Having stayed in Lviv for a month and given a couple of lectures at the university, I feel the awfulness of this war in a more personal way. My partner has far closer and longer connections with Lviv, going back some 18 years, and involving spells of teaching in the Department of Translation Studies at the university. She feels it far more: it involves people she knows, and places she knows. She has also seen a lot more of Ukraine, having taught in several universities as part of a poetry in performance and translation circuit. A connection she inherited from her mentor, Vera Rich, a translator honoured by the Ukrainians who awarded Vera their most prestigious medal in recognition of the services she had provided to Ukrainian culture.
I really hope that the war can be stopped, but I fear it will escalate to the level of violence necessary to obtain victory. That is one of the basic facts of war. Once started, there is only one criteria – victory or defeat. That is why they are so hard to stop, even though so many wars become bogged down in some kind of stalemate. The investment cost and the embitterment does not allow for easy extrication of the combatants.
The Quaker, Jonathan Dymond (1796-1828), recognised the core problem inherent in war:
When nations are mutually exasperated, and armies are levied, and battles fought, does not every one know that with whatever motives of defence one party may have begun the contest, both in turn become aggressors? In the fury of slaughter soldiers do not attend, they cannot attend, to questions of aggression. Their business is destruction, and their business they will perform. If the army of defence obtains success, it soon becomes an army of aggression. Having repelled the invader, it begins to punish him. If a war has once begun, it is vain to talk of distinctions of aggression and defence. Moralists may talk of distinctions, but soldiers will make none; and none can be made: it is outside the limits of possibility. (An inquiry into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity, and an Examination of the Philosophical Reasoning by which it is defended: with Observations on Some of the Causes of War and Some of Its Effects.1823)
Having lived through the Napoleonic wars, Dymond understood the fundamental truth for those engaged in war: "Their business is destruction, and their business they will preform." because they cannot do otherwise, for if they hesitate or relent, then they will be destroyed. The normal frames of moral reference are replaced by the need to survive and to win. Wars upend values: during them we give medals to murders and put peace-activist in prison.
That inevitable escalation of war was only too obvious during the Second World war. To obtain victory the allies were prepared to destroy dams, drowning thousands as a result, to fire-storm cities, or to use the ultimate weapon of destruction – the atomic bomb. The Soviet approach was to mass artillery and tanks to flatten everything in front of them. A tactic they used in more recently in Chechnya to reduce Grozny, making it, according the the United Nations, the most destroyed city on earth.
If there is no military victory – and there seldom is – then some sort of substitute victory may be manufactured, as at Versailles in 1919. Its imposition was only achieved by the mass starvation of the German population after the armistice of 11/11/18. The lack of military victory begat the need for victory by enforced starvation, to be followed by reparations designed to ensure the economic crushing of Germany: a Carthaginian peace.
If Putin wins, then a process of cultural erasure will follow – his version of a Carthaginian peace – which may be worse than it was in Soviet times. The Soviets regarded Ukrainian as suspect and dangerous, limiting its use and making Russian the official language and the language of education above elementary levels. Translation into and out of Ukrainian was severely limited and controlled. Putin has denied the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and will enforce even more thorough Russification. The refrain we heard over and over again when we were in the Ukraine was "Please don't let the Russians came back" precisely because Ukrainians do not want to be submerged beneath the weight of Russian cultural dominance.
It can hardly be a surprise that my lectures on the survival of Welsh went down well: the parallels were too obvious.
