Yesterday, my family joined about twenty other people – all Ukrainians or Russian emigres opposed to Putin’s regime – on a march through the centre of Brighton in the cause of stopping the invasion.
You could see that most people who saw us thought:
Oh yeah. They’re Ukrainians. They’re protesting about the war. Good for them.
And then walked on their way. To get on with their own business, not giving us or the issue another thought. No one joined us. No one engaged with us. We were essentially ignored.
Hundreds of people who, in their heads, were silently and unknowingly echoing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s notorious pronouncement on 27 September 1938 about Herr Hitler’s demand to march into the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to defend the three million ethnic Germans who lived there from persecution and genocide at the hands of Czechoslovakian ‘nationalists’:
A quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.
And we all know how it turns out when you ignore things happening a long way away and which seem to have nothing to do with you, don’t we? 1938 turned into 1939. And World War. Again.
But here we go again. Travelling along the narrative spelled out in the Ladybird of How to Annex A Country. History repeating over and over and not a single lesson learned. Not by our leaders. Not by our people. Not by anyone.
Слава Україні! 
Stop the invasion 
Slava Ukraini!
Can people not see the existential threat that Putin poses to us all? Can they not see that this is the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge? Does it not stir any concern that we have just had the first intra-European military invasion since WWII? That our continent is, in truth, at war?
Where’s the panic? Where’s the outrage? No. Instead, people are shopping.
For those of us who are not sedated by shopping Soma*, the invasion of the Ukraine by Putin’s forces forces us to confront a hard truth. What should we, as private citizens, parents, do in the face of a clear and present danger? When we face the single biggest existential man made threat in our own adult lives, what action should we, can we take?
The first thing to decide is how we think all this is this going to play out. We now have a madman in the Kremlin who shows all the characteristics of being unhinged. His own narrative, used to justify the ‘special military operation’, is twisted and incoherent. Much more seriously, it is backed up by an explicit threat to unleash nuclear strikes if anyone (NATO) attempts to frustrate his territorial ambitions. This man throws around nuclear blackmail like a playground bully throws round punches. No leader in history has been so casual with his ability to unleash Hell on Earth.
Why aren’t we all up in arms? Why aren’t there mass demonstrations of millions of people taking to the streets to demand a stop to this invasion? Why aren’t our newspapers and TV stations up in arms calling this naked aggression out? And, more to the point, why aren’t our politicians screaming blue murder at this abhorrent bully?
I’ll tell you why.
Because:
- (a) It’s in a distant land people think is far away. (It isn’t distant and so what if it is? We’re talking nuclear holocaust here and radiation doesn’t respect borders.)
- (b) People trust their leaders to know what to do. (Uh-oh: have we learnt nothing from the last two years of the pandemic and from history in general?)
- (c) We swallow the lie that our leaders’ inaction is, in fact, measured calculation. (It’s not. It’s lack of resolve. It’s lack of conviction. It’s dithering – and, dare I say it, a conflict of interests in some cases.)
The western alliance soaks up Putin’s threats and meets them with weakness, indecision and prevarication. The only glimmer of hope is the Ukrainians’ fierce and so far effective defence against the seemingly not-so-mighty Russian military. At least the stories seeping out of the war zone about lost invading tank troops and directionless army units alongside the clips of defiant Kyiv housewives offering sunflower seeds to occupying Russian soldiers so that “when you die you will produce something useful like sunflowers” let us believe that Putin’s blitzkrieg does not have the punch of its Nazi antecedent. Ukrainians are inflicting a bloody nose on the Moscow dictator and that will hurt him.
What is to become of the West? It is now ranged against the might of China and the nuclear madness of Putin’s resurgent Russia. Two foes bent on NATO’s containment – even destruction – and finding common cause in that objective. Gone is the optimistic resolve of JFK’s inaugural declaration that
We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.
John F. Kennedy. Inaugural address as President 1961
Gone is the certainty of American leadership of this Atlantic alliance. A second term for Trump in 2024 would put paid to that and permit China to enter the western oceanic hemisphere with its brand new, purpose built Atlantic fleet. Even without a Trump victory, the resolve of an America which looks increasingly inside and which fails to see its star waning and outshone by the rising empire across the Pacific, is as unpredictable as it is questionable. And if China invade Taiwan, this will only accelerate a showdown.
