In the film The Day Of The Jackal, starring Edward Fox as the eponymous assassin, the Jackal had reached a cross roads. Knowing that his identity was compromised, he had to make the choice between aborting his mission, escape and settling for half the payment or carrying on, with all the risk that that entailed and seeing the mission through. Left or right? Paris and potential glory or Italy and a life on the run? After a minute’s deliberation, the Jackal reaches behind him and hauls the canvas roof into place to protect him from the storm to come; he turns left, to the north, to Paris, and, as it turns out, to his death. The die is cast. He has chosen his fate. To carry on with his doomed mission. Putin, our very own C21st assassin, is faced with a similar choice. And so are we, in the West. Face up or run away. Possible death or the certainty of life on the run.
We all make choices in this life. All choices have consequences. Some are life and death. As our world has turned upside down and war is now settled at the heart of our European continent, we have all had to make choices. Nothing makes choices simpler than war. At the outbreak of hostilities, our daughter’s Russian language school in Brighton posted a notice to say that they did not want parents discussing the situation because it was divisive and they were a school. As if they were separate from the events going on in the world. We took exception. If a school is not in the business of educating children in what is right and what is wrong, in the merits of peace over aggression, then what business has it calling itself a place of learning? Education is more fundamental than the subject being taught. Our daughter was withdrawn from the school with immediate effect.
The war has been a great divider. It has become easy to identify those that are to remain friends and those with whom we must cut ties. The Russian mother of a friend of our son’s lives in France and we had grown a friendship. But she gave her position away very fast. Her tirade against the flow of ‘criminal’ Ukrainian immigrants into France was a dead giveaway. She said that Britain had got all the good ones, the educated ones, whilst France had taken the dregs. She was immediately excluded from our social media circle. Our daughter’s godmother is conspicuous by her unwillingness to be drawn into debate. Her priest, the man who baptised our daughter, preaches the sanctity of the Russian armed forces’ mission to cleanse Ukraine of nazis. So that’s them out as well. My wife’s father has branded her a traitor. Not much room for manoeuvre there, then. All this is hard to bear. War has put us on different moral sides.
There is a schism in many Russian families now. Many complain on social media that their parents, weened on a ceaseless diet of state television propaganda, believe the pronouncements of the Kremlin over the first hand testimony of their own adult children. The benighted generation of my father-in-law have spent their entire lives being lied to by various governments and still they fail to see any other perspective than the one given to them every evening in their own front rooms…by their government. It is as if they are wilfully misled, failing to see any pattern in the decades of dishonesty. Are they making conscious decisions? Or are they unthinkingly thinking as they are told?
Here, in the West, do we stand up to this tyrant, Putin, or continue to let the Nazi in the Kremlin dictate circumstances? What happens when he deploys a nuclear strike in Ukraine, or in Estonia or the North Sea? Will NATO ignore it? Or will NATO do what it must do and declare “enough – no further”? I am not a warmonger. I am not a hawk. But it has become abundantly clear that dictators only respond to and respect strength. When he looks us in the eye, he must know that we mean it. That we will not hesitate or flinch from what must be done if he oversteps the mark. (He has already gone way further than we should have let him go. Hence this mass murder in Ukraine.)
It is rapidly getting to the time when NATO must decide if it will arm Ukraine with offensive weaponry or not. I fear that if we do not, even if there is a solution to the situation around Donbas, Putin will be back for more some time in the future. Or he will call out the covert supply of offensive arms and make a nuclear strike anyway, hoping it will intimidate the west into compliance. He must not be allowed to dictate the terms and we must be prepared to pay the price for taking the initiative away from him. If we do not take the initiative, if we are always behind him and not ahead of him, if we do not start making the running in this conflict, we will regret it.
There will be no guarantee of peace for Ukraine – or any of us – if Putin stays in charge of Russia. He is hell bent on the Russification of continental Europe based on some mutant genealogical theory similar to that held by the National Socialists in the 1930s. Instead of Aryans, it’s now Slavs. He envisions Russia somehow saving the world and being on a spiritual mission. He is a dangerous ideologue and must be stopped. Strike back. Strike now. The consequences of not striking are an inevitable slide into ultimate doom. Putin may well be prepared to do the unthinkable. And we must be too.
The Jackal was thwarted by dogged police work. He was contained. But not before he got in a shot on his intended victim, President Charles De Gaulle. The Jackal of the world today is Putin. He, too, will probably get a shot in (by which I mean a nuclear detonation). He is the assassin at large. We must hound him to the grave and all who serve him. They are a menace to the world’s peace. It is decision time: turn right to run away and be on the run for ever or turn left to confront the mission and take the consequences. I am for turning left. The consequences of turning and running will be eventual nuclear obliteration. The consequences of facing up to him are limited nuclear confrontation followed by regime change and a mediated peace via China.
None of these are nice choices or easy decisions. They are not to be made in a cavalier fashion. But they are, nonetheless, the decisions we have to make. Yesterday, a package arrived from Amazon. It is the worst package I have ever received. In it was our order for Potassium Iodide. The pills are 65mg strength and provide thyroid protection against nuclear fallout if you take them before or very quickly after a nuclear explosion. Yes, it has got that bad. Our car is packed to the hilt with camping stuff and our documents and vital supplies are ready to grab and run. This does not feel like a drill nor does it feel like an unnecessary panic. It is just being sensible. After all, how many of us, particularly in Ukraine, thought that the 24 February invasion would never come? But it did. The world we inhabit now is full of the unpredictable. So isn’t it best to be as prepared as we can be?
I truly hope that my children and grand children read this and find it comical. I worry that they will find it prescient.