Commenting on theIliadthis story of the Trojan War, the philosopher Simone Weil praised its “extraordinary fairness”, which “had no imitators” and which notably presents the victors and the vanquished as “brothers in the same misery”.
A few centuries after Homer, Aeschylus, in his tragedy The Persiansdepicts the grief of the Persian court and the king of kings Xerxes, who mourn their compatriots who lost their lives in the Battle of Salamis. Now, the play was performed in Athens in 472, barely eight years after this victory at Salamis, in which Aeschylus himself, like many of the Athenians seated in the stands, had participated. This Greek audience was therefore invited both to take pride in the victory won over the powerful Achaemenid empire, but also to sympathize with the pain and mourning felt by the enemy.
In A taxi to Tobruka film directed in 1961 by Denys de La Patellière, we gradually see the emergence of friendly relations between a German officer of the Afrika Korps and the four French commandos who took him prisoner, which makes it a very human film next to which today’s Hollywood war films seem profoundly barbaric, in which raging GIs massacre totally dehumanized enemies left, right and centre.
If I invoke these three works, it is because it is a humanist way of speaking about war, which does not give in to Manichaeism any more than to betrayal. Neither Aeschylus nor Dionysius de La Patellière celebrate the enemy, much less would they have wished for his victory. Nor do they forget his crimes. They simply recognize that, in the opposing camp, there are men just like them, with their parents, their wives and their children, their doubts, their suffering and their fear of death. They recognize their humanity.
I haven’t seen the movie Russians at War by Russian-Canadian director Anastasia Trofimova, but from what I’ve read it doesn’t seem to be a propaganda film extolling the power and resilience of the Russian military.
Why then did Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland speak out against its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), saying it was “not right” for public funds to be used to broadcast such a documentary?
This statement by the minister is tantamount to a threat of defunding and must be denounced, because it is clearly an abuse of power on her part. If she were speaking as a private individual, it would be her strict right to consider that TIFF should not broadcast a documentary film about Russian soldiers. But as a member of the government, she should respect a duty of reserve inherent in her office, especially since the festival does not come under her ministry at all.
Her public statement necessarily and deliberately leaves room for doubt: is she speaking on behalf of the government to which she belongs? Will those responsible for TIFF be directly or indirectly sanctioned if they persist in their choice of programming? Will TIFF itself see its public funding reduced in the future? When it comes to censorship, vagueness is sometimes more effective than laws that limit freedom of expression or creation.
I must also highlight the courage of the festival’s management, who refused, despite pressure from the minister, to cancel Trofimova’s film. But the effectiveness of censorship remains. A few hours later, TIFF management announced that the three public screenings of the documentary scheduled for Friday to Sunday were “suspended” due to threats. As if that were not enough, TVO, Ontario’s public broadcaster, announced that it would not broadcast the film as originally planned.
Beyond the censorship aspect, Minister Freeland’s remarks raise a second problem, which is of a completely different order. In this war, she says, there is no “moral equivalence” between the Russian aggressor and the Ukrainians who are only defending themselves; in which she is right. However, in order to achieve a peace settlement in the future, it is necessary to recognize a certain equivalence between the two belligerents.
For if the enemy is only recognized as an enemy that must be defeated, the war can only be ended by its unconditional surrender or by its annihilation. This absolutist logic that was that of the Allies during the Second World War was then justifiable because of the nature of the Nazi regime and that of the war that opposed them to it. It is, however, not realistic in the face of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, if only for this reason that it is more than improbable that the Ukrainians will succeed in defeating the Russians so decisively that they will force them to surrender unconditionally or even to agree to end the war on the basis of a status quo ante.
Whatever the outcome of this war, there will come a time when both parties will have to sit down at a table to negotiate an end to hostilities. However, in order to negotiate, it is imperative to get out of this logic where there is no equivalence between them.
From this point of view, by presenting Russian soldiers, who, as individuals, certainly had no say in the outbreak of this war, as “brothers in the same misery” as their Ukrainian counterparts, the film Russians at War is certainly a step in the right direction, one that takes us out of sinister Manichean logic and allows us to reconnect with our common humanity.