Ukraine conflict is telling westerners what war actually is

The acrimonious fact is wars are an ongoing phenomenon on planet earth and we witness wars as a never-ending monopoly game at one place or another.

The wars I have observed in my lifetime are mostly for peace i.e. making the world a better place. West spends surmounting energies to develop a unique war narrative to justify war, having even crafted titles for them, such as the war against terror, the war for peace, enduring freedom, etc.

For me, war can never be justified due to human suffering no matter how flashy catchline is used — well, by the Western media — to pretend otherwise. The narrative to describe death and destruction is cynically biased — maybe that is the priority of global capitalism.

I used to wonder how a mass killing can be watched in a presidential office as a ceremony and how collateral damage can be cherished. I always had this itch to know how come the West is so numb to human atrocities. My internal suffering ends when I discover that the West has all its emotions intact. Not only do they consider war an orchestrated atrocity, they also feel the pain of the victims — and I only got this revelation after the Ukraine situation.

Today, the citizens of Europe can review their viewpoint that not considering the devastations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Palestine as ‘catastrophe’ could be an insensitive act because these wars led or engineered by the West had different meanings for them. These wars were somehow or the other actions to mitigate global terrorism and people killed in them were just ‘numerical figures’.

Ukraine war is an important issue for Europe, especially for eastern Europe. Dozens of think tanks and policy institutions are organising discussions on it. Since it is being done on a massive scale, the demand for aspects/angles is very high — like how to approach Ukraine war with a different angle in the next seminar. As a student of the human meaning-making process, I am overwhelmed with the sheer number of ideas under which Ukraine is being discussed. I am collecting all the ideas. Maybe one day I will replicate them for the mass killing/collateral damage in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc; but maybe I will never be able to do that because neither do I have the most powerful narrative-weaving machine nor the resources for that.

Let’s come back to the unique ideas to discuss the same topic excessively and intensively. Yesterday I attended a seminar ‘Feminist Solidarity and Ukraine war’ in order to learn the angling thing mentioned above. The seminar advert says: “Since Russia’s full-scale imperialist invasion of Ukraine was launched by Vladimir Putin on February 24, Putin’s speeches, Russian state propaganda and the actual massacres and rapes committed by the Russian army have revealed the genocidal and misogynist character of this invasion”.

Apart from the brilliant idea to discuss a war with feminist and LGBT perspective, just see the words and their usage such as an imperialist invasion, massacre, rape, misogyny, genocide — meaning the discussion will be Russian invasion is imperialistic so it cannot be considered war for peace or war against terror and it is just for the sake of glory and power. And since war for glory has genocidal tendencies and male chauvinistic elements, here comes the idea of feminist solidarity.

I am not taking a side or justifying war; I am just going through an overwhelming experience that how powerful media and global capitalism behind it can create truth. I am fully aware that the first victim of any war is truth, so both sides have their own truth but what matters is that whose truth is being woven by the biggest and finest loom that will sell.

It was an interesting conference which well discussed the misogynic aspect of war and how Russia is using different ethnicities other than mainland Moscow to fight on the frontline and how Russia is funding almost all the anti-leftist organisations in the world. I am attending these conferences almost once per day on average and the diversity of the topics and angling is a true learning experience.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 18^th, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.