Colonel Hunger and Major Sickness

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Pictures: four-leaved clover – https://pixabay.com/users/silviarita-3142410/, https://pixabay.com/photos/four-leaf-clover-road-green-3336774/ and red telephone booth – https://pixabay.com/users/teefarm-199315/, https://pixabay.com/photos/london-phone-booth-red-england-2254104/

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As a South African living in Wales, I find LitNet interviews very useful. One in particular last week, that between Eben Viktor, based in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, and LitNet’s Izak de Vries, was quite simply by far the most insightful of all the mass of articles and interviews that I have come across this past week, while doomscrolling like everyone else.
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As a South African living in Wales, I find LitNet interviews very useful. One in particular last week, that between Eben Viktor, based in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, and LitNet’s Izak de Vries, was quite simply by far the most insightful of all the mass of articles and interviews that I have come across this past week, while doomscrolling like everyone else.

Viktor was describing his life in Dnipro, with the Russians shelling civilian targets not all that far away. He and his wife live in one of those apartment buildings that we now so often see exploding under the impact of a Russian shell or rocket. He might have been excused the odd anxious tremor, or catch in his breath, but no. In calm, measured, fluent Afrikaans, he described the routines of their lives: the search for food, taking shelter from the missiles, the options that faced them, even taking iodine tablets in case of radiation poisoning. Nothing is simple, with his life under hostile fire. Even joining the long lines of refugees means taking care to conceal valuables from the gangs of robbers taking advantage of desperate people. All these things have to be thought of.

The Ukrainians are not intimidated, he said. Their cities may be crumbling around them, but they prefer to be free among the ruins, than live under the tyrannical heel of a Putin-led Russia.

Viktor may have been taking some calming muti, for all I know, but I doubt it. It was his natural style, employing this special peculiarity that Afrikaans has, to convey the message in such quiet, unemotional terms. By complete coincidence, I have been reading John Buchan’s Mr Standfast, written during the First World War, the third in the series of the Hannay books. Mr Standfast has been compared with Erich Maria Remarque’s All quiet on the western front, as a definitive account of the German spring offensive in 1918. In this book, Hannay’s great friend from their Boer War years together, Peter Pienaar, caught up in some frontline drama towards the end, also calmly reassures Hannay: “Ons sal 'n plan maak,” Pienaar says quietly in Afrikaans. The book was published at a time when the educated British reader didn't need a translation. They knew what it meant: a “can do” attitude that had impressed the English about the Afrikaners ever since they had got to know them during the Boer War.

And that was the calm tone that emerged in the Viktor interview, which seemed to encapsulate the courage of the Ukrainians today: “Ons sal 'n plan maak.”

I'll return to the German offensive of 1918, because it's relevant to this story. But meanwhile, when Viktor was pressed to describe the essential difference between the bilingual Ukrainians and Russians, essentially speaking one another's language, he said the nearest analogy was that of Ireland and England.

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But meanwhile, when Viktor was pressed to describe the essential difference between the bilingual Ukrainians and Russians, essentially speaking one another's language, he said the nearest analogy was that of Ireland and England.
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This was an interesting point. The history of Ukraine does indeed show similarities to Ireland. Let’s take language: Gaelic was gradually replaced by English in Ireland, while in Ukraine the Russian language took root, a bit like the relationship between Afrikaans and English in South Africa. In Ireland, the Catholic Mass was preached in Latin rather than in Gaelic, and that in a sense discouraged the original tongue. In Wales, by contrast, the Bible was translated into Welsh at a much earlier stage, and that is one reason why Welsh is the mother tongue of one third of the country today, although everyone understands English as well.

We also see that many of the big historical inflection dates are similar in the case of Ireland and Ukraine.

For example, the Irish rose up in April 1916 (the so-called Easter Rising) when the British were fully committed in WWI, and were brutally crushed, but the momentum for independence had started, and the Irish War of Independence was fought from 1919 until July 1921, when the Irish Free State came into being. In other words, it was a protracted conflict. And then, of course, Ireland was convulsed by civil war. But the trigger for the wider rebellion was the British response to the preparatory build-up of German forces in the run-up to the 1918 spring offensive, when the British government extended military conscription to Ireland in order to make up troop numbers. The Irish objected and declared their Free State, and they got away with it, although not without some tears being shed. The English never reconquered Ireland, and the Irish were free.

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But the trigger for the wider rebellion was the British response to the preparatory build-up of German forces in the run-up to the 1918 spring offensive, when the British government extended military conscription to Ireland in order to make up troop numbers. The Irish objected and declared their Free State, and they got away with it, although not without some tears being shed. The English never reconquered Ireland, and the Irish were free.
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Likewise, Ukraine chose the side of freedom in the 1918 civil war in Russia – against the Bolsheviks. But, unlike the Irish, the Ukrainians didn't get away with it. Lenin invaded and violently consolidated control over Ukraine. Other similarities between Ireland and Ukraine followed. Stalin sentenced the still rebelling Ukrainians to starve (millions died) in the thirties, when he imposed agricultural collectivisation on the country, while the Irish endured their own period of hardship during that same period, because of British-imposed trade tariffs. But then, the fortunes of the two countries diverged: Ireland remained neutral and undamaged in the Second World War, while Ukraine suffered horrendously on the anvil of war. By now, however, for the Russians, Ukraine seemed indistinguishable from the very concept of Russia, and Ukrainian cities were rewarded with Russia's highest medal of valour for their defence against the German Nazis. Ironically, today those same cities are being shelled by the Russians.

After the war, Ukraine remained yoked to Russia, although as a separate state like Belarus next door, but as far as one can establish, it never lost its national identity or its language. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it received international recognition as an independent country and swiftly marked its territory as an aspiring member of Nato and the EU. It made Ukrainian the official language in schools and the like, an important marker of national identity, a bit like Welsh, which is a requirement in Welsh schools and jobs these days. Ireland, on the other hand, has lost Gaelic as an everyday language.

