War and the Centre of the Universe

Introduction

While death is mass-produced on the other side of the continent, we sit here self-castrated and impotent in the comfortable safety of our oblivious apathy.

Time is in cahoots with doom, carrying us swiftly downstream, floating inexorably towards our demise. Hence, we have neither the time nor desire to be reminded of Death’s presence. At least not our own…

Whether we like it or not however, our eyes will be encircled by constant images of other people’s death like a pack of ravenous wild dogs, with glistening sharp fangs bared, closing in on a wounded rabbit. Though destruction is the talk of the town right now, and the blood mist hangs over Ukraine, is it moving us to think about this undoing as if it were our own?

No.

Who Death? What Death? When Death? Where Death? Why Death?

Even this fanatical journalistic maxim feels powerless when it comes to covering the true depth of the death that’s being assembled and distributed like a product, curated and shared like content, in Ukraine.

The new age saying goes a little something like “pics or it didn’t happen” yet despite the mountain of pics we continue to act like this war isn’t happening. Our attitude to this conflict is more like “out of sight, out of mind.”

The reality of men, women and children turned into mince by bullets whizzing through the air like acrimonious metal hornets, rockets slicing the atmosphere and levelling cities to the ground, and the death-defying fight the Ukrainians are putting up against their savage invaders is just not reaching us in a pure form. Like Chinese whispers, by the time the message of this barbarity reaches our ears, it’s been heavily manipulated, switched, garbled, encrypted, decrypted then encrypted again until the screams, gunfire, and explosions are muffled down to an inaudible pop.

The news stories which make up our exposure to the war have all the urgency and agency of the Heat Death of the universe, something we’re powerless against yet is so far in the future that no one will be around to see it. Words – both printed and digital – read like hollow, choked utterances, and TV broadcasts and announcements are delivered by dispassionate gravediggers, which creates the odd effect of a war that is happening, has happened, and is yet to happen.

There are two wars going on right now.

The real one in Ukraine where a fascist, schizophrenic megalomaniac has injected his army to seize the country, destroying lives and systems, all in the pursuit of some decomposed ideal to return his nation back to its former glory. Like that’s ever been a plan successfully carried out.

Then there’s the simulacra of the real stuff that we’re witnessing in our echo chambers. A flat hologram of the brutal reality out there flickers before our eyes like a candle flame being breathed on. This image is as one-dimensional as the isolated point of view which brings us this image, totally missing the perplexing totality of the war between Ukraine and Russia.

What justifies experimentally snipping away the entire reel of the conflict into little static bits to be suspended in the media vacuum?

The end product is a little bit like a snow globe; a scenario plucked out of the stream of time and dimensions of space, hurled into a glass globe full of fluid, give it a little shake and watch the little flakes swarm like snow around the ruin of a bombed hospital with limbs sticking out of the rubble. Submerged in such mini sensory deprivation tanks, these isolated scenes from the war make it so that the whole war can be consumed gradually, one senseless morsel at a time, drip-fed over the course of the conflict, without overwhelming our feeble minds to the point of insanity. This is a kind of sanity few have asked for.

This war, like each of its bloody ancestors, has upended the delicate equilibrium of the status quo of its time and in doing so has torn the masks off the world. People, attitudes, ways of thought, governments, and the role the media plays in bringing all of these together are all left naked and exposed in the blinding red glare of military flares.

When it’s all over, the dust will settle on a completely different world, as if the Earth went under the knife for facial reconstructive surgery. Things will have to change, and the universe will sic its white blood cells upon those who resist this transformation.

But that day is separated from us by a long and winding stretch of time and everything that happens between today and that moment of retribution is subject to the crushing pressures of countless possibilities.

The war has cast a fuliginous shadow over the face of the planet, and everything looks black. It is under the cover of such darkness that this book is being written, during one of those now frequent moments when the human race gets a bit too uncomfortably close to its own nature and sudden death fills the air. Split in disproportionate quarters, this book will exhaust its pages by covering the four usual suspects of war and how their behaviour is different this time around.

The first chapter on MEDIA is an exegesis of how news and social media dictate our perception of the war to such an extent that they splinter reality in two, creating a simulation of the real war that is currently being waged in Ukraine. Through the ruthless ubiquity of such media, the simulation has supplanted the real thing as something that requires our attention and emotions. A companion more skilled than its guide. The matter gets even worse when one considers that this media vacuum is a medium which only allows Western ideas and thought to pass through it, instantly vaporising any foreign perspectives that enter it, even if those points of view are far more informed than the West’s colonial, power-centric tunnel-vision.

Chapter two on PEOPLE centres around the first and worst casualty of war, the organic apparatus which operates the ballistic instruments to wage the conflict, and the bystanders, activists, and those who just don’t care about a war going on. More pointedly though this section focuses on the Western folk who amidst their culture of endless content, drama, and safety are stricken with a terminal case of disinterestedness towards the suffering of anything or anyone outside the arbitrary boundaries of the West. Closing off with the notion of solidarity an autopsy is made on it to find just how solid it is.

The third chapter on GOVERNMENTS is an unhinged rambling meditation on the international pissing contest that our world leaders are engaged in at the expense of actual death against those whom these leaders were elected to supposedly protect. Here the demise of meaningful action and leadership among the Western nations make way for a hollow and impotent way of conducting international business which they call diplomacy. The superficiality of Western alliances such as NATO and the imaginary lines they draw over the planet is another topic of discussion which I recall dedicating a lot of words to. Fascism is a word which appears time and again throughout this sequence and it couldn’t be helped at all when the truth sits plainly before the eyes waiting to be sketched. How thinly veiled fascist ideologies are perpetuated in the West and etched into the minds of their most suggestible and stupid populations (who also make up the largest portion) which has truly deranged the international response to the war in Ukraine. There is also a considerable part of the chapter used up by the perception of politics as nothing more than pageantry and exhibitionism where all politicians, especially those at the very crest of the system, really care about is how things look rather than how they are.

Finally, the chapter time/space can only be described as wandering through a dense forest at midnight in a state of shell shock and delirium. The words which make up its form arrange themselves into explorations of the curious effects war has on the space-time continuum, or put in less science-fiction words, how the interlinked qualities of physical space and time are disrupted and thrown in an uncontrollable upward bounce once war breaks out like a fever.

I deserve to be tied to a pole and executed by firing squad if I didn’t acknowledge those flashes of brilliance in a darkening universe of knowledge who influenced my writing in this book, whose ideas served as a starting point from which I took this piece in a direction of chaos and uncertainty. Jean Baudrillard was one whose seminal books Simulation and Simulacra and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place remained obstinately in my mind while I sat at this keyboard in a state of pure hysteria. My own contorted versions of his ideas crop up time and again throughout the book, especially in the MEDIA chapter and if it weren’t for the resplendent fireworks that went off in my brain while I first read his works then this book would’ve never happened.

Another marvellous illumination to me was the combined works of Lillie Chouliaraki who focuses on spectatorship theory and how it applies to the suffering of foreign people as portrayed in the media and the sense of Otherness created when those in safety watch the suffering of those in danger. Her oeuvre is deeply rooted not just in journalism of the traditional kind but of its subsequent evolutions on the internet and social media that have propelled the whole school of writing and information into stark pervasiveness. Her self-contained essays on digital witnessing within war zones as well as a truly scathing book penned by her called The Spectatorship of Suffering stayed fresh and reverberant in my head while writing this book.

The rest is my own work which emerged out of the depths of my messy mind.

Like it or not the West happens to be the dominant presence on the Earth and it is, or sees itself as, the director of all action which takes place on the international stage. And if it seems as if I’m acrimoniously bullying the West in this book then you’d be perfectly correct, because this narcissistic and masturbatory ideal of The West deserves a good thrashing. It is the collective upkeep of this shell of an ideal from which almost all of the problems I bring up in this book arise. Where globalisation was pedalled as something that would link us together and create planetary unity, it turned out to be something designed and orchestrated by the West to enforce their domination on the globe. And it worked. Not a thing gets past them, and the mindless horde known as the masses who keep them in power. It takes two to tango.

While going through the following pages the reader might notice that a lot of my furious examples are rooted in Britain. There’s a very simple explanation to that; Britain is my home country (as painful as it is to utter those words) and the happenings around the war in Ukraine which have occurred here are the ones I’m most familiar with as I’ve lived through them and took part in the discourse they left as aftermath.

I’m neither trying to suggest that things are only like this in Britain because I’m writing from a British perspective, or that things would be better under some other government/regime, or that elsewhere in some other nation or even in the remotest corner of the planet things are better. None of that. Where there is humanity, there is disaster. Things are rubbish everywhere. It may seem like other nations have gotten it marginally better, but on street level the existence of fascism and everything which makes humanity truly ugly are very present. Of course, so are all the things which make humanity beautiful but unfortunately the former far outweighs the latter. The grass isn’t just not greener on the other side, there is no grass there at all.

Media

It surrounds us like the contents of the atmosphere. We’re breathing it in right now, feeling its passage through our lungs and its influence on the brain. It is the middleman for our perception.

Wars aren’t just fought using armaments which bring instant death, but also through utilising the media. Only a fool would overlook weaponizing the media with their interests during a conflict.

The truly weird manifestations of the media appear in those countries that are not directly involved in the war. In those nations that take a back seat and watch both sides slaughter each other. This is the kingdom of spectacles where the most gut-wrenching displays of violence and pandemonium become circus performances to witness. All the acts on this bill are bought to you solely by government-funded, corporate news juggernauts. If this particular story of maddening brutality doesn’t take your fancy, then stick around because you certainly might like the next one. This vaudevillian treatment of war has been around since 24/7 news coverage and war got in bed together, and the level of penetration is pushed deeper with every subsequent conflict.

Sexual and s(t)imulated penetration.

Western audiences are voyeurs of disaster. Watching hell breaking loose from our couches, there’s an ironic distance between us watching suffering from safety. With electric and organic eyes watching the swivet of battle and bringing the sights back home to us, the conflict strips itself naked for us while we sit back and watch with a sense of gratification. Surely nothing like this would happen to us… and this fantastical quality of something we’re unlikely to experience in our own lives, owed to Western power and safety, keeps our eyes locked onto the terror/titillation unfolding before our eyes.

I would be doing a criminal injustice if I didn’t mention early enough that the role media plays in depicting a conflict isn’t all perversity and doom. Our awareness of what’s happening outside the relative safety of our walls, both the crises and cries for justice, is because of our artificial eyes which extend across this planet. Were it not for the media, we’d all be screaming into an echoless void.

Any form of resistance against this fascist catastrophe wouldn’t have half its force without the internet and news media propagating it around the globe like a crazy pinball.

We wouldn’t know of all the demonstrations against the regime and war from within Russia and the stark manner in which the Gestapo-esque police are picking people off the streets in broad daylight.

Not a single whisper of how bravely the Ukrainians are repelling this unprovoked brutality would reach our ears. 

The media is our sense-making organ in this digitalised world and without it we’d be catatonic. However, no organ is invulnerable and can go haywire at any time due to an error and produce some very peculiar effects. These queer twists of function are the subject of this rambling meditation on the role media is playing in representing the conflict.  Even a complete shutdown of the senses isn’t enough to miss the fact that news media is mis/used, especially in the West, for reasons other than mere reportage. Slap the skin enough and you’ll find veins bulging out in which flow motives of consolidating and boasting about our standing in the international order, shaping public opinion to meet the interests of those in power, and sending out propaganda – because of course, a totalitarian state isn’t the only place where propaganda can be found. And the rogue proteins and cells which replicate ferociously to form this tumour on the media are Western capitalism, unconscious biases and prejudices which have been put in place by an operation dominated by white people, and the upkeep of the fortress of the power structures which govern society.

With these held in the boundless mind of the reader, you will be able to visualise just how the media organ can go berserk and cause the entire being to convulse.  

Where the measure of strength on the frontlines of Ukraine is firepower, that criterion here in the West, until we physically get involved, is media-power. How much round-the-clock coverage of the war can they bring to our living rooms? How many types of media is this war available on? Do they come with pictures? Videos? How quickly is the story being brought to us?

Our involvement in the war is to showcase the reach of our artificial eyes, and the digital central nervous system which seditiously shaves away microseconds from the delay between the event occurring and its news reaching us.

