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OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Writing just 48 hours after the first Russian strikes on Ukraine, Jamie Chong (Year 13) reflects on the need to cherish our democratic institutions and to recognise the significance of our hard-fought freedoms
It’s late evening on February 26th, two days after Russia’s declaration of war on Ukraine: two days during which there have been airstrikes on homes and on military bases. The night sky over Kyiv glitters with the flames of bombs. A banner hangs in Westminster, lamenting Putin’s authoritarian expansion ‘from Aleppo to Kyiv’. It is the season during which daffodils begin to bloom. As their yellow heads sprout from the ground, I wonder how many fresh graves will be furnished with flowers. We are often told that we are making history, creating a change in the narrative, a turning point in the flow of time. Yet it strikes me just how easily the most positive of changes can be reversed. One moment, a love can thrive unharmed and the next, its very existence is threatened. The rights that our community has fought for, for so long, can be so easily snatched away. Such fragility, I feel, is terrifying. Yet, curiously, fragility is also what makes life so beautiful — we must treasure the fleeting, ephemeral gifts we keep for a minute, a week, or, if we are lucky, a lifetime. Love burning with passionate intensity will end, just the same as that enduring, quietly smouldering romance. What is there for us to be jealous of? All returns to darkness again. That is where the lesson lies, though. We fight hard for love, in the hope that it will outlive us. We must fight the same way for the systems that protect us. Elif Shafak, who spoke at the College on International Women’s Day, describes the nature of democracy as a series of checks and balances that maintains and perpetuates itself. Ancient Athenian democracy had a lifetime of almost two centuries, briefly interrupted by two incidences of oligarchy, until it was replaced by autocratic foreign rule. It was continuously kept alive by people who believed in its function. Now, as democracy is bombarded across the globe, I feel that we need to engage with it a little more. We need to fight for a love of humanity. Perhaps we have grown complacent, taking our own system for granted, feeling that it will always be there; or, in our own
dissatisfaction with the way our governments function, maybe we have become disillusioned by the concept of democracy, or have started to ignore the privilege that we have of owning it. Or are we so blinded by our individual agendas that the collective, the community, particularly the international one, has been forgotten? I don’t understand — and it is not my job to diagnose — the root of our isolationism. The Russo-Ukrainian crisis is probably the first war to be quite so closely documented by social media — I’ve seen TikTok videos of teenage Ukrainians in the back of cars trapped in the line of vehicles trying to drive out of Kyiv, alongside pictures of a bombed kindergarten — the synapses of a digitally connected world sharing its trauma. We are less isolated from conflict than ever. However, while we witness the conflict from the eyes of those in Ukraine, we are simultaneously caught up in a cyberwar. As seen with the 2016 US presidential election, the Russian government are no beginners when it comes to misinformation and digital attacks. Thousands of troll accounts have been spawned on the battlefield of the internet and pro-Russian imperialist comments are left to confuse and disturb, meanwhile recruiting many of those among us into the ranks of the misinformed. Though we are physically distant from the fighting, we must stand guard, as our perspective is ambushed. Even so, we can glean lessons from what we see in Kyiv. President Zelensky has staunchly rejected American offers to help him escape, which would have meant leaving his citizens behind, saying that ‘we need ammunition, not a ride’; and a country that Putin thought would fall in three hours, has withstood days of siege. As with the Athenians, Ukrainian resistance is powered by a love of their democracy. We can learn from their endurance a gratitude for our own privileges and should be reminded how hard we must work to keep our democratic powers. ‘Shelter our skies’, a banner pleads at an anti-war protest in London. Look up at the empty space that contains our hopes, our dreams, and our futures — it is something we all share. I hope that it is something we can continue to treasure.
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