Just a Game of appearances
Many of you were born in a safe place, in a country where war has no access, and you have never feared for the life and health of yourselves and your loved ones. Many of you have no connection or close relationship with those who lived through the hell of war, often losing not only the possessions of their entire life but also their beloved ones, who were taken by death in a very cruel way. I was born 30 years after the Second World War, my parents and other family members as well as their friends and acquaintances lived through the most terrible conflict in mankind’s history. For them, those war years were so powerful and such profound experiences that they never really ebbed away from their souls. They carried that baggage to the end of their lives and, in a sense, passed it on to their children, including myself. I used to say that my generation, and others in the vicinity, all of us, in a way, became victims of a war we didn’t witness since it ended long before we came into this world. And yet… this terrible war is within us and weighs down on us like a millstone hanging on our necks. As a thorn in the eye, preventing from seeing the world in full colours. This war that we never suffered took away our ability to see and feel, making us a generation with delusional PTSD. Our world and life perspective are different, flattened, distorted and discoloured — only because we are children of the war generation. It is a lesson that must never be forgotten and it is our duty to ensure that this hell never happens again.
So what have we done? The answer is nothing. Look at what is happening today in Ukraine. Burning, bombed cities, ruined houses, destroyed hospitals, schools, bakeries and churches. Masses of refugees are marching along broken, potholed roads. Mothers, children, old people… They often spend weeks on foot. Stopping at friends’ and sometimes at strangers’ homes. In the daytime, they hide in basements while at night and in the evenings they move towards the border. Sometimes we see them die on the way, shot or torn apart by falling bombs or rockets. The image of war is a woman killed by a random bomb as she goes to buy bread for her neighbour, who is unable to walk so she lies in a bed. It is a child crossing the border and wailing in despair for having left behind a fighting daddy. It is a shot dog lying on someone’s lawn, a family burned in a car run over by a tank. These are images and emotions that cannot be ignored, passed by without thinking and talking about. In the face of such apparent evil, it is impossible to remain neutral in one’s view of the world, and one cannot and must not remain in a position of apolitical cowardice. The situation and the time demand that we make a loud and clear declaration — war is evil, it is the most terrible thing that man has ever embarked upon.
War takes everything away and affects everything, including the future of upcoming generations. I understand and know this well, for I lived and grew up among those touched by war.
The drama of those fleeing Ukraine today does not end there at the border, or on the other side, somewhere in Poland, Germany or even here in Ireland. The tragedy of these people continues and grows stronger every day, trauma weighs on them like an inoperable hump that will be passed on to future generations. The children of today’s Ukraine will burden unknowingly their fear, grief, pain and hatred on future generations who, like myself, will become victims of a conflict they did not actually live through. Today’s tragedy of Ukraine, blood, suffering, ruins, all this inhuman and incomprehensible evil has one author, or as to say is the work of one realm — Russia. I am deliberately pointing out Russia, not Putin, since this is, in essence, the work of Russia: an aggressive, utterly evil state that has failed to change its policy for hundreds of years, hiding its true identity behind a facade of time-appropriate political systems.
It does not matter whether it was Feudal Russia under Ivan IV the Terrible, or Nicholas the II Imperial Russia, or Lenin’s Revolutionary Red Russia, or Stalin’s, Khrushchev, Gromyko, Brezhnev and Gorbachev USSR, or Yeltsin’s disintegrating, falling state, or finally Putin’s Great Russia rising from her knees and always hungry for her neighbour’s blood. It does not matter under which banner and in what years — it is and will always be an antediluvian state built upon and drawing handfuls of customs and practices dating back to the days when the armies of the Golden Horde were ravaging the lands east of the Oder. A closer look reveals a state built on such a Hordish foundation, with ferocious laws being bent according to the rulers’ will, with political opponents disposed of along with their families and friends. A state governed and thriving in a never-ending fear for the future — colouring reality in its own fashion. where truth and freedom mean as much as lies and enslavement. Where all the values we know and cherish are flipped upside down and fed to a public that has been stupefied for centuries. Yes, it is as much a Russian as Putin’s war. Where students rally in support of the ruler’s policies, where families of Ukrainians repent of their loved ones, calling them Fascists, or where the mothers of captured Russian soldiers tell them [on the phone] that it would be better for them to die as in captivity they become traitors to their motherland.
