A chance comment I made about a visit to the Russian orthodox church in Florence led to a confrontation with a fervent Putinite in the course of which I learned that no current war can be fully understood without delving into the darkest recesses.of the combatants’ history. I merely wrote that I was not particularly interested in visiting a place with strong connections to the patriarch of Moscow who fully supports the horrible war (but then aren’t all wars horrible) which started with the invasion of a separate nation by the leader of the Russian federation. My respondent who did not have a Russian name replied that I was confusing culture with politics. I replied that culture is a manifestation of a political situation thinking particularly of the way Russian artists under the Soviet regime would be condemned if they did not stick to the axioms of social realism. Shostakovich, for example, had several of his works banned and was in danger of life or gulag because they were accused of capitalist formalism. My critic then gave me a list of massacres against the red army carried out by the Ukrainian nationalist army under the aegis of Stephan Bandera. I thanked her for spotlighting to me historical aspects I had previously been unaware of.
Who was Bandera? A Ukrainian born in Lviv in 1909 and brought up in the new Polish state he is regarded by some as a hero (a posthumous award by the then Ukrainian president was bestowed in 2010) and by others as a Nazi stooge useful to the third Reich for helping to stem Russian military advances after Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941. The ‘Great Patriotic War’ was certainly not considered one for Bandera and his henchmen and, although he survived the war, he was murdered in the former German Democratic Republic by soviet agents in 1959.
In a devious way Putin supporters are, therefore, correct in suggesting that Ukraine is full of Nazis. But this is merely confusing Ukrainian nationalism with the most ghastly of extreme right-wing ideologies.
Having visited the Ukraine in the distant 2004 when any thought of a future war with Russia would have been unthinkable I can only explain the present horrors surrounding the northern hinterland of the Black Sea by trying to unravel the complexities of mittel-europa politics – an area where the absence of strongly defining mountain ranges, a multitude of rivers and the vast vagueness of the northern European plains which merge into the steppes preclude any clear country borders.
Of course, as Pope Francis reiterates with increasingly desperation all war is a defeat. Indeed it is. Ecologically because the detritus of war pollutes the natural environment, economically because no-one has been shown to be better off as a result (except of course the arms manufacturers) and because most tragically because so many, especially the young, are killed and the social fabric is devastated for years to come.
The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is so sadly all of these. And now, the world has to contend with another one: the Israel – Hamas war. Again I have noted a difference of opinion among my correspondents. One person does not define it as a war but as a response to a terrorist attack very much in the manner of 9/11. Others declare it a war with the majority siding with the Gaza strip inhabitants. The BBC does not even like to call Hamas a terrorist group.
Here again one must delve into the hoary past and try to work out how the present situations and accusations have evolved. All wars have a territorial basis and in Palestine one moved from biblical times to the Ottomans (perhaps the most tolerant rulers of this part of the world, ironically) to Arab liberation under El Orens, to mandate control, to Zionism, to the 1948 Palestine war which initiated a whole sequence of conflicts continuing so terribly today. I was lucky enough to visit Jerusalem in 1967 as an ex-school kid. The city, holy to the three major monotheistic religions of the world, was then part of the kingdom of Jordan although Israel had built a newer city to the left of the border. I was advised not to get close to the dividing wall as I was liable to be shot. I heeded the advice.
There is an amusing dialogue in that finest of British films The Third Man in which the protagonist (Orson Welles) suggests that centuries of rape, pillage and destruction in most of Europe have produced the likes of Dante, Michaelangelo and Beethoven whereas a similar period of peace in Switzerland has only produced the cuckoo clock! (Of course this is a fanciful confabulation: the cuckoo clock was invented in the Black forest and it was the Swiss Guards who protected the Pope.)
Is then war something to be eradicated like Malaria or illiteracy? Or is it something endemic to the genetic makeup of the homo sapiens species? I am not one to want to decide on such a galactically enormous question. Just consider our own petty domestic situations. How many times do we argue in the comfort and security of our own homes about who’s lost the car keys or why the cats haven’t been fed or why the gate has been left open. Or who decides on whether to watch the match or the ballet on the telly tonight?
The scale of any conflict is, of course, the prime concern. And it is the scale which decides on the possibility of its resolution. The car keys may be found. The gate may be closed. The ballet may be more interesting than the match. But how will any situation be resolved among the thousands of dead, so many of whom are innocent children, among those digging for loved ones in the rubble of their bombed homes, among those who may be alive but have lost everything from their eyesight to their families, among those who are dying because of lack of food,water and medicines.
As that avuncular good-hearted and supremely honest person says again and again: all war is a defeat.
