“As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
THE opening salvo from George Orwell’s essay England Your England during The Blitz of 1941 is chilling. The fact that, no doubt “kind-hearted law-abiding men” were doing “their duty” by blowing all beneath them to kingdom come could have been written from a Ukrainian bunker today. As Orwell explained of the bomber, serving his country had “the power to absolve him from evil”.
Time and again, it is Orwell’s prescient words that serve to shine a light when the darkness descends – a mainstay of the truth amid the fog of war; a guide to the driving forces that cause conflict where only the details and dates change. He understood how the manipulation of language can serve unscrupulous political goals and turn the state into a killing machine, human being against human being.
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And so here we are, more than 80 years on from Hitler’s attempts at world domination, where alternative facts and fake news straight from the 1984 rule book are being used by a delusional demigod with untrammelled influence and aggrieved righteousness to justify invasion. Just as Winston Smith was told “who controls the past controls the future”, Putin has adopted a pick ’n’ mix version of historical facts in his quest to recreate a Russian superstate that never actually existed.
What fascinates me, however, are the forces at play among the invaders, the free pass each and every Russian soldier is handed by the state to justify the annihilation of families, the bombing of hospitals or the shooting of innocent people in the street.
Again, it’s back to Orwell for clarity, explaining nothing can compare with the overwhelming strength of patriotism and national loyalty, as he adds: “Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it.” Murder is not murder when it is in “defence” of the motherland.
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Brief moments captured in our age of social media offer a glimpse inside the maw of the war monster. An elderly Ukrainian woman’s poetic insult against an enemy invader exposed the sheer insanity of the situation. She berated the Russian soldier, offering him sunflower seeds so that when he died on Ukrainian soil flowers would grow. In no uncertain terms, the soldier, machine gun in hand, told her to leave now before she made matters worse.
In ordinary times, such an exchange between strangers would be unthinkable. The same soldier will probably have, or had, a granny he loved and cherished just like this woman. She, on the other hand, may have a son like him, to whom she has devoted her life to. But these are not ordinary times. They are enemies. The Russian state machine has made it so.
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it”, wrote Orwell, and it has been the West’s conceit that it was assumed mass war couldn’t touch Europe again.
Our best hope lies in the people of Russia, those brave souls taking to the streets in a their valiant attempts to stop more bloodshed. Putin is a shrewd enough operator to know how to stress test the West’s unity to its limits, while mad enough to push civilisation to edge of a nuclear abyss. It’s truly apocalyptic. But, like all absolute rulers, his enemies will stalk in the shadows and he knows it.
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