Fate has forced me to ponder more deeply the human factor of the on-going war in the Ukraine. Said fate came in the shape of our boiler that decided to pack up yesterday.
In full compliance with sod’s law, the boiler had to choose a winter Sunday to do its dirty work. Our regular plumber was kind enough to answer our desperate call for help but explained there was nothing he could do until Tuesday – he is fully booked all day Monday.
Hence, as I write this, I’m wearing three layers of clothing and considering the possibility of typing in gloves. Penelope is courageously practising her Bach Partitas, which is a hell of a task when one’s fingers are cold and stiff.
Allow me to put our plight in a meteorological context: outside temperature is 11C. That’s plus, not minus.
In Kiev, it’s -9C at the moment, and recently it has been as low as -20. And yet on-going Russian raids on the Ukrainian capital’s energy infrastructure have left the city pretty much without electricity, and hence without light and, more to the point, heat.
How do the Kievans manage to stay alive? One could put on one’s whole wardrobe and still die of hypothermia, especially if one is no longer in the first flush of youth. Old people must be dying in droves as the world watches on with perfunctory empathy or, increasingly, without thereof.
Whenever someone in the US or Britain accuses the Russians of beastly savagery, they have their stock replies ready and well-rehearsed. You bombed Dresden! You dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki! And now you have the nerve to accuse us of monstrosity?!?
Yes, somehow our progressive age has taught us that civilians are legitimate targets in any war. That’s what progress is all about: our progressive science enables us to produce doomsday weapons; or progressive morality allows us to use them to murder millions.
When Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan and Batu swept across Eurasia, they usually spared the populations of the town they conquered. The Mongols tended to massacre civilians only after the parley they’d send out to the town had been killed. But that was before progress arrived. We are much more open-minded now.
It’s only numerically that the ordeal of Kiev still hasn’t reached the scale of Dresden or Hiroshima – fewer Kievans have lost their lives so far, and more of their buildings are still standing. That said, I’d suggest that what’s going on in Kiev is worse than the terrible tragedies of Dresden and Hiroshima. It’s worse both objectively, seen in the light of the military situation, and subjectively, from the standpoint of the soldiers involved.
First, a minor point: neither Britain nor the US was the aggressor in that war. That fact doesn’t absolve them of any responsibility for subsequent atrocities, but it must be taken into consideration.
Second, those bombings pursued hard-nosed strategic objectives. Dresden and Leipzig were important railway junctions, through which the Nazis were moving reinforcements north to Berlin, as the Red Army was approaching. That’s why the Soviets asked the Allied High Command to bomb the two cities.
Smart ordnance didn’t exist at the time, and high-altitude carpet bombing was the only way to degrade those railway junctions. Of the two cities, Leipzig received a much higher load of explosive, but the city was fortunate in that there were no swirling winds to cause a fire storm. Dresden wasn’t so lucky.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little military significance, which is why choosing them for nuclear annihilation was more problematic morally. However, US strategists wanted to avoid desperate fighting island by island, which would have had to happen had Japan not been knocked out of the war quickly. The estimates of potential American casualties ran well into six digits, which must have focused President Truman’s mind.
None of this is earth-shattering news. The arguments pro and con the aerial bombardment of German and Japanese cities (incidentally, Tokyo was bombed with conventional weapons and still suffered higher casualties than Hiroshima) have raged ever since. Only a brave debater would insist that the morality of those actions is unequivocal one way or the other, and I’m not so brave.
However, there is one aspect that hardly ever comes up, and yet I think it’s morally significant. Those airmen dropping bombs on German cities didn’t just kill. They also risked being killed, and 81,000 of them actually died – 55,573 RAF (Penelope’s uncle among them) and over 26,000 USAF.
Had the Germans had neither Luftwaffe fighters nor flak guns, the airmen dropping almost three megatons of bombs on German cities (yes, RAF and USAF already spoke the language of the nuclear age) wouldn’t have been soldiers. They would have been terrorists.
This brings me back to the on-going conflict. Referring to it as ‘PlayStation war’ is an exaggeration, but it’s true that at the moment the heaviest casualties on either side are caused by similar devices and the drones they control.
Those drone ‘pilots’ are essentially youngsters who grew up playing computer games. Now they are using skills accrued thereby to play the same games, except that their targets are made of flesh and blood, not pixels. These barely post-pubescent lads kill with no risk of being killed, which makes them terrorists in my book.
I’m not suggesting moral equivalence between the two sides, far from it. First, the Ukraine is an innocent victim of fascist aggression (I’m using the modifier advisedly), and she is fighting not just for her national political sovereignty but also for her national existential survival.
The Russians have already shown in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere that they are willing and able to conduct a systematic genocide of Ukrainians. Hence I’d say that anything the Ukrainians do to defend themselves is morally justified, and nothing the Russians do is.
Second, Ukrainian drone ‘pilots’ are hitting military targets almost exclusively. Though last year they destroyed some 20 per cent of Russia’s oil refining capacity, they haven’t targeted power stations around Russian cities to make sure the inhabitants freeze to death.
I wish the Ukrainians had the weapons to launch retaliatory strikes against Moscow and Petersburg because only such actions could make the Russians desist from their genocidal practices. But the spineless pusillanimity of the Ukraine’s Western allies has made such weapons unavailable.
This means Ukrainian soldiers will continue to die at the front, and Ukrainian civilians in their unheated homes. Meanwhile, I promise not to moan about our own unheated flat. Considering what the Ukrainians are going through, such whingeing would be in bad taste.