It has been fashionable in some circles in recent
times to talk of the ‘post-truth society’. Epistemologically, that falls at the
first hurdle as the invocation of such a society would require us to take its
existence as a truth, thereby nullifying its validity, but that – to quote the
poet Shelley – is a tale for the long winter nights.
Truth is also, famously, the first casualty of war,
gunned down as it leaps out of the trench to death. It certainly caught the
first volley of the war in Ukraine, where the story of battle swirls around
like a dust storm, with small, momentarily appealing truths flashing by to be
grabbed at and caught.
As I clamber over the trash-mounds of the media, I
read that Putin is finished and that he has only just started. I find that the
Russian economy is teetering on the brink of annihilation and also that it is a
powerhouse, out-performing its NATO enemies due to increased oil revenue. Apparently,
this is both an unwinnable war and one Putin had won from the start. It’s like
the board game Scrabble; you wait to see what letters you pick blind, then you
try and make an intelligible, legitimate word from them.
Now, a rebellion that lasted for far less time than a
cricket test match. Is this psy-ops by Putin, or did one of the – surely unstable
– mercenaries earning the Czar’s shilling really come swashbuckling his way
almost to Moscow? Were the Western media supposed to get the message that the
calculating, chess-playing, judo brown-belt Vladimir Putin is a better bet with
the nuclear codes than a man who commands drunken battalions for money from whomever
will pay him for his time and violence.
Trouble anywhere in the Balkans usually bodes ill for
Europe, and with the added involvement of NATO, we must now be seeing a proxy
war. I must look out the definition. If definition is still operation, that is.
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