The Distorting Mirror

If you look at yourself for ages in a mirror, your face tends to look weirder and weirder until you no longer completely recognise yourself, and age helps the process. It’s still your face, but not as you are familiar with it.

That’s not a perfect analogy for Mr Putin’s speech of justification as he annexed the four Ukrainian oblasts the other day, but there’s a similarity. Like an occasion when two people recount the same sequence of events and interpret them completely differently, it was an entire narrative of world history from a divergent point of view to most of ours. Liberalism, a philosophy that has its basis in the idea of individual human uniqueness and worth, becomes in this story a threat to what is ‘really’ human, and a handmaid of colonialism: ‘satanic’. Now, not only does a country taking over bits of someone else’s and then complaining about ‘colonialism’ look like something of a case of pots and kettles, but we know that when Russia got the chance in the great and heroic age of colonialism it behaved in exactly the same way as the West. It had little in the way of overseas possessions, preferring to absorb its neighbours, but Alaska – a Russian colony until it was sold to the US in 1867 – underwent an experience of state-capitalist resource extraction, enslavement of the native population, slaughter and disease that was absolutely indistinguishable from that of any other imperial territory, and only smaller in scale because not many Russians went to live there. But everyone believes they’re special.

Nevertheless, the hard reality is that this perverse and self-serving narrative resonates across much of the world, and, like all great lies, it isn’t empty of truth. It holds up a mirror in which we see ourselves distorted, but still horribly there. We, the Western imperial powers, did do all those things, and they are remembered: they are one powerful reason why many African countries are actively hostile to the Western account of the current struggle, whose story on the surface might seem so obvious to us; or at most they can’t see what it has to do with them. It’s a contest between distant, declining imperial regimes. Why should they suffer for it? Haven’t Europe and the US brought them enough trouble already? We may have begun, slowly, painfully, and with much controversy, to face up to the uncomfortable facts of Empire, while Russia very much hasn’t, but that cuts little ice.

Gradually and often sorrowfully we grow towards the truth, which is the apocalyptic movement of the Holy Spirit. If we ever get through our current moment of danger – and at this exact time I find it hard to imagine how we might – we should pay attention to this lesson, as well as the others it is teaching us.