Before this, it was the Iraq War which held the status of a conflict that deserved such piercing journalistic attention. Not a single bomb was dropped without us knowing about it in our living rooms in Manchester or Sheffield or London or Cardiff or Scotland or Chicago or Washington DC or Boston or…………

That was 19 years ago in 2003, and a lot can happen, especially in the media during that time. Unlike humans, technology doesn’t take millions of years to show signs that it’s evolving. In these circuits the pace of evolution is blistering, each new yearly iteration of an electric species, though only incrementally better, technically and culturally supplants its predecessor. Each new phone, laptop, TV, camera, car, assault rifle, ballistic missile is faster, glossier, more powerful, and far more deadly than the last. Anything with a circuit board that can plug itself into the boundless vortex of the internet is subject to such light-speed development.

With a separate army of correspondents in the combat zone, social media witnessing from the nucleus of the threat, and cameras in every conceivable corner, this war is simulated in all its visceral phantasmagoria around us, creating a simulacrum of involvement. The lived event and the spectated event are desperately trying to become one under the eyes of Western media.

It's 2022 now and the moment the Russian forces who were loitering menacingly around the Ukrainian border stepped over the dividing line, we knew about it instantly. We heard the sonorous symphony of death here in Britain the exact same time the Ukrainians did as they all tried to get the hell out of dodge. We have absolute and complete involvement in this war, not as participants, but as bystanders as if we’re witnessing some astronomical injustice in the street and just stand there idly watching. Some even pull out their phones to record what’s happening for their bottomless archive of content. Few among us are moved to do something about it, but the nature of the scuffle transpiring before our eyes is such that it only allows them at most to raise their objections over it or help the victims afterwards.

Therein lies the fatal limit of the media beyond which lays its complete evisceration. It can only show and tell, not do. Any meaningful action which comes out of its reportage is down solely to the compassion quotient of the audience. And this obsessive watchfulness on part of the media, especially in news circles, has left its readers/watchers/listeners with a case of terminal powerlessness.

Those stories which appear like ink splatter on the front page of newspapers or delivered dispassionately on special news bulletins are of great social, political, and global import. The rampage of climate change. Mass migration due to tearing conflict. Rising sexual and domestic violence against women. The continual threat of recession and a financial nosedive. All these and many more portentous bombs of news affect the lives of its audience on a dangerous level, yet we’re totally helpless to them. Just what are you supposed to do about it other than receive the news, curl up into the fetal position and wait for the panic attack to pass?

This occurs on a daily basis. No wonder a huge portion of the population is completely disillusioned with the news and avoids it as if it were a plague-bearing rat.

So now there’s a war going on. And nothing unites people like a war. That crippling helplessness that the news is so adept at instilling in us has been cured temporarily, replaced by the kind of unified involvement that comes with total head-to-toe immersion into the hologram of war. However, only so much engagement can be fostered in people who learned to stop taking the news seriously long ago. It’s just another nightmare in a long ancestral line of nightmares in the eyes of the public. No matter how passive our involvement may be, however, we have a common enemy to rise up against, and the collective contempt against that fool Vladimir Putin will flow through the torrential discourse burst forth by our intimate familiarity with the events on the front lines.

News media is one thing though. What of its younger, vapid brother, social media? This is where things, in my mind at least, become rather carnivalesque.

Social media platforms are the nexus of today’s thought, a kind of global palace court where everything that happens in the lives of the people is broached for discussion, argument, insult, praise, and just about any form of discourse – shallow and profound – with the billions of courtiers. Which means that the place can turn into a bit of a zoo sometimes…

I’d be remised if I failed to at least mention some of the good that’s come out of social media during this war.

It’s granted people a new kind of agency to voice their derision against this conflict without having to leave their homes and get involved in a protest, coupled with the fact that word of any such demonstrations for those who want to take part only goes around on social media too.

Nothing would be heard of about those obscure acts of rebellion that have taken place in Russia, of those touching moments of humanity inside bomb shelters in Ukraine, the steely determination of the Ukrainian defenders on the front lines, and every aspect of this war overlooked by traditional news media.

But I’d also be pulling the wool over your eyes if I didn’t point out the way this grotesque conflict has been reduced on social media for Western audiences to something that wildly oscillates between escapism and entertainment.

Firstly, escapism for who exactly? Claire in Los Angeles, safe within the haven of her upper-middle class life who isn’t getting her home blown up, family members killed, and her life torn to shreds? Davidin London who doesn’t have to abandon her home and brave it against the war, the deadly cold, and the otherworldly grief and uncertainty of what’s to happen to her and her kids?

It's completely understandable for those who have friends and family in Ukraine trying to make it out of the havoc, those Ukrainians living here who are watching their country being ravaged, or those Russians who feel infinite shame for what their nation is perpetrating, but what right to escapism do the rest of us have? Our concerns over the presence of war are invisible in comparison to the harsh realities of those caught in the whirlwind of this warfare must battle with from one day to the next.

If you were to hang around the heaving corners of social media enough, you’d notice something which is almost unavoidable. Whether it be text posts or memes, it appears that to most people on social media, this very real and horrendous conflict in Ukraine is nothing more than a sitcom. A certain saying has been thrown around lately which for me encapsulates this horrid misrepresentation.

“Every girl you know has a crush on President Zelenskyy and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The Ukrainian president’s indefatigable defence of his country aside, this facetious phrase lacks self-awareness on the part of those who spit it out of their mouths because it’s treating people in this war as if they’re fun and likeable characters in a TV show. What makes this preternatural portrayal of the war and the principal characters in it even more surreal is the fact that before President Zelenskyy took over the reins of Ukrainian power, he made his living as a comedian, even starring in how own sit-com called “Servant of the People” where a gregarious free-spoken average man ends up becoming the president of Ukraine. The parallels between reality and fiction have become too startling, further cementing the fact that alongside the real war is the simulated war.

In the sit-com universe, the world exists in a state of eternal recurrence, without any sort of development or growth. Characters remain static and don’t learn any lessons. And perhaps this simulated war which seems to be getting more attention than the real thing does in fact possess similar qualities.

It has sure been one long-running TV show indeed, if we’re to run with this twisted thinking, going all the way back to 1917 when the Bolsheviks rolled into Ukraine to lay claim to it. The situation has always been the same whether it be during the post-Russian Revolution days, during the USSR period, or the modern times with the conflict over Crimea which left it a null state and with what’s happening now. Only the characters have changed, some swapped out for others, yet all of them have one motive, to get their grubby hands on Ukraine. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, all the characters are united under the goal of defending their country from the Russian threat. It’s hard to tell at this point, what season of this show we’re on, however, another revelation comes out of this crooked train of thought, that the simulated war doesn’t solely exist in one isolated period, it is plugged into the whole power grid of history. Every piece of artifice, each hologram, the entire virtual reality of this simulated war is constructed with atoms and pixels which have all of history embedded into their surface.

So, what we end up with on our hands here is a splintering of time and space. When any aspect or event of the real world is rebuilt, one non-existent brick at a time, in the fugue reality of the media sphere, we’re effectively creating two isomorphic versions of the occurrence in question which exist independently and sprint full tilt down the avenue of their own timeline. Although a sense of concreteness is shared between the two dittos of the world, depending on how much attention or engagement either of them gets, one will always be more real than the other, and no one can tell whether it’s the copy or the original which can lay claim to its own existence. The more validation through acknowledgement one is given, the other begins to fade and loses its shape and mass to amorphousness until it answers the call of nothingness and is quietly erased.

Consequently, nothing in the world as we know it today is its original. A perplexing melange of authentics and copies are floating around in our surroundings like anti-matter particles in inter-galactic space, annihilated when coming in contact with their opposing selves. This reality-counterfeiting is evident in all aspects of our busy existence from the media, history, politics, money, and warfare, to design, manufacture, fashion, and art. Most people will already recognise this raging replication as a fulminant of that all-too-well-known, and perhaps overused, concept of post-modernism.

The very day the war began, it took absolutely no time for teenagers on social media to make insulting light out of it. Short, attention-span zapping TikTok and Instagram videos of people doing point-of-view reactions of the first few footages of the war which flew out of the war pit began spewing forth like vomit. One thing is perfectly clear, to some this war is just another object to be used in service of their great idol, content.

These few instances which are replicated and contorted to the nth degree are a flagrant and gross identifier of Western solipsism. Anything outside the geographical and cultural boundaries of that hallowed mecca known as The West might as well not even exist. The West is in fact the centre of the observable universe. Excuse the hyperbole, but it does hold a scintilla of truth that finds confirmation in the painfully unmistakable way in which the West’s standing in the international order is desperately consolidated in every item of masturbatory news handed to us.

Before I venture any further, it’s salient to point out something about the catch-all term of “The West”. Where coalescing all the nations who so proudly declare themselves part of this elusive point on the compass would suggest unity, multiple bodies governed by a single mind and symmetrical goals, it really doesn’t. It proves the exact opposite. Every country whether it be Britain, the USA, Germany, Switzerland or France, have all bent their will towards the only thing that matters, convincing their citizens and the rest of the world that here is the place to be, the rest be damned. Who would really care about a place where it isn’t happening?

Take one look at the news, at the way your country is portrayed in your national media, and this tunnel-vision monomania for validation from god, the universe, and everyone, becomes abundantly known. Despite any criticism against the government, there is a manifest tone that the only place which matters is this. No news of foreign events will be reported unless the West has some part to play in it.  Barely any information will trickle down from the mountain about the events in Africa or South America or Southeast Asia because they’re not on the correct quadrant of the compass, and if an iota of news surprisingly does appear, the links to the West are too clear.

Disentangling myself from the hold of this tangent, let me return to the smoke-blanketed skies of Ukraine. Why is the war in Ukraine being reported with such x-ray vision? Let’s list all the altruistic reasons first; to raise attention and demonstrate against this senseless conflict, there is a considerable Ukrainian and Russian population in Britain who want to know what is going down in their respective nations, reporting on the humanitarian aid, and that’s about it. Now for all the ulterior motives: how the war affects business with Russia and Ukraine, how Britain can salvage their already dire humanitarian status by helping the Ukrainian refugees, the threat to NATO, painting Britain as the arbitrators of Europe by covering the back and forth of empty threats and entreaties between Britain and Russia, proving that Britain opposes the presence of oligarchs with connections to the Kremlin by imposing crippling sanctions on them despite the fact that London is built on their blood money, and the list goes on…

This entire conflict in Ukraine turns out to be quite serendipitous for Britain because the media here can ride on its wave and pull a sick trick which’ll bamboozle the world into thinking without a shadow of a doubt that they’re with Ukraine. Britain’s filthy reputation of anti-immigration is hopefully shed, and it gets to show off just how compassionate of a nation it is, in one fell swoop. It’s obvious that no one is in favour of this war apart from Putin and the people who eat up his propaganda living in his expansionist regime , and though the media firms are echoing the firm solidarity with Ukraine, it has all the weight and actuality as a whisper in a cavern amplified to a scream. No amount of acoustics or aural amplification will change the fact that the sound is really just a whisper. It’s all well and good to say that we stand with Ukraine and changing colour schemes to yellow and blue around the shop, but what are we really doing to help? I’ll pick up the thread again on this point in a later chapter which is dedicated to the caricatured governments “involved” in this war and the many masks they wear during the proceedings.

In the feverish attempt for the media to simulate this war in all its hyperreal detail, journalists are sent into the heart of darkness, embedded within the army, refugee camps and other sites where the war is ripping the world up, and these journalists come back with experiences and the words and images to attach to them which serve as the building blocks of this facsimile. But even then, they’re doing a half-assed job and stumble into the situation ill-equipped. Not in terms of gear or facilities, but totally lacking in the cultural knowledge which should fuel proper insight into the puzzle.

These war correspondents and journalists on the ground, usually of white skin and middle-class standing and, most importantly, of the male side of the species, wander into a foreign country without knowing a single word of their language apart from “hello” or maybe “thank you”, they have as much knowledge of that country’s history and culture as a hairstylist has of particle physics (and vice versa), and they hardly ever get the perspectives that really matters – those of the common citizens who have been personally affected by the hostilities. If they’re venturing into a country which is held airtight by totalitarian rule, they can only move about and do their job via approval from the regime, and the sources they do talk to are those vetted and put before them by the regime who will tell them exactly and only what the people in power want them to know. In essence, what journalists really end up doing is marketing for fascists. 

Although the case in Ukraine is different where the country hasn’t fallen into the hands of Putin’s regime yet, and some newspapers like the Evening Standard and The Times have indeed quite assiduously included a variety of sources from both officials and citizens, there is still something disinterested about their legwork in Ukraine.

