Crisis 22 - Section 1: A Literary Premise
Glaciers & Novels
Introduction - Slaughterhouse-Five - What Most People Would Choose
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Introduction
In Crisis 22 I explore the Ukraine War from a variety of angles, most of them literary. In my attempt to fathom of — and argue against — the Kremlin’s actions and rhetoric, I highlight novels set all over Eurasia, from St. Petersburg to Jakarta.
In general, I make the following two points:
1. Russian literature shows us Russian history and politics from personal, cultural, philosophical, and dramatic points of view. This diverse perspective gives us a more rounded understanding of what Ukraine is up against.
While some Russian writers, like Bulgakov and Chekhov, stood up to injustice and autocracy, many have done the opposite. Examining these latter gives us an insight into how deeply autocracy, empire, and a sense of Russian superiority are engrained in Russian culture. In his wonderfully titled book, War and Punishment (2023), Mikhail Zygar notes the cause-and-effect relation between many (though not all) Russian writers and the present war:
Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labor. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was. (Of course, any “empire” is evil, but let different historians judge other empires.) We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.
In Crisis 22 I use some Russian writers to explore this imperial bent, and others to illustrate how difficult it is to oppose this bent. My notion is that the great Russian writers, whether they’re for or against empire, help us to contextualize, expand, and deepen our understanding of Russian culture and history.
2. Postcolonial literature can also be used to counter the Kremlin, especially its claim to be a champion of the Global South. The present war is a hybrid one, and one part of this is Russia’s appeal to nations such as India, South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia. If Russia can convince these nations that the West is the real problem, then Russia can take over Ukraine and not suffer the economic or diplomatic consequences. Yet how can a government that represses its own people and attacks its neighbours be a model for a post-colonial, post-imperial world? Novels such as The Quiet American and The Year of Living Dangerously explore the previous Cold War situation, and help us see that Russia is today rehashing aspects of its communist propaganda in order to justify its war. The key difference here is that communism may have had a rationale, yet invading Ukraine has none whatsoever.
My approach to the Ukraine Crisis assumes that literature can enrich our understanding, which is often pared to the bone by political realism, harsh economic facts, media rhetoric, and the brutality of war. Literature is helpful here, since it deals with history and politics, yet at the same time it contextualizes the understanding of these disciplines, giving them flesh and blood.
Of course, there are many things we can do to deal with the present situation. We can do practical things, like send them drones and support the various initiatives that send weapons, defence systems, vehicles, medical aid, money, etc. We can also follow the news, social media, and podcasts like Ukraine: The Latest. That podcast is particularly wide-ranging: it deals with 1. military tactics and strategy, 2. geopolitics and economics, and 3. psychology, culture, and art. Ukraine: The Latest demonstrates that we can learn about geopolitics and also face this war culturally, in a way that puts muscle and flesh back on the bones. We can turn the horror of this war into a diverse understanding, and yet still unambiguously oppose the destruction of Ukraine and its people.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
At the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut recounts how he’s asked by a film producer what he’s working on. Vonnegut responds that he's writing an anti-war book about the bombing of Dresden. The producer asks, “Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?” In many ways the producer is right: both are attempts to stop the unstoppable. From Mesopotamia to Ukraine, for the last five millennia, war has been an unwanted companion of civilization, the worst expression of its discontent.
From the Standard of Ur, 26th century BC, "War" panel. (Wikimedia)
Yet the film producer's point has three limitations. First, it’s worth trying to mitigate the extent or severity of war even if we can’t eliminate it. Second, as Camus’ Sisyphus concludes, even in an absurd world our struggle for freedom constitutes its own type of meaning and freedom. Third, Vonnegut nevertheless went on to write Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the finest anti-war books ever written.
So to those who think What's the use? and What can be done? I’d say that we can help Ukraine defend itself and we can arm ourselves with insight — about Ukraine, Russia, Europe, war, and the complexity of global conflict. There are endless books, TV programs, Youtube videos, and podcasts on these topics. Yet we can also read novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, War and Peace, The Year of Living Dangerously, and The Quiet American. Unlike videos, these novels provide an immersive, prolonged, and unified type of experience, similar to a good TV series. We get to know characters who have the same type of feelings and thoughts and relationships that we do, and yet they are confronting large-scale geopolitical crises. They become flesh and blood examples that we can relate to, and they suggest various ways that we can deal with geopolitical crisis.