Here in the West, we have grown accustomed to evaluating events as observers and commentators, whereas in Russia the participants of the same events are not the subjects of history, but merely its objects. I know it may sound rather odd, but Russia is a place of paradoxes, where everything is possible and impossible at the same time. This is best illustrated by the already well-described and diagnosed problem of doublethink, typical to enslaved societies, terrorised to such an extent that logic enters into marriage with fantasy, creating a hybrid (monster) perfectly captured by Orwell in his model phrase: „All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This applies equally to individuals and states. Putin grew up in a system where such double standards and dual logic were already very deeply rooted. And perhaps its origins can be read between the pages of the history of the Novgorod the Great. It happened in the snowy winter of January 1570. Black robes with embroidered brooms and dogs’ heads on their foreheads came to the gates of Novgorod like the armies of Mordor, as the Oprichniks swore to the Tsar that they would sweep and devour anyone who betrayed Russia and its Ruler. Then Novgorod the Great was a thorn in Ivan’s eye, just as today Ukraine is a thorn in Putin’s pupil.
Times have changed, but the principle stays the same as ever. Russia from its origin to the present minute is a state of power, existing for power and for the purpose of strengthening that power — it is a great but also ill Idea, built and established on the proven model of the oppressive rule of a single potent sovereign surrounded by loyal dukes, barons, commissars, oligarchs (depending on the times they live in). So it may seem strange and sometimes even impossible to comprehend to all those who were born in the West, where history is still moving forward. Whereas it stopped in Russia, at best at the Decapitation of the Great Novgorod. It was meant to be an intimidating example to the rest who yearned for freedom. Just as Ukraine is to be punished and destroyed nowadays. Indeed, the wars in Ukraine and earlier in Georgia, Chechnya and Transdniestria are not and were not conflicts over land, people, natural resources or wealth, but solely and exclusively over the idea of freedom and the right to decide one’s own future. These are cultural/ideological wars at the civilisational level.
Today’s modus operandi in Ukraine is a crude copy of the system that was built and then implemented by Ivan Vasilievich with the use of Oprichnina, the same initiative which stirred the imagination of Peter the Great and the same alignment of stars that pushed Empress Catherine the II to liquidate the Zaporozhian Sichs and consequently to wipe out the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the map of Europe for almost 130 years, it was the same thought impulses, only dressed up in the modern speech of Marks and Engels, which drove Lenin to action and finally the same threat, or rather its everlasting glow, which prompted Vladimir Putin to attack his neighbour!
There is nothing new or revealing about this attack, it is the same meanness and the same fear of freedom that has haunted generations of Russian rulers. The modern and docile face of Russia is, therefore, nothing but a bluff, a shabby game of appearances in which, sooner or later, all the masks will fall away to reveal the true face of evil. Seeing this with our own eyes, we may boldly say that today the Ukrainians are the first to stand up for values dear to all free people, as in essence, it is a clash of two different systems of beingness. Where one has to devour the other as they are simply not made to coexist. It is like night and day, fire and ice. This immortal, time-proof monster cannot afford another rising star of freedom just across its borders. For all these merits Ukrainians are bleeding themselves today are like the stake driven into Dracula’s heart so, if this were the case there would be no power, no court, palaces, no cabinet, no commissars or oligarchs.
That is why I fear that Ukraine may share the fate of a city that was meant to be forgotten as for Putin and for Russia failure means the death of something that doesn’t want to die, but also cannot die, having been dead for a long, long time. The only consolation is that Russians can’t win this war regardless of the outcome, for even if they kill their brave little neighbour rest of the world will mark them as perpetrators of terrible atrocities against the sovereign state, or should they lose Russia will become the monstrous giant slain by a little girl with a sling. None of this brings any solace, since death does not distinguish between victory and defeat.
