Crisis 22: Preface
Glaciers & Novels
Writing Against War - The Depth of Novels - Overview - Three Main Points
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Writing Against War
On the opening page of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut recounts that a film producer once asked him what he was writing about lately. Vonnegut told him that he was writing an anti-war book about the bombing of Dresden. The producer then asked, “Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?”
In some ways the producer was right: an anti-war book and an anti-glacier book are both desperate attempts to stop the unstoppable. From Mesopotamia to Ukraine, for the last five millennia, war has continued to ravage the human race. It has been an unwanted companion of civilization, perhaps the worst expression of its discontent.
From the Standard of Ur, 26th century BC, "War" panel. (Wikimedia)
Yet the film producer’s point has at least four weaknesses. ❧ First, it’s not as if there aren’t successful films about war. Would we say that Dr. Strangelove or Apocalypse Now weren’t worth producing? ❧ Second, it’s worth trying to understand the causes and effects of war, and it’s worth trying to mitigate the extent or severity of war even if we can’t eliminate it. From Lysistrata (411 BC) to The Things They Carried (1990), literature has helped humans see that war comes at an exorbitant cost. If books had no effect, why would All’s Quiet on the Western Front (1928) have been banned and burned in Nazi Germany? ❧ Third, as Camus’ Sisyphus concludes, even in an absurd world our struggle for freedom constitutes its own type of meaning and freedom. ❧ Fourth, despite the producer’s skepticism, Vonnegut nevertheless went on to write Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the finest anti-war books ever written.
Glacier Bay, Alaska (Photo by RYC)
There are at least three ways the average citizen can help to counter Russia’s aggression. First, we can support politicians who speak against Russia and who send weapons, medicine, and money to Ukraine. Second, we can also send money, arms, and medicine through NGOs and other organizations. Third, we can also arm ourselves with insight — about Ukraine, Russia, Europe, war, and the complexity of global conflict.
There are endless books, TV programs, Youtube videos, and podcasts on these topics. We can also get insight from novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, War and Peace, The Year of Living Dangerously, and The Quiet American. Such novels provide an immersive, prolonged, and unified type of experience, similar to a good TV series. We get to know characters who have the same type of feelings and thoughts and relationships that we do, and yet they are confronting large-scale geopolitical crises. They become flesh and blood examples that we can relate to, and they suggest various ways that we can deal with geopolitical crisis.
Reading a novel may even have some advantages over other media when it comes to forming a deep understanding of complex events. This may be because reading gets more exclusively at language-driven parts of our brain. It encourages deep and complex reflection unhurried by a director’s pace. When we read, we think actively and creatively. We take in words and create scenarios in our heads. We also have time to ponder what these scenarios mean.
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The Depth of Novels
In the following pages I hope to show that a closer look into Russian and post colonial literature can help us confront the difficulties of the Ukraine War. Literature isn’t likely to have an effect on the battlefield itself, and perhaps it can’t even expose the war in a startlingly clear light. Yet it can help us to contextualize our understanding of war. It can provide us with larger, integrated contexts in which we can see the war not in isolation, but in interpenetrating patterns of culture, psychology, history, language, personal relations, cultural norms, etc.
Seeing in this way, we might avoid the trap the Kremlin has set ❧ to divide us from Russia ❧ to divide us among ourselves, and ❧ to divide us from the rest of the world. For instance, if we gain empathy for the Vietnamese and Indonesian trishaw drivers in The Quiet American and The Year of Living Dangerously, we're more likely to think and feel about the struggling masses in a more generous way. If we follow the trajectory of Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, who starts by murdering the old pawnbroker and ends by turning himself in at the police station, we might think differently about that famed Russian bullishness that knows only to double down and never to repent. Even the scoundrel Chichikov, who in Gogol’s Dead Souls tries to hoodwink buyers and cheat the State, attempts to change his ways.
Looking through the medium of the novel, we might come to feel that the world isn't divided up by nation, race, language or culture, but instead is unified by common needs, fears, strengths, weaknesses, and doubts. With this type of understanding, we're less likely to set ourselves apart from other people, and less likely to demonize Russians. And if we understand the Russians better, we might even find a way to stop them from killing their neighbours, as if they were the Raskolnikov at the start of Crime and Punishment who believed that there was no deep, universal, moral law against murder.
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Overview
In Crisis 22 I explore the Ukraine War from a variety of angles, most of them literary. 1. A Literary Premise uses Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and other literary figures to define and illustrate my literary approach, and to argue against Putin’s war and the thinking behind it. 2. Waking Up explores how the outbreak of war in 2022 interrupted our relatively peaceful Western world. 3. Cunning Plans looks at what Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bulgakov might have to teach us about the sneaky and immoral operations of authoritarians. 4. Puppet Masters uses novels by Koch, Greene, Vonnegut, and Rushdie to argue against superpower claims to speak for the Global South. In this chapter I also explore ❧ the differences between the Old Cold War and the New Cold War, ❧ the difficulty of seeing what’s really going on, and ❧ ways we might use paradigms from the Global South to understand and cope with the present crisis. Finally, 5 Fearless Leaders argues against nationalistic exceptionalism, whether this be American or Russian.
