Si via pacem, para bellum
Ukraine has shattered my generation’s naive anti-war moralism
The techno-capitalists of Davos used to talk about the Great Reset - a globalist utopia in which no one owns anything and where nationalism and war is in the dustbin of history. 2022 saw a reset alright but it wasn’t quite what the World Economic Forum had in mind. More a grim reset back to the 1930’s.
An independent country was invaded by an imperial power with all the ruthlessness and expansionist ideology of National Socialists.
After decades in which Europeans thought only of a peace dividend, we are now paying the cost of war, in the form of inflation and elevated energy prices. The world is suddenly a dangerous place again, and the nations of Europe are spending serious money on defence. Germany is rearming after 80 years of beating swords into ploughshares or rather BMWs. The men and women of Europe, accustomed to the ways of peace are relearning the culture of war.
For the first time in my lifetime I found myself cheering the killing of human beings. Real flesh and blood, not pixels in a video game. Indeed, almost everyone I know found themselves cheering the deaths of Russian soldiers, in one way or another, if only by celebrating Ukrainian advances on the battlefield.
Never before has front line combat been so up close and personal. Social media has given us eyes in the sky, made us virtual participants in slaughter. We routinely see smouldering troop carriers surrounded by Russian corpses. We have watched, fascinated, those sick videos of “orcs “, as the Ukrainian propagandists call Russians, lying in coffin-like dugouts and being blown apart by grenades dropped from Ukrainian drones. Often to a comedy music soundtrack.
We know, moreover, that we are being shown a highly selective account of this war. Heroic Ukrainian soldiers holding kittens, getting married, hugging grannies, singing patriotic songs. These video tales betray a partial truth. For Ukrainians too are being killed in the tens of thousands. Many civilians have become collateral damage in those liberated villages. There have been atrocities on both sides. War brutalises everyone who participates in it.
But propaganda, we have been reminded in 2022, is a necessary part of fighting a war. The outnumbered Ukrainian armed forces have to show the world that they are putting up a fight - winning even - to ensure that arms shipments keep coming. Shooting down helicopters, blasting tanks, blowing up command posts. It is also important for the bereaved families of Ukrainian soldiers to see that the enemy is suffering too.
So I do not condemn the authors of these video nasties. We know too, or should, that many of the videos are produced by the ultra -nationalist Asov battalions. Russian propaganda about Nazis in Ukraine isn’t entirely fiction. But in a war of liberation you can’t be too choosy about your allies. So long as they shoot in the right direction the rightists were, are, accepted as freedom fighters. Many gave their lives in the Avostal steel works in Mariupol in May when it was pummelled to dust in scenes reminiscent of Stalingrad.
This is truly a life and death struggle. Kill or be killed. The more Russian invaders that die the more likely Ukraine will regain its freedom. It is as sickeningly simple as that.
And as the year of the grim reset ends it is perhaps time to reflect on how far we have strayed from the moral universe we inhabited only 12 months ago. We now approve murder, willingly consume propaganda and discuss our own deception calmly, clinically, cynically.
I grew up in a pacifist household with parents who said war, all war, was evil. I read books like Catch 22 and All Quiet on the Western Front, which portray war as fascist madness. I learned the anti war poems of the Great War, like Wilfrid Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, which condemned the “old lie” that it is a noble thing to die for your country. The idea of a just war seemed like a cop out. War was about imperialism, said my Marxist university lecturers, a necessary by-product of capitalism.
This naive pacifism was reflected in countless anti war films - Apocalypse Now, MASH and Born on the Fourth of July - that portrayed courage in battle as little better than psychotic self-harm. Popular music invariably denounced war as morally wrong whatever side you were on. Songs like Donovan’s “Universal Soldier” (he really is to blame ). Bruce Springsteen singing “War! (oof!) What is it good for? Absolutely nuthin’” Bob Dylan wondered “how many years must the cannon balls fire before they are forever banned”. Well hopefully not many since cannon balls are little use against thermobaric missiles and kamikaze drones
I shudder to think what people who fought in the Second World War must have thought of us long-haired peaceniks. But the mindset of the pacifist Boomer generation was transmitted intact by popular culture to the generations that succeeded us. The anti-war message is taught in one way or another in every primary school - outside Ukraine that is. But not for much longer perhaps. School children may soon be told, as they used to be in the past, that sometimes your country needs to be defended. If you want peace, prepare for war (Si vis pacem, para bellum) as the look Roman general Vegetius put it (and no he wasn’t a vegetarian). Is that not the hard-headed lesson of 2022?
Listen to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speeches and they come from a distant era. They talk of sacrifice, valour, courage. Of homeland, family, faith even. Pro Patria Mori. All those values we were taught to despise by the war poets have come winging back from the devastated streets of Ukraine. Boys are again being urged to fight for their wives and children.
