Terry Prone: Worldwide emotional support for the Ukraine won't have any effect on Putin
A carnivalist with a banner reading "Stop Putin — Stop War" follows the traditional Funken bivouac of the carnival Traditionscorps Rote Funken in Cologne, Germany, at the weekend. Picture: Oliver Berg/AP
The editor of this paper tells his columnists to let the paper know in advance what they plan to write about.
Us columnists, when we remember to obey the rule, don’t assume he’s trying to prevent a “Two Johnnies” outbreak where we line up to quote squalidly anti-female car stickers and laugh reprovingly at them.
Normal checks and balances will prevent that. We know that going near a car-sticker type issue will provoke a civil call from our sub editor suggesting we might have second thoughts.
No, the purpose of the rule is to ensure that the reader gets variety. To assume that all readers want nothing but a particular topic — and a particular take on that topic — is to ensure readers go elsewhere.
At the moment, for example, the singular topic dominating mainstream media is Ukraine.
The singular individual dominating the same coverage is Putin, and any writer who doesn’t take on these subjects is subject to the fear that they will be seen as trivial or uncaring. Particularly uncaring.
The fear of appearing uncaring is what drives enormous volumes of response to any crisis; once you have proved you care, by publicly saying the equivalent of “Isn’t this truly awful?” you’re grand.
We are, in Ireland, possessed of marvellously mobile hearts. Our hearts, at various times, go out to the homeless, those suffering mental ill-health, refugees drowning in the Mediterranean and — now — the Ukrainians.
You can’t afford NOT to have your heart go out, because the very statement is an affirmation of your essential humanity and empathy. Other people must witness your itinerant heart in action.
No point in having silent sympathy with people being bludgeoned by Russian rockets. You can’t afford to have a parked heart.
Looking at it charitably, this may have been the motivation behind England's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle saying they stand by the people of Ukraine.
Brand Sussex couldn’t afford not to show solidarity, and — although it’s a bit of a stretch — we must acknowledge the possibility that Ukrainian parents scrunched beside their children in bunkers in Kyiv told their toddlers about this to make them feel better and distract them from the muffled noises of explosions overhead.
As an offering to a war-torn people, it was beyond ridiculous. But, on the other hand, had they not issued such a statement, its absence would have created a controversy and a rationale, all by itself.
If nature abhors a vacuum, social media abhors one much worse; into any vacuum caused by a decent refusal to virtue-signal comes a tsunami of accusations that the silence denoted lack of care, lack of concern.
Sometimes, pointless communication happens, not in anticipation of public criticism, but because of genuine horror.
Millions worldwide reacted in one or another form of media to the photograph of a drowned refugee toddler. Understandably.
Some pictures still the daily chaos as they sum up an issue and personify a tragedy.
The danger is that public expression of sympathy may also provide the illusion of action; research suggests that this tends to happen when it comes to voting.
The people who get it off their chest in social media, who feel better as a result of expressed outrage, may and do confuse that process with affecting the issue, and therefore don’t vote. Why should they? Haven’t they fixed it by yelling electronically at a minister?
When Marshall McLuhan talked of radio and TV creating a “global village,” he was simultaneously right and wrong.
Social media created a global village of celebrity, but it did so at the same time TV networks retreated from global coverage in response to viewer research indicating a limited interest in people they’d never heard of, having complicated conflicts in places far, far away.
That research, added to the data about the shortening attention span, worldwide, should give us pause before we start believing that worldwide emotional support for the Ukraine will have the smallest effect on the Russian dictator.
Putin understands that while the 24-hour news cycle has died, the week-long attention span has not.
Just as Hitler observed that the Pope had no military divisions, so Putin knows that western public opinion is not worth a toss on the battlefield. He has never been seduced by what the West thinks.
Go through the photographs of him with the four American presidents he has survived, and you cannot but be struck by his visual consistency.
He is present but absent, unengaged with the immediate, his gaze on the distance, his attitude is that of infinity man vaguely but transiently amused by these westerners with their love of the temporary, which is in sharp contrast with his constant concentration on the recreation of a Russian empire.
He will figure that, while the West initially loves Ukraine, particularly the former comedian who’s now president there, and who has a powerful instinct for doing the right thing in a memorable way, time will erode that interest, particularly if discomfort is experienced by the enthusiasts.
When disaffection begins to appear, he will move to feed it, although he may have moved too quickly, this weekend, with his statement that: “We will strive for the demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians.”
On the face of it, the issuance of the statement was clever in its intention to shift the focus to an examination of the truth — if any — in the allegation.
It recalls a moment recounted in Laurence Rees’ 2017 book .
The moment happened as the war was coming to an end, when the Nazis took thousands of inmates out of concentration camps and, with a cruelty matched by its pointlessness, forced the emaciated men and women to walk hundreds of miles to get them away from advancing Allied forces.
But — as Rees shows — that would be to ignore the atavistic need to blame victims, manifest in the wondering speculation expressed one German bystander at the sight of prisoners on a death march: “What crimes they must have committed to be treated so cruelly...”
Putin is pushing precisely that button: Shifting international attention by suggesting that the Ukrainians had it coming and deserved every bit of it.
His timing, in this case, was off. The statement did not generate substantial interest in exploring the accusation.
But so what? This is the opposite of a populist western politician. Putin has enough time for to allow his fifth column to work. That fifth column being the political ADHD of the West.
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