This desynchronisation stems from the fact that we’re seeing this conflict through Western eyes that have no grasp over the nuances of Ukrainian culture, its people, and their history. It’s as if a person with total colour blindness stares into a swirling kaleidoscope, seeing shapes move but lacking every idea of how resplendent it truly is. And the visions of these lacklustre eyes are used as the touchstone of our perception of this conflict. Some may speak the language or have a serviceable insight into the country’s history or politics, but nothing short of a Ukrainian journalist working with Western media will accurately capture the war in all its many sharp and pointed edges.

The old forms of colonialism just don’t work anymore. Invading a country, erasing its culture, and rewriting it with your own went out of style with the fall of the British Empire. You’ll meet resistance too fierce from the nation you want to colonise and opprobrium too cutting from everywhere else if you decide to waste your military’s time and charge into their country. It’s not going according to plan for Putin precisely because of this. Which is why the West (USA and Britain especially) use more subtle forms of colonialism which manipulate their target countries with a soft and invisible touch. And it's done without sending a single person over their borders.

Where else do you think terms like “Americanisation” or “Westernised” come from? Like an airborne virus, these culture particles are swept across the planet on the winds of our media hegemony. And it takes only a matter of time for it to spiral into a full-scale pandemic in their country once a few thousand people get infected. Before long a dominant proportion of the population develops herd immunity to it, and not immune in the sense that they can repel these outside influences but rather they assimilate these foreign particles into their cultural biology. Without the power and reach of the media, this virus would rely solely on sexual person-to-person transmission for its work to be done.

This is our singular act in portraying the Ukrainian conflict the way we are. No matter how many sources from Ukraine may support our journalism, no matter how deep we suffuse ourselves into the warzone to bring news of it back to audiences, we’re still only giving a Western perspective of the war, a point of view which seeks to replace the Ukrainian one and do so automatically too. There’s a prevailing tone in Britain’s reporting of the war which sounds a little something like this,

“Well, they can’t report on their conflict properly because they’re obviously trying to survive and fight the war, so let’s just do it for them because they can’t.”

This soft colonialism isn’t only patronising in that it calls to attention the inabilities of the other but is also a subliminal power play that strives to further consolidate British strength. This show of power is hidden in the lining of our support which supposedly makes it above reproach, or does it?

We’ve deluded ourselves over centuries into thinking we’re the supreme benefactors of Earth and that we will always save the day for those in need, even if it means committing genocide against those who we’re supposedly helping.  It’s been some time since our hands have pulled the triggers and swung the swords of genocide, but the point still stands. The vivid anamneses of our imperial past have left us thinking that other nations are lucky if they get our support.

I am by no means suggesting the ridiculous notion that we shouldn’t support Ukraine and cut all coverage of the war adrift and let the Ukrainians fend for themselves, instead, I’m merely pointing out that the utterance of our aid is carried on a breath which belies our bloodstained past and how it has shaped our current sensibilities.

I earlier touched on the sense of powerlessness that traditional news media has left its audiences with which I’d like to expand a bit more upon in relation to our agency to take action.

From the power generated by the engines of social and news media, the Ukrainian conflict is circulating in current discourse with great ferocity and we’re all at the very least complicit in its existence where none of us can really say that “I didn’t know there was a war going on in Ukraine…”

To end this chapter on a less pessimistic and sardonic tone, I feel it as a duty to point out that had we continued living in universal oblivion over the events in Ukraine – or any strife for that matter – there would be no audience to it and the actors would be butchering each other on a stage for an empty auditorium. And just like a tree falling in an empty forest for no one, the conflict wouldn’t exist without anyone outside of its vacuum knowing about it. If no one knew about the happening of violence for them to raise their objection over or turn a blind eye to it – whatever they choose to do with that information - then the crime would remain isolated in its own pocket of reality totally invisible to our eyes. Despite the unconscious agendas and one-sided perspectives of the media, if it wasn’t for its presence then we would remain imprisoned in our lack of awareness over the few privileged conflicts that Western media does choose to report on.

Once we’re all fused together in the knowledge, no matter how incomplete, of the presence of a conflict, the extent to which we involve ourselves in it is down completely to us. We can either stand frozen in the simulation and throw our hands up in apathy or we can wander in and around it to complete its perforated image the media has presented us.

There exist as many histories and perspectives as there are countries, cultures, and people on this planet, so it’s foolish to subscribe to only one viewpoint, one measly brushstroke, to paint the entire picture for you. No one person will ever possess absolute insight into the workings of a crisis or situation, and if you do then please make yourself known. And even when you think you have hit the mark and have gained as full of a picture as possible, it is about time to question everything you have learned so far because you’re still miles off.

The 21st is the century of mistrust and masks and absolutely everything told us must be subjected to a tsunami of questioning to pull out what truth it holds. Putting immediate trust in what the media is drip-feeding you without digging deeper into it to build up a reservoir of knowledge on it is tantamount to hacking off entire lobes of the brain and obstinately relying on one potentially erroneous and certainly incomplete sense to navigate the terrain of the event.

The media relies on us for its purposes to be fulfilled proportional to our reliance on it to lift us out of collective ignorance, but if we don’t engage with it properly (questioning it, adding to it, and starting a conversation about the things it tells us) then we’re allowing ourselves to be talked into stupidity.

People

I woke up to the news that the Russian forces had moved into Ukraine and the orchestra of rockets and bombs had begun early in the morning of the 24th of February. A great nameless dread descended on me and my partner, and as self-absorbed as it seems I was expecting the rest of London to be assaulted by the same lead-like feeling between their stomach and lungs. How couldn’t everyone? This affects us all, I remember thinking, no matter where one calls home. Yet the long tube ride on the Northern Line into Central London was no different to the one I took the very day before, or any of the countless days before the war began. People densely packed together in this metal snake during the peak time swarm, eyes locked onto their phones, earphones plugging all sounds of the external world out of their private orbs, everyone ignoring the homeless man in blue tattered jeans wandering through the length of the tube begging for loose change. What was peculiar to me was that there were smiles and laughter upon many faces, and blank indifference upon the rest. Absolutely no sign of restless doom…

Somethings dawned on me as I stared around the tube looking at all these humans who acted as if people weren’t being exterminated en masse right across the continent; either Londoners are really good at internalising their fears, or their own lives are such a tightly laced matrix of worry, stress, and things to get done on time that they just don’t have a spare moment (or spare change) to concern themselves with the struggles of other people, a reason which isn’t incompatible with the first, and lastly, perhaps despite my misanthropy human nature isn’t all that black and white and exists largely in that grey area that defies explanation.

No matter how many unpiloted drones swarm the sky or driverless tanks trod the earth, there will always be that human element in war (persons of interest that need strategic killing to topple the command, civilian targets, casualties on both sides, etc). Though mechanised and controlled remotely, these killing machines are still operated by humans, and right at the very nucleus of it, it is the human being that issues the order to attack. Hence humanity and war are inextricable, it is one of the things we do best, apart from marketing and alienation, always making it a thing of business with us.

This chapter then is an attempt to take the nature out of the human, and hold it suspended in the dark with cameras, guns, and lasers pointed at it in order to study it by moving it closer and further from the core of war to scrutinise its reaction. How black or white (or grey) does it become depending on its distance from the death factory?

One thing I must compartmentalise before we head any further is that politicians and world leaders will not be included here and have a chapter dedicated to them, not just because I don’t consider any of them as human but also because their position of supreme power or being close to it exists in a constellation which is in a completely different galaxy from where we ordinary folk exist.

All the many synonyms that orbit the word “war” like satellites can uncover something about our attitude towards the word itself and the incomprehensible realities that come crashing down in lieu of it like asteroids capable of extinction events. “Conflict”, “hostilities”, “struggle”, “collision”, “armed combat”, offensive”, “discord” … all of these are the terms which are afforded by those who can put distance between them and the bloodshed. The further out you go, the more watered down and verbose the synonyms become, “enmity”, “antagonism”, “animus”. But once the spectre of death catches up with you, arrives at your shores with that irregular explosive heartbeat, the crackle of gunfire, and the unsympathetic mechanism of tanks and aeroplanes, that’s when all these synonyms lose their power in the face of their hideous root, “war”, when all those superfluous polysyllables become irrelevant and must be replaced by the more direct and concise monosyllable.

Our proximity to the vortex determines not just our language, but our instincts (fear) and attitude (concern, agency, etc) to it. Which could make a start in explaining the clueless reaction to the start of the conflict I witnessed around me on the Northern Line tube to Moorgate on the 24th of February, the year of our absent lord, 2022. Perhaps I was in the wrong tube at the time, the one before or after me or on a completely different line may have been holding passengers that were clawing down the brushed metal walls in paroxysms of fear and hysteria.

Perceived safety and strength also rain down shades of grey upon the boundary of the black and white that, in my mind at least, define humanity. Just compare the reaction to the war across the Eastern and Western European countries.

While the West, at least London as I’ve witnessed, is the town of talk – intellectual discussions over the war and its ramifications, and distanced discourse from our hiding place in our cement and metal ant colonies – the East has shown itself to be the town of action. There is a clear distinction between the active demonstration of support in countries neighbouring Ukraine (even Russia as people protest against the regime despite the obvious threat of instant jail) especially Poland and Moldova who have taken in with open arms the refugees pouring out of the war, given them a place to stay, and have allowed them to pass through towards the hope of greater safety in the West, and the sort of passive, lazy support we’re giving them in the very place they are trekking towards.

All the botched immigration and humanitarian systems aside, once again at least with the prevailing attitude in Britain, there just doesn’t seem to be the same urgency and desire to help the Ukrainian refugees as there is in Eastern Europe. And that’s precisely because of the 2215km between us and Ukraine. Another factor is that Ukraine isn’t part of NATO, as if that even means anything, but were they part of this Western military alliance then the whole scope of the war would be transformed. We’d be told that Putin’s attack is against the whole Western world rather than a country that is still taking its time embracing the Western fold.

Imagine an alternative universe with me for a moment. Civil war breaks out in Northern Ireland. Bad craziness and destruction are sweeping across that bucolic country. How would the people react on the British mainland? They’d jump at once to their assistance not just through humanitarian aid, but English, Scottish and Welsh military would jump right into the fray themselves. Why? Not just because they’re part of the so-called United Kingdom (despite the fact a Queen sits at the helm of it) but because they’re just a stone’s throw across the Irish Sea. You can even see it from some parts of the main bulk of the island if you squint your eyes enough. I won’t waste any more time on this alternate universe which may or may not be happening right now, but the point remains the same. Proximity in war is everything. The whole mess of geopolitics is built on proximity and the possessive dotted lines we’ve drawn over the land masses of planet Earth.

One thing which does help the Ukrainian refugees in the eyes of the British although, is the colour of their skin. Their whiteness even bypasses the physical distance between us and Ukraine. British media has been going to great pains to illustrate the rhetoric that these refugees have blue eyes and blonde hair, that they’re coming from Europe, and that they’re just like the rest of us. Which sounds a whole like “they’re more human than the refugees coming from the Middle East or Africa because the Ukrainian refugees are white.” Don’t mistake me even for a moment, I’m elated that Britain and the rest of the West are helping the Ukrainian refugees in whatever capacity they can, either through donations or signing up to this terribly handled scheme which allows them to take a Ukrainian migrant into their homes provided they have the space for it. I’m also happy that some Ukrainian refugees are being given AirBnBs to stay in and that the conversation even came up that the mansions seized off the Russian oligarchs could be used to house incoming migrants. What I’m questioning is, where, in the eyes of white people, does humanity start and end? Why even call it humanitarian if there’s a different criterion of humanity across the colours of the skin? Would that then suggest that the refugees from Syria or Afghanistan or Nigeria or Rwanda are less human if they’re being stuffed in refugee camps and then treated as second-class citizens when they try to integrate? Whitey will always prefer whitey over the rest, it’s been like this for centuries and this prejudice – unconscious or criminally acted upon – is an inveteracy that’s etched into the DNA of (white) people in power.

Optically the only good thing to come out of this is the readiness for the Western white people to help their fellow white refugees knocked asunder from Ukraine, but really, should the colour of their skin really be a factor in whether they deserve our help or not and how much delay we’ll put between actually giving that help?

Eastern Europe also has a long and complicated history which they don’t like sharing with Russia. Invaded repeatedly by the playground bully of Eastern Europe, nations like Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic especially still carry scars which sting each time the word “communism” or “Soviet” gets thrown around. Every war that breaks out across Europe, always leaves these nations in the East caught up in the crossfire. The bristling threat of a Russian invasion has been constant at the borders of these nations through every perennial period Russia has been under the grip of a despotic loon. They’re continually worked up into a frenzy of defensive panic when Russia starts trouble in one of their neighbours because they can’t help but think they’re next.