The old European powers offer no promise of democratic safeguarding. President Macron is up for re-election and up against nationalistic opposition which is bankrolled by the Kremlin and will take France out of the EU. Germany is under new and untested management (did Putin wait until that experienced old hand, Chancellor Merkel, had quit the field?). The UK is out of the EU and run by a clown interested only in grabbing headlines who possesses the strategic foresight of randy teenager. And many of the EU countries that are left are run by right leaning populists or are economically and territorially vulnerable to Putin’s expansionism rather than military forces to be reckoned with.
Emboldened by territorial gains in Georgia, in the Crimea and now in Ukraine, where will Putin turn his tanks next? Moldova? The Baltic states? To ‘keep the peace’ and ‘protect’ Russian ethnics under mythical attack in other countries bordering Russia? To protect fellow Slavs unto Germany’s borders? To secure that old Scandinavian former colony, Finland?
We are returning to a world of Checkpoint Charlie and Putin’s vision is for a Soviet style area of influence in Eastern and Central Europe. Who is going to stand in his way? Johnson? Biden? Nathalie Arthaud? Olaf Scholz? These people are shadows of the seasoned politicians who oversaw the dismantling of the Soviet bloc. They are no Thatcher. They are no Reagan. They are no Helmut Kohl. Nor have they imbibed the historical lessons of living through the second World War. Instead, they are children under the blanket of freedom the post war politicians provided through strength and unbreakable alliance. As they have shown this week with their glacial reaction times to events toothless sanctions and utter failure to envisage Putin’s plans.
We are witnessing the second stage in Putin’s plan to unravel the last forty years and roll back the frontier to buy Russia territory at NATO’s expense. Having faced zero opposition to his Georgian and Crimean adventures, he has taken encouragement from the West’s non-response. He has made it clear that he will use nuclear weapons. NATO is obliged to spring to the defence of any NATO member country which is attacked by Russia. NATO will be forced to use nuclear weapons or simply cave in to a stronger-willed and more ruthless opponent.
But will they, when the time comes, do it? And could it have been prevented from getting to this stage with earlier firm responses to Putin’s aggression? Like the fur trapper on his sledge being pursued by wolves, the West has kept on throwing elk steaks off the back to delay the pursuing wolves. But the wolf learns a different lesson: that if they keep following the sledge, they will get more and more steak.
So we will get to a moment when NATO has to decide if it is prepared to go nuclear when faced with an enemy who is clearly prepared to press the button? (What a 180 degree turn round from forty years ago, when we thought all this was behind us.) And if they are prepared, who will pay the price?
We will. In Britain. In France. In Germany. In Russia. We are potentially staring at a nuclear strike in Europe within the next five years.
Unthinkable, I hear you say. Unthinkable in a world run by rational and reasonable leaders, yes. Leaders who have checks and balances imposed on them. (Even the Soviet system had checks and balances – witness the removal of Nikita Khrushchev.) Not unthinkable in a world where the leader of the aggressing country is unhinged, explicitly prepared to use nuclear force in pursuit of political and territorial goals and who is unchallenged in his authority. Putin is all of these, and if sanctions fail to deter him, if his ministers remain cowed and the majority of the Russian population remain in his thrall, we are screwed. I do not have faith that the Western leadership, faced with the bully in the Kremlin backed by the power of China, will do anything but crumble. Bit by bit. Border by border. Appeasing all the way. Until. Until they have to act and have to respond to nuclear attack with nuclear counter-attack.
Which leaves us with the problem of what to do. As private citizens who have no trust in our governments’ ability to stop this future coming to fruition. I do not want to be here, with 4 minutes to go on the clock before me, my wife, our children and all my world are incinerated, thinking “how did it come to this? How have we allowed this to happen?” I do not want to be the fool that placed all his faith in our glorious leaders. I do not want to be the fool that looked the other way. That believed what he wanted to believe because the alternative was too awful to contemplate or too horrific to imagine. I do not want to be the in-denial sheep entering the abattoir that look imminent destruction in the face and conclude “it’ll never happen – they wouldn’t do this to us”. They would.
Instead, I want to act. I want to run. Run to the southern hemisphere where countries are saner and have some perspective on their own self-importance. I want to remove my family from the madness of the Northern hemisphere. From the egotistical politics of empire builders and ex-empire rulers in lock step to prideful self-destruction. Not to act, not to run would be the true act of madness.
Once you’ve decided that, the only remaining question is: “who will have us?”
*Brave New World – read it and Orwell’s ‘1984’ if you want to see where we’re really headed.