Introduction: Rivers & Apples
All Over the Map - 1. A Literary Premise - 2. Waking Up - 3. Cunning Plans - 4. Puppet Masters - 5. Fearless Leaders - 6. Coda
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All Over the Map
Crisis 22 looks at the Ukraine Crisis in an unconventional way. In terms of geography, it shifts back and forth from Ukraine to locations all over the world — especially Dresden, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, London, Paris, Saigon, Jakarta, Sidney, Mumbai, Delhi, Karachi, Quetta, Havana, New York, Cape Cod, and Vancouver. In terms of genre, it uses straightforward argument, music, art, history, human geography, philosophy, religion, and all forms of literature — especially novels from Russia, India, Australia, England, and the United States.
The following map locates this geographical range. The pink stars indicate the main powers involved in the Ukraine conflict, and the purple stars indicate the places & authors that are key to my literary-political exploration of the conflict. Reading from top left (a cultural particularity in itself), my point of view starts with where I live in Vancouver (with its proximity to the US), and moves on to the complexity of Europe. The dense stretch from Dublin to the Danube could use its own map, so deep is Europe in this conflict and in my own personal experiences and perspectives.
The size and colour of the Middle Eastern star is yet to be seen, especially given the potential dangers that lie on the road from Damascus to Teheran. The interpenetration of Russian & Ukrainian stars might seem disturbing to some, yet this indicates the complexity involved. For instance, two of the great Russian writers I deal with, Gogol & Bulgakov, come from Ukraine …
Finally, it’s not at all clear how the Ukraine situation will be affected by ❧ democratic struggles in the Indian subcontinent (chiefly Pakistan, India, & Bangladesh), ❧ China’s influence in Eastern Europe & Taiwan, and ❧ Cold War tensions in the Korean peninsula. I’ll give specific context to Asia’s role in the Ukrainian crisis by looking at ❧ Rushdie’s take on the cultural and political histories of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, ❧ Greene’s prescient look at the shift from French to American violence in Vietnam, ❧ Koch’s take on Indonesia’s shift from China to the West in 1965, and ❧ Vonnegut’s strange vision of global conflict, in which he juxtaposes 1945 Germany, 1968 Vietnam, and the eternity of an alien species who live in the 5th dimension.
Because of the diversity and complexity of the ground I cover, I start on this page with an introduction to the six main sections. And because much of what I write is affected by my personal points of view, biases, and shortcomings, I try to clarify these beforehand: 🍎 The Road to Damascus gives my personal take on who’s to blame for this crisis; ☕️ Politics and the Language of Literature clarifies my views on political language, my knowledge of Russian and Ukrainian languages (close to zero), and my exposure to Russia (one month in 2005). Finally, I conclude these largely introductory pages with 🌗 With Open Eyes, 🌘 Gogol & Co., & 🌒 Down South, which supply a three-part introduction to how each page of Crisis 22 fits into its section and into the overall design.
The six main sections are as follows:
1. A Literary Premise illustrates the way that literature can be used to see into personal, social, cultural, and political aspects of the Ukraine Crisis. I’ll here illustrate this point by explaining how the metaphor of crossing a red line can be used politically and philosophically in the form of an extended metaphor or conceit.
While throughout Crisis 22 I focus mostly on literary texts, it’s important to note that the role of literary language is very, very wide. It isn’t limited to poetry, plays, and novels, but is used — and abused — by TV commentators, political candidates, journalists, etc. It can be seen even in the words used at the highest level of international politics. Here, for instance, the Ukrainian representative at the Security Council (on October 31, 2024) turns the otherwise common metaphor of crossing a red line into an extended metaphor which has great visual and emotional impact:
We have heard now and then that Russia would never cross this or that red line of the civilized world. But open your eyes: Russia is not crossing your red lines. Russia is walking down a red carpet, a carpet woven from weak responses, unfounded hopes, and complacency. In truth, it is not even a red carpet, but a river of blood, one that began flowing the moment that Russia was given the Soviet seat in this chamber in 1991. Do I need to remind anyone whose blood flows in this river?
The Ukrainian representative took the river metaphor and combined it with the notion of blood, which stands for human life. The river metaphor is very common in literature, and can even be used to describe literature itself. For writing may come from the common source of creativity, yet it tends to flow into three currents: poetry (including long poems and epic poems), plays or drama (including theatre, film, TV, trilogies, tetralogies, etc.), and fiction or fictional prose (including short stories and novels, as well as linked stories, trilogies, tetralogies, etc.).
Literature can also be seen in a more abstract sense in terms of multiple river currents which run into the ocean and are fused with other stories. Rushdie uses this extended metaphor in his 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in which he explicitly borrows from the sea of stories Somadeva writes about in 11th century Kashmir. True to the spirit of Somadeva, Rushdie then takes this Hindu metaphor and fuses it with Attar’s Sufi metaphor about a flight of birds toward God.
