My flights these days are often sad. I sit on tree limbs and watch televisions through windows with my other bird friends. We see decayed, murdered civilians, their hands tied behind their backs, laying on streets in Bucha, a town in Ukraine. Close-range gunshots have blasted heads open. A Russian murderer in uniform assassinated the victim. Children lay massacred on street curbs. Dead bodies are tossed like rubbish into pits. Mothers have been raped in front of their children by the Russian Army. This is what passes for modern war in this, our 21st century. We have the nerve to call ancient times Dark Ages. Today, however, when high explosives are unleashed into functioning hospitals, or direct-fired into schools and railroad stations, or blast apartment blocks into blackened shells, what else can this be? And for what? Our times are dark. Those who brought this about are dark-minded.

The slaughter of innocents we see on television and social media every day elicits comments of “how hard it is to understand.” And yet, is it? Great men of the past have studied such events in their own times. We can learn from them what we are dealing with, and understand. We cannot fight what we don’t understand.

About the time that Adolf Hitler launched his Teutonic legions into Norway, so to conquer with his brand of racial superiority, an American writer, John Steinbeck, wrote “The Moon is Down.” It is the story of an imaginary country invaded by another, for no reason but the expression of military might against a weaker country. We learn from this story about how “conquered” people slowly came to resist. They would kill their conquerors in utterly unexpected ways. A widow, alone at home, was visited by a conquering officer. He wanted to reach out, to be a friend. He felt he was not to blame for the conflict between their people. What he didn’t know was that she was a recent widow. The conquerors killed her husband, a hostage. She left the officer dead on the street with a knitting needle through his ear. We hear today Ukrainian women are offering poison to their conquerors, who have raped others of their sisters, and murdered their children and husbands, held hostage. In Steinbeck’s story, a couple of conquerors discuss, in their officer’s club, the strange response of the civilian population. Why, they ask, do they hate us so? You see it in their sullen faces, their leaving when we arrive. One officer, drunk with honesty comments, “Yes. We are like flies. We are flies who have conquered 200 miles of fly paper.” Someone unidentified overheard this comment. It was mysteriously known all over the conquered country by the end of the week.

Russian propaganda directed at its own people is a tissue of lies. If we read George Orwell’s great dystopian novel “1984,” we discover that “Newspeak,” the imaginary language of dictatorships, is the exact parallel. Lies alone sustain a dictatorship. First, Putin says desperate Ukrainians called on the Russians to liberate them from “Nazis” and “drug addicts.” When the Russians are stopped by massive Ukrainian military resistance, a Russian news outlet says that “no, the Ukrainians are themselves all Nazis, and deserve no humane treatment. There can be no war crimes if the nation itself is a Nazi entity.” In the Russian dictatorship, the lies of today erase the ineffective lies of yesterday. “Truth” in the Russian dictatorship is only what today’s lie tells you happened yesterday.

Where could such people come from, these Russians? Are they not people like us? Are they not men and women with hopes, dreams and families? Indeed they are, but they have been sorely deceived then exploited by their gangster leaders. The Russian people have been led down a haunted alley, where existential fear was created. First came fear of the outsider. Putin’s government created, then exploited a giant lie about Russia’s aggrieved past, where they were done wrong by NATO, by Ukrainians and others. The Russian government devised a false history, which caused their people to believe themselves victims of an uncaring world, of neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The Russians were told NATO had physically threatened them. The Russians were lied to when told that theirs was a formerly benign, wealthy Soviet motherland, not a dictatorship which imprisoned and murdered millions; a police state ruled by terror of prison in the Gulag. They are lied to now. They are told their patriotism demands battle against a completely created “enemy,” which exists only as the product of a propagandist’s mind. Anyone who challenges these assertions goes to jail.

Another wise American observer, Eric Hoffer, noted that you can create a “true believer” in dictatorship, if you tell him his problems aren’t due to a changing world. No, the future true believer is told he’s a victim of huge, dark plots by evil conspirators, by outsiders who don’t share his unique patriotism, or race or interests. The dictator offers simple answers to all the true believer’s worries and doubts about the world. He offers the true believer a cause he can belong to. It is a cause larger than himself, and will overcome his feelings of loneliness or abandonment in the new complicated world. Hoffer wrote “The True Believer” to explain the phenomenon of why people join mass movements. It has remained a valid source to explain where the foot soldiers come from who enforce the rule of dictators.

We would do well to encourage one another to read these books. They explain a lot about what is happening in our world today.