Like many I’ve spent much of the last few days doomscrolling through news and social media feeds with a sense of despair about Putin’s war on Ukraine. Yet why does this war seem so much closer to home than other wars?
A simple answer that it is because Ukraine is a European nation and a democracy. As such it shares something that makes Europe Europe in that it is a also melting pot of ethnic identities, just like where most Europeans live with another nation very close by. There is a tension towards the bigger more powerful culture next door, yet most of the time there is a realisation that far more is shared in cultural terms than is different. Such relationships exist across this continent.
I’m Welsh and we’ve had such a relationship with the English since the Anglo Saxons came to Britain, before the concept of the nation state became a reality. There had been many bloody wars across centuries before the Union was established, since then there have been many cultural conflicts that continue to this day. Nonetheless there is peace, we regard England as our friends, we live next door to each other, work together, marry each other, share our cultures. There are those who don’t like the fact that Wales has retained it’s own culture, identity and language despite living in a Union with one of the first superpowers and home of the worlds lingua franca. However generally such people I believe are those who don’t value diversity and instead value a narrow conformity that happens to suit them as individuals well. I’ve written here about this a lot.
The last time Europe descended into the pointless conflicts brought about by the nationalism that one ethnic identity is more important than another was due to the breakup of Yugoslavia. I was a child at the time and found it ridiculous that Serbs, Croats and Bosnians whom had been living literally next door to each other, making friends, raising families and working together for generations suddenly woke up to realise that these minor cultural differences must be amplified and used to justify war. How can people who are friends one day and shooting guns at each other the next be justified?
Ukrainians and Russians have also been living together as neighbours for a very long time, many Ukrainians live in Russia and many Russians live in Ukraine, just as there are Welsh people living in England, Canadians in the US, French people in Germany and since 1945 have all done so peaceably.
The rivalries are generally restricted to the sports field. As we will witness tomorrow when the Welsh rugby team visit the home of English rugby for the annual match; much beer is drunk, songs are passionatly sung, banter is made and then on Sunday we are all friends again. We are not secretly plotting to engage the spirit of the legendary King Arthur to expel the Saxons from our lands. Neither are the English plotting to return to engage the zeal of King Edward the Firsts attempts to expunge the Celts from the British Isles. We’ve learnt to live together as friends.
Why does Putin seem to be engaging the spirit of Hitler and engage in a war of cultural hatrid towards a people, the Ukrainians, that Russians have so much in common with? I think it’s more Europe’s great curse on the world, Imperialism. The UK, Spain, France, the Netherlands have all plundered various parts of the world via empire for cheaper commodities; gold, spices, cotten and tea with scant regard for the people and cultures who got in the way. In the Twentieth century as the Empire period came to an end, leaving a mess of brutal dictatorships, arbitrary lines on maps splitting cultures as Europe, joined by the newcomer superpower, the United States sought a new imperialism. The US, often aided by the UK, brutally installed and maintained cooperative dictators in South America, Africa and the Middle East, to maintain the benefits fo imperialism, cheap commodities and a market for their exuberance of products, latterly for the great new commodity, oil. Sometimes these installed dictators go rogue and the British army is dragged back into the mess they left to maintain the flow of oil, most recently in Iraq and Syria. Is not Putin just continuing this European imperial legacy, by seeking to control it’s neighbours to plunder them for their resources and maintain a market for it’s products? There is a deep irony in governments of the West wailing and moaning over Ukraine, when all Putin is doing is what they themselves have engaged in, imperialism, for centuries.
Yet there is a dichotomy here, as Europeans, self-satisfied living in the “Cradle of Civilisation”, Europe, wailing over the wars in places like Iraq in consequence of installing dictators required to maintain our addiction to oil, now face a war that Western Europe isn’t responsible for, but an old school war of cultural genocide and territorial expansion, within the borders of Europe, masquerading as installing a Putin friendly cooperative dictator, rather than a democratically elected one.