Literature, like history, contains many types of currents: epic and common, sacred and profane, peaceful and unitary, violent and divisive. Among the violent and divisive currents we find the long, far too long history of the rivers of blood — from the warring city-states of early Mesopotamia to the present massacres in Bucha and Mariupol. Literature can freely explore all of these currents, good and bad, then and now, because literature doesn’t crown any one metaphor as the river or the last straw, or the final red line. Atrocities run left and right — German blitzkrieg toward Moscow, American bombers over the jungles of South-east Asia, tanks moving in a line toward Kiev, 500 kilogram glide-bombs coursing down the air to a Ukrainian power station, etcetera.
In his Kathasaritsagara or Ocean of the Streams of Stories, Somadeva brings together a staggering number of stories. The typical Hindu notion is that these stories have been mixed from the past and can be remixed in the future. As such, the ocean of stories offers a vision of proliferative narration, one that contrasts with the rather tight canal of history that constitutes the genealogy of the Bible. As the philologists have shown, biblical attempts to shepherd Middle Eastern water are vexed by the tributaries and underground springs of earlier narratives — the flood & ark story in Gilgamesh, the One God and His evil nemesis in Zoroastrianism, the afterlife judgment and water-journey of Egyptian religion, etc.
From the Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich (photo RYC).
The familiar canal of Judaism also branches out into new canals, rivers, lakes, deltas, and finally the ocean. The main run-offs are Christianity and Islam, and the further run-offs are the Sunni, Shia, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant versions of the Abrahamic source. And yet the story streams don’t end there, for many people who come from the Abrahamic tradition find themselves on the wide waterways of ecumenicalism, comparative religion, and any type of mysticism that contemplates the universal nature of water — from the eucharist of a Jesuit priest in the Amazon to the invisible river of Saraswati, to Laozi’s watery Way (which gives life yet asks nothing in return).
Just as religious, philosophical, and poetic narratives have many sources and many directions of flow, so too do social and political narratives. In today’s polarized world — where algorithms give us tidal flows of information but also tend to shepherd us into particular streams of thought — literature offers extensions, extrapolations, divergencies, and exit doors. It offers a million run-off streams leading us further afield, to different perspectives and different paradigms.
The one thing literature insists upon, however, is freedom of expression. This means the freedom to read and access information of all kinds, as well as the freedom to write, speak, and participate in the management of an open, free society. Literature is a borderless merging of disciplines and perspectives that requires the freedom to delve into any topic, including politics, global conflict, and war.
This is perhaps the crux of the issue: Putin is corralling the thought of his population. He is of course free to shape his narrative of history and Russia, yet should he be free to stop writers, reporters, and politicians from offering alternative streams of thought? While he often presents himself as open and reasonable, his grand words often boil down to the reality that his beliefs are the only official — and permitted — beliefs. Unfortunately, he also seems to believe that all the area west and east of the Dnipro River should be a Little Russia — or a river of blood.
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2. Waking Up. The second section of Crisis 22 looks at how the 2022 invasion came to Westerners as a shock, especially after having spent our peace dividend on internal politics, mortgage payments, iPhones, and the luxuries of travel and art. This section has several autobiographical pages, where I try to give a sense of ❧ why it seems that the present crisis resembles the previous Cold War, and ❧ how I went from a detached interest in politics to a more active interest. The last several pages look at how we might cope psychologically with a crisis that has shaken the world and that has the potential to destroy the world as we know it.
3. Cunning Plans uses Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov to look at Putin’s actions in light of cultural and political morality. Like Gogol’s Chichikov and Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Putin commits a primal error — in this case a primal sin of international law: the violent invasion of a sovereign country. Yet unlike the other two Russian characters, Putin doesn’t repent. Rather, he doubles down, making apple sauce from forbidden fruit.
In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Crime and Punishment, David McDuff quotes from Dostoevsky’s friend, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. The subject of the quote is the protagonist Raskolnikov, who at the start of Dostoyevsky’s novel initially thinks himself above morality. As if to prove this to himself, he cold-bloodedly kills two defenceless women. Yet Raskolnikov eventually sees the proverbial light above him on the road to Damascus, and repents. We can only hope that at some point the Kremlin does the same, realizing that the agreements Russia signed with Ukraine run deeper than ink and paper, deeper even than the Slavic blood they share, blood that has been deeply intermingled over the centuries.
[Raskolnikov] is a representative of that view of things according to which every strong man is his own master, and all is permitted to him. In the name of his personal superiority, in the name of his belief that he is a force, he considers himself entitled to commit murder and does in fact do so. But then suddenly the deed he thought was merely a violation of a senseless outer law and a bold challenge to the prejudice of society turns out, for his own conscience, to be something much more than this – it turns out to be a sin, a violation of inner moral justice. His violation of the outer law meets its lawful retribution from without in exile and penal servitude, but his inward sin of pride that has separated the strong man from humanity and has led him to commit murder – that inward sin of self-idolatry can only be redeemed by an inner moral act of self-renunciation. His boundless self-confidence must disappear in the face of that which is greater than himself, and his self-fabricated justification must humble itself before the higher justice of God that lives in those very same simple, weak folk whom the strong man viewed as paltry insects.
