A courageous trooper, soldiering for peace
UKRAINE. Pacifism in a war of battlefields and troubled minds
A voiceover of this article is available by clicking above
It has taken me 13 months of patient waiting. In the last 13 months, I had not a sign nor a whisper nor so much as a hint in response to a question I posed when the Russo-Ukrainian war broke out. And now, I have the response I sought. The question: Is the united Ukraine that is defending itself against attack in any measure assisted by those among its population who are conscientious objectors?
It seemed to me at the time that it was impossible: Ukraine cannot have no pacifists; dyed-in-the-wool pacifists, who would refuse point blank to raise a gun against their fellow man. No population of 45 million has no pacifists. It’s impossible. And no pacifist would recant his belief. That I also know. I knew one.
My Great Uncle David declined to bear arms in the Second World War, but the tests he was put to in order to stand by his principles were every bit as arduous as the defence of a strategic battle front. “It would have been a far easier task for me to simply have donned the uniform and attended at muster,” was how he put it to me, many years afterwards.
It is not dishonourable to fight for one’s country. But it is dishonourable to do so contrary to your own conscience. Conscience is an aspect of the human psyche that, many will tell you, gets conveniently laid to one side, prospectively for as long as the battle rages; and whether or not it is ever then taken up again, once the battle is done, is open to question. For those for whom conscience is important, then it is as important as any matter of life or death but, in that, it is nonetheless not so important as to project the prospect of the pacifist’s own death onto another living person.
My great uncle’s nation lost, due to his conscientious objection, a soldier in arms. Morale, Napoleon I said, is worth thrice a soldier’s firepower. If, by that, Napoleon would, as I believe, have excluded pacifists from his army’s ranks (if not for their own soul’s sake, then for the sake of their fellow soldiers’), then I stand by my belief that to press a pacifist to military service is a matter of the greatest delicacy. Many showered unveiled disdain on Great Uncle David for his pacifism, and he lost a great many friends as a result; but at no point did he lose his self-respect.
The actor Dirk Bogarde recalls in his seven-volume autobiography how he served his nation as an air reconnaissance photograph interpreter. He recounts how he thereby took responsibility for the deaths of thousands and yet never looked a one of them in the face. He wasn’t a pacifist before the Second World War, but, especially after viewing in the face first hand the piles upon piles of human bodies at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, he was a pacifist by the time it ended. Is that what a pacifist, who realises he is a pacifist, would seek? To kill thousands, but never see their faces?
In A Short Book For Troubled Times, the dramatist Edward Bond writes: “I wonder whose feelings people are expressing when they say they wish to retain nuclear weapons. Would they go to the victims of these weapons – the innocent children and their families, all of whom would be burned – and with their own hands burn them to death with a blow torch? Would you? – all of them? If you would not yet still say you wish to retain nuclear weapons, then you are not expressing your own feelings when you say it, even though you think you are, and call your decision democratic ...
In war, we praise an airman for burning children to death. When he comes home and kisses his own children he is praised for being a good father. But how can he then live with his own thoughts and feelings – he must deny them. But if he does that, how could he know himself? Surely his life cannot make any sense? He has lost his humanity.” I don’t entirely agree with Bond. The airman doesn’t lose his humanity; rather, he acquires a second one. One for his children; one for the children of others. But Beliavsky would agree with Bond: Ukraine may be holding its own in the war, but it is losing its own sense of the joy of life in the doing; it is losing its humanity. “If you look at the darkness too long,” he says, citing Nietzsche, “the darkness also starts looking at you.”
Well, I now have this war’s pacifist, and the search will continue, because he won’t be the only one. His name is Vlad Beliavsky (depicted above) and he may just unwittingly have become a hero of mine. The way Seneca became a hero of his: literally, the writer being unaware of the existence of the reader, and yet the reader feeling such a holistic entirety and oneness with the sentiments of the writer that they are, in that instant, as two peas in a pod, and each, he does know the other, even if the writer could never have known the reader.
Mr Beliavsky is described as a master of the understatement. Masters of understatement know masters of understatement, and here’s the biggest understatement of them all. He’d asked an American friend how he could kill on a battlefield and not later be tormented. The friend had replied that he didn’t perceive them as human beings and that helped him deal with it. “It was a hard thing for me to accept.” Asked if he himself could ever adopt that mentality, he quietly replies, “No.”
But did Vlad betray himself in the end by signing up for the cause that runs counter to all he lives and breathes for? You cannot answer this question with a blanket response that applies to every pacifist. Pacifism is not a political party with a paragraphed manifesto that tells adherents what they can and cannot do or say or react. When a pacifist engages in an act that is ostensibly contrary to his deepest-held belief, then he will suffer mental torture. It is – or ought, by rights, to be – precisely the same mental torture that everyone else has gone through, and yet hasn’t. For, if they had, there would be no war to be enlisting for.
“A friend of mine said he was afraid there would be no future in our country, even after the war ended,” Beliavsky continues. “I said: ‘What is one good or constructive thing that has come out of the war?’ And he thought, and said: ‘Well, we have become stronger as a nation, we have a powerful army, and we have people we are proud of.’ I asked him: ‘Do you think if we manage to get through this nightmare period, this hell, these people would help you and our country to rebuild faster and would there be a brighter future for everybody?’ And he said: ‘Yes.’ So he created a new narrative.” And Vlad helped him create it. It is his most satisfying material contribution to this war: its brighter peace. In this manner, the philosopher psychoanalyst helps his comrades make some sense of what they are doing. But, of course he doesn’t make a brighter future for everybody; he just instils the prospects of a brighter future for everybody.
It is the prospect of a bright future that creates belief in a bright future; and that belief, if not that prospect, can indeed bring a bright future to reality. Vlad Beliavsky may be doing his bit in serving his nation in this war, even as a pacifist; but, most of all, he is doing huge spadework towards preventing the next war.
In the conclusion to this Guardian article on the man that, for 13 months, I have searched for, he says two things which are both remarkable but of which one is true and one only half-true.
The truth lies in this: if he were to die in the war, he would now feel he has made his mark on the world. That he has indeed done that, dear reader, is, I can unhesitatingly assure you, the truth. The half-truth spoken by Beliavsky lies in this, however: “I knew we were resilient, but I didn’t know how wonderful and strong our people are. You’ve got 40 million united Ukrainians, so what will Putin do? Will he massacre 40 million people? That’s the only way he can win this war. The only way.”
It’s half-true, because there is another way. A way that seems to be advocated vehemently by just as many social medialites, using methods so decried by Edward Bond: to massacre 144 million Russians.