thought experiment

Here’s a thought experiment. If Ukraine wants to avoid death and destruction – they should surrender and not resist the Russian invasion. I can feel you recoiling from this idea even as I feel a slight revulsion typing it.

Fighting bravely for your country/fighting bravely for their country is such an obvious ‘right thing to do’ that on every side Ukrainians are being encouraged to take up arms (indeed are being sent extra armoury from the EU) to fight back against the Russians – who are much more powerful, much bigger and probably much better equipped.

But what is a country? It’s a set of thoughts about us and them, the right and wrong way to govern, a love of your family and friends and the place where you live. In central Europe the makeup of state lines has changed so regularly that the borders are usually porous and difficult. “Russians” live on either side of the Ukrainian border and I’m sure that elsewhere there are ‘croatians’ in Austria, ‘latvians’ in Lithuania and so on. Closer to home, ‘Scots’ live in England, Welsh people presumably still feel welsh in Birmingham.

And who is totally contented with their government or recognises it as a true democracy – I don’t and anybody who has ever voted for an opposition party presumably feels that the incumbents of government are ‘wrong’. So that leaves love of where you live and your family.

I wouldn’t take up arms to defend my little town. I wouldn’t take up arms – full stop. I’m a pacifist and have never seen any cause worth dying for. If my family were killed I might want to die – but i wouldn’t want to go after, with a gun, the people who did it. Ah, you might say, you say that now, but if it happened…. Nope, my response to tragedy is sadness not rage and I can’t imagine why that would change. Which isn’t to say that I don’t get angry – behind a wheel, at the sewing machine, for sure. But not if someone that I know and love is sick or suddenly dead.

Surrendering, giving in, walking away from a fight. These are reactions that we do not encourage in men but we accept in women. We do not encourage them in nations either and I think that the two things are not a coincidence.

I don’t think that we are helping anyone when we celebrate the bravery of fighting against the odds. People will die and most of those will be innocent. The biggest fuck you to Putin is for people to not fight – ideally Russians but Ukrainians too. He wants the fight to prove what a big man he is (and again, there’s that man thing) – brave soldiers fighting (and dying in his name) is exactly what he wants. His country broke, oligarchs angry, his soldiers walking peacefully into a democratic neighbour – that’s not the legacy the man envisages.

But we won’t encourage surrender (cowardly, yellow…) because dying for one’s country is still something that we believe in – despite two bloody world wars, numerous disastrous excursions (Iraq, Afghanistan, the US in Vietnam), terrible civil wars (former Yugoslavia) and so on and so on. I don’t believe it though, and one of these days people will realise that the best way to preserve your way of life is to live and protest at the ballot box or on the streets. If you are dead – you can’t change a fucking thing.

I leave you with the famous poem by Wilfred Owen who knew a thing or two about pointless war – and then died in one.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.