When the Rush of War Recedes

Long ago, for a master’s degree, I wrote a thesis titled “The Great War and the Canadian Novel, 1915-1926.” The novels of the period I read were cheerfully pro-war.

One or two actually described what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder in returned veterans, and veterans’ refusal to talk about what they’d seen and done in combat. But most treated the First World War as an invigorating jolt delivered to a Canada slightly adrift, a colony peopled by recent settlers not quite sure of themselves even as they dreamed big dreams for their home (more than 40 million Canadians in a century!). War also seemed to bring clarity to a moment when media wrestled with what “manhood” was all about.

In the novels I studied, the arrival of war seemed like an escape from a dull backwater. Strikingly, Canadians in the summer of 1914 are shown gathering around the telegraph office or the local newspaper, where bulletins are being pasted up, to get the latest news from the front. The bulletins delivered one outrage after another as, for example, nuns in plucky little Belgium were assaulted and killed by the Huns at the instigation of the evil Kaiser.

In these novels, the early days of war were a reading experience, about people and countries far away. But they were also a social experience in which everyone had a part to play. It was like Twitter or Facebook, but with the threads and comments delivered face to face on the sidewalk by neighbours.

This past week has reminded me of that time over a century ago. As horrified as we’ve been by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the response in Europe and North America has been strangely a kind of relief.

It’s as if the pandemic, our festering politics and the worsening climate had made us furious with our feckless selves. We couldn’t seem to do anything right — get vaccinated, elect honest people, get a decent education for a good job, or even find an affordable place to rent. We hated everything and everyone, but without a focus.

Suddenly Vladimir Putin drew our attention and our wrath. We’d watched him play the thug for 20 years, poisoning and shooting his critics, invading small countries, screwing with our elections and pulling Donald Trump’s strings. None of it seemed like more than an annoyance. But once his tanks rolled into Ukraine, we recognized this was an old-fashioned war. We knew the script; we’ve been here before.

We have a foe as banal and absurd as a James Bond villain — or Kaiser Wilhelm or Hitler with their ridiculous moustaches. We have a friend in an underdog country with a president who looks uncomfortable but determined in battle dress. Canadians love Ukraine’s brilliant use of social media, which puts us right in the street as missiles hit. It’s as cathartic as the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, letting us pour all our frustration with ourselves into detesting the Russians. But we do it not for two minutes, but all day long.

And yet we realize we’re shaking our fists at a nuclear power. We’re unlikely to die in a worldwide barrage of H-bombs, but Putin could shatter most of Europe and some of North America before Russia burned from the Baltic to the Pacific.

If we had a nuclear winter, it would probably slow but not stop global heating. The collapse of agriculture, trade and health care would kill far more than would die in a nuclear exchange. Postwar governments would mostly be improvised military regimes fighting to survive.

So we can’t follow the scripts that led our grandfathers and great-grandfathers from recruitment offices to battlefields in France, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Afghanistan. Canadians will not liberate the grateful Crimeans as they did the Dutch.

That may be why most of the world has abruptly improvised a relatively non-violent solution: sealing off Russia behind a digital curtain. By cutting off financial transactions, freezing assets and generally crippling the Russian economy, we can’t stop a single vacuum bomb — but we can make Russians feel the cost of that bomb, and make them know Putin is the reason for their sudden impoverishment.

After this sudden rush of solidarity against Putin as the man we all love to hate, we’re going to find ourselves in a very different world. Expect the complexities of where we have collectively landed to begin to seep in. The questions, and the doubts they raise, are myriad.

Everyone on the planet with a social media account has been psychoanalyzing Vladimir Putin like Freud himself, but we don’t really know what he’s thinking. Some Russia experts like Fiona Hill believe that Putin would indeed use nuclear weapons. British reporter Carole Cadwalladr argues that we are already eight years into World War Three, or 108 years into a continuous world war. Our current conflict, she says, is “the first Great Information War.”

Whether so much information will catalyze or paralyze remains to be seen. The old European empires, now reduced to merely prosperous nations, are individually in no position to fight Putin; neither is imperial America, currently locked in internal conflict. But they still realize that if they do not hang together, Putin will try to hang them individually.

With luck and diplomatic skill, this impromptu alliance may frustrate Putin’s plans and thereby see fewer Ukrainian lives lost. A new Russian government might behave better. But beating Vladimir Putin will only buy us time.

When the euphoria of war fever fades, we will still face our biggest threats: climate change and global inequity. Lacking faces, they’re harder to hate and therefore harder to fight.

And they offer an ironic challenge. If we can somehow stop thinking in warlike terms about them, and build peaceful, sustainable societies, we might just succeed.

Otherwise, the mortality of future wars will far exceed that of the one that has erupted in Ukraine.