The images are looping both on my TV and in my head. Extreme sights and sounds: of violence, of pain and of those left on the docks, of those who are told their lives are worth less than other lives as they all face to death.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
The station platforms remind me of those of the Second World War. It was as a result of this war that the United Nations was born. Today, Russia sits on the Security Council and yes, Russia even has a right of veto there. What to remain doubtful.
Much has been learned in recent days about Putin’s relations with the West. On the West’s compromises with this dictator, the imprisonments, the poisonings, the perversions of globalization, the global investments of his friends, the Russian oligarchs. Today, everyone is crying wolf.
I have the strange feeling of living the war live, of seeing human rights evaporate before my eyes, like snow in the sun. To see death live. The Boutcha massacre is reminiscent of the Guernica massacre, the Srebrenica massacre in all their horrors.
Srebrenica. I am thinking of the war journalist Paul M. Marchand. To his punchy story: Sympathy for the Devil. I wonder what he would have written today, he who lived and carried on his body and in his soul the horrors of war. He told us: he spoke of the devil. But have we heard his warning that he paid the price for his youth and his innocence? Paul wrote: “For 10 years, I have seen too much, felt too much, accepted too much and not hated enough. Since then, I have been sliding towards obscurity and seclusion. Between obedience to life and the madness of memories, I am several dead old. »
Paul, who has seen too much horror, took his own life in 2009. He won’t be the one to tell us this time. This time death is live, we will have to manage it alone. A question: what will we do when we are all witnesses?
Of course, there are wars that take place in silence, even in the indifference of the West and humanitarian crises that have remained on the sidelines. But the war that has fed my television for endless days seems to have another meaning. This war is a European war. It carries another meaning and its victims are more humanized.
However, for the past two years, people have been talking to me about war, the warrior vocabulary has been imposed on my daily life: the war against the virus, the war against COVID-19, the war against Omicron… I have always been uneasy comfortable with this metaphor. Why talk to me about war when we are facing a virus?
I remember newspaper headlines. On December 23, 2021, in the Montreal JournalChristian Dubé: “We are at war with Omicron and he has no qualms”. The PressMarch 26, 2020: François Legault called for unity on Wednesday, the COVID-19 pandemic “risks being the greatest battle of our lives”.
Not to mention the monster demonstrations in Ottawa of the “freedom convoy”, a protest movement against the restrictions linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this convoy was to make the Trudeau government capitulate on its health strategy. The vocabulary used raises even more eyebrows today: health tyranny.
I was deeply uncomfortable with the use of his metaphors which use fundamental rights for more than dubious ends. What should have been obvious is all the more so today in the light of the battlefields of Ukraine.
Here we are today: we are confronted with the proper meanings of words, no more unjustifiable borrowings and inappropriate metaphors. We only have our eyes left to cry.
As Paul said after his arm was ripped off by a bomb: “On the brink of breaking, devoured by fever, I knew that this infernal pain was a punishment. I was paying for all my failed silences, all those moments when cynicism had corrupted me, unwelcome, cowardly pride, when witnessing eyes, derision had prevailed over revolt, when I had awarded myself all of the war ball, doing it, I was my own executioner. All these scandals of my conscience where I had not acted like a man”.
The meaning of the words strikes us in the face. The war is not only Ukraine, but also Syria – war endorsed by Russia – and Ethiopia.
What Russia’s war against Ukraine asks of us is solidarity, and we owe this solidarity to all those who experience war and humanitarian crises, Syrians, Ethiopians and others who did not attract enough attention from the great powers.
Our humanity demands it!