THE SHAME OF UKRAINE

The spectacle currently unfolding in Ukraine has all the moral clarity of a three-card trick performed under a flickering streetlamp by a man who keeps insisting he is a magician of the purest integrity. One is invited to stare at the glittering promise of democracy, rule of law and civilisation while the real action happens somewhere off to the side, in a private house on the outskirts of Kyiv where men in uniform appear to have been improvising their own version of due process. A fourteen-year-old boy emerges wrapped in a blanket, eyes wide with the particular astonishment of someone who has just discovered that the adults in the room have been playing a rather different game from the one advertised on television. The local unit of the Azov corps, we are solemnly informed, was merely running a temporary deployment facility. Temporary, one assumes, in the same sense that a black hole is temporary: it swallows what is fed into it and does not trouble itself with exit strategies.

This is the moment, of course, when the Western chorus is supposed to clear its throat and explain that the whole business is Russian propaganda, or an isolated incident, or the regrettable but inevitable by-product of a just war against the forces of darkness. The same voices that once dissected every alleged Russian atrocity with forensic relish now discover an almost monastic capacity for silence. Ursula von der Leyen, that tireless lecturer on European values, is nowhere to be found. Emmanuel Macron, ever ready with a vision of strategic autonomy, has likewise taken an extended leave of absence from the subject. The moral accounting, it seems, is suspended the moment the victims are Ukrainian and the perpetrators wear the approved insignia.

One might almost admire the consistency if it were not so thoroughly self-serving. For years the same people have lectured us on the necessity of supporting Ukraine without qualification, as though critical thought itself had been declared a form of collaboration. The invasion of February 2022 is treated as Year Zero, a clean break after which history began and all previous complications were rendered irrelevant. Never mind the 2008 Bucharest summit and its casual promise of NATO membership. Never mind Maidan, the Donbass, the Minsk agreements left to wither on the vine, or three decades of eastward expansion that Moscow had, with tedious regularity, described as a red line. To notice any of this is to be accused of moral relativism, as if recognising complexity were the same thing as endorsing tanks rolling across borders. It is not. It is simply the refusal to accept that the universe operates according to the narrative conventions of a Marvel film.

Even if one grants, for the sake of argument, that Vladimir Putin carries the overwhelming share of responsibility for the catastrophe, the question remains: who benefits from its indefinite prolongation? A war without end is an emergency without end. Billions circulate with the transparency of a Swiss bank account held in the name of a shell company. Leaders who no longer face serious electoral scrutiny discover that the moral high ground is an excellent place from which to issue demands while remaining immune to reciprocal examination. In this climate, the man who has most skilfully positioned himself as the indispensable face of resistance is Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

There is a particular species of political actor who thrives in the gap between rhetoric and reality. Zelenskyy has perfected the art. He tours Western capitals with the practised urgency of a man who knows that the next tranche of funding depends on the next carefully staged appearance of resolve. Meanwhile, at home, the machinery of mobilisation grinds on with a brutality that would have drawn howls of outrage had it been occurring in any other country. Desertion is treated less as a human response to impossible conditions than as a disciplinary problem to be solved in private houses with the lights kept low. Elections are postponed indefinitely, the better to preserve national unity, which is the traditional euphemism for preserving the current arrangement of power. Corruption scandals surface and are absorbed with the practised shrug of an administration that has learned how useful a permanent state of emergency can be.

To call this man a war criminal is not to claim moral equivalence with those who launched the invasion. It is to observe that the systematic coercion of one’s own population, the toleration of extrajudicial detention and the conversion of a national tragedy into a personal brand all sit uncomfortably with the language of democratic virtue he so freely deploys. The same Western elites who can barely contain their contempt for bureaucratic overreach, institutional capture and the casual disregard for public consent within their own borders become models of deference the moment the subject turns to Kyiv. They see the system clearly enough when it inconveniences them; they develop a sudden, convenient blindness when it is dressed in the colours of a preferred cause.

The boy in the blanket is not an aberration. He is a symptom. He is what happens when a narrative hardens into dogma and the people managing the dogma discover that scrutiny is optional. Demand independent investigation and one is told one is playing into the enemy’s hands. Demand elections and one is accused of undermining the war effort. Demand that the same standards applied to Russia be applied, however unevenly, to Ukraine and one is informed that the situation is too serious for such pedantry. The seriousness, of course, is precisely why the pedantry is required.

