When is a victory ever a victory?

First published on 29 April 2022

There’s much I don’t really understand in this world. It all started long ago with how tape recorders work, but now embraces crypto-currencies (can you sell one to buy another?) and why you can’t fish a bit of egg shell out of the white. Now one more. It seems the president of Russia requires a victory. And this is something I don’t understand. For a number of reasons.

The people of Russia think what the president of Russia tells them to think. To aid the process, he considerately conceals from their view any fact that might dissuade them from doing so. He tells them he is godlike, and they believe that. So, if he tells them to think there is a victory, is there not a victory, then? Yes. (Just like there is a tooth fairy for the under-5s among you.)

Maybe thinking there’s a victory isn’t enough, however. I would wager that the president of Russia doesn’t just want the Russian people to think there is a victory: he would want them to believe it. Thinking, saying and believing are all nebulous ideas (you can say something with a gesture, with a kiss or even with flowers; Voltaire might have said he’ll defend your right to say it, but it didn’t make him think what you said was right; and belief in God the Father and in Jesus Christ, His only son, springs from something yet less fathomable than even saying and thinking can convey). To believe is to place trust in something; it’s to place your life in the hands of another. That would mean, for there to be belief in a victory, Russians would need to place their lives in the hands of their president. And this they do. I don’t think belief in a victory would be far behind thinking there’s one.

Of course, Russia’s president could open up all the free information channels and let people believe what they see; but that would entail him actually obliterating Ukraine. And he’s not very good that, though he’s done a fair job in places, but it’s not really on the table. More “in the mind”.

The great thing with being excruciatingly “yourself” (as Oliver Cromwell put it, “warts and all”) is that some people like warts. Really, they do. Not many, I’ll grant, but a coterie of truly devoted aesthetically blind acolytes is far better than a whole host of fair-weather friends, is it not? Couldn’t “being a sod” be vaunted as something of a victory? Say, for … truth?

The sad truth is that Russia’s president has constructed his war with such terminological precision that he doesn’t need a victory and in fact can’t logically have one. The “special military operation” is his cake, and cake has to be cake and can’t be a war, and victories come at the end of wars. Of course, he could say to his people, “We won the war – yes, it was war all along, we were just kidding.” Or he could even say to them, “We have entirely conquered Ukraine,” even if he hasn’t – who in Russia would know different? Or he could, at a stretch, simply say, “We have concluded the special military operation and come home.”

When you’re in a hole, you should stop digging, that’s what they say: stop digging and go home.