If history rhymes, then today it sings. It sings in many voices, harmonising till the pitch resembles the whistle of a bomb as it drops from on high upon us. We know the victims of history’s ballad already – they are you and I, either now or in the past or in the future. We are in the throes of another ‘Nintendo War’ (as Peter Lamborn Wilson, in reference to the Gulf War, once so eloquently put it), where we watch from afar and near as our fragile lives are toyed with.
This post has been written, forgotten, re-written and then remembered, shifting perspective and tone across every new iteration. In the grip of a major event no one can remain certain about the travails of history, let alone such outdated concepts such as truth. The pace of the invasion of Ukraine has outstripped both the imagined horizon of its possibilities and its appended commentary: conflict brings out the surreal nature of the world, stranger than fiction. I find it impossible to keep track of exactly what I should think of it. I wish, in times like these, to have the safe temporal distance to know history properly.
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The flurry of articles, podcasts, YouTube videos, or plain old conflict correspondence-to-TV was mobilised as soon as the conflict began is reminiscent of an orchestrated PR campaign. The grinding, orotund, surreal cogs of international media coverage satisfies our urge to simultaneously be horrified and entertained. Well, most of us will admit to being deeply horrified, with our ideals of universal humanity shattered. Few of us will admit that the spectacle of ongoing conflict somewhat sustains us. Whilst ostensibly focused on the plight of the Ukrainians, the timbre of these conflict dispatches is a reflection of ‘our’ broader anxieties: about Russia, about war, and about the prospect of history.
History has become a central rhetorical tool in the conflict. It has been used to justify Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, which was part of the USSR and the Russian Empire before that; although public historians have resisted the historical claims that leads to. In other ways, historical allegiances have also crept into the foray: not only have those American hawks (who have achieved a wondrous about-turn on Putin) taken their old battle-lines, but those who have a historical allegiance to Russia, like the ANC who were aided by the former Soviet Union among other soviet states, now support them. There is an absurd idea floating about that Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is an anti-imperial move, and thus should be supported by those with anti-imperialist programmes.
But apart from these forays into history, which is part of the modus operandi of modern invasions, the most disquieting aspect for many people is how history has not ended. The ascendancy of Western liberal democracy, which Francis Fukuyama in The End of History claimed was ‘the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution’, has ironically ended. Its decline had been in the making ever since its primacy was pronounced after the fall of the Soviet Union (and thus, history reserves further irony for Fukuyama’s absurd reading of Marx and Hegel). Premature histories are the only ones that sell well.
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War is often the most dreadful prospect of history, if not the brutal culmination of all its material desires. But what is truly terrorizing is history's indeterminacy. It may rhyme, it may sing, but you never know what verse lies ahead. This ambiguous relationship to the past is constantly disrupted by our collective memory. I began by suggesting that there is something eerily reminiscent about this point in history to others, not only in the global possibilities of war or how once again freedom teeters on the edge of ‘Europe’, but how for many of us in the ‘Third World’ countless conflicts have marked our fate and we have paid the price for them, whether they are our doing or not. In this part of the world we have grown up instinctively knowing that history is uneven, that some lives are more valuable than others. That history informs us while its making jars us is a dialectic that perhaps will forever remain unresolved.
That does not detract from the world-significance of this conflict, it just helps us to better recognise it, to better articulate a position from which we can be both sensible and critical. What that position is or ought to be escapes me. There is no doubt that this is a major historical rupture, one that will define the global stage for many years to come. Or not, I may be falling into the wide ambit of contemporary events, unable to exercise proper historical judgement. This just may be my Fukuyama moment.
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