Droning On: Are You Tired Yet?

Everything Is Connected (Part Two)

This is a short post. It’s late and I am tired. You’re tired, we’re all tired.

I have encountered a neurasthenia this year that I had never thought could be possible. Age? Possibly: I am actually older now than I was when this war started (this war that has been waged since 1654). War fatigue? It would be selfish to agree, when some of my friends in trenches and in fields do not have the luxury of admitting to tiredness.

Even if there is not a drone buzzing above your home, even if there is not a tank at the end of your garden, its turret pointed over your head and firing over your roof, does not mean that you are not at war. I have taken so much for granted in my life, and thought it unnecessary to attend to gaps in my knowledge. I guess the things I regret most are the things I have neglected to learn: I can play the piano, and have performed jazz in the West End, but never pressed myself to be superb (many of my relatives have been outstanding professional musicians, so I reckon I could have become half-decent had I exerted myself and my wrists and pulled my fingers out).

I learned languages and loved to do so, but never realised how important it was to know Ukrainian until late.

I focused on artsy stuff and fascinated myself as a sideline in espionage, though I was too devilishly handsome to blend in the background as a certain type of intelligence agent. I even shaved my head to divert attention from my lineaments, though even this did not work.

I did not learn what war meant until recently. I mean this intellectually, in a way that still has meaning. When I was teaching in a Russian secondary-school many years ago, and the pupils there explained that they were terrified of NATO and wanted to learn how to fire rifles to defend their country, even while being besotted with me (okay, it’s too late to consider a different word other than ‘besotted’), even then I did not take that seriously.

Now I am left unable to define what a war is, how it is being fought, or the motivation for that. I have been trying to consider heterology recently and what this means for us, for Russia, and for information and its manipulation. I am probing at the (typically for me, shallow and generalistic) supposition that there is an issue in Russia with heterology: of course a starting point is that Russia is other from Europe, but the issue is how that difference is managed. This is not a binary opposition, but a complex relationship of continual inversions where the Russian is permanently assimilates and is in conflict with the anti-Russian. Russian traditions of eschatology and contemptus mundi also feed into this, and for now the Ukrainian is the focus of the anti-Russian. However, from the previous sentence it becomes clear that it is not just Ukraine. It is about us. We are not safe.

Everything is connected.

This war is not about Ukraine. This is about us, our lives and systems, our types of knowledge which, even when we are too lazy to improve them, are still our own.

So when Ukrainian soldiers fight, they protect us. Not just our homes in Ukraine, but our homes in England, in Germany, across the world.

It’s high time to stop thinking about Ukraine over there, other from us. We have to understand what this war means to us, how it is already here, in the murder of Dawn Sturgess, their agents running around our streets with Novichok and polonium, the attacks on our government and infrastructure, and on our cognitive systems. It’s high time to consider what they will do next.

Photo credit: Hell Hornets

I was honoured in November to host a post by Daria Zhydkova, an UAV pilot for the Hell Hornets, a reconnaissance unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Reconnaissance drones save lives, replacing some highly risky on-the-ground operations and reducing the deaths of people in Ukraine.

They also are essential to us. So please do not think of the Hell Hornets as a distant group fighting an abstract war. They are real, and fighting for us. I know we are all tired, and I am, er wittering on: but please consider supporting them, even a small amount, if you can.

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