One Tin Soldier (1969)

 

Even the most indifferent student of History knows that the June 28, 1914 assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian national was not the reason for the First World War, only the last of many. Indeed, one of the greatest lessons of that war is its multiple triggers.

One of these triggers concerns the many and shifting alliances and treaties that had been forming and dissolving in the years prior to the Archduke's assassination, in part due to increasing paranoia (the Balkan Wars, militarization, imperialism, nationalism), and resulting in obligations by those allied with those declaring.

Not long after the Archduke's assassination, Austria-Hungry bombed Belgrade (Serbia), Russia mobilized, then Germany, and soon everyone was involved, not just in Europe and the UK, but in Arabia, Africa, the Far East ... Hence the name the Great War. Then a quarter-century later, World War I -- after the start of World War II.

NATO is a Treaty Organization that began with North Atlantic nations, and like an expansionist state (Germany and Italy in the 1930s, Israel since its inception in the late-1940s, China, India and Russia in our current moment), added those nations willing to join it, often to the chagrin of countries who had unfinished business with them.

Russia is an odd place. Neither Europe nor Asia, it is, continentally speaking, its own thing: a forest of poetry loving grumps with extreme and merciless positions on whatever matters most to those who disagree with them, certainly no less racist than Ukraine. And did I say paradoxical? The Russians I am descended from were wholly paradoxical. 

That Russia's Putin has laid claim to Ukraine has been justified for many reasons, among them the importance of Kiev as the spiritual (Christian Orthodox) centre of the Russian people. That Russia should destroy a country in an effort to connect with its spiritual centre is itself a paradox of the highest order.

For my part in the resistance I am currently at work on a Russian translation of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter's 1969 song "One Tin Soldier", which I am told through intermediaries that a Pussy Riot cover band has offered to perform (dressed as Cossacks) outside Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. More on this story as it unfolds.