Ukraine
The Society has always been at pains to stress its position that the Battle of Tewkesbury is to be commemorated, and certainly not celebrated. For nearly all the participants it would have been by far the most pointless and frightening episode in their lives, even if they survived it. They were ‘cannon fodder’ in more recent parlance. Even at the distance of five hundred and fifty years there is ample evidence of post-traumatic stress amongst the survivors, something they have in common with ‘cannon fodder’ in the thousands of conflicts since.
Whilst some wars might be claimed to have some moral purpose, and have moved freedom forward, or stopped it being moved back, most, and that definitely includes the Wars of the Roses, did not. They were about the egos of people who are simply seeking power. They were about the right of the country’s elite to dominate and exploit. Fourteen short years after the sacrifices of 1471 there was another battle and another regime took power, with no good consequences for most of the population.
Last year we were marking the anniversary, following the progress of the armies towards the battle and we had correspondence with members in Ukraine, discussing the similarities with events in Ukraine’s past. In the fifteenth century, the country was part of the Lithuanian state, later to be disrupted by the Polish-Lithuanian Union, which brought intolerance of their Eastern Orthodox religion and the inevitable persecution of believers.
It has been said many, many, times, but there is no other way of saying it. We all thought that the war against Hitler was to be the last war in Europe caused by the obsessions of a megalomaniac; that civilisation had taken us beyond that. We now know how wrong we were. Mr Putin obsesses on past glories and past empires. Someone less consumed with his imagined grievances would have taken the long view and realised that winning the peace is more important than winning the war, and subjugating a nation with terror is a very short-term victory which in the longer term will have consequences.
There is small comfort to the Ukrainian people in knowing that the population of the rest of Europe are feeling impotent but doing what they can to support them, and from here in Tewkesbury it seems so little. Maybe just getting the message to Ukraine that we are outraged by the hell they have been so unjustly put through by the latest in a long line of despots who think that destroying proud and ancient cities and murdering their people is acceptable whilst he lies to the people of Russia about what his army are really doing to those towns and those people. Maybe some of our small Russian readership will see this as well and understand the outrage which their leader has created in every other corner of Europe.
Sunday March 6th, was Forgiveness Day in the Russian Orthodox Church’s calendar. These sins will take a very, very, long time to forgive, which is a tragedy for the whole world.