I’m just writing to keep the dream alive here. I took a week away from Substack because I was in a friend’s wedding (Congratulation to them both). The week after that wedding, Russia invaded Ukraine. I don’t consider myself much of a international relations expert, so I didn’t want to write about Ukraine. But I couldn’t think about anything else.
So fine, I’ll write about Ukraine. Another filler article until I get the energy and resolve to write about something I feel knowledgeable about.
I didn’t expect Russia to invade, of course. Very few did.
There’s been arguments. Many leftists have taken this time to point out the hypocrisy of Western media focusing so heavily on Ukraine while conflicts in Palestine, Yemen, and Somalia have been of similar magnitude and received nowhere near this level of attention. Of course, there’s always hypocrisy to find. Hypocrisy is an endless commodity, and it feels so cathartic to dig it up and reveal, but I never know what good it does.
I understand the desire to minimize Ukraine. I understand the desire to be angry that no one cared about Yemen. I understand the catharsis to stick it to NATO and have some pro-Russia stance. At some point, though, you cannot abandon your principles for the sake of pissing off your enemies. Even the USSR worked with liberal democracies when fascism became an apparent threat.
We’ve been analogizing for a while now. Pundits have compared the past decade to the 1930s, as we see democratic institutions erode throughout the world and populist ideologies make a resurgence. We see fascists again. We see socialists (hello!). There is a global upset.
And of course there’s analogizing right now. An imperial power, embarrassed for several decades, has invaded a country and started a land war in Europe. It does seem to invite some analogizing, especially if we’re leaving this second iteration of the 1930s. Is this World War 2? Or is this another regional conflict that will die down eventually.
I’m not sure. In part because this conflict takes place in a world that has already invented the nuclear bomb. There’s no race to develop this technology like there was in the 1940s. We already have it. Every major global player has it. Fingers hover over big red buttons.
The reality is that the war in Yemen doesn’t have the risk of nuclear escalation. The war in Ukraine—because of racism and Eurocentrism or whatever—has the focus on the global superpowers and, therefore, has the potential to spiral into a nuclear conflict. I wish it weren’t that way, but it is. And so this conflict is important. This conflict is existential.
And yet what do I do? As I process insurance policies in an office and sometimes watch livestreams of the news, switching to different channels, nations, biases, etc in the hopes of finding some new piece of information that might tell me what comes next. I don’t find it. I want to skip ahead and skim until I find the chapter called “Nuclear war” or “Peace.” The news moves so fast, and yet it moves so slow.
I think about Dorothy Day. She held her principled antiwar stance throughout World War 2. I respect her for it, but I think I’m too weak or pragmatic or emotional to adamantly oppose any and all violence. I find myself appreciating Zelensky’s resolve, despite his neoliberal politics and other faults—I’m a sucker for a hero myth. We all are. We’re human after all.
We’re spinning stories out of the violence because most of us who are politically engaged are not on the ground or involved in the crisis in any way. We watch from our homes or our jobs as events unfold and try desperately to be on the right side. A good friend of mine broke his femur a few weeks ago, and I think about him sitting at home endlessly scrolling through war coverage. We’re all going to go insane.
I think about the nuclear threat. I was born in 1997 which is six years or so after the end of the Cold War. I didn’t grow up with these fears. I didn’t grow up being told how to hide under a desk in case of a nuclear attack. Now I’m thinking about it, and it helps me empathize with a certain neurosis anyone born before the 1980s probably has if they were thinking about this everyday throughout their childhood. Of course the boomers are insane. Of course Gen X are insane.
Dorothy Day condemned the bombing of Hiroshima. In 1945 she wrote somberly that perhaps “we will breathe their dust”—the 318,000 Japanese men and women vaporized by the bomb—“into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton. Jubilate Deo. … We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto.”
We live in the aftershock of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. These two events haunt recent history.
And now people ask if we’re in the 1930s again. If the invasion of Ukraine is the start of the next World War. Perhaps, but we can’t have the 1930s again because the bomb has already been dropped. We live in a post-Hiroshima world. The world conflict will be done with fingers hovering over buttons that could end all human life.
We point to hypocrisy. We argue about having the right stance. We argue because we wonder how history will judge us, as if we aren’t dealing with a crisis that could end history itself.
I hope I’m being melodramatic. I hope a future version of myself will reread this piece in ten years and cringe at how incorrect I was and how sloppy my writing is. I can’t wait.
We cannot allow Ukraine to die. But we cannot go to war with Russia. If there was a time for prayer, it’s now.