It’s also part of the whole post-Soviet era. Democracy cannot be imposed on a culture, it has to evolve natively. It’s also not as great as it is often made out to be. Populations are easily manipulated and make bad voting choices. Just look at the Boris Johnson regime in the UK, how people thought this twerp, this buffoon, with severe personal issues can be seen as ‘the best person the lead the government’ demonstrates how weak democracy is. Yet Western democracies are at least relatively stable since popular emacipation, they have not made wars of cultural genocide or territorial expansion for almost a century. However those of Eastern and Central Europe, those nations, Russia aside, linked to the Soviet system quickly adopted democracy without the time for it develop. Nations like Ukraine suffer massively from the huge economic drag of corruption. Of course places like the UK or Italy are far from being free from curroption and getting worse rather than better. However the thing about democracy is that leaders are not really imposed by a foreign power, if populations are misled then it’s kind of our own fault, we have to take some personal responsibility for idiots getting elected, even if it’s simply not listening, understanding and campaigning hard enough against them.
Yet there is there is still the ancient network of the Ruling classes, where once Romanian princesses were married off to Spanish princes to form alliances and thus maintain a pan national network of ruling families, such networks still exist in a new way, Putin, Trump, Johnson are all part this network, often with ever increasing disdain for the little people, for electorates, so easily manipulated by the media networks they themselves own.
I think this terrible, pointless war in Ukraine hits home because at some level we all do feel a sense of unease that something is terribly wrong with the world and it’s appeared in a war on ‘people like us’ a ‘white’ Christian European democracy plunged slowly into a war by a decade long campaign of lies and manipulation by the Putin regime. This isn’t in the Middle East where people may worship God a different way, or have a culture quite alien to our own, it’s next door, it’s in Europe, our home, raising that fear of ‘Are they coming for us next?’ Life is getting harder, prices are going up, wages are not, in our great consumerist culture we can no longer consume as much, we are looking for someone or something to blame, rather than understand the real issue. Maybe it is these ruddy Ukrainians, the Catholics, the gays, and not the leaders of these old European superpowers or the US.
This sense is often manipulated by those in power, such as Hitler’s deflecting the blame for economic hard times onto the Jewish people, the Romany people, homosexuals, rather than it being largely part of the Great Depression of the 1930s felt across all the developed world albeit exagerrated in Germany by the cost of war reparations for the last big European war. Yet, despite almost a century of teaching our children about the horrors of the Nazi era, we still have populations that can be convinced that cultural genocide can be justified, that it’s these people who live next door who are ever so slightly different to us that are to blame, rather than it being identified as purely propoganda to deflect from the truth, that those in power are continuing to do what they can to keep us servile and we never learn.
It’s also odd that the West isn’t talking about a military solution. The West was quite happy to send our young people in to fight in Iraq and Syria over squabbles in the former British Empire, yet not in Europe? The only explanation I can think of is because Putin has a nuclear arsenal. If Ukraine had not got rid it’s nuclear weapons after becoming an independent or was a NATO member I suspect there would not be this reluctance to protect the people of Ukraine from Putin’s warmongering, the NATO powers have more than enough military to stop Putin in his tracks if there wasn’t a fear of nuclear war.
Why is this war in Ukraine so poignant to me a white man in an old Christian country? My heart has gone out to the people suffering in Iraq, Somalia, Syria and so on. I think’s because Ukrainians are so like us, it seems so much closer to home, so much like the old European wars we’ve read about in history books, something we kind of thought was consigned to history.
I challenge any white European to watch the this video of Despacito in Ukrainian and not be in tears thinking about these young people now living in fear of the bombs and not feel a pang of guilt that somehow bombing Syria and Iraq and killing young people there was justifiable. Ask yourselves is it because we think these could be our children, the people in our street, singing old folk songs like we do? I think this is why Putin’s war hits us hard.
Squimple 