George Orwell once observed that the trouble with most political language is that it is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. The current discourse around Ukraine has refined the technique to an almost industrial standard. The lies are not always outright fabrications; they are more often strategic omissions, selective outrage and the careful curation of which faces are allowed to appear on the evening news. The result is a public conversation so carefully managed that a fourteen-year-old emerging from an Azov facility can be treated as an inconvenience rather than a warning.

The only coherent response is to insist on the obvious. Accountability is not a luxury to be postponed until victory. Elections are not a reward for good behaviour but the minimum condition of legitimate government. Leaders who have grown comfortable with emergency powers should be required to seek a fresh mandate rather than treat the continuation of conflict as a form of personal tenure. And the man who has most thoroughly embodied the gap between the rhetoric of civilisation and the practice of coercion should not be shielded from the same moral vocabulary so freely applied to his opponents. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has presided over a system that has, by its own admission, produced facilities of the sort that spat out a traumatised child into the night. That is not the record of a pure defender of democratic values. It is the record of a war criminal of a particularly modern and media-savvy variety: one who understands that the camera prefers a certain kind of heroism and is prepared to supply it, while the less photogenic realities are handled off-stage.

The irony is almost too neat. Those who spend their days denouncing the democratic deficits of European institutions become models of uncritical loyalty the moment the same methods are deployed in a cause they have chosen to sacralise. They have not changed their nature. They have merely changed the border. The rest of us are left to connect the dots that the official narrative prefers to leave scattered.

THE LIVER DOES NOT CALL BRUSSELS

The European Union, that grand confederation of good intentions and better stationery, has lately been reminding us that history does not so much repeat itself as develop a mild stammer. One had rather hoped, after the last century’s more theatrical experiments in central planning—those involving uniforms, mass graves and the occasional five-year plan that somehow produced neither the five nor the plan—that the continent might have learned to keep its hands off other people’s constitutions. 

Apparently not. The old disease has returned, not with jackboots and torchlight parades, but with briefing papers, procedural motions and the soft, insistent language of “harmonisation.” It is the same malignancy, merely better dressed and fluent in three official languages before breakfast. We once believed the tumour had been excised. In 1945 the visible growths were cut away; in 1989 the remaining metastases in the east were starved of oxygen. People of a certain optimistic turn even spoke of the end of history, as though the organism had finally achieved permanent remission. What they overlooked was that the diseased cells had never quite gone. The belief that a centre should know better than the periphery, that nations are inconvenient local colour rather than living tissues, that citizens require constant guidance against their own untidy preferences—these ideas survived in the deeper marrow. They merely waited for a more respectable host. The European Union obliged.

A healthy organism, as any biologist who has not yet been appointed to a Brussels working group will tell you, is not a dictatorship of the central nervous system. The liver does not telephone the pancreas for permission to metabolise. The individual cell goes about its quiet business of division and repair without waiting for a directive from the Commission. So it is, or ought to be, with societies. Families raise children, companies invent things that people actually want, towns mend their own roads, and nations attend to the few matters that genuinely cannot be handled lower down—borders, defence, the occasional outbreak of piracy. When one level begins to devour the others, claiming superior wisdom and an unlimited mandate to correct every anomaly, we are no longer watching governance. We are watching oncology.

Poland, that perennial canary in Europe’s coal mine, has lately provided the diagnostic scan. The government of Donald Tusk—Brussels’ favourite pupil, ever eager to earn a gold star for rule-of-law homework—has found itself in a brisk constitutional scuffle with the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. A judge whom the president had declined to swear in announced the suspension of the Tribunal’s president; police materialised; the actual president of the republic turned his aircraft around mid-flight and hurried home, employing language not customarily found in the Treaty on European Union. Liberal legal scholars who ordinarily have little time for the Tribunal’s previous leadership nevertheless observed that the legal basis for the suspension was, to put it gently, non-existent. One side calls it restoration of the rule of law. The other side calls it a coup with better lighting. Both may be speaking more truth than they intend.

There is a certain historical symmetry that would be almost comic if it were not so thoroughly exhausted. Poland is the country where the last great European catastrophe began in 1939, the country subsequently shared between two competing totalitarian brands, the country whose shipyard workers later helped crack the Soviet edifice from within. If any national immune system still carries the antibodies, it is the Polish one. That the current drama should unfold under the approving gaze of the European Commission only heightens the irony. When the ballot box and the existing institutions refuse to produce the preferred result, one simply rearranges the institutions. The vocabulary has been updated—no more talk of living space or class enemies, only of “shared values,” “disinformation” and the urgent need to prevent democratic backsliding by means that look remarkably like democratic backsliding—but the underlying appetite remains familiar.

