We must not get used to war dead
IT’S EXTRAORDINARY how quickly we adapt to the unthinkable. And we have had quite a lot to re-frame as “normal’ in recent years. Take the pandemic. How rapidly lockdown became simply the way things were. Shops closed? Nothing odd about it. Not allowed to visit friends? That’s fine too.
The invasion of Ukraine was a terrible shock and it was only a couple of months ago. But already it seems ordinary and – shaming though it is to say this – something one can park at the back of one’s mind.
Maybe it’s a kind of instinctive survival strategy, this ability to not think about things you can’t do anything about.
The sight of bombed apartment buildings is now a familiar sight in any news programme. Even the Ukrainians who continue to live in these destroyed cities seem to have found a sort of normality, a way of getting through the day.
On one news programme a couple of elderly ladies sat outside what was once their home, boiling up water for tea on a makeshift camping stove.
Children were playing in what was left of a playground. A woman walked through ruins checking her phone. A man brushed
broken glass from his window sill. Remind yourself that a few weeks ago these people were leading lives exactly like ours.
With this in mind – our self-preserving amnesia in the face of a crisis – it was interesting to read something by C S Lewis (of Narnia fame) in a non-fiction book he wrote during the Second World War called The Problem Of Pain.
“My own experience is something like this,” he said. “I am progressing along the path of life… absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my fancy today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in a newspaper that threatens us with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down.
“At first I am overwhelmed and all my little happiness looks like broken toys… But the moment the threat is withdrawn my whole nature leaps back to the toys.”
That mirrors my experience. Probably yours too. But in recent days the grim photographic evidence of war crimes in Bucha has grabbed my attention again.
It seems unlikely at present that Putin or any of his henchmen will find themselves in the dock. But history tells us that many who commit war crimes do eventually get called to account. Look at the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War and the ongoing work of the International Criminal Tribunal into Bosnian war crimes.
I’m horrified by those pictures of bodies lying in the streets of Bucha. And we shouldn’t turn away.
Even from the comfort of our armchairs we can bear witness. It’s evidence.