A Better World

Ben Wildsmith

The events in Washington on Friday night weren’t pretty. Everyone on the planet saw the world order trashed on live TV as a new reality came crashing through our screens and into our lives without warning or apology.

Let’s deal with the moral stuff first. Vladimir Putin is a monstrous figure, his KGB-forged take on the world is remorselessly calculating and devoid of empathy.

A better world wouldn’t elevate people like him to power. Neither would a better world reward the crass posturing of Donald Trump and his acolytes.

In a better world, the leaders of nations that gave the world Tchaikovsky, Elvis Presley, Solzhenitsyn, iPhones, and space travel would have transcended this squalid acrimony long ago.

It isn’t a better world, though, and our new dystopic reality demands that we interrogate the assumptions that have led us here. Chief amongst these is the belief that Russia ceased to matter after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I urge you to watch Adam Curtis’s TraumaZone on BBC iPlayer, which relates the extraordinary chaos unleashed in Russia by the American-led imposition of a market economy in the 1990s.

The series ends by describing how the KGB installed Putin to bring order, and how they modelled his public persona on a character then considered to be the darling of democracy: Tony Blair.

Distortions

It is impossible to escape the shadow of the 1939-1945 war when attempting to rationalise what’s going on now. Under Putin, state TV produced lavish, sprawling dramas about Russia’s role in the conflict.

The statistics of the war justify this attempt to reframe it against Hollywood distortions of what happened. 26 million Russians, at conservative estimate, died because of the German invasion, over 8 million of them directly killed in battle.

In the first six months of 1942, 2000 people were arrested for eating human flesh as the Germans laid siege to Leningrad. 80% of German casualties were inflicted by Russian forces. 0% was inflicted by John Wayne or John Mills.

There are, regrettably, no mountains between Berlin and Moscow. The reason Europe is perpetually terrified of Russian invasion is because of this geographical imperative.

History, though, records a succession of French, German, and British trips across the lowlands of Poland and Ukraine with diminishing rewards and seemingly no lessons learned.

Russia is never going to allow Ukraine to join NATO.

The fratricidal conflict between those two nations is as unknowable as a family feud and painting our 2025 western values on to it without considering the historical context, including Ukraine’s conflicted role in WWII, is unrealistic.

So, enough of history, where are we now? You and everyone you know could conceivably be killed right now because of decisions made by your Prime Minister. Russia’s protocol for waging war against another nation was changed some months ago.

Legally, Russia was previously allowed to attack countries that attacked them. Russia has changed its law to allow warfare against nations who supply weapons that land in its territory. This was done as a direct response to Keir Starmer’s decision to supply Ukraine with long-range missiles.

Bullish

You might like to consider why the UK, which we are told is too impoverished to subsidise winter warmth to its elderly, is so consistently bullish in this matter. According to all other media input you will receive, it’s a matter of morality. As Israel, with the explicit support of your government, has dropped more ordinance on Gaza than was expended by all nations in WWII, we are instructed that the matter in Ukraine is an offence against humanity.

It is an offence against humanity; metal raining down on innocent people, tearing their flesh and ending their dreams should outrage us all. Nobody in Ukraine deserves this.

Neither, though do ordinary folks in Gaza, and governmental policy in the UK abhors one atrocity whilst supporting the other. Arms, of course, are supplied to both, at profit.

Alongside the moral contradictions in the UK position, sits a logical fallacy. Whilst Vladimir Putin is presented to us as an unhinged despot, we are also being encouraged to ‘stand up’ to the playground bully. The definitive characteristic of playground bullies is their underlying powerlessness.

Whilst they are fuelled by daddy-issues rage, their threats can easily be defused if we confront them. A nuclear arsenal, however, is a real thing, not a boast. It doesn’t care who fires it. It isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact. It’s potentially the end of you, your children, and everything you can imagine.

Maybe you are braver than me. Perhaps living on a little island that could be reduced to ashes in minutes by a nation that has enough land to rebuild from catastrophe doesn’t spook you.

Are you Churchill or Captain Mainwaring?

Respect

Much of the comment on the Trump- Zelenskyy meeting has focussed on respect. Respect, uncomfortably, is derived from power. We wish it to be otherwise, for it to be earned from virtue, but history rebukes that.

Donald Trump didn’t shape the world in that meeting, he described it. If Europe were the moral force it claims to be then its position as regards Russia would be irresistible for the USA. In reality, it has refused to pay for its own defence and is now overextended to the east. Those are the facts.

These are desperate times.

The USA has funded itself for years by issuing dollars to a world that has woken up to the idea that it doesn’t need them to trade.

The BRICS alliance implies a multipolar arrangement that would shunt that gravy train into the buffers. China has destroyed the manufacturing base of the western hemisphere with catastrophic social consequences, as evidenced here in Wales.

America has no need to go to war with Russia, it is self-sufficient in energy and faces no territorial threat.

Europe, on the other hand, is deficient in natural resources and has a history of aggression against Russia which, whether you like it or not, is seen there as justification for active self-defence.

Cowboy films

I’m paid to provide an opinion so, despite what I know will be coming my way, I will. Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia on its own. The USA, despite all the white-hat cowboy films you’ve seen, does not surrender its blood and treasure for nothing.

So, we are left with the prospect of a war between Russia and Europe. The variable in that scenario is whether it becomes a nuclear conflict, and I’m assuming that even the fiercest of you don’t want that, or whether it remains conventional.

In the happiest scenario, we are going to be sending our kids into trench warfare just like you read about in those Wilfred Owen poems every November at school. Stare into the eyes of your nearest teenager and gauge whether they are prepared for that, and whether you are content to use them in such a way.

Donald Trump is a scourge on humanity, a despicable product of bullying privilege. Vladimir Putin is the soulless inheritor of Stalin’s crimes. Both, however, possess the technology to end us all and the current positioning of Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron is a retreat from reality.

A better world isn’t going to be birthed by any of these intellectual pygmies. In so much as we retain a world to improve, however, Trump’s insistence on ending this war is the logical first step.