The right side of a safe border
UKRAINE. Should Ukraine eradicate its to Russia by submitting?
I viewed a film on YouTube.
A Russian boys’ choir, who sang like angels. It truly is beautiful. But, from beginning to end, I couldn’t shake out of my mind the thought that these boys will, if they know what’s good for them, also hold automatic rifles as members of their Youth Armies. Angels with Dirty Faces.
Ukraine rose up at Maidan and said, “So far, but no farther.” Its people took a stand against what they believed to be wrong; and I believed it was wrong as well. Yet Russians make no such stand.
Ukraine rose up against oppressors and violent policemen to say, “No” in 2014, and the citizens of Lviv and Kyiv joined hands the whole length of the road between the two cities to show solidarity and unity in 1991. We really needn’t have been surprised at Ukraine’s resistance now, at its vehement “NO!”: they resisted valiantly and in a peaceable manner for 30 years. People forget that. They say, “Stop the war, Ukraine: submit!” They haven’t a clue what it will take to stop this war, not for good; and I’m not even sure if Ukraine and NATO know that. I do, and it frightens me to contemplate it.
Whatever possessed Russia to think Ukraine would roll over and submit is beyond me.
And whatever possesses them to place Kalashnikovs in the hands of angelic choirboys is, likewise, beyond me.
The non-combatants, nota bene: non-combatants, who rail at Ukraine and demand that it stop resisting: if their own country were invaded, say, by, I dunno, Russia, for instance, how vehemently would they resist?
Would they man the barricades and throw improvised molotov cocktails at mighty tanks, organise food and clothing for those who cannot flee, and, as pacifists, succour to the mental needs of soldiers on weary leave from the battlefront?
Or would they stand against their own leaders and insist: “Stop resisting, and give in to the aggressor in order to save the economy on which I so depend”?
I cannot even tell you which I would do. In such a case, the decision of fight or flight is not one we can predict. If we could, we’d all be heroes. But I know what would sway me: the thought that doing nothing is siding with the aggressor; and I know what would persuade me: the example of Ukraine. But I cannot tell you what I would actually do: the decision of fight or flight is only easy, when you’re not the one who has to fight or flee.
Or, maybe, those so full of advice for Ukraine would in the end, neither fight nor protest. They would perhaps indeed have already been on the first plane out of danger; to Switzerland, maybe, where it is green and pleasant, and no sound ever disturbs the platitudes emitted from the right side of a safe border.
More on the Russo-Ukrainian War here: