World War III
by Oleksandr Boichenko
Every ten years or so, I love going on a literary tour abroad. However, I do not enjoy participating in the events of said tour. I actually prefer to participate in literary events in Ukraine. Abroad, it always ends up being too mechanical, like sowing seeds in winter. Meaning that you can probably sow, but is anything going to germinate?
Such trips are often useful otherwise: they serve as a kind of research on public opinion. So, having no belief in my own educational mission and lightheartedly answering their questions depending on the weather, I do try to remember those questions. How do they see us? What are they curious to know? What are they worried about? Do they have the skills to tell regular information from hidden (or not) Kremlin propaganda in their media?
Thinking back on the summer of 2015, I must admit the remarkable efficacy of that propaganda. To be more precise, the efficacy has always been high, but that time, its latest result caught my eye. Surely, one could say that such a ‘study’ is very subjective: different countries, different – sometimes completely random – people, so trying to narrow their words down to a common geopolitical denominator would mean practicing utter methodological voluntarism. I reckon, however, that the fact of repetition of a certain theme by different people in different countries and different situations alone represents the same certain tendency.
Coming to Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland, I was ready to discuss Ukrainian right-wingery in general and homophobia in particular, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and anti-Jewish pogroms, our unwillingness to federalize and the “discrimination” against the Russian language and its speakers—not to mention our inability to fight corruption, fix our roads and eradicate casual rudeness. But no one asked me about any of that, except for, perhaps, “discrimination”. I did, however, have a few conversations about the possibility of World War III. Two cases were especially notable.
The first one took place in Ostrava. After the event, my new acquaintances and I were sitting at the “Absinth Club”, tasting Švejk’s kontuszowka and continuing our discussion about the situation in Ukraine. A drunk young Czech man from Prague passed by our table. Overhearing our conversation, he stopped, asked who at the table was from Ukraine, and then proceeded to hazily look me in the eyes and say, “I am very afraid you will be the reason for World War III”. Jakub, my new friend from Ostrava, blazed up, “What do you mean, they will be the reason? Are you trying to say that Ukraine attacked Russia?” “No, I know it wasn’t Ukraine,” uttered the drunk young Czech man, “I’m just very afraid that World War III will start because of Ukraine.”
Fine, the Czech man from Prague was drunk, young, and at a bar. But the Polish man from Wroclaw was old, sober, and in a library. He also asked me, “Aren’t you afraid that the conflict in Donbas will lead to World War III?”
Additionally, there had been a couple informal conversations on adjacent topics in Brno and Košice. The conclusion I have reached based on all those conversations is quite sad. No, our European neighbors mostly do not consider us to be at fault and certainly do not justify Russia’s actions. But they are tired and they are scared. Unable to convince them that Putin is a good guy, the Kremlin propaganda is ever more successfully inoculating Westerners with the idea that Putin is bonkers and, if necessary, will indeed turn their ancient cities into radioactive dust. Thus, many of them, blushing internally, are ready to sacrifice Ukraine – in order not to provoke the aggressor too much.
And this is where I lose my mind. Because I do not know about others, but Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles – while World War III remains a fiction – should remember fairly well how World War II began. How, unwilling to provoke Hitler too much, the ‘great Western countries’ forced Czechoslovakia to accept the Minsk… no, sorry, the Munich Agreement in 1938, which was supposed to prevent war and in reality only fired up the territorial appetite of Mr. Adolf. And how from September 1939 until May 1940 England and France, instead of following through with their agreement duties towards Poland, conducted a hybrid… no, sorry, a phoney (sitting, strange – different languages have different terms for it) war against Germany without combat, even though they had almost five times the capacity of the Germans at the time.
Later on, during a trial, a field marshal named Wilhelm Keitel confessed that in 1939 Germany had no chance against the Allied powers. But the inaction of one hundred and ten French and English divisions (against the twenty-three German ones) served as a signal for Hitler that he could invade Warsaw punishment-free. And then came the turn of the Western countries, which were very afraid that a big war could break out because of Czechoslovakia or Poland and which until the very end tried to please a Führer who was bonkers, choosing disgrace over war and ending up with both war and disgrace.
Therefore, despite my relative lack of love for literary events abroad, I do occasionally engage in them. Whether anything germinates or not, I attempt to sow in those heads a single thesis: when someone is afraid of World War III, it is normal and understandable. What is, however, neither normal nor understandable is when those afraid of it do everything in their power to ensure that it does eventually begin.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandra Boychenko