked about Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves.
This month Tim O’Sullivan reviews the 547 page prize-winning Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. In the last few months I had heard this book recommended several times as good background reading to the war in Ukraine and certainly O’Sullivan’s review of Bloodlands comes as a bit of revelation. The countries of Eastern Europe were truly “Bloodlands”, and for the Jews in particular. Auschwitz was only the tip of the ice-berg. (And clearly even the Holocaust is being forgotten: a very recent study in the Netherlands showed that nearly a quarter of young people there believe the Holocaust was a “myth” or exaggerated.)
And Ukraine lay at the epicentre of these “Bloodlands”. Tim O’Sullivan speaks of a term which is probably new to most of us: “Holodomor”. This is the word used to describe the artificially created famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, in which insane Soviet policies surrounding agricultural collectivisation lead to the deaths of millions there and elsewhere.
Truly the mass crimes perpetrated in this part of Europe by the Nazis and Soviets before and during the Second World War are astounding, and the scale of them still remains largely unknown in the West. There is also the question concerning the degree to which the Soviet Union / Russia has faced its past and acknowledged Communist crimes and the impact of Communist ideology. Germany after the war (perhaps more slowly and less completely than one might have hoped) did go through a process of “de-nazification” and also soul-searching about the crimes of the Nazi era. It does not appear, especially in the light of Putin’s ambivalence about the Soviet era, that quite the same has happened in Russia.
It wasn’t intentional that our review of Bloodlands be followed by that of Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, but it probably serves to highlight the well-meaning naivety of Bregman’s thesis – that we’re all basically good. The blood-soaked chapters of European history of the mid-twentieth century alone should be enough to put paid to that idea. Every one of the millions upon millions of victims of the Holocausts and the Holodomors of the twentieth century was a victim in the strict sense of the term: the object of the murderous intent of another human being: a soldier, a camp official, a civil servant. Closer to the mark is the account – ironically – in a Russian masterpiece, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (revisited this month by Michael Kirke); a novel which takes seriously the struggle with the evil we find within, and the redemption we find only in Christ’s mercy.