Where in the East the people are intimately familiar with invasion and military involvement with the Russians, here in the West we’ve never so much as had a real face-to-face clash with Russia, except in sports. Each time the war against the red menace has gone into full swing, neither America nor Britain have ever fought the Russians personally, settling instead for regimes and extremist groups backed by the Russians. The West, whether it be out of spinelessness or self-preservation, has never tried to get itself involved in a showdown with Russia, keeping its aggression limited to empty threats, taunts, and displays of self-aggrandisement in the form of diplomacy. All of which shows our furtiveness with the whole scene going down in Eastern Europe.

But nothing really showcases the utter disinterestedness of the Western people in this gruesome war more than what’s been running in the newspapers lately.

Since the battle began on the 24th of February, all developments in Ukraine have been front-page news, stark and flat windows into the war. All it took to belt the war off its pedestal of importance was Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, which then ended up as front-page news and has seemingly replaced the conflict in Ukraine in current discourse.

Is this really how blitzed our attention span is that something as petty and meaningless as a tussle, if it could be even called that, between two grown men is suddenly of greater importance than hospitals with children inside getting blown sky high? If the media is the caterer of what people want to consume, then this would suggest that all we in the West care about is drama. Big or small. And the bits of drama brought to us by the soap opera of the news isn’t in order of magnitude but of recency. Will Smith’s loss of control at the Academy Awards will be replaced by the next moment of shock as the reigning star of drama as quickly as it replaced the war in Ukraine.

On the more fucked up end of the scale, Ukrainian refugees are used by some in the West to demonstrate just how morally clean they are. It’s very kind indeed of those who have the means to take Ukrainian refugees in and give them a temporary home until they can get their feet on the ground again. But this act of selflessness is completely reversed and lands in the red when those with the means, especially celebrities, take in Ukrainian refugees to give them a home, taking selfies with them as if they’re social media props just to show off to their fans how altruistic and compassionate they are. There’s a term for that which hasn’t been heard of in a very long time, “virtue signalling.” This may not be necessarily a product of the West, but we’ve certainly perfected its design.

An act of kindness only exists if its motives are uncontaminated with exhibitionism. Using the Ukrainians as a means to market your own humanity on social media is no less than giving £5 to a homeless person while recording yourself doing it. It’s patronising at best and exploitative at worst. This isn’t a transaction, just because one has shown the kindness of opening their doors to the Ukrainians in need doesn’t automatically give them the right to use them how they please.

What I’m about to type down may sound heartlessly pessimistic and totally blind to kindness through a propensity to dissect things that don’t need dissecting but stay with me here because I’m doing it for reasons not completely unproductive and spiteful. There is an obvious power structure between the sponsoring households who have opened their doors and the Ukrainians for whom the doors are being opened. It doesn’t matter how deep in the consciousness it is for both sides of this relationship, but it’s there, and both are aware of it on some quiet level. So, when the refugees walk through the door to their new temporary home, their already weary shoulders are now under a debt of gratitude they owe to their benefactors. And the weight of gratitude is enormous enough that people are willing to overlook enough transgressions in its wake until they cancel each other out. Basically, the Ukrainian migrants won’t mind being used as social media props, whether out of politeness or gratefulness or any other -ness which reflects the relationship between the sponsoring household and the refugees. To clear my name here a bit, I’m not insinuating that the Ukrainian refugees will just sit idly by and let their benefactors exploit them this way, neither am I suggesting that the first thing that everyone in the West has on their minds is to take selfies with the migrants to show off their morality. Many will speak their mind if they find themselves being mistreated, and those of us with an ounce of consideration would ask them if they’re comfortable with having their picture taken, but it’s for the few who may not that I’m writing this for. Why must some of us be like this in the first place?

As stentorian as the gunfire and explosions is the unstoppable deafening tsunami of protest against this war that is sweeping across the Earth like a great deluge.

It wouldn’t be careless of me to assume that a greater number of people are totally opposed to this war than those who aren’t. Even those who transgress reason and have been brainlessly engaging with this war in the most incorrect way on social media, I’m sure if asked, would never say they’re on Putin’s side. Their dumb behaviour is more a product of the Western condition, leaving those living in it with a vapid attitude of self-congratulation and superciliousness, than an absence of humanity.

This entire terrible conflict has galvanised a gigantic population of the world into a sonorous cry for justice, a sound which comes only once in a few years, which spells out S T O P. T H I S. Unspeakable crimes against humanity on such a grand and hideous scale, and the protest sparked by it, are an opportunity to take stock of the goodand rotten apples among the populous.

One glance at the protest against the war makes its nature quite clear, no matter how active or passive, it is borne from a place of love and empathy for the fellow human. What appears as an anomaly in the system however, are those who actively support this war. It’s easy to pin the blame on fanatic nationalism or racism, but it’s important to understand how that cancer took hold of the brain and began doing its dirty work in the first place.

Many interviews have been beamed out straight from the heart of Russia, conversations with citizens on the street asking for their opinions on this war. What the viewer will find truly puzzling is why do so many of these people fervently support Putin’s war and believe that Ukraine and its people deserve destruction, despite the fact that living conditions for those that hold such opinions are at an all-time low, their economy in shambles and their lives no better than that of a tree about to meet the buzzing blades of a chainsaw. Why is my friend from Russia living and working in Britain and totally against the war denounced by her family still living in Russia as a traitor?

The simple reason behind this is the same behind why clumps of the Russian population (as well as many idiots in the West) still believe that Stalin was a great leader. They’ve learnt to disregard all the clear evidence around them of a failed and terrible life as lies, or at least temporary speedbumps on the road to endless prosperity. This mass brainwashing is of course the product of the vicious propaganda which is laced like a nerve toxin into every part of Russian life.

To use an analogy that people in this age will understand, every facet of Russian life is curated by the state for the people. The Kremlin are the algorithm that brings you, citizen of Russia, everything that they think will do you good. The only agency you have is to keep scrolling and lapping up what’s thrown your way.

This attitude is not the fault of the Russian people, let me make that crystal clear. When Russia has known more totalitarianism than freedom, and even that freedom is of a compromised capacity, when its people have gone hungry while its leaders and the inner circle around it have lived in abject luxury, when its people are threatened with torture, forced labour or death for holding any opinion that isn’t state authorised, what other outcome can realistically be expected?

The halls of Russian leadership (and those of any superpower country for that matter) have been stunk up by the acid-breath of insecure, power-crazed lunatics who perceive the universe only in terms of absolutes. Over the long and painful course of a century, the folks in Russia have systematically had their brains scooped out by hypnotic nationalist propaganda, a feat worthy of the attention of all the most eminent psychiatrists in the universe, turning their skulls into hollow receptacles to house the state-approved thoughts which will turn these people into perfect cattle. Of course, some have resisted this conditioning, gone underground, and sought out the forbidden fruit of outside influences to educate themselves as best as they could under the circumstances. These are the brave souls you see protesting in Russia, out in public squares, on TV, in institutions, risking arrest and cutting punishment. While the rest who hungrily sucked from the tit of the state, drinking the bitter milk of propaganda, have ended up as insignificant nodes in a hive mind of fascism. They live in Putin’s stead. They think, feel and act exactly how Putin wants them to. While sitting in the nexus of this thought-organism, when he waves his left arm, most of the 145 million people in Russia wave their left arms too, whether they want to or not.

No matter the strength of the rouble, the only currency in Russia that really matters is fear. It governs everything that goes on there, down from the street to the corridors of the Kremlin, and all of it is centred around the name Vladimir Putin. But as someone once said, “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.” Who was that again? Ah yes, Hermione Granger.

What people in Russia understand to a certain extent and people outside of it understand not at all, is that the power and fear which surrounds Putin is partly an illusion. If the Russian people knew him for the unstable, ageing schizophrenic, self-conscious, slobbering pit-bull that he truly is, he’d have been dragged out of office and flayed alive in the streets of Moscow long ago. The reason why he, and every autocratic leader he’s following in the footsteps of, has been able to keep such a stronghold over power is due to the overinflation of his capabilities. No doubt he’s a dangerous man, all the craziness he’s turned loose on the Russian people and is currently breaking open on Ukraine clearly backs that up. But these images of him as an all-powerful being who rides topless on bareback horses in the biting cold, or as a man who can carry large logs over one shoulder, or him embodying the soul of Russia are cartoonish, narcissistic over-exaggerations constructed by him to mask his sweaty body odour with the purple scent of fear and veneration. And the fact that many people outside of Russian borders play right into this image of Putin without having been subjected to the long prescription of propaganda that the Russian citizens are, says volumes about the state of minds held by such imbeciles.

So, to those who see Putin as this omnipotent being of Russian brilliance, ask yourself, did you land on this image yourself or did you pick it up from somewhere? Once you start off holding this ideaof a Putin to questioning, that’s when the long yet productive process of psychologically reverse engineering the propaganda the regime has stuffed into your head (inside and outside Russia) will begin. Freedom of speech is one thing, because some people certainly abuse that right to spit revolting fascist bile into this world, but freedom of thought is another. There should be absolutely no limit on thought, the reach of the mind is far too vast to be boxed into an arbitrary pattern of thinking. Both positive and negative thoughts should be open to exploration because it’s through all the illogical and flawed reasoning we must pass to arrive at sound thinking. If everyone thought like everyone else or if large swathes of people started taking on the thinking of one central figure, then we might as well just wait for the great rocks from outer space to wipe us all out.

I fear I may have strayed really far into the unknown of these woods and will have to blindly stumble back to the path I was originally on. The previous section, before careening into how propaganda has turned the Russian population into docile imitators of Putin’s thought, started off with questioning the nature of protesting which was initially supposed to lead to a negotiation of how solid solidarity is. This is where I’d like to take you now if you’ll allow me.

The answer to that question is a very boring and predictable, “it depends”. But I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I just left you with that.

It depends upon a number of things (mostly subjective); the personality of the person, their upbringing, their desire to get things done, to get involved, to make a difference, but the deciding factor is something that opened this chapter, proximity. The closer the threat or the happening, the more solid the solidarity becomes, yes? But it isn’t as clear-cut.

Solidarity is the translation of the desire of siding with a group of people and becoming a part of them in the face of oppression, into the act of doing so. While in the state of desire, solidarity remains liquid, flowing through your consciousness as it becomes invaded by news of whatever injustice invokes the need for such action. However, once the person in whose mind the desire lingers becomes squarely and unmistakably attached to the cause in question, solidarity becomes solid. To complicate matters a bit more, solidarity doesn’t enjoy the luxury of a binary, if it only were that easy. Between the solid and liquid are amorphous states of flux. These fluctuations of solidarity are effects of the level of involvement the person(s) hold in their fight against oppression. Anything short of physical involvement or a meaningful commitment which requires a sacrifice on the part of the person to help the people who need it exists in this uncertain state of neither solid nor liquid. Acts such as posting thoughtful messages on the endless pin-board of social media, changing the colour scheme of your company logos, making art, or writing about it, all land on the in-between (with the latter two far closer to a solid state than the former two).

And this is no attempt to disregard the efforts of those who are doing more than just thinking about getting involved and promptly pushing the idea out of their mind. Everyone does their bit in their own way through the means they afford. I don’t have the money to donate, nor the time I can take off from my studies to travel to the Polish border and help the Ukrainian refugees, and my tiny studio flat which I share with my partner certainly won’t be comfortable living for any Ukrainian migrants I’d want to take in. Instead, I sit here and write.

Things are beginning to take the shape of a graph then, where level of involvement takes the x-axis and proximity takes the y-axis. These are two independent variables which affect the solidity of solidarity based on their values. Take for example the display of fervent and unbreakable solidarity with the Ukrainians in Poland, a nation usually so backwards and reactionary that abortion is still largely banned and it’s one of the worst places on Earth to be if you’re a gay person on account of rampant homophobia. Their proximity to the threat, as well as their shared history of Russian communist oppression, has temporarily pulled them out of their thick-skulled Catholicism and turned them into rocksteady allies of the Ukrainians. 

One can be inches away from the threat and have anywhere from maximum to minimum involvement in it, same goes for if one is a whole continent away. It all depends on the person’s disposition and the means available to them.

