I am, like most of us who are far from Ukraine, neither a military strategist nor a specialist in geopolitics. I witness, helpless, the massacre of a people of which I knew almost nothing and of a country which would be the stake of a rivalry between Europe and Russia, which would like to be part of a Europe which does not don’t want it, and don’t want to return to Russia, which would rather destroy it than lose it. Like most of us, I am against individual or collective violence, I have never killed or hit anyone and I always try to overcome disagreements by telling myself that “the opposite of a deep truth , that is another profound truth” (Bohr).
I am, like most of us, more or less paralyzed by the unbearable images of this war which merge with those of other, more distant wars, which we had forgotten. I repeat to myself that the best way to pacify the world is to cultivate my garden (do my job well, be attentive to the beauty of the world, help others if I can), summon the great wisdoms that invite us to fight violence without taking up arms, read all the scholarly analyzes that explain to me the genesis of this conflict (American stupidity or greed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the blindness of NATO, the imperialist madness of Putin , etc.), the main principles of the world order, the fear of nuclear weapons, etc.
In short, I believe, as a good artist of peace that I am in times of peace, that everything must be done to avoid war (demilitarization of the world, reform of the UN, scientific and cultural collaboration, fight against poverty and climate change), but I can’t get rid of this reality: we’re not in peacetime, we haven’t been since 1945. We enjoyed a rotten peace that others paid for and continue to pay the price (Palestine, Vietnam, Syria, Yemen, etc.), and we will not be more so when Ukraine is a neutral country, devastated, because there is no peace without justice.
If it is true, as some pacifists try to convince themselves, that it is better to live on your knees than to die standing, how is it that Ukraine has not capitulated, has not given its all following the aggressor what will he end up having? Because no country, no human being is free if it abdicates before force, no neutrality will protect it from the strongest. Bernanos, who had fought the Vichy government, wondered at the end of the war how long it would take for France to recover from this moral defeat that was collaboration.
The calculation of the Europeans and the United States to buy peace by refraining from actually defending Ukraine (have economic sanctions and the expulsion of diplomats saved a single life so far?), and by supplying it with just enough arms to prolong its resistance and its massacre, signs their moral and political defeat: whoever has not defended democracy in a country can no longer claim to be the guarantor of democracies in the world.
There was a possibility of averting or delaying the Russian invasion (as all NATO critics repeat), or limiting its scope by securing the skies over Ukraine, but like nothing has been done, there will soon be only ruins in Ukraine, and everything will be played out elsewhere until a new empire defines the rules of the war which is everywhere without being global and which reduces the human beings to be only pawns on the chessboard of the forces which, without knowing it, undertook to possess the planet, even if it were lifeless.
Repentant pacifists, like Simone Weil and Edgar Morin, entered the resistance because defensive violence is moral. What can a Quebec writer do to combat the violence of aggressors in Ukraine? In the absence of being able to realize my dream (thousands of people marching bare-handed on Ukraine), ask Canada to both intensify humanitarian aid in Ukraine, maintain diplomatic relations with Russia and support the peaceful occupation of Ukrainian skies. And read again The fall of Camus which tells how a lawyer, by refusing to rescue a drowning woman, committed the greatest injustice.