Yesterday, I wrote about the facility – still relatively large – with which Russian citizens are able to travel the world. I don’t know about you, but I’m shocked at how easy it still is.
There is a part of me, as perhaps there is a part of you, which says that Russian citizens should not carry the yoke of their government’s sins. I personally believe that the British government is doing some pretty dreadful things, but I’d be aggrieved if people thought I ought to bear responsibility for them. But I don’t know every last one of them, so many slip by me unnoticed and my lack of explicit protest could, I know, be taken as tacit approval. If there is anything on which I may have been misjudged, please, let me know and I shall give you my view on it. Then, you may lambast me for my view if you disagree. There, cannot say fairer than that, can I?
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Do you think there are any Russians who are unaware of the war in Ukraine? Their protests are mute. Or muted. One or the other, surely? Or are there none? Are the 144 million citizens of Russia all united behind Mr Putin and his war? If they are, then Ukraine’s task is far greater than anyone could to this point have imagined. For, then, they will come, the Russians will, wave after wave until their leader’s bidding is finally done and the name Ukraine has been eradicated from the map.
But, then again, what can I or you or anyone, even if they are Russian, do about that? Resignation to a set of circumstances, calm acceptance of events beyond our control, giving ourselves up to the hand of our maker, like the violinists on the sinking Titanic in 1912, or suicide bombers who recite Arabic prayers before exploding themselves and those around them, or Dr and Mrs Goebbels, administering cyanide to their five children in May 1945. Yielding to circumstance but not until the very moment at which the realisation dawns that circumstance has become the inevitable. For the Christian, for the believer, it is at the moment at which all hope is lost that all hope is strongest: all my hope on God is founded, He doth still my trust renew; me, through change and chance, He guideth, only good and only true; God unknown, He alone calls my heart to be His own.
So, that mutation that takes place in a human being, from hope of life to hope of life eternal is in some measure dependent on that inchoate factor: belief. It’s like Fred Astaire’s style: you’ve either got it or you haven’t got it.
The Russians who voice no protest out of fear for the reprisals against them were they to do so: if all fear were banished from them, would they then protest? Would they stand up and be counted, and rail against their leadership to cease and desist these horrors? No; I don’t believe they would. After all, do you?
How many of you have marched down a city street with a banner to protest at this ignominy being acted out in south-eastern Europe? How many of you have written to your MP to protest this outrage? How many of you have sent messages of sympathy to beleaguered Ukrainians fighting for the very survival of their nation? How many of you have sent food and aid to the organisations who are striving to plug the gaps in the necessities of life that are so lacking in Ukraine? In Gambia? In Kenya? In wherever?
On 4 August 2022, I wrote about mice, and men, and mouse-like men. The authors of horror. And about one in particular, about Putin. Oh, I mentioned en passant, Franco and Hitler and the Washington DC snipers. At one point, I said, Mr Putin will be punished by God: we’re not going to get a chance. And we’re too greedy in any case. Since then, an arrest warrant has been issued against Vladimir Putin, for war crimes, to which the Kremlin has responded by saying that anyone who seeks to enforce it will be regarded by them as committing an act of war.
You know, that’s almost funny. “An act of war.” Well, perhaps they’re slow on the uptake in Moscow, but a war is precisely what they’re in and, yes, if arraigning Mr Putin on these charges is to be done, then we can have little doubt but that engaging in acts of war will be what is needed to bring him to justice. No one for a second imagines that Mr Putin will simply hop on the next flight to Holland.
But, what is equally unimaginable is the ease and facility with which those who endorse and rejoice in the acts of the Russian leadership at this time can flit and flot around the world in freedom and comfort: just look again at that list I wrote yesterday, the long, long list of countries that welcome Russian citizens, who tacitly or otherwise endorse the murder, rape, beheading and torture of children, women and men, and are able to get away on holiday, to vacation outside their nation, and to escape scot free all feeling of guilt, like a dieter sneaking a cream cake from the fridge. Naughty, but nice.
Germany is one of the few countries that, in response to the ICC warrant, has said explicitly: come here and we’ll slap you in irons, Mr Putin. Now, why do you suppose that Germany has been moved to say that? Hm? Because Germany is horrified at what it has seen? Are we not all horrified at what we’ve seen? Or is it usual to bicycle down the street and get the iPhone shot out of your hand as you notice men at the side of the road, on their knees, their hands bound behind their backs with cable ties, you giving a militia man a hearty greeting before he blows out their brains and you continue onward to the supermarket for a half pound of butter? Well, is it no less usual than having the ICC issue an arrest warrant for the most evil man on God’s Earth and to not say, “Hear, hear, and we’ll arrest him if he comes here”?
What is it that’s unusual about endorsing law enforcement? Don’t you believe the court is right to issue its warrant? Did Putin not do these things? Do you think he won’t get a fair trial? Like the Nuremberg trials, were they not fair? Was justice not done, was justice not seen to be done? Maybe those who don’t endorse the warrant with the vehemence of Germany have not, unlike Germany, been through that kind of process. Maybe the entire seriousness of the whole idea of justice is laughable, a waste of time. Perhaps you’ve long since stopped playing your violin on the Titanic. Maybe you’ve already donned your own suicide belt. Perhaps you’ve already prepared your own cyanide pill.
The nations of the world look on at this horror and, for much part, say nothing. The worst of them continue to deal and bargain and trade with the miscreant. They grant passage to the miscreant’s nationals and say nought to them as they pass their borders for pleasure and for business. They will not yield their comfort in the name of defiance. And when justice raises a finger and points it at the culpable, there are those who waver, undecided, unresolved, unabashed, unholy.
They are equivocating. They avoid commitment or wish to mislead; they prevaricate; they hedge. As they hedge, the world edges. Edges towards an edge, as if they will it. As if they want it. As if they desire it. They hedge their futures because they are uncertain as to whether their future lies brighter with honesty and fairness or with evil and death. The latter are not inevitable. The world’s ship has not yet been holed beneath the waterline and yet these nations act as if they suspect that that “bump” might have been an iceberg. And Russia, dear naval, maritime Russia has got the only lifeboat on board.
Are they looking before they leap? Or is he who hesitates lost? Never in all my born days, until this one, have I been forced so abruptly to a recognition of how very lacking in leadership the world’s leaders are able to be.
This is not well. In 2019, I trod the theatre’s boards in Brussels and spoke these words in the figure of King Henry IV. It was, I may say with pride, my finest hour on the stage. And, I will warrant to you, it was Henry IV’s finest hour as well. Is South Africa, Hungary, and the rest, are they all to prove themselves exhaled meteors, prodgies of fear, portents of broached mischief to the unborn times?
You have deceived our trust,
And made us doff our easy robes of peace,
To crush our old limbs in ungentle steel.
This is not well, my lord, this is not well.
What say you to it? Will you again unknit
This churlish knot of all-abhorred war?
And move in that obedient orb again
Where you did give a fair and natural light,
And be no more an exhaled meteor,
A prodigy of fear, and a portent
Of broached mischief to the unborn times?
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