For geopolitical reasons too long to describe here, Moscow then land-grabbed Crimea and a couple of other Russian-speaking border regions of Ukraine, and the rest is history. Ireland, meanwhile, had relatively peacefully come to terms with its former imperial occupier, Britain, although the division of the island of Ireland into north and south along largely religious grounds has become a difficult issue for all sides to resolve, now that Britain has left the EU. Ireland has not joined Nato, but in light of the current drama involving Ukraine, may yet consider doing so. Nothing theoretically prevents a country like Russia from invading Ireland, since Putin knows they have no mutual defensive agreements with other countries. For the same reasons, we may yet see Finland and Sweden join Nato.

But there are also much older overlaps between Ireland and Ukraine worth looking at, on the assumption that history is doomed to repeat itself, as it seems to be doing now in Ukraine’s relationship with Russia.

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But there are also much older overlaps between Ireland and Ukraine worth looking at, on the assumption that history is doomed to repeat itself, as it seems to be doing now in Ukraine’s relationship with Russia.

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In the early 1600s, the Ukrainian Cossacks had already established a reputation for free thinking. They had broken the bonds of European serfdom. And already the Ukrainian language had become a distinctive tongue, compared with the difference today between Portuguese and Spanish. But with political forces gathering pace across Europe during those years, the Cossacks placed themselves under the protection of the Russian tsar, and in a sense this is what has since given rise to the notion of “historic Kiev”, with the capital of Ukraine becoming a kind of spiritual birthplace for Russians themselves. The Orthodox Patriarch of Kiev always saw himself as a cut above his vis-à-vis in Moscow. Today, the two branches of Orthodoxy have split, with the Kiev Patriarch recognising the independence of Ukraine, while his Moscow counterpart is frantically trying to cement exclusive alliances with, for example, the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia.

The English, on the other hand, would never see Ireland as a spiritual birthplace. Although the Normans (1066 and all that) occupied Ireland at the same time that they settled England and Wales, England never took much interest in the place. Relations between the two countries withered quite naturally over the centuries, until the mid-1600s, when we had the English civil war, which was ruthlessly won by Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant protector of the Protestant faith.

The Catholics in Ireland, encouraged by the Pope in Rome, then formed a threatening confederacy of pro-Royalists and menaced England. Having executed Charles I, Cromwell acted swiftly, invading Ireland through Dublin with his “new model army” (acting according to the radical Cromwellian precepts of command, control and communications, a thoroughly modern drill that endures to this day). He then established a frightful reputation which time has not undimmed in Ireland, by sacking and massacring thousands of inhabitants, soldiers, civilians, men, women and children, of the town of Drogheda. This was swiftly followed by another massacre of two Irish towns. Cromwell’s guiding principle in any siege where there was resistance was to deploy his officers: “Colonel Hunger and Major Sickness”.

But Ireland staggered on, much as Ukraine has done, still imbued with a spirit of independence. A bridge too far was crossed, however, when Irish revolutionaries proved susceptible 100 years later to the blandishments of the French Revolution – a country with whom Britain was at war. England responded by orchestrating a rigged Irish election – rigged by local Protestant land owners, that is, the “Anglo-Irish” – and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was then directly ruled by one single parliament at Westminster, with Ireland providing 100 MPs. Later that century, around 1870, greater “home rule” was cautiously extended to Ireland, until the 1919 rebellion forged a Free Ireland.

Here, the parallel between modern Ireland and Ukraine diverges in terms of historical time frames – instead, the horrible massacres of yesteryear’s Cromwell are today being visited on modern Ukrainians by their larger neighbour, and it is debatable whether they will be able to shrug this atrocity off and reconcile with the Russians – as in, “Vergewe maar nooit vergeet nie” – especially if the war is allowed to drag on for much longer in one manifestation or another, with Major Hunger and Colonel Sickness orchestrating events. It certainly took decades for Ireland to learn to co-exist with Britain in a spirit of amity, as we all know.

In Ukraine, the rules of 17th century continental siege warfare seem to be adhered to by Putin right now. “No surrender, no quarter.” Free-fire zones are being established for Russian forces to shoot at anything that moves. Terror rules.

To sum up: the one incontrovertible parallel is that Ukraine was happy to be free from its overlord, the USSR, in the same way that Ireland has been happy to be free of the overlordship of its neighbour, England. The other incontrovertible parallel is that both countries will put up with anything to be free.

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To sum up: the one incontrovertible parallel is that Ukraine was happy to be free from its overlord, the USSR, in the same way that Ireland has been happy to be free of the overlordship of its neighbour, England. The other incontrovertible parallel is that both countries will put up with anything to be free.
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Meanwhile, what of Russia? Millions of words have been written about the motives of Putin, but I like this comment (repeated here with permission) from South African author John Conyngham, who comes from Anglo-Irish stock and knows Ireland well, and who wrote to me as follows:

To me, the whole hoo-hah is grounded in modern Russia's (Putin's) inferiority complex – a humiliation at the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Putin's paranoid quest to re-establish some sort of mythical tsarist Shangri-La to make the country, and himself, feel “great again”. However autocratic and mad the tsars may have been, nearly all of what is considered culturally “great” about Russia is rooted in tsarist culture. I am biased, but I just have to look at Putin and his generals and lackey politicians and I see thugs. Ireland, too, has had to rebuild its self-esteem, crushed by centuries of oppression, but it doesn't have such grandiose delusions and seems more at peace with itself.

David Willers is a former editor of the Natal Witness (today: The Witness)

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Oekraïne: Berigte te velde

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