Paul Alkazraji's Blog - Posts Tagged "comment"

Photo by Peter Wilson.

Comment: From Russia with Love
By Paul Alkazraji

A woman plays Chopin one last time on a piano in the rubble of her home near Kyiv. A little girl at the Polish border says a window exploded during her city’s siege, and all the batteries in her toys ran out. A man tells how he left behind people surviving on scraps of food and boiled snow, and fled through the rubble and dead bodies without his shoes. Such are the fragmented impressions of many, like ‘shrapnel in the mind’, as the war in Ukraine continues.

These weeks, we have become inured to Russia’s public statements, the smoke and mirrors of them, even whilst knowing that camouflage and surprise are, of course, military tactics. A simple layperson’s guide seems to be: read the opposite. ‘We are not going to invade Ukraine… The Ukrainians are preparing chemical weapons for use… The Ukrainians are using actors to fake casualties and spread a false narrative on social media.’ In Communist countries public statements were always about the glory of the State and not reality. Now, this information war bombards the truth even as atrocities are uncovered. We have also seen Putin threaten the use of his nuclear arsenal, which would, as Sting once sang, ‘Be such an ignorant thing to do if the Russians love their children too.’

There has been a tectonic shift in the geo-political ground, and when the war has run its course, what might follow from an isolated pariah Russia and its allies? ‘The world is changing Frodo…’ and when you look at the signs of the times, the prospect seems bleak. We wish we were not seeing these things; ‘so do all who live to see such times…’ says Gandalf. But just where is there ground for hope? Dare I say it, surely only on the ‘Rock of Ages’.

In a novel I wrote called ‘The Migrant’, in addition to the sanctuary and aid refugees and migrants can receive on arriving in new countries having left their conflict zones, the dangers that await them are looked at too. There is the rise of far right political groups and racist attacks, and criminal gangs that prey on people’s vulnerability. Nevertheless, the ultimate source of hope is also pointed to.
‘There are so many people searching for… a place where there is peace, just to call it home,’ says one character in the book.
‘Hasn’t it always been like that?’ says another.
‘Since the beginning, but it won’t always be so,’ replies the first. ‘There will come a time when, “Nations will not raise their swords against other nations, nor will they train for war any more. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”’

It’s been noted for some time that Russia has been trying to undermine and destabilize Western democracies by stoking conflict and division inside and between them. Whether unanticipated or calculated by the Kremlin, four million refugees and counting, numbers unprecedented since World War Two, have now been driven into Europe’s burden of care… ‘From Russia with Love’.











Kyiv bombardment.
Photo by Julia Rekamie on Unsplash.

Links.
A woman plays Chopin one last time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDUdK...

Sting sings 'Russians'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHylQ...

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