he would gladly drag us all into WWIII
another reason why Ukraine was unfit for NATO
You're one of the few @JPP that will have the wit to understand this:
Russia’s war shatters the illusion that a global triumph for democracy is only a matter of time
right flames above the dark skylines of ancient cities, helicopters swarming over forested horizons, children huddled in bomb shelters, rockets slamming into graceful European squares, columns of tanks rolling east. On its front cover this week Time magazine announces “The return of history” above a picture of one of those tanks advancing through the wintry Ukrainian countryside — the shot surely chosen because it looks so much like history. Turn on the History Channel and it’s likely you will catch a similar tank in a similar part of Europe in a similar-looking war more than 70 years ago.
When people speak of “the end of history” — the idea that the world’s nations will inevitably progress into a peaceful liberal democratic order — that tank in that place is what they imagine to have ended.
History continues elsewhere — in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, it has been going full tilt for decades. But in the West we have become accustomed to feeling that even if history has not reached an end exactly, we have at least been granted an exemption.
This is the shock of a full-scale European war. It offends our sense of history, which is also our sense of reality — our instinct for the way the past, the present and the future join up. Wars, we came to believe after the fall of the Soviet Union, would probably now happen only to other people and they would happen less. Eventually those other people would get richer and more democratic, and then history would end for them too.
In the late 1990s, the American columnist Thomas Friedman proposed his “golden arches theory of conflict prevention”, which said there could never be a war between two countries with branches of McDonald’s. Russia has 850 McDonald’s restaurants and Ukraine more than 100.
Indeed, until a few days ago you could find ramen and sashimi as easily in the streets of Kyiv as in London. That those same streets are now crumbling under Russian bombardment feels surreal as well as horrifying because our culture and politics everywhere teaches us that history is not supposed to go “backwards” like this.
“The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice” was the motto woven into the rug in President Obama’s Oval Office. The culture wars are fought over the idea that the values of the present are superior to those of the past. “Progressive” means believing in things getting better, not worse. We speak portentously of being on “the right side of history” but it is a meaningless phrase. History has no direction.
Putin began his invasion with a history lesson. The West’s values, he said, were not universal, virtuous and inevitable but “pseudo-values” that lead to “degradation and degeneration”. The fall of the USSR had been not the end of history but the birth of a terrible new era of unrestrained western power that unleashed, Putin told his people, “huge casualties, destruction . . . bloody, unhealed wounds, ulcers of international terrorism and extremism” upon the world.
It is often said there is something quasi-religious in the West’s faith in progress. But we are not the only ones for whom history is spiritual destiny. The history of Russian national identity, for instance, is inextricable from the Orthodox faith. “Russia, Ukraine and Belarus / There you have it holy Rus”, runs a favourite rhyme of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, whom Putin once accompanied on pilgrimage to Kyiv.
In Russia, the Great Patriotic War (the Eastern front of the Second World War to us, where at least 20 million Russians died defending their homeland) has the status of a second national religion. Those questioning the government account of that war’s progress find themselves labelled “blasphemous” or “sacrilegious”.
Western notions about the sovereignty of small states and the advancing rights of individuals are not only different from Putin’s view of history but offensive to it. For Putin, individuals are subordinate to the power of the state and small countries exist to be controlled by great powers. He knows that Russia has intervened before to check the progress of western ideas. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars it formed the Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia, partly to resist the forces of democracy, liberalism, and secularism.
“As gravity bends light, so power bends time,” the historian Christopher Clark once wrote. Political power means power over history. Putin, resenting the West’s power to impose its history on the world, has made his own history impossible to ignore. Few of us are likely to buy the idea that Ukraine was invented by Lenin or that it should not exist. But we have suddenly found ourselves scrambling to comprehend our position in time. Evidently we are not at history’s end, driving graceful victory laps up and down the long arc of justice.
So where are we? The Russia expert Fiona Hill warns that “we keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War.” Not the end of history, then, but a break between wars.
If the invasion of Ukraine feels unreal as well as horrifying, it is because our sense of reality is reordering. Perhaps that renewed sense of the chaos of history will lead us to understand that our values are not inevitabilities but infinitely fragile. We must take care of them.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-had-history-sewn-up-now-its-unravelling-j02b3t59z
