The massive, mad destruction being inflicted across Ukraine brings to mind this passage from Italo Calvino, which I'd quoted in an article I wrote about George W. Bush's Guernica-like destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.
"The inferno…is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
As detailed in the article, Bush's forces bombed medical centers (to prevent bad PR from pictures of wounded civilians) and slaughtered countless innocent people after declaring the entire city a "free-fire zone" where anyone moving could be killed.
We can only pray that Putin stops short of the frenzied, murderous incineration that Bush wrought upon Fallujah, in the illegal war he launched after months of deception, threats, outright lies and misinformation – exactly, point by point, as we've seen in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine. Everything Putin has done so far in Ukraine, Bush (and Blair) did tenfold in Iraq. Yet both Bush and Blair walk free, living in vast wealth and comfort, treated as honored and honorable elder statesmen, even after openly committing what the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime, encompassing all others in its wake": a war of aggression. Perhaps Putin took note of this as he plotted his own war of aggression: "They got away with it; why can't I? Maybe after I've killed hundreds of thousand of innocent people in a senseless act of moral depravity, as Bush and Blair did, I too can get a hug from Michelle Obama. And a knighthood from the Queen."
All three of these men – and their myriad followers, accomplices and sycophants – are of the inferno. (As are those now bombing Yemen into starvation and near-genocide, an ongoing atrocity armed and abetted by Obama, Trump, Biden, Cameron, May, Johnson and their parties.) Even as we focus on the plight of those under assault in Ukraine right now, doing whatever possible to help stop the wanton carnage and aid the victims, we must not close our eyes to the inferno elsewhere: within our midst, within our past, within our present; perhaps even within ourselves. We must heed Calvino and refuse to accept the inferno, wherever and however it appears, and instead make space for all that is outside the hell we create for each other on earth.