In my attempt to fathom, and argue against, the Kremlin’s war, I highlight novels set all over Eurasia, from St. Petersburg to Jakarta. In this sense, my project is experimental, a sort of test to see how effectively literature can help us understand and cope with political, historical, and military crises. Crisis 22 thus works on two levels at once: it sheds light on the Kremlin’s ghastly game, and it gauges the insight of literature itself.
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Three Main Points
Three main propositions or lines of argument run through this project:
1. Literature in general can help us understand history, culture, and war.
2. Literature can help us see more specifically into the way that manipulative and violent superpowers coerce and divide the world. To begin with, I’ll look at how Russian literature can help us understand what lies behind the warlike imperialism of the present regime. Russian literature shows us Russian history and politics from personal, cultural, philosophical, and dramatic points of view. This diverse perspective gives us a more rounded understanding of what Ukraine is up against. It also allows us various cultural entry points through which we can examine global imperialism in ❧ the colonial period, ❧ Vietnam and Iraq, and ❧ the present global shake-up commandeered by Putin, Trump, and Xi.
While some Russian writers, like Bulgakov and Chekhov, stood up to injustice and autocracy, many have done the opposite. Examining these latter gives us an insight into how deeply autocracy, empire, and a sense of Russian superiority are engrained in Russian culture. In his wonderfully titled book, War and Punishment (2023), Mikhail Zygar notes the cause-and-effect relation between many (though not all) Russian writers and the present war:
Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labor. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was. (Of course, any “empire” is evil, but let different historians judge other empires.) We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.
In Crisis 22 I’ll try to confront what Zygar puts into parentheses here: the fact that Russia isn’t alone in its imperialism. Yet my starting point is Russia and the Russian writers who i. explore this imperial current, ii. show us how difficult it is to oppose this current, and iii. show us how easy it is to add to this current’s strength. My working hypothesis is that the great Russian writers, whether they’re for or against empire, help us to contextualize, expand, and deepen our understanding of the relation of politics to culture and history — especially in Russia but also around the world.
3. Postcolonial literature can also be used to counter imperialism of any sort, and to counter the Kremlin’s specific contradictory claims to i) have the right to control other countries and ii) be a champion of the Global South (against countries who aim to control it, like Russia aims to control Ukraine!). Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West is a hybrid one, and one part of this is Russia’s appeal to nations such as India, South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia. If Russia can convince these nations that the West is the real problem, then Russia is more likely to take over Ukraine and less likely to suffer economic or diplomatic consequences. Yet how can a government that represses its own people and attacks its neighbours be a model for a post-colonial, post-imperial world?
Novels such as The Quiet American and The Year of Living Dangerously explore the previous Cold War situation, and help us see that Russia is today rehashing aspects of its Soviet propaganda in order to justify its war. The key difference here is that communism may had a rationale about exploitation and the common worker, however idealistic in theory and distorted in practice. Invading Ukraine has no such rationale.
This isn’t to say that the West is somehow angelic. On the one hand The Year of Living Dangerously sides largely with the capitalist West, which has an authoritarian pedigree of its own. On the other hand, The Quiet American takes direct aim at both France and the U.S., whose interests coincide in Indochina, as do their methods of aerial bombardment.
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My approach to the Ukraine Crisis advances the idea that literature can enrich our understanding, which is often pared to the bone by political realism, harsh economic facts, media rhetoric, and the brutality of war. Literature is helpful here, since it deals with history and politics, yet at the same time it contextualizes the understanding of these disciplines, giving them flesh and blood.
Of course, there are many things we can do to deal with an unjust war. We can do practical things, like send drones or support the various initiatives that send weapons, defence systems, vehicles, medical aid, money, etc. We can follow the news, social media, and podcasts like Ukraine: The Latest. That podcast is particularly wide-ranging, since it deals with 1. military tactics and strategy, 2. geopolitics and economics, and 3. psychology, culture, and art. Ukraine: The Latest demonstrates that we can learn about geopolitics and also face war culturally, in a way that puts muscle and flesh back on the bones. We can turn the horror of war into a diverse understanding, and yet still unambiguously oppose the imperialistic destruction of Ukraine and its people.
I’ll end this prefatory page with a December 2024 excerpt from Ukraine: The Latest. Here, Francis Dearnley argues that Ukraine’s fight for freedom and democracy isn’t just a fight for Western ideals, but for global ones.
I stumbled across a Woodrow Wilson quote last week which got me thinking. He said in 1917, when trying to lay the foundations for the League of Nations,
Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be not a balance of power but a community of power. Not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.
[…] Power in and of itself does not make right; […] there are higher values which should be upheld and defended, not because they're culturally or intellectually superior, but because history has shown them to be more pragmatically auspicious to humanity, and what most people would choose if they were given a fair choice: a more democratic world under a rule of law.
What I find so staggering at this moment is how many supposedly clever people in the West have seemingly abandoned that idea and speak now only in the language of power and the balance of power. Because if you do that, you concede so much ground to those who fundamentally seek to destroy you.
For once you permit the idea of balance of power alone, you permit the idea of spheres of influence. And once you concede that, as we've seen with Ukraine, then you find yourself willing to accept that millions of people should live their lives in bondage, at the whim of a dictator, because it's within his sphere, because that's what the balance of power dictates. We tend to not follow the logic all the way through to the end, but when you do, you see, I would argue, how corrosive that mentality can be ...
December 20, 2024
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