Terry Prone: Sadly, our warm consensus is of little use when fighting despots like Putin
Volodymyr Zelensky won the hearts of the West with impassioned videos from Kyiv. A grim possibility is that the Ukrainian president's media appearances will achieve no more than that. Picture: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty
THE parish priest’s contribution sums it all up. Live on the air, he was talking to Joe about the Ukraine situation when he took the opportunity to lash a can of red paint onto the fencing of the Russian embassy in Dublin. Much less extreme than the burning of the British embassy, then in Merrion Square, back in the spring of 1972. But Dolphin’s Barn parish priest Fr Fergal MacDonagh made his point. Got pictured beside the splotches of scarlet paint. Found his way into the next day’s media. Won his 15 minutes of fame.
This is not to denigrate the cleric involved, although Yuri Filatov, the Russian ambassador, would undoubtedly view the 60-year-old as one of the protestors the ambassador condemned on state-controlled Russian TV as “violent and aggressive”.
Fr MacDonagh exemplifies the governing assumption in the West that opinion matters. That stating your opinion can evoke a response that multiplies your power. That the more followers you have, the more “likes” you provoke, the more likely it is that the person you condemn will lose their power, will be forced to surrender and apologise, and that you will be the victor as a result.
Or, as the American anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
In theory, the committed citizens of Ukraine, in concert with small groups of supporters all over the western world, could more easily change the world than was the case in any previous invasion, this being the first such brutal incursion to happen in real time, shared on a constant news cycle largely unmediated by the great powers.
That wasn’t the case during the Second World War, where news announced by the BBC’s Alvar Lidell was heavily edited, if not controlled, by government interests.
Mild control by the Allied authorities was one thing. The more important difference between information-gathering and dissemination now and during the Second World War is how incredibly difficult it was, in the early ’40s.
To offer just one example; in 1942, a member of the Polish resistance was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, where he witnessed at first hand the dead lying in the streets as a result of starvation, and was briefed by the Jewish leaders. This man got back out of the ghetto, an achievement in itself, and started a fraught journey across occupied Europe. It took him almost the rest of the year.
Compare that with footage filmed in Kyiv which can be accessed within minutes by anybody — except of course the Russian citizen, who is prevented from seeing it by Putin’s shutdown of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.
In 1942, the objective was not to disseminate the data to everybody, but to deliver the information to the British prime minister and to the Vatican, who were believed by the Warsaw Ghetto’s leaders to be capable of changing their ghastly situation.
After almost a year of covert travel and resourceful courage, Jan Karski — the messenger — handed over his information.
His story fits neatly into the mythology of war: the guy who risks all to tell the truth and change the course of history — except that the man himself said afterwards:
The question, today, when much faster delivery is possible — at least in the West — is whether aresthe memorably brave statements coming from individuals like Zelenskyy will be any more effective than Jan Karski’s effortful heroism.
The grim possibility is that although they have created a warm consensus on the part of millions in the West, they may achieve nothing more than that. Information does not always lead to action, and a warm consensus is a poor weapon against a despot with men and materiel to burn, and the clear willingness to burn both.
The mythology of the last world war has it won by dauntless Londoners sheltering in the Underground, by the Dambusters, by the oratory of Winston Churchill, and by the Yanks liberating one European nation after another, one concentration camp after another. Also by America dropping atomic bombs on Japan.
That mythology has been repeatedly hammered home in history books, movies, and TV series.
It ignores the fact that the Russians won much, if not most, of the war and sacrificed immeasurably more than any European nation whether measured in numbers of soldiers, tanks, guns, and civilians destroyed than any European nation.
Stalin’s leaders — effective brutes like Marshal Zhukov — made America’s George Patten look like a pacifist in their absolute determination.
That determination was deployed in battle and in sustained horrors like the 872-day siege of Leningrad where more lives were lost than by the UK and the US, combined, in the course of the entire war.
The primacy of opinion in the West is almost total. In the past half-decade, it has destroyed political leaders, entertainers, and others with expedition and efficiency. It predates social media, but has been fuelled by social media.
The predictions of nameless respondents in opinion polls as to which party they will vote for in a forthcoming election can lead to the visitation of the leader of that party by grey eminences who tell him it’s time to go.
Similarly, a movement like #MeToo can precipitate the legal destruction of a figure like Harvey Weinstein or the erasure of a major talent like Kevin Spacey. In the case of Spacey, he was never proven to have broken any law, yet public opinion moved so decisively against him as to finish his career.
All of which feeds into the sense that because the overwhelming majority of people in the EU, the US, and — it’s fair to assume — in Poland and Romania want Ukraine to succeed, this David of a nation will face down the Russian Goliath and win, because that would be the proper moral conclusion.
The fact is, however, that Putin is immune to Western opinion and can shape Russian opinion by what he ensures his people learn and don’t learn. Those of his oligarchs living in the West may hate what he has done to their fortunes, but they will be mindful of his proven capacity to reach out and eliminate individuals dissenting from his master plan.
The West loves Ukraine and is heartbroken by the pictures of brave men, their tears shining on drawn faces as they relinquish their wives and children to evacuation. The West hopes against hope that Margaret Mead’s statement proves to be accurate.
It’s a great quotation. It’s a quotation that fits perfectly into the mythology of war and into the beliefs that may be core to what it is to be human.
But it isn’t true. Sadly, it isn’t true.
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