Humanity isn’t the only species on this planet, or in the universe, that can lay claim to war. Rival ant colonies wage them. Packs of animals like chimpanzees, lions, hyenas, and wolves fight other packs over resources in the wild all the time. But humanity has taken war and raised it to a depraved art. Sun Tzu would never have written his book about it had this not been the case.

It's also in the way we compose ourselves during war which separates us from the animals. Our battles aren’t fought for survival but over greed. While the animals fight only when necessary, we go out looking for one. The amount of money governments around the world spend on the military-industrial complex to conjure up new and bizarre ways of bringing death to this world makes the money they spend on anything else seem like loose pennies found under the couch cushions. We don’t just invade; we rape and burn and kill civilians and those who have surrendered. We’re a species made for war which makes us far more savage and primal than the animals.

So, with our track record in history (one not written by the victor) and all the bloodstained news that seems to constantly surround us, it would seem that humanity’s propensity for evil far outweighs its propensity for good. Our evil doesn’t supplant our good the moment we enter this world, we’re not created inherently evil, but our potential to do harm and hurt is certainly a lot greater than our potential to do good. And those who lead a virtuous life of kindness and compassion are intimately aware of the evil they could potentially wreak upon their fellow neighbour. But the many keep giving the good few a very bad name and they don’t seem to want to stop.

Essentially humanity has overstayed its welcome on this planet by 200,000 years. Evolution took a crooked turn with those homo-sapiens and things have gone sincerely wrong since.

Governments

Without people to wield power, the guns would be useless hunks of metal, and without power the people are nothing more than useless sacks of meat. Wars may be fought by people, but they’re waged in the first place in the service of governments. In the name of those suits who possess power of the most supreme kind across the land (as far as the geographical border extends). And we, the common rabble, gave them such astronomical power, the kind that by the mere stroke of a pen and a command can pull Death from its time off, keeping it rooted on the Earth to reap souls by the thousands every hour like a file clerk chained to his desk with a box full of torturous reports sitting in front of him which he must stay up all night, wired on cheap Lavazza instant coffee, to get through. All of this on top of Death’s already tall order of daily reaping…

The origins of power have escaped everyone’s recollection here. Who gave it to whom? It’s much like humanity inventing god and immediately blotting the memory out so that their creation rules over them as it likes and they may turn to it for guidance. We fetishize power in all its forms, and when we’re not out frantically chasing it, we’re prostituting ourselves to it so we may taste its receiving end.

There’s a war going on now, and how do the governments use the power we’ve entrusted them for situations precisely like these? With all the loyalty of a self-castrated eunuch, only centred unto themselves. With the obvious exception of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, these politicians who darken our doors every day with their oleaginous faces in the newspaper are like unholy unions between snake oil and used car salesmen, lying straight through their plastic teeth, rattling off whatever comes into their desiccated brains so they can make a trade/deal/arrangement. Creating the elaborate illusion that they’re doing something, all while doing absolutely nothing, that’s how they preach their high dogma of diplomacy.

Let’s make our beginnings in the most obvious place: the self-professed centre of the multiverse, the West.

It must first be addressed that if it looks like the governments in the West are acting like total cowards in the face of this war, it’s because they are, but this cowardice is forced on them by the circumstances. No one really wants any part of this war, and they certainly don’t want it to exponentially grow into World War III which will surely be the last great war of this current human civilisation, so they don’t get involved.

We’re an international band of spineless bystanders and onlookers who while walking through the street see someone getting beaten up by thugs and out of fear that their sense of justice might backfire with them receiving the same beating, they stand and stare for a moment and then stroll right past.

The West is also choosing not to fight in this conflict over religious grounds. What? Since when did that play any part in international dealings?

Since a new religion was formed on the 6th of August, 1945 which has held the world, especially ruling politicians in a trance of fear since. The Great God of this terrifying religion is the Atom Bomb, a deity that unlike those of all modern major religions has proved its existence, shown its divine and ugly face, and possesses a power so tangible and universal that its destruction rivals those wild visions from the Book of Revelations.

Much like the formation of any organised sect, the godhead is a completely human-made entity, blood and deceit are written right into its origin, and it has caused its followers to do some pretty ludicrous things throughout its history. Since the miraculous powers of the atom were discovered, nations all over Earth have bent their will to attain religious enlightenment by cracking the sacred code to develop nuclear weapons.

However, the Grand Church of the Atom is as vulnerable to schisms and splinters as any other religion. First, it was either fission or fusion, but now there exists as many sects, castes, sub-groups, false idols, and classes as there are nations armed with nuclear weapons. And each country which has formed its own contorted version of this religion frequently threatens to ask its ostensibly superior god to smite all the others down.

When it comes to influence and intimidation, no other religion reaches the same calibre as this destructive nuclear one. The mere mention of the bomb in a conversation between politicians and world leaders will put people in their place, evoke terrified shocks and let fly accusations of inhumanity. What is truly inhumanhowever is inventing a suicidal god that when it gets what it wants will level entire cities, vaporise everyone within its path instantly, and render the land acrid, cancerous, and dead for thousands of years.

With all of this considered, Western world leaders are all really thinking foremost about themselves, which anyone would do in their situation, but this is where the line which marks the benefit of the doubt ends. Over yonder as far as the land goes is hideous behaviour, wretchedness, and ineptitude on part of our governments of the most exemplary kind.

It took no more than a war in their own backyard to point out the superficiality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This military alliance which was created in the shadow of precisely such a threat as is going on in Ukraine right now is really just an exclusive gentlemen’s club, akin to the Free Masons – complete with initiation rituals, secret handshakes, and misogyny – who keep their stock and services among themselves.

To pull focus back to the map of Europe with smoke billowing and a deathly orange glow emanating from Ukraine, the whole of NATO will gawk at the destruction Putin is causing in Ukraine without lifting a finger to get involved, but the moment the stipulation is met that some sort of Russian aggression is targeted towards any patch of NATO land, that’s when all thirty members of this boys club will be whipped into a frenzy of rage and loathing, foaming at the mouth ready to fight back.

With how furtively the governments in the West are acting, set against all their large-chested warnings and gesticulations about what would go down if Russia extended its war into NATO territory, it’s difficult not to imagine them all as cartoon characters lunging into a scuffle over the map of Europe that gets blanketed with a white puffy cloud of dust out of which the occasional fist, foot, or neck being strangled emerges before being pulled back into the confusing cloud of cartoonish violence.

That entire block of text up there by no means suggests that this war is a cartoon, heavens no, but instead seeks to highlight how the governments who know the NATO secret handshake view this war. Through the eyes of the common people what’s happening in Ukraine is a real war with untimely and dispassionate death, destruction of livelihoods, and traumas, but through the eyes of governments who run the surrounding nations, with a far enough aerial view, the European continent looks like an elaborate board game with pieces advancing and retreating until they’re knocked off the surface completely.

Unlike the European Union, which has a long list of benefits for example, unrestricted movement within the union, having the same access to education and services as if one were a citizen of that country, and a solid market which unifies trade across those countries, NATO on the other hand is nothing more than a threat which very rarely is followed through. If you attack me then you’re attacking all of us, and all of us will retaliate.

And sure enough, that threat works, it’s currently what’s keeping Putin from advancing his unprincipled army any further than Ukraine. The entire reason this senseless slaughter started was because Ukraine considered joining NATO. So I beg the question, do only NATO nations deserve being defended from military violence, everybody else be damned? Clearly, and this sentiment reeks of Westernism. This selective perception over who does or doesn’t get NATO’s protection/support is tantamount to hospitals in segregated USA treating whites only and turning the rest away at the door.

Ever since NATO was drawn up and signed in 1949, the entire alliance has been quaking in their boots over the threat of a Russian invasion, working themselves up in paroxysms of paranoia. But anyone who is in the political game knows, paranoia doesn’t exist, they really are out to get you, and more proof came from the Soviet Union’s expansion in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.

The entire “Free World”, as they like to call themselves nowadays, have been waiting for a Russian invasion as if it was prophesied long ago, and now that one is happening right in their backyard, they’ve locked themselves in the house and boarded up the windows. Turns out the invasion they were really waiting for was upon their own soil. In their eyes, Ukraine doesn’t count because… well they should’ve joined NATO sooner and embraced the benefits of the West.

All these alliances, treaties, unions, pacts, agreements, summits, anything that requires two parties sitting across each other on an oversized oval mahogany table and signing a piece of paper, goes to show how volatile the West is that it needs constant reinforcement and validation from its member states.

It’s as if the West is being invented all over again each time a new treaty is signed and the heads of every Western nation scramble to get themselves a place at that gigantic table to lay their claim on their presence when it happened.

In this respect the suits who run our countries and ruin our lives are no different to another strange and reviled breed of human who think they’re better than the rest, social media influencers. These politicians zip back and forth across Europe and North America to show their faces at a new treaty signing, alliance forming, agreement making, summit attendance as if it were the new hip, cool joint in town and they document the whole thing with a constant bursting torrent of tweets, pictures, press releases, video feed, and interviews, they’re version of Instagramming your meal as if it were the most important event since Eve took a bite out of the Apple.

Seen through this lens, NATO starts to look more like a boy scout group (one armed with a bottomless military arsenal including nuclear warheads) and claiming to be a part of it carries no more weight than the NATO patch which participants should sew onto their scarves.

Of course, there are certain benefits of being a card-carrying member of the West. Apart from the military protection which I mentioned above, one can see their status instantly rise to stratospheric heights, one will have access to all the leading industries the West has hoarded, and not to mention the right to belittle, dominate, loot, plunder, and condition any patch of land that lay outside the arbitrary and constantly shifting boundaries of the West. But don’t let all of that get to your head because then you’d end up as unmoored from reality as the schizoid ruling class and policymakers who would sell their sisters for a sausage roll without hesitation and who are also in charge of every material aspect of our lives.

In the country that brings me monumental shame to call my home, Great Britain, no mention of the war in Ukraine in the news or through a politician is complete without them stating how Britain is “leading the international response to Ukraine.” These words remain the same across every article, whether it be the Evening Standard (staid), The Times (elitist), The Metro (rubbish), The Daily Telegraph (yuck!), or The Sun (ewww!), all of them are for once in agreement that we’re leading the international response to Ukraine. Too bad they’re in agreement over a lie.

Firstly, why are Britain themselves claiming to be leading the international response to Ukraine? Surely that judgment should be passed by someone else. It’s like telling the people you meet that you’re a good person. That’s not the sort of thing one goes around announcing, rather it’s something that’s bestowed. But really what else is to be expected of a nation that calls itself Great Britain?

Although in contradiction to what I said earlier, the status of spearheading action to the war in Ukraine has been bestowed on Britain by someone. President Zeleneskyy of Ukraine himself. Well, it appears there would be no arguing that would it? If the leader of the very country who is in need of help seems to think that Britain is doing more than others, then truly that must be the case.

NOT SO FAST!

Not to diminish Zelenskyy’s intelligence in any way, but it would appear that he’s fallen for the optical illusions and trickery that are a signature modus operandi of the current regime in power here in Britain. And when he eventually finds out that he’s been duped, I implore Zelenskyy to not be so hard on himself because this cavalcade of charlatans who run my country have more than half its population utterly fooled.

So, let’s see exactly how Britain is leading the international response to Ukraine…

I’ve exhausted enough words already to illustrate that nobody in the West will get militarily involved in the war in Ukraine over fears that the Third and Final World War would break out, however there are still plenty of other ways to help Ukraine, all of which Britain is doing a lazy job at.

Compared to all our neighbouring nations who have an open-door policy to the refugees displaced from Ukraine, we’re the only ones who are making it a headache for both the refugees who want to come here and also for the selfless British people who want to house the incoming refugees. Britain’s notorious disrepute as an immigrant-hating country has always been painfully obvious to everyone, and now we’ve once again seen the clear nationalistic xenophobia which this country is built on.

Our numbers of Ukrainian immigrants who have cleared through the bureaucratic viper’s nest of gaining a visa to this country are still lagging far behind those of other European nations. The Home Office, who handle all matters regarding immigration, citizenship, asylum seeking, and the flow of people in and out of this stinking land, desperately insist with all the tone and demeanour of a Nazi officer claiming they were just following orders, that they’re only following procedure, that they’ve got to properly vet these people to ensure that Russian spies aren’t among them.

All these are pathetic excuses designed to mask the truth that they really don’t want the Ukrainian refugees coming here, anywhere but here. If anyone wanted more proof of the British government’s anathema of refugees, look no further than their current disgraceful move of slapping a one-way ticket to Rwanda in the palm of all current asylum seekers and “encouraging” them to settle there instead. Yes, to Rwanda, who have a sorry track record of human rights violations and a history that’s perforated with genocides, despite our brave and fearless leader Boris Johnson feverishly trying to convince the public otherwise.

