“Drop down ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.”
Judith Weir – Advent Anthem
The images of Putin meeting with women who have lost husbands and sons during his invasion of Ukraine are sickening. The number of people who have lost their lives in this ridiculous campaign now probably exceeds a quarter of a million, including so many ordinary citizens in Ukraine and the estimate of over 200,000 military personnel on both sides.
To achieve what?
Even if Putin were to succeed in his barbarous land-grabbing attempt, what would he inherit?
A land where almost all facilities of civilisation are being bombed into oblivion, inhabited by a people filled with disgust and distrust for the Kremlin autocracy: and bearing in mind that an estimated 11 million Russians have family in Ukraine and the close cultural relationship between their two countries, this disgust and distrust will be shared by much of the Russian population.
The invasion is now a lost cause in all respects, and under any outcome. The best course of action would be to accept that it has failed, take all Russian forces out of Ukraine — including the Crimea — and try to find a way back from Russia being branded a pariah state for the foreseeable future.
In a series of commentaries in February and March we set out an analysis of what appears to be the main driver for Putin's timing of his invasion of Ukraine: the fact that the end is in sight for fossil fuels powering the world economy. It is the awful legacy of carbon which has enabled him to leverage the huge trading imbalance that has developed over past decades. With a population of less than 146 million and a desperately impoverished population (apart from the oligarchs), there is no way that a war could have been waged in Ukraine on this scale without the funding from oil and gas revenues.
There is no justification for civilised modern nations resorting to conflict in order to achieve their territorial ambitions; but, of course, it is not a nation that has made this decision — it's a narrow clique of powerful individuals around Putin himself. There have been enough examples during the 20th century of the devastation and mass murder that war creates, and we are reminded of that toll each November. When the famous Christmas carol ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ was first introduced to King’s College Chapel, Cambridge in 1918, the line ‘When like stars His children crowned, all in white shall wait around’ had a special poignancy to reflect the massive human cost of the First World War, supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars’.
People abhor violence and suffering, and their courage in opposing autocratic rulers becomes more evident by the day. President Xi of China, fresh from his confirmation of another term in power, faces recurrent opposition to his strong-armed tactics to impose Covid control, and the threats of using violence in his quest for Taiwan has not been removed.
Somehow we have to find a way by which autocratic post-communist rule can evolve towards civilisation, and egalitarian capitalism may well be the answer. Rather than relying on democracy which would appear to threaten that rule, it seeks to empower individuals by enabling them to share in wealth creation and to achieve their potential through enterprise: and, by providing inter-generational rebalancing, it looks afresh at each new generation in order to give them the resources and the life skills needed to break the cycle of deprivation which condemns so many before they can get started.
Moving towards mass participation in wealth creation, egalitarian capitalism fosters the responsibility which comes with ownership, and an experience of distributed governance on a huge scale which connects with business, not politics. It therefore allows for a growing maturity without challenging the autocrats in power, so that a move towards democracy can follow rather than lead the change.
The fact that mass equity participation must be introduced at a global level provides the opportunity to look to international bodies for regulation and oversight. That will also change the balance between nation states and the embryonic ‘global planet authority’ of which Angus Forbes writes in his recent book.
It's for these reasons that our commentary on 14 November looked at ways to empower the United Nations, because this transition to global oversight will need to be evolutionary. The lacklustre outcome of COP27 shows how important it is to strengthen global governance for the sake of the environment, not just economic justice and peaceful co-existence.
Not all features of this move to a more egalitarian form of capitalism require the global dimension: inter-generational rebalancing can be introduced country by country, and the lead that Gordon Brown and Ruth Kelly gave with the Child Trust Fund in the United Kingdom is being picked up in several places, including California. This will enable a greater and widespread maturity among the young, who are of course the generation most impacted by conflict — which is almost always initiated by old men.
As concluded in Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson’s book ‘Putin vs. The People’, the Kremlin’s descent into totalitarianism is depriving Russians of community, replacing social trust with dread and suspicion, and of autonomy, reducing people’s ability to shape the trajectories of their own lives.
So, the pointlessness of war is not lost on these young generations, whose high level of communication and mobility also gives rise to a much better understanding of the need for global interconnectivity. These are reasons to be optimistic, although who knows how long the world will have to endure the wasteland-creating stupidity of the warmongers.
Let's just pray that they keep their blood-stained fingers off the nuclear button.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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