Reading a novel may even have some advantages over TV when it comes to forming a deep understanding of complex events. This may be because reading gets more exclusively at language-driven parts of our brain. It encourages deep and complex reflection unhurried by a director’s pace. When we read, we think actively and creatively. We take in words and create scenarios in our heads. We also have time to ponder what these scenarios mean.
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In the following pages I hope to show that a closer look into Russian and post colonial literature can help us confront this most difficult problem of the Ukraine War. Not solve the problem, but confront it. Literature isn’t likely to have much effect on the battle field itself. Perhaps it can’t even expose the war in a startlingly clear light. Yet it can help us to contextualize our understanding. It can provide us with larger, integrated contexts in which we can see issues not in isolation, but in interpenetrating patterns of culture, psychology, history, language, personal relations, cultural norms, etc.
Seeing in this way, we might avoid the trap the Kremlin has set: to divide us among ourselves, and to divide us from the rest of the world. If we gain empathy for the alcoholic father or Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, or for the plights of the Vietnamese and Indonesian trishaw drivers in The Quiet American and The Year of Living Dangerously, we're more likely to think and feel about the world in a more generous way. We might even come to feel that the world isn't divided up by nation, race, language or culture, but instead is unified by common needs, fears, strengths, weaknesses, and doubts. With this type of understanding, we're less likely to stereotype other peoples, and less likely to demonize Russians. And if we understand the Russians better, we might even find a way to stop them from killing their neighbours, as if there was no law against it.
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Crisis 22 is divided into five parts. 1. A Literary Premise defines and illustrates my literary approach. 2. Waking Up explores how the outbreak of war in 2022 interrupted our relatively peaceful Western world. 3. Cunning Plans looks at what Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bulgakov might have to teach us about the present situation. 4. Puppet Masters uses novels by Koch, Greene, Vonnegut, and Rushdie to explore i. the differences between the Old Cold War and the New Cold War, ii. the difficulty of seeing what’s really going on, and iii. ways we might use paradigms from the Global South to understand and cope with the present crisis.
Finally, 5 Fearless Leaders argues against the Kremlin’s claim to speak for the Global South. I also take a shot at suggesting a new world order, one that isn’t dominated by the West, and certainly not by the new colonialism of the Kremlin and its authoritarian allies. Rather, it should be dominated by 🕊️ respect for national sovereignty, 🕊️ a functional and more representative U.N., 🕊️ the elimination of nuclear arms, 🕊️ the development and implementation of defensive technologies, 🕊️ the reinvigoration of courts and institutions that can ☮️ punish war crimes, ☮️ mediate trade, ☮️ advance environmental protections, ☮️ reckon with ethnic disputes, ☮️ send peacekeepers, ☮️ distribute aid, etc. While such an order is only an ideal at present, it’s one that I think the majority of the world would support.
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What Most People Would Choose
I’ve mentioned Ukraine: The Latest twice above, and will end this prefatory page with an excerpt from the transcript. Here, Francis Dearnley articulates eloquently what I’ve been trying to suggest: Ukraine’s fight for freedom and democracy isn’t just a fight for Western ideals, but for global ones.
I stumbled across a Woodrow Wilson quote last week which got me thinking. He said in 1917, when trying to lay the foundations for the League of Nations, "only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be not a balance of power but a community of power. Not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”
[…] power in and of itself does not make right; […] there are higher values which should be upheld and defended, not because they're culturally or intellectually superior, but because history has shown them to be more pragmatically auspicious to humanity, and what most people would choose if they were given a fair choice: a more democratic world under a rule of law.
What I find so staggering at this moment is how many supposedly clever people in the West have seemingly abandoned that idea and speak now only in the language of power and the balance of power. Because if you do that, you concede so much ground to those who fundamentally seek to destroy you.
For once you permit the idea of balance of power alone, you permit the idea of spheres of influence. And once you concede that, as we've seen with Ukraine, then you find yourself willing to accept that millions of people should live their lives in bondage, at the whim of a dictator, because it's within his sphere, because that's what the balance of power dictates. We tend to not follow the logic all the way through to the end, but when you do, you see, I would argue, how corrosive that mentality can be ...
December 20, 2024
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Next: 🦅🕊️ War & Peace