We didn’t end up like this overnight, our obstinate repulsion towards anyone foreign and especially non-white was a social brainwashing centuries in the making, finding its explicit roots in the imperial fascism of the British Empire, but let’s be real here, this pathetic aversion to anything different to oneself has been around since apes started losing hair and evolved into the terrible scum-sucking species we are today.

These atavistic narrow-minded ideologies have been pedalled to us by the demagogues in power, targeted to the lowest common denominator which makes up the largest part of the population; the stupid and suggestible.

This broken and racist pattern of thinking that all refugees are evil, whitey is always right, and that the rest of the world is but an extension of the West safely finds refuge in the minds of idiots across all levels of class and social hierarchy, but it’s the working and upper class especially who are like putty in the hands of the Western propaganda machine.

Not to say the middle class are totally immune to this diseased thinking, there are many within this uneven social sandwich who will take up these ideologies with the ignorant zeal of a maggot.

Members of these working and upper classes are indoctrinated by having their economic insecurity played on; fear of not gaining more money to ascend up the social ladder on one hand, and fear of losing money and falling down that same ladder on the other respectively. Which is where the classic “they’re coming here to steal our jobs” saying comes from. Both classes are high off their heads on hope; the working class are dependent on the government to sustain the economy so that they may slowly enrich themselves, while the upper class rely on that same government to keep the value of their money strong and bring them lots more in the meantime.

So of course, there’s cause for concern among both those social groups when the government speaks of malevolent aliens coming to invade their land, wreak havoc upon the economy, and quite possibly steal their women too. This threat is totally fabricated at worst and carelessly exaggerated at best. These fears are instilled early enough, especially during times of political and cultural upheaval when the pillars of society begin shaking in the wind, and then kept alive through figures and statistics of violence, crime and anti-social behaviour that are presented as fact in spite of the statisticians and so-called experts continually stressing that these are probabilistic projections rather than the truth.

Which leaves us in the current scenario where the thinking of the fascist few becomes the thinking of the many, and the ones profiting from this mass extinction of free thought are those who sit at the vertiginous peak of society, who wish to keep power and wealth among the white men and to widen the gulf between the ruling class and every other member of the population, so much that the latter falls right off the face of the Earth.

Oh dear, I’ve fallen prey to the mellifluous charms of a Tangent again, although my excuse is it was a necessary one. Where was I? Yes, Britain’s aggressive self-induced allergy to refugees.

It was only after weeks of opprobrium against the British government’s blindness to the refugees blown about by the winds of war that they finally introduced this scheme that would allow British people living here to house Ukrainian refugees, depending on the size of the household of course. Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? So does communism, but exactly like that much-reviled economic system, it has been executed with all the poise and efficiency of a scoop of sorbet on the pavement melting into a sticky puddle in the blazing sun.

The level of support and interest to this scheme has been overwhelmingly positive, more than 200,000 counts of interest to be exact. The influx of applications has been large, 43,000 as of a week ago on the 8th of April, 2022. 12,500 visas have been granted. But only 1200 have actually arrived in the UK. Interesting.

So, either the refugees suddenly changed their mind while in a boat or plane over the English Channel and turned back, or despite having visas Britain is still making them jump bureaucratic hoops too small for them to fit through. And these aren’t figures the government would willingly divulge to the public, only if someone goes seeking it and plays the Freedom of Information card on them.

It will become abundantly clear from now on that all the British government cares about is optics, how things look like, because without the optical they wouldn’t have the illusion of things being done.

On top of this, the way the government are matching refugees with sponsors lacks a complete understanding of the situation. When they start matching lone women refugees with single men, one can’t help but wonder if the people running this scheme have misplaced their minds.

No thought has been given to the potential for abuse and violence when a vulnerable woman so ravaged by shock is made to share a room and potentially even a bed with a single, lust-crazed man.

Before one of those self-righteous testosterone junkies who are totally oblivious to the problem of female violence raises their idiotic cry of “not all men!”, I’ll do it for you. Of course, not all men have the desire to sexually harass or abuse women, but an enormous proportion of them do, and to dance around this fact without addressing it will only prolong the subconscious misogyny which comes like second nature to most men. It will take the old generation of men to either change their ways or die out and for a new generation to be taught better on how to treat and respect people, especially women, to even begin tackling the problem.

Back to migration again.

Not only does Britain prefer to hold onto their atavistic foreign-hating ways, but they also feel it their responsibility to lecture other nations on how to deal with the refugees. What on Earth am I talking about?

During the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, around the 8th of March 2022, amidst the generally dreadful avalanche of news which slides downhills and buries us deep in the throes of hopelessness was one particular item of debris which rode the crest of this filthy landslide. An unnamed source in the British government had been criticising Ireland’s open-door policy to the Ukrainian refugees, letting them in without visas or the rigorous security obstacle course which usually makes the process of entering a country for a long stay so breathtakingly difficult, adding further that if there’s any rogue refugees or Russian spies among them they’ll find no problem entering Britain through the backdoor which connects it to Ireland.

The original story appeared in the Daily Telegraph (typical) which got picked up and spread around by other newspapers like bees carrying pollen. Although there was considerable amount of criticism against this sentiment from the public, the government chose to zip their mouths. Their silence, on top of their hatchet job at properly accommodating the refugees, spoke a thousand words.

Where the Ukrainian military is defending their home with indescribable bravery, repelling an invasion by an army that far outsizes them in numbers and weaponry, squashing Putin’s so-called “lightning invasion”, what are the nations in the West doing?

Piling pressure.

Come again? What exactly does that mean? Most news pieces on the subject since the war unfurled mention this piling of pressure without any explanation like some terrible joke missing its punchline. It’s also the phrase on the tongues of almost every politician when they open their mouths on the matter, “trust me we’re really piling that pressure on the Kremlin!”

Is piling pressure, whatever that even means, all we’re willing and capable of doing?

Perhaps first it would be useful to understand just what kind of pressure is being piled. Well, there’s the sanctions.

Reading through the list of financial and economic sanctions the European Union have imposed on Russia is like reading all the coal that will go to the misbehaved children on Santa’s naughty list, except it’s plastic rather than real coal so that Russia couldn’t use it to any advantage.

The list is long and prodigious, enforcing “packages” of financial and economic sanctions on Russia as if they were self-destructing Christmas presents. While reading the list one can hear the gut-twisting punches delivered to Russia’s economy; cutting them out of the banking ecosystem of the Western world, halting all trade with them, targeting individuals and corporations who are in cahoots with the Kremlin, freezing assets, forbidding travel, all of which caused the rouble (Russia’s currency) to take a spiralling nosedive into uselessness.

These sanctions no doubt sound incredibly effective as they force Russia into a financial coma by flooding its bloodstream with enough economic anaesthetics to topple a government. Putin’s great nation is now in total isolation from the rest of the world and all these sanctions theoretically will certainly make it unfeasible for the invasion to continue because war doesn’t come cheap.

But are said sanctions really going into effect? The information is readily available in the news and on the internet and the value of the rouble clearly has taken a crazy plunge, but one thing you learn after years of misanthropy and news addiction is that the most readily available information should be viewed through thick lenses of scepticism as its usually only the things institutions want you to know. Things begin to look more suspicious when consideration is given to the fact that these sanctions are only a deterrent, in that they will only last while the war goes on and until Putin’s army is defeated or a ceasefire is agreed upon. The moment the war is over it’ll be business as usual with Russia again. The West are customers of Russia’s goods as much as Russia is a customer of ours, and would we really push someone who is willing to give us money away? No, even if they’re war criminals.

When it comes to transactions like these on a global scale, no money is clean. You could launder this cash a million times over and still the bloodstains won’t come out. Just look at how Britain and other Western countries are boycotting Russian gas (which we rely on like someone with a mild junk addiction) in favour of gas from Saudi Arabia. Refuse business with one fascist regime to shake hands with a religious extremist regime. But the deal makes sense, because while we use Russian gas and continue trading with them, we’re effectively funding Putin’s war machine. It still doesn’t change the fact that there is as much blood money circulating the world as there are red blood cells in blood.

So I pose the question again, are the sanctions really happening?

In a metaphysical sense these sanctions have always been waiting to be put into effect, floating freely in the aether until the pen that signed the prohibitions off touched the paper, but once actualised they found themselves to be lacking in form. These sanctions will never truly take place until they are a permanent state in which Putin’s Russia will exist. Because it goes without saying that no matter the outcome of this war, so long as Putin stays alive, the current problem is never truly over. If someone worse than Putin succeeds him that’ll be a different problem.

What other pressure do you think the West is piling on the Kremlin other than the pausing business with them? Most probably nothing else.

Want to know why? Optics.

Do the bare minimum but make it look and sound like great leaps are being made to fight the problem, this is the Western strategy (or at the very least in Britain who are apparently still “leading the international response to Ukraine”). In actual fact, the West are itching for this war to end so they can get back to trading with Russia without having all the scathing backlash from their respective populations for engaging in business with a fascist war machine, as if they weren’t already one before they invaded Ukraine.

No one understands herd mentality more than politicians, you don’t end up as the leader of an entire country without knowing how to exploit your people’s weaknesses. They see their constituents as one formless grey mass of clay who through the right words and actions can be shaped to their desire. And the docile, lazy, brainless lump that we collectively are let them. There are few among us who resist the hands and influences of our politicians, hardening before we can be shaped so to speak, but none of that matters when an overwhelming head-in-the-sand majority of us with their short-circuited attention spans and total unquestioning credulity to everything spoon-fed to them just lay there and let the whole mass be shaped according to their overseers.

And there could be no better audience for this pageantry which goes by names like “politics” and “diplomacy”.

Politicians understand intimately that people respond best to imagery. Text is dead. Nobody is reading this. And if by chance someone is, you really aren’t reading because there’s no pictorial accompaniment. This is the Eternal Age of the Image, and no one has any idea what kind of super-medium it will evolve into next.

If a well-written piece of text can set off colourful fireworks in your brain, a powerful image will give you pause through the magnitude of its explosion. The Image is both memorable and expendable, where compositions, landscapes, facial expressions, and scenes both harrowing and delightful can cut deep into the mind of the person viewing it to etch themselves onto its furthest surface. To say the image is a language in itself wouldn’t be an understatement, it speaks in a tongue that doesn’t even need one. But The Image is everywhere, it permeates all aspects of being from the sub-atomic particle to galactic super-clusters, hence making them as valuable as breath – it can be instantly replaced by another yet can’t survive without it.

Down on street level, the seemingly meaningless and disposable images which incessantly flash past our eyeballs at the speed of light, like a chaotic kaleidoscope in a state of perpetual collapse and relapse, are on the political level tools of consolidating power which have the ability to rake in money and allies alike. This is the reason why no news story on politics is delivered without the imagery, often officially photographed/edited/curated, to cement its impact. In the eyes of politicians, images have a monetary value all of their own where a bad image will lead to a loss of support, money, and power, while a good image can result in a big boost in the aforementioned three, so look sharp and smile for the camera.

Far from only being political currency, the image is a means of waterboarding us with the proof that the people in power exist. A desperate all-out assault on the senses to keep the subjects of the images constantly burning in the minds of the people. Were Baudrillard still alive today he’d be tearing his hair out over this because this is textbook hyperreality on mescaline.

Those hundreds of billions of images of every regime leader from Boris Johnson to Vladimir Putin to Joe Biden to Emmanuel Macron to Xi Jinping to Kim Jong-un to… plaster every surface of both digital and ostensibly ““““real”””” reality in and out of their respective countries, on the internet, in the newspapers, on billboards, prancing around on TV, their voices oozing like pus out of the radio, and even without the explicit presence of the image, the laws and policies of society are drawn up, agreed, and enforced in the image of their beliefs. There are as many independent increments of power as there are infinitely reproducible copies of their image.

No one understood this better than Joseph Stalin who had an unbreakable hold on the images of himself circulating around both inside and outside the USSR, so much so that the edited and touched-up images of him which made him look younger, his arms longer, his hairline less receding, even his relations closer with certain people, these became more real than the man himself. Literally photoshopping himself into the minds of the people and his grip on power, that was how he was able to hold onto control for so long until his anti-climactic death.

