F. W. Maitland (English Law Historian -1850 – 1906)
*
So – more quoting this week. Maybe there just no
longer seems much point in writing out what is obvious when it has been so very
obvious for so very long.
At the weekend I got into a poignant discussion with
my young cousins’ Ukrainian girlfriend. A sparklingly intelligent young woman,
making the most of her displacement and trying to live a normal life while
worry clearly accompanies all her thoughts and actions concerning her
internally displaced family back in Ukraine.
OF the many interesting things she said, there was a
central point that many would do well to remember in relation to the hysteria
over migrants and in particular the government’s mad obsession and ludicrous
incompetence (not to mention criminal waste of money) over the laughably insane
Rwanda scheme. In fact it is a point that we’d do well to keep front and
centre of any discussion relating to migrants or refugees, debate now derailed
by the rabid right wing. That point is that she would not be here if it were
not for the situation in Ukraine.
Do we really need to be reminded that people do not
just up- sticks and risk their lives or leave their homes and families without
good cause? It seems we do.
The reason I tie in this family snippet with the
quote above is many fold but most urgently this –
Maitland was writing not just pre-WWII but pre WWI.
In fact his seminal works were written in the C19th and yet the point he is
making (and this is very broad brush) is that there may be and possibly is
always a point in time when we have the option to change humanity’s direction
of travel. History is what has happened but history is happening all the time.
At some point in the not too distant future – will historians point to this
current mess and the chaos in the UK and US – and say – ah yes – at moments up
to and during 2024 when opportunities arose to halt the descent into the hell
of all-out global war – no one seized those opportunities? No one attempted to
divert the cataclysm.
I’ve already alluded to the Tory Party’s addiction
to Russian oligarch money and – when he was PM - Boris Johnson sneering at the
military advisors who warned him of an imminent invasion by Russia. While no
one would impute Chamberlain with Johnson’s venality back in September 1938 –
it’s hard not to think of the challenges surrounding Hitler’s claims over The
Sudetenland and his land grab in Czechoslovakia and not draw comparisons with
recent activities in Crimea and now the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
At what point could Hitler have been stopped? At
what point Putin?
Are we at another Sudetenland crisis? Have we past
it already?
At the moment – all the West are doing, while more
Ukrainians die, is preventing Ukraine from losing outright. Putin is not being
stopped and voices are growing concerning how to placate him.
Really!
I would regard myself as a pacifist – broadly – but
even I know that if someone is smacking you around the head with a baseball
bat, you don’t stop and wonder if you tied a ribbon around the bat and offered
them a cream cake – they’d stop and go away.
And if we do let this situation slide – we need to
be clear – any conflagration in the 21st century would make WWI and WWII
look like a drunken brawl after a bad wedding – just look at the horrors of
Gaza. Yes The Somme is a stain on humanity in terms of trusting young soldiers’
lives lost – but then what is 13,000 dead Palestinian children? Think of the
image in the early days of Putin’s madness – of the pregnant young Ukrainian
woman with the smashed hip being stretchered away from a bomb site screaming to
be allowed to die.
So let us draw on that 19th century wisdom and apply it to the humanitarian apocalypse we may be stumbling into – today – tomorrow or next week because surely – we don’t want to make that type of history again.