The people driving this process are not cartoon villains. That is the truly unsettling part. They sincerely believe they are the grown-ups in the room, protecting the citizenry from its own provincial instincts. They are the sort of competent, well-briefed individuals who would have made excellent middle managers in any number of previous regimes, provided the stationery was of sufficient quality. Totalitarianism has never required monsters. It requires only people convinced of their own rectitude and a system that has gradually removed the awkward checks that once stood in the way.

There is, of course, an alternative. It involves the radical notion that a state might confine itself to the few things only a state can do, and leave the rest alone. Security, justice, borders, defence—those are the sovereign functions. Everything else can safely be returned to the organs that evolved to handle them: individuals, families, companies, towns. A smaller state, but one that is actually present when required, rather than omnipresent and largely useless. This is not nostalgia for some golden age of nationalism; it is simply the organisational logic of any organism that intends to survive. Distributed systems tend to endure. Centralised ones tend to produce impressive monuments and unfortunate body counts.

One remains, against considerable evidence, mildly optimistic. The organism has been this way before. It carries the scars and, more importantly, the memory. Information now circulates outside the approved channels with irritating efficiency. In Poland, in Hungary, in parts of France and even, occasionally, in the more restive corners of the older member states, people are beginning to notice the pattern. They may not yet have the precise vocabulary, but they feel the pressure of the growing centre. Antibodies are stirring. Whether they will prove sufficient this time is the only question that matters. 

History, as Clive James himself might have observed while reviewing a particularly earnest television documentary, has a long memory and a dry sense of humour. It would be a pity if Europe provided it with another punchline.

SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Sir Patrick Stewart, who has died at the age of 86, spent a lifetime proving that a bald head could be more expressive than most actors’ entire faces. Born in 1940 in the unpromising surroundings of Mirfield, Yorkshire, he emerged from a childhood marked by the usual post-war austerities and an abusive father, only to discover that the English language, properly spoken, could be a form of armour. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and stayed long enough to make the Bard’s verse sound less like homework and more like a series of elegant threats.

Hollywood eventually noticed the threat. In 1987 he was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a role that required him to sit in a chair, issue measured orders, and occasionally raise one eyebrow with the force of a photon torpedo. American audiences, unused to an Englishman who did not wave his arms while speaking, took to him immediately. Picard became the thinking person’s action hero: a man who preferred negotiation to phasers, Shakespeare to shouting, and a cup of Earl Grey to the nearest available bar. Stewart played him with such grave authority that even the most absurd alien costumes somehow acquired dignity by proximity.

Not content with one franchise, he later donned a wheelchair and a slightly more benevolent scowl as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films. Here was a man who could make telepathy look like the natural extension of a well-run seminar. Between these two iconic parts he continued to return to the stage, reminding everyone that the man who once commanded the USS Enterprise could still stop a theatre dead with a single pause in Macbeth or The Tempest.

His private life was conducted with the same brisk efficiency he brought to the bridge. Multiple marriages came and went; the last, to Sunny Ozell, appeared to stick. He spoke openly about the violence of his childhood, turning personal darkness into public advocacy without ever sounding as if he expected a medal for it. Knighthood arrived in 2010, an honour he accepted from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II with the dry amusement of a man who had already been addressed as “Captain” by half the planet.

Stewart’s great gift was seriousness without solemnity. He could intone “Make it so” as if the fate of the galaxy depended on the precise cadence of three syllables, then undercut the grandeur with a glint that suggested he knew perfectly well how ridiculous the whole enterprise was. He openly sent himself up on Extras with Ricky Gervais, and in animated form as Avery Bullock in American Dad, as well as a marvelously flamboyant theatre director on Fraiser. In an age of actors who mistake volume for intensity, he remained the master of the quiet authority that needs no amplification, without taking himself too seriously. 

He leaves behind a body of work that will continue to make starship bridges and mutant academies feel improbably civilised. The rest of us will simply have to manage without that voice telling us, in the most reasonable tones imaginable, that everything is under control. It never was, of course. But for a few hours at a time, he made us believe it might be.