But that was yesterday’s news and politicians in the 21st century have turned Stalin’s weapon over its head, shooting it upside down, to great effect. Where Stalin was using the media to make himself look like an omnipotent demi-god, the politicians of today try to look as unflattering or boring for the camera as inhumanly possible.

Articles both online and printed, exposés, features, and news bulletins in the stuff corporate government-funded news organisations pump out like a factory producing Coca-Cola bottles are littered with these supposedly candid photographs which catch politicians off guard like a deer in the headlights of the camera. The intent of these images won’t become instantly apparent as it’s hidden behind the unattractiveness of the politicos caught in the photograph, but after you notice them a few thousand times they look like an unmistakable attempt at humanising these politicians. Showing the people what’s underneath the suit so to speak. It’s a herculean task indeed, just how do you make a race of cyclopses look human? But you couldn’t blame them for not trying because as I type this a deluge of strange, contorted photographs of major politicians and heads of states with facial features twisted into a confused orgasm under the camera’s flash are coming hot off the presses all around the world.

It’s an ingenious strategy however, make them look like the average people, and create yet another illusion that the people who are savagely raping society are actually the furthest thing from serial rapists.

Same sentiment applies to pieces written for corporate news goliaths which seem harsh or critical of the state. It’s but a textual extension of that optical illusion mentioned above, except here the motive is to make it seem like a free press who can write whatever they want exists.

I’m fully aware these words sound like they’re being typed on the edge of a paranoid freak out but stick with me for a moment.

All major newspapers which are disseminated in a way that they reach the lion’s share of the population, some may claim to be self-regulating or independent, are government funded. For a fascist state that calls itself a democracy, it is in its best interest to make itself look as much like a democracy as possible. This democratic mask allows the jackals in power to orchestrate their dirty fascist work behind the scenes in the form of constant surveillance of its people, inching the nation closer and closer to a police state enforced by racist, sexist, homophobic cops, injecting the bad heroin of fanatic hate-fuelled nationalism into every vein of the population and turning the people into mindless projections of the views of the state, making exploitation standard practice in all industries, and practising a perverse form of population cleansing by making it astronomically harder and more expensive for the poor and vulnerable of the population to survive so that they fall through the cracks of society and eventually die out.

Where some countries in the world are overtly totalitarian, almost every single one is totalitarian in everything but name.

So then major news publications and organisations by dint of being funded by the government will actually write what the state tells them to. Stories which appear critical are this way because the people who are being written about are in ultimate control of how they are portrayed, and they want this lousy portrait painted of them in the news (as befits the situations) to maintain the sturdy illusion that the press is independent and on the people’s side.

The journalist then is just another meaningless and easily replaceable screw in the titanic machinery of power because they write what their editor tells them to, their editor enforces what is told by his/her boss who then in turn is under the thumb of their supervisor, and this inverted pyramid of control rises all the way to the top where the money ultimately comes from. The news organisations may be signing the journalist’s paychecks, but that money is supplied by the people who they are supposedly holding accountable for their governing of the country.

Spiralling back around to the war in Ukraine and the West’s penchant for pageantry during this dramatic upheaval.

The reason why Britain themselves and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine have deluded themselves into thinking that Britain is “leading the international response to Ukraine” is because Boris Johnson plays the game of political pageantry with indefatigable commitment and dedication, strutting down the catwalk and showing off all side of him with the exhibitionism of a flasher.  He’s saying all the right things, showing his dishevelled face in all the right places, but is he doing all the right stuff?

His recent visit to Ukraine to meet President Zelenskyy in Kyiv puts his act into stark naked perspective.

He sends some anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine to help them repel the Russian horde. He goes to visit the warzone to see for himself the destruction Putin’s army has spread there, something which no other leader of the Western world has done so far. He talks to the people, shakes a few hands, poses each time the camera is aimed at him, and shows that he really stands with Ukraine. Sure.

Meanwhile, what do he and his government do back home? Apart from making it inordinately difficult for the refugees from Ukraine displaced by the war to enter this country and criticising other nations for their open-door policies, he belittles and reduces the severity of the war by comparing it to, wait for it… Brexit.

It was ““reported”” in The Independent on the 21st of March 2020, when Johnson spat these ignominious words out of his mouth at a Conservative Party speech “[It is in the] instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom” using the Brexit vote to leave the EU as a “famous recent example.”

If I’m reading this right, in Boris’ mind the systematic unprovoked invasion of a country by a dictator resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of people (innocent civilians included), millions of people having to flee their lives and homes and rough it against the deadly uncertainty of a harsh world without a roof over their heads, and the destruction of the culture and fabric of an entire country is comparable to Britain wanting to leave the EU over a xenophobic desire to isolate themselves from foreign influences and people.

Those weapons which Britain has been sending to Ukraine, well there’re not the only ones as there’s Lithuania, Poland, France, the USA, and Estonia who all unlike Great Britain express shipped weapons to Ukraine within 24 hours of the invasion. His supposedly brave and selfless visit to Ukraine was nothing more than an opportunity to make an impression before anyone else. Cameras were omnipresent for the constant documentation of the visit for the world to see and the entire visit had all the candidness of an open-casket funeral.

Is this the kind of ally Zelensky wants? One who pledges all his support only while everyone is looking and denies it when the moment comes to act. But Zelensky is in the difficult situation that he has to accept all the help he can get.

He is also under the same hex that Boris Johnson has put a huge proportion of the British population under, enough to ensure that the people and his party keep him in power. Johnson is actually the greatest magician since Houdini, just as hypnotic to watch (albeit people watch him in the way one would look at a car crash) and can charm the people into following him into quicksand. But he’s also a crooked charlatan totally devoid of the grace which made his magical predecessor so alluring.

His empty promises and lofty, unfeasible goals are disguised by his elaborate song-and-dance routine which tricks people into thinking this bumbling joker could do no wrong. He presents himself as a blubbering seal which makes people underestimate him, all the while he masks an aloof and insidious criminality underneath all this gesticulation. The British people missed his sleight of hand which allowed him to make the leap from Mayor of London to Prime Minister of Britain and his constant hoodwinking of the people has kept that oversized chair he sits in warm ever since. One can’t really blame Zelenskyy for being bamboozled by the ways of Boris Johnson then, when he singlehandedly sandbagged more than half a nation.

And this doesn’t apply just to Boris, put anyone in his place and the same would hold true – except for some queer variations in character – because one doesn’t attain the highest seat of power in the land without shedding all their humanity and integrity along the way. Replace him with his opposition and the situation would be the same. Change the country beneath the leader’s feet and things would remain exactly as they are.

I mentioned earlier in the book that the outdated methods of military colonialism are long gone, it just isn’t feasible in such a world that’s such a hotbed for nuclear escalation, geopolitics, backstabbing on an international scale, and most importantly in a world that is desperately trying to convince people that its nations are progressive. Instead, the dominant powers on this planet rely on their culture to spread across the world like a sexually transmitted disease in a brothel and replace that of other nations. Colonialism lite.

Language is an aspect of culture which also gets bacterially spread once it enters the air. You can see its transmission in action today where countries all over Europe like Spain, France, and Sweden to name but a few, get students learning English early enough so they pick it up quicker.

To give optimism my dues here, it’s wonderful that with them learning English there’ll be more communication and understanding, they’ll be able to translate and maybe pass on their cultures to us, and of course, they will be able to work here if they know the language. But that also begs the question why we in Britain and the USA aren’t being encouraged to learn their language just as they are to learn ours? Well, it’s because these two English-speaking countries see themselves as the head honchos of the world. Why should we learn their language when they’re already learning ours?

Western hegemony has such a grip on the world that English is being downright forced on everyone else as it’s virtually impossible to make it internationally without it. Industries, educational facilities, and services (at least all the good ones which are hoarded here in the West) all require English, which leaves everyone else from outside English-speaking countries with an ultimatum: either learn the language and get on board or get lost.

As I’ve said, I’m not suggesting that everyone abandons learning English, that’s just the way things are now and we might as well reap the benefits of increased communication between strangers, but I am encouraging English speakers to think twice about the perceived language privilege they feel they have and wonder if they have the right to expect everyone else to go through the herculean effort of learning the new language in order to understand each other while putting no effort into learning theirs.

What does this have to do with the war in Ukraine, I expect some people to be thinking right about now. Quite a lot, especially when it comes to the West addressing a lot of the things going down in the warzone.

While English-speaking countries are shoving their language down everyone’s throats, back in their own land they refuse to use it properly. Apart from those supercilious and airheaded citizens who criticise foreigners for speaking “broken English” while these monolingual imbeciles speak it themselves on a level that barely passes for communication, what I’m really referring to is the way the West is dancing around the subject of the Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Despite the mountains of evidence which, verbal testimonies from the Ukrainian citizens on the run aside, include images of bombed hospitals and theatres which sheltered civilians, photographs of mass graves, and the obvious state of ruin the country lay in, the Western press and politicians still attach safe words like “alleged”, “accused”, and “unconfirmed” to Putin’s war crimes. How much more evidence do Western governments need before these alleged war crimes become real? Here’s how much, if the crimes were committed against their people and on their land.

This stillborn language isn’t just a product of the West’s self-centred stance on the atrocities of the war which aren’t credible unless they say so, even though the journalists who are covering this war couldn’t be any further removed from the situation. The impotence of such language is very much rooted in the nature of diplomacy itself.

It’s all talk and no walk. Over fears of enraging or god forbid, offending, Putin and his cronies, politicians in the West will only obliquely comment on his war crimes. Why are we extending such courtesy to him? If the West aren’t going to take any meaningful action to help Ukraine over fears that their military boy’s club which they call NATO might be threatened, the very least they can do is directly address what’s happening in Ukraine.

By keeping the proper words caged within us, we’re letting Putin get on with his barbarity as he pleases because by denying his acts their true label, everyone remains in the dark about whether war crimes are actually happening or not. These diplomatic dance words like “unconfirmed reports” or “accused of” though at face value sound not too distant from the truth, in the mind cleave an impassable gulf between what the word is conveying and the truth. Such is the power of words that they sound like a bunch of intelligible gibberish when they roll off the tongue but once they burrow themselves into the mind of the listener, they take on a life of their own, and enough of these words put together in just the right way can rearrange all the furniture of the mind. Willingly or unwillingly, far too much doubt is being created over the veracity of Putin’s actions, because politicians are adding unnecessary prosthetic limbs to the truth and refusing to acknowledge that this unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a war crime in itself.  

And while we’re on the subject, there’s talk going around that if Vladimir Putin gets tried and sentenced in the International Criminal Court, it’s being pushed by those who want to see him on the stand that he gets a 20-year prison sentence. Well if there was any sense of justice in this world the man would be held guilty for murder in the first degree of all the lives lost directly because of this war. No less than capital punishment befits such a person.

As the Russian army reduce Ukraine to rubble and human lives to pulp at the behest of Putin, what exactly are they hoping to find underneath the debris? What Putin thinks he’ll find at the nucleus of this war is the ultimate culmination of a life led by fascism: purity and power.

Although one is a phantom to the other and cannot exist together. No power is pure and absolute, and no total purity is powerful (except when it comes to drugs). But fascism is a means for those twisted enough to reconcile the phantasm between the two and materialise them in one space together. Fascism may mask the impossibility of the task, but it doesn’t solve the paradox. That’s not going to stop the fascist from running headlong after it, and if they had their way they’d move from one country to the next using their bladed power to hack away at a nation until it resembles the purity of the doomed ideal they chase, continuing the process until they’ve run out of countries at which point they can go planetary if the technology would allow them. Every dictator has their ideal, Putin’s is to reanimate the corpse of the Soviet Union and unite the whole universe under his perfection.

But where is the Soviet Union? More to the point, where is the cadaver of the Soviet Union buried?

The obvious answer looks like it is buried with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow, but how does that then explain the spectre of communism that has hung over the former Eastern bloc for decades after the fall of the USSR? The shift from communist subjugation to something that vaguely resembles freedom wasn’t easy for Eastern Europe who by that time had a pretty bad case of Stockholm syndrome for a dead captor.

So it would seem that every piece of land which the Soviet Union claimed as its own would be its burial place.

The next step then is to figure out how to unearth the corpse of the Union.

Pick and shovel? Nonsense. Why contract an army of diggers armed with shovels when you can bomb the ground open and use a real army armed with assault rifles to make sure no one interrupts the process? But he won’t find the entire motherlode of his beloved remains in Ukraine, the bones of the Soviet Union are scattered all across Europe like the fossil of some vast dinosaur and Putin’s excavation job doesn’t end with Ukraine. He’ll probably move onto Poland next and blow the ground to bits right underneath NATO’s noses to dig up a femur.