Many 20th Century feminists regarded war as a product of toxic masculinity - a patriarchal anachronism that would end as soon as women took control of the world. Well not so fast. Gender roles too were reset in Ukraine in February 2022.
When war was declared all men over sixteen were required to enlist in defence of the homeland and the movement of males was severely restricted. Only women and children were allowed to leave Ukraine, and did so in their millions. Of course there are many brave women fighters in the front line, but the war in Ukraine is very much male preserve and underpinned by traditional traditional male values as feminists like Jessica Darden have pointed out. Men were ordered to say that were fighting for their families. Such at least are the values promoted by the Ukrainian leadership. We are not in a great position to lecture them right now on women’s rights.
Most of us, male and female, in what we still calL, for lack of a better word, the West, are comfortably insulated from Ukraine even though it is only a couple of hours by Ryanair. We have accepted Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s portrayal of a war for civilisation that affects us all. But we social media voyeurs do not risk being enlisted because NATO has left the fighting to the Ukrainians. This is of course sensible Geo-politics. Putin would probably use his nuclear weapons if Nato troops and planes became directly involved in combat with Russian armed forces.
But we are up to our necks in this war nevertheless. Our taxpayer money will decide the outcome. It is not to diminish Ukrainian valour on the battlefield to say that their armed forces have depended on the sophisticated weapons provided by Western countries. The technical superiority of our weapons allowed Ukraine to prevail against an enemy with far greater manpower.
We have provided tens of billions of advanced kit including sophisticated AI technology, like Palantir, which allows artillery to be targeted with unprecedented precision.
The “Masters of War” whom Dylan denounced for making “the bombs and death planes” were not buried by protest songs. Fortunately for Ukraine, arms manufacturers continued fashioning remarkable weapons like the British NLAW anti tank rocket, which helped the Ukrainian resistance in their darkest hour as Russia tried to sweep into Kiev in March. The Himars mobile missile system helped liberate Kherson in November. Relatively unsophisticated ground to air missiles provided by us prevented Russia gaining air supremacy early in the war. It is perhaps unfortunate that the soon-to-be-delivered Patriot anti -cruise missile system was not given to Ukraine early enough to stop the Russians devastating power stations this winter.
Of course these weapons would have been so much junk had it not been for the bravery of the Ukrainian conscripts who deployed them. And the many Ukrainian technicians and engineers who found ingenious ways of adapting captured Russian military hardware for their own use. Who could forget the farm tractors of Ukraine dragging stricken and abandoned Russian vehicles to Ukrainian repair shops where men with granite jaws waited with flaming torches.
It seems inevitable that the West will win what is clearly now a proxy war against Russia. Vladimir Putin must surely realise his folly as his soldiers are killed by digitally-enabled weaponry they don’t understand and from which they cannot hide. But this is going to be a long war, with many casualties as those who see past the propaganda of both sides can now see. Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz may wish for a negotiated solution that gives Russia an “off ramp” and some face-saving territory. But after such terrible loss of life, Ukraine will never accept Russian boots on their soil. They will fight till every Russian is dead or deported.
Europe will never be the same again. From the Baltic States to the Black Sea, Europe has already become a fortress. No country in Central Europe - Poland, Hungary, Slovakia - will feel entirely safe again. Finland and Sweden, who remained aloof from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation for 70 years are now firmly in the fold.
NATO has been revived only a year or so since it was being called a brain deadanachronism. A new NATO rapid reaction force of 300,000 is being headquartered in Poland. Vladimir Putin’s military adventurism has turned his propaganda about Western hostility to Russia into geopolitical reality. His country is now surrounded and will be regarded as an enemy country for decades after the Ukraine war is over.
Yet as the West celebrated its renewed unity, it now faces an increasingly united anti-Western front. China has pledged “rock solid” support for Russia. Large parts of Africa look to the Sino-Russian front rather tha the old “imperial” countries. America, after its defeat in Iraq and humiliation in Afghanistsn, is no longer feared or revered.
The Russian enemy at the gates has brought Europe together after the fracture of Brexit. Suddenly we are all in it together. But the European Union is not a state and is not a military power. Indeed, it believed itself be be an agent of peace - putting an end to war in Europe. Brussels has, however, been forced to speak the language of nationalism and warfare over Ukraine.
Europe was once seen by Davos man as an important step on the way to the Great Reset. A neoliberal supranational formation, ruled by technocrats, with no borders, no army and no imperial ambitions. Pure borderless capitalism. As the world is reordered into military alliances, and as broken supply chains post Covid have brought globalism to a halt, techno-utopianism is looking passé. We are reverting to the culture wars of an earlier epoch. It has found itself in the bin earmarked for the nation state.