We can only hope that everything Solovyov says about Raskolnikov will one day apply to Putin, Lavrov, and Peskov, and to everyone else in the Kremlin and in the Russian media who think that Russians are above the laws and moral codes that they once agreed upon with their Ukrainian brothers.
We can see this agreement in the first two articles of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, officially called, “Memorandum on security assurances in connection with Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Budapest, 5 December 1994”:
Because Russia’s war is clearly not in self-defense, Russia is going against this extremely crucial signed memorandum of understanding — and this is doubly so when it threatens to use the very nuclear weapons that it got as a result of its solemn guarantee not to invade Ukraine. The Kremlin’s arguments in favour of their war are very weak, although I go into them on several pages (💥 Exceptional Violence, ✊ Fearless Leader of the Global South, 🇺🇦 Golden Bridges, and 🇺🇸 / 🇷🇺 Exceptionalism — and especially in 🎙️ Putin at Valdai, which is in progress).
Put very briefly, to say that Russia is acting in accordance with the Budapest Memorandum because it’s acting in self defense of the Russian speakers in Ukraine is flawed in several key ways: ❧ Many Ukrainians whose first language is Russian (such as Zelensky) are against Russia’s invasion. ❧ The Russian speakers in the Donbas and Crimea were not in the type of danger that requires self-defense. Perhaps an adjustment of language laws (as happens in places like Quebec), but not an invasion. ❧ The very notion of self-defense is rendered meaningless if the definition of self is ambiguous or distorted: Russia can defend itself in self-defense but it can’t defend another country (or part of that country) in self-defense. The self in this memorandum is clearly a national self. ❧ Invading part of a country to free it or change it is against the international order, which rests on the notion of nation. If the Turkic countries of Central Asia decided to make Uigurs or ethnic Turks in Russia part of their definition of self, then they too could claim the right to invade China or Russia. It doesn’t take long to see where this type of illogic leads. One place it leads in the Ukraine context is to Russia’s use of the term military operation, which attempts to downplay what is in fact a full-scale invasion of a sovereign state.
Putin’s argument that Russia did everything according to the UN Charter is also deeply flawed. He says that the Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted, that Russia helped them to gain some autonomy, that the people in the Donbas held a referendum and signed a self-defense agreement with Russsia, and that Russia was therefore obligated to undertake a special military operation to ensure their safety.
The problem with Russia’s integration of the Donbas into its convenient policy of ethnic self-defense is easy to see if one applies the scheme elsewhere. If a Turkic state in Central Asia gave military assistance to a breakaway part of Xinjiang, held a referendum, and signed a mutual self-defense pact, would Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan be justified to attack China? Would this mean they could send a line of tanks to Urumchi and Beijing, and drop glide bombs on hospitals in Xi’an?
Like the American actions in Vietnam and Iraq, the Russian actions have their internal logic, yet when this logic is externalized, seen in terms of parallel scenarios, it no longer makes sense.
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Section 4. Puppet Masters shifts my project in time and space — from today’s Cold War in Eastern Europe to the Cold War in 1965 Indonesia — yet my application to the Ukraine Crisis stays the same. In this section I make extensive use of the Indonesian shadow-puppet theatre (the Wayang) and other non-European paradigms to compare Cold War I and Cold War II in terms of rhetoric, secretive operations, and the use of mass violence.
Both the novel and the film version of The Year of Living Dangerously present us with a new or foreign way of looking at politics in both 1965 Indonesia and 2020s Ukraine. I say new or foreign way because the Wayang is part of a very old way, going back 2,000 years to the Indian epics, and to the words of Krishna to Arjuna about placing duty & morality above kith & kin.
I’ll also use Rushdie’s postcolonial novels to round out my argument against Putin’s vision of globalism, national identity, colonialism, culture, religion, and history.
5. Fearless Leaders argues against Putin’s vision of internationalism and the Global South. While the Russian president acts like an imperial czar against any internal dissent, and like a colonial overlord against his neighbours, he persists in using the rhetoric of an anti-colonial leader like Sukarno. Those who are intensely bitter about the West may get sucked into Putin’s argument. Yet those who realize that the West, unlike Putin, has generally moved on from a direct and violent colonialism, are not easily convinced.
In this section I don’t argue that the West is anywhere near perfect. Its involvement in places like Vietnam, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Serbia, Libya, Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq can all be seen in a very negative light — especially Vietnam and Iraq. Yet in general today the West aims toward a fair and liberal world in which each nation has sovereign rights. Russia denies this, and argues that the Kremlin helps the world in a way that the West claims to do but never does. All the while, the Russian Army violates the sovereignty of Ukraine, drops bombs on schools and hospitals, and and commits innumerable war crimes. It seems to me that Russia, not the West, is now the violent colonial power in the world.
6. Coda presents several short creative pieces which hint at worst-case scenarios, from slaughter to apocalypse.
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Next: 🍎 The Road to Damascus