Those who think that Ukraine is the beginning and end of his expansionist crusade and sorely mistaken and ill-equipped to make it through the rest of the month, because Putin will find a way to push NATO’s buttons, advancing his army progressively westwards and rather than take action NATO will either do a silly diplomatic dance to try and de-escalate the situation and if no other alternative is available they’ll just cut Poland out of the deal and watch it burn just as watched Ukraine. 

Once Putin has finished his continental grave-digging job, the question is how preserved will he find the corpse? What sort of necromancy will he have to pull off to revive the Soviet Union and return it to its former glory?

Time doesn’t exist below ground and even if the corpse was perfectly well-preserved, if the vast time difference between above and below ground doesn’t totally dematerialise the Soviet Union from exposure to the toxic atmosphere of the Earth, and if Putin does indeed manage to bring it once again into the realm of the living then there is a huge possibility that it’d commit suicide because the one-trillion-volt culture shock would be insurmountable.

But that would require Putin to reverse the Soviet Union’s death first, and that in turn relies on him finding all its pieces. And that will be an impossibility because all he’ll really find is a big load of nothing. The Soviet Union became worm food a long time ago and even the bones have dissolved into the soil. There’s nothing to dig up and Putin’s entire invasion is based on a schizoid vision of amounting to the same level as the man his grandfather used to cook for and bringing back some outdated regime run by the same man.

When one takes a step back from the confusing flurry of this war, the military and diplomatic back and forth between the West and Russia, the true nature of this whole conflict becomes painfully crystal.

It’s all really a pissing contest on an international scale between Russia, USA, and China, more specifically Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, and Xi Jinping. And everyone else is being pissed on.

This pointless conflict amounts to gestures and taunts between the three aforementioned superpowers. It’s a game of Battleships between them and the globe is the board. At that level of leadership, they are blind to the human consequences of war and are only concerned about the political and financial. Their expansionist imperialism is a monstrous symptom that feeds on greed, power, wealth, and narcissism, all the hoofprints of the fascist stampede.

time/space

Where there is matter, there is war. Every atom in the universe is involved in its own personal war against entropy. Everything moves in perpetual reverse motion, swimming against the water of space, carried by the currents of time that are remorselessly carrying each particle in the cosmos towards the abyssal condition of statelessness.

This process of ridding something of state is one which lasts over a perennial amount of time, the decay of time itself. What is happening in Ukraine right now is an acceleration of that process, molesting lives and matter with entropy, all under Putin’s mission of discrediting Ukraine as a state.

How does warfare in a universe that’s already at war with itself? It comes on slow and strong like a heavy illness and wreaks havoc during its stay, but once its momentum slows down due to the diminishing replication of the viral cells which make up this cosmic illness, the immune system of the universe takes care of the rest.

Of course, there are always profound losses during war, but from the vantage point of outside the observable universe, it’s as if nothing ever happened. The infernal explosions and the deafening ceaseless racket of gunfire register as silence in outer space. So, to borrow and rework the question The Temptations asked in 1970, what is war good for in a universe that’s already trying to wipe us all out?

Absolutely nothin’.

The gun is a weapon that exists in space. It’s made of metal, plastic, wood, and other ballistic materials that allow it to be operated and carried with ease. Its intricate internal mechanism makes it an ingenious piece of deadly design. It has an aesthetic unlike anything else and its image certainly has left an impression since the very first person got shot with it.

The gun is also a weapon that exists on time. Not in. Its projectile-based rounds (although many guns are capable of shooting explosive and other terrifying variations of rounds too) can travel up to 1,422 meters per second – a speed achieved by the .220 Swift round. One of the most fascinating points of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is that the faster something travels through space, the slower it travels through time.

When the bullet is shot out of a gun, the projectile rips through the air, travelling at breakneck speed, while dragging itself with a snail’s pace through the mud of time, but the bullet doesn’t know this. Besides having no sentience, from the death-projectile’s perspective time would continue to march along at a pace that would be considered “normal”, but by virtue of its velocity compared to that of its observer - the shooter - the bullet would experience time slower than them. Almost as if time is exerting a much greater force on the bullet, where it not only has to fight against the air resistance in the spatial atmosphere but also the temporal one.

A soldier armed with an assault rifle spots a civilian, a man in around his mid-thirties wearing dusty blue jeans and a tattered grey untucked shirt, who is sneaking down an alleyway trying to get away from the firefight. The civilian doesn’t know he’s been spotted and quietly continues to get away at a crouch while hugging the remains of a demolished wall. Raising his rifle dispassionately, the soldier takes aim, and pulls the trigger.

BANG

Emerging with the ceremony of a fiery flash from the tip of the barrel, the bullet cuts through the air zipping towards the unfortunately oblivious civilian male. So, we know that the bullet is travelling through space, dealing quite effortlessly with air resistance. We also know that it’s moving slower through time as due to its crazy speed time becomes more concentrated on it. Like a snowball barrelling down a steep hill, the further the bullet travels through space, the greater becomes the divide of time between it and its observers (the shooter and civilian, yes, the civilian is also an observer despite him being unaware of what’s coming) as it gets more charged with time. Think of it as potential energy which the bullet collects as it travels through space/time. When the bullet hits the civilian in the back of the neck, all that temporal potential energy it had collected through its insanely quick travel between the tip of the barrel and the base of the civilian’s brain stem gets released into the thing it strikes. That dense concentration of time the bullet fought through and gathered during its journey is then disposed onto the civilian, killing him as much through the instantaneous surge of time the bullet forced on the civilian as the grotesque injury caused by the projectile’s impact. Thus, the damage the bullet does is as temporal as it is spatial.

Well, what about being shot at point-blank range? That depends on where the gunshot wound is inflicted. But let’s for the sake of argument say that it’s a point-blank shot to the head, well, then the physical spatial effect of the bullet far outweighs the time-damage it inflicts, but that curious destabilisation of time is still present as there is still a distance, however short, which the bullet must travel.

So, what of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers rampaging around Ukraine with these weapons which make time go sideways, shooting with will at anything that moves? An illimitable amount of these individual time disconnections and sudden reconnections is wreaking total havoc on the force of time which collectively flows over Ukraine. The fuse is being tripped over and over again, thousands of times a day, and the circuit can only handle so much. Plainly, once the war is over, Ukraine will feel like time has gone cold, approaching absolute zero. This effect of timelessness is the same stifling stillness one feels when walking into a place which has known indescribable trauma.

Another grave threat to time that looms over Ukraine like the outline of a spectral mushroom cloud waiting to be filled is the potential usage of nuclear weapons and how it’ll throw space-time haywire.

With how unhinged Vladimir Putin has become through the course of the war it’s becoming concerningly clear that he’d rather reduce Ukraine to a radiated hole in the ground than concede defeat. His expectations haven’t been met, his plans foiled, some of his best regiments scattered and running with tails between their legs, and Russian planes falling out of the sky like petrified birds, Putin’s blood has all but evaporated which has left him in a psychotic state of absolute delirium, irrationality and animality. Like a mongrel dog backed into a corner, there’s no telling what he might resort to and the possibility of the Great Atomic God awakening from its long slumber is becoming very real.

If Putin is unable to conquer Ukraine then he’ll most probably be pressing the big red button, and we’ll all be toast. Then it’s just a question of whether he’s sending the black angel of death strapped to an intercontinental ballistic missile or dropping it out of a plane.

Right after that surreal moment of serenity which instantly follows the detonation, time will stop moving. The fireball of the explosion will immediately vaporise everything and everyone in its path. And they’re the lucky ones. The shockwave will level half the city to the ground, and rupture eardrums and internal organs all around. No one will be safe from the severe radiation burns which will melt skin off the bones and turn everyone into walking medical exhibits. Then comes the hellish nuclear fallout which will make Dante’s journey into the inferno seem like a sunny day out in Regents Park. The air turns into poison as it becomes polluted by irradiated dust, smoke, and ash. The land becomes infested with radiation, uninhabited for decades, unable to support plant or human life. Cancer goes around like it’s the common cold. All current and new life is contorted out of shape through bizarre mutations that are worse than death. And a tall mushroom cloud will stand over the site of the explosion as a reminder of who truly rules over this planet.

All areas affected by the nuclear bomb are put into an exclusion zone not just in space but also in time. People will avoid that bit of the country for generations. So will the steady ticking of time. For a little perspective, it won’t be for another 20,000 years that the grounds of Pripyat, Ukraine, the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster which went down in 1986, are safe to live in. Where nuclear bombs are designed to release the entire load of their radiation in one deadly go, the cosmic bile which spilled out of Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl seeped into the ground over a prolonged period thus rendering the land comatose.

Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two Japanese cities where the Atomic God made its first ugly appearance at the end of WWII, are habitable and relatively safe with low levels of background radiation, there was a time when the explosion sites were locked in steep limbo and couldn’t be approached by person nor time. Despite it being safe to live there, the two regions are still lagging in time compared to the places around them, not just in an economical sense but also due to the cumbersome weight of that historical trauma the cities must carry on their backs.

And that was in 1945, which by today’s standard of super-accelerated digitalised survival seems like an irrelevant eternity ago. The nuclear bombs of today make Little Boy and Fat Man (the ones dropped in Japan) seem like cheap firecrackers. They’re the ripest fruits of humanity’s unceasing desire to cause as much irreversible destruction as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Nuclear-powered countries around the world have also been stockpiling these death-devices since those primitive days like a squirrel hoards nuts for the winter. Here are what the numbers look like…

·     Russia: 4,477

·     USA: 3,708

·     China: 350

·     France: 290

·     UK: 180

·     Pakistan: 165

·     India: 160

·     Israel: 90

·     North Korea: 20

And these are just the ones in active military inventory today, excluding those that have been retired, also excluding the fact that this accredited data could be totally incorrect.

Unsatisfied with the imbalanced power they already hold, humanity is continually trying to overthrow the laws of nature, and this is the closest we’ve been to the coup finally beginning.

Once war breaks out over a piece of land, time becomes allergic to it and must keep its distance as if it’s some diseased patient. Much like an organ under attack by cancerous cells or an aggressive virus, its movement in time almost halts as the malignant entities begin eating away at it. And once the incessant shooting and explosions stop, it becomes agonisingly clear just how unmoored from time the region had become. The meticulous evisceration of buildings, the extermination of life, and the scarification of land flings the place so far back in time that it would take decades for it to return to where it was before war ravaged it. With a broken infrastructure, ruined landscape and traumatised population, the territory becomes a region that is forever playing catch-up with time.

Of course, if you have the money for it then you can skip the queue and rebuild the city/country back to tip-top shape in under a decade. But does Ukraine have that sort of money, and will the West be willing to extend that aid? I think not.

Thus, war isn’t just a geographical deterioration, but a temporal one too.

Even during the microscopic war against COVID-19 which preceded the war in Ukraine and spread all around the world, time seemed to have taken a long hiatus. And once that miniature substitutional war was over, humanity jumped right back to waging full-scale war again.

With the fervour and zeal that humanity went back to war made it look like a heroin addict shooting up after a long and excruciating withdrawal. Although this restlessness to get back to what we’re best at isn’t just down to our murderous nature but is also a universal characteristic of the atoms that make up our very being.

Our bodies are made of the very same atoms that were violently packed together in stars, floated around the universe as arcipluvian space dust, or jettisoned out of nebulae billions of years ago in the infant universe. No wonder every piece of matter on Earth, supercharged by the hubris of humanity, is so dysfunctional.

We have sunk to new and horrifying depths of chaos indeed where we impose instant death upon everything that moves around us. We created god just so we could steal the job back from it and undo all of creation as we please.

We’ve shanghaied this whole planet and are acting upon it like a bacterial infection, disconnecting it from the biology of the rest of the universe. Space might as well not even exist beyond Earth. But the cosmic immune system is trying to fight this infection, suppressing us under our own undoing. The role of creator and creation have become indistinguishable. Who made who? If humanity created god, then did we also create the universe? Our random and unprovoked outbursts of violence, our treacherous societal machines that are designed to exploit and dish out abject misery upon the many in the grand service of the privileged few, our solipsistic hubris, our design flaws, and the creation of a world suffering from permanent psychosis so as to disguise psychological freaks outs and make logic and reason seem demented are the obvious efforts of a species of discounted gods trying to fashion themselves in the image of a creation they inherited from a greater god which they, in turn, created themselves.

The universe isn’t unsympathetic and empty, we are.