The first anniversary of the Russo-Ukrainian war: We are all bystanders

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the start of the Russo-Ukraine war, an invasion that killed tens of thousands and sparked Europe's biggest refugee crisis since World War II. The war has been going on for a whole year, and there is no sign of it ending. Many facts show that people cannot stop war and cruelty, and they have not tried their best to stop it, allowing all horrible things to continue to happen on a large scale, while watching them in great detail. This is human Shame.

One year ago today, on February 24, 2022, a reporter interviewed evacuees in eastern Ukraine. When he asked one of the children named Andrey, do you like it here or at home. Andrea replied: I love being at home with my kittens.

On the same day that the war broke out, Russian artillery shells hit a residential building in Ukraine, and dance teacher Yelena Kurilo was injured. The next day, pictures of her bloodied face made the front pages of many newspapers around the world. Shards of glass also lodged in her eyes, severely impairing her vision. Currillo lived for a month in Chuhuif under fire but managed to travel to Poland for medical treatment. She underwent three operations, but her eyesight has not fully recovered yet.

On March 24, 2022, Mariupol was evacuated. For weeks, civilians remaining in Mariupol were unable to leave the war-torn city. People hid in basements, built fires in courtyards, cooked food, and fetched water from sump pits. Many — the exact number remains unknown — were killed by the shelling, leaving neighbors to bury them in yards.

Every day since then, the war has repeated its cruelty with greater intensity. The aggressors send mothers and children to the front line to go through fire and water, to commit crimes, to die, or, as the propaganda instills, "to build the greatest heroic cause". "Every general and soldier feels small by the awareness that he is a drop in the ocean, and powerful by the awareness that he is part of a whole."

Countless Ukrainians have been forced to leave their homes, and their families may live or die. When I read a profile of a poet born in Ukraine, it showed that he was Jewish. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, there was a wave of anti-Semitism in Eastern European countries. When he was a teenager, he had no choice but to immigrate to the United States with his family as refugees. What does it mean, a Ukrainian has been a refugee twice in his life. Now that Russia has committed such crimes against them, and is the first to claim them as "Nazis" - is the world really so evil that it can't even tell what is the most despicable and evil violence?

And we have become bystanders, witnessing countless slices and every detail of this war. This is where we are different from people in the past. If they were not victims, perpetrators or witnesses, they could only listen To some rumors, black or white legends. In the past, people could only learn about what happened in other places through hearsay, but today, wars are unfolding before our eyes like serial dramas.

What shocked me the most about this war was that there were a large number of videos uploaded by soldiers on social media about front-line news. The spectators came to cheer them on—yes, there were "spectators" in this war, and the results were all the more poignant. So it is no longer just a war of one country against another, some peoples against others, but a war of all against all, and even people who pretend to be civilized talk about the situation with Talking about a football game is no different. The aggressors are eager to win and are unwilling to give up. When the onlookers choose their positions, they will inevitably choose losers and winners.

The Chinese are probably more evil than any bystander in the world. People with conscience express deeper shame because our motherland has taken the initiative to be an ally of the aggressors. There is only one sentence in the news: Only China’s fearless true ally, Russia, is fighting against the evil struggle against the West. The fanatics of the war absorbed a lot of disinformation from Russia and shouted louder and more terrifying than the aggressors. Until February 23, 2023, China did not change its position on a peace agreement that required Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine unconditionally at the United Nations Congress, but chose to abstain, followed by Iran.

According to the Russian Satellite News Agency, they interviewed a patriotic club called "Youth Guards Z" established in Beijing by Chinese young people. These young people are extremely interested in the Soviet era and love Soviet culture. Let's watch together Movies, listen to Russian music, study Russian equipment and weapons, discuss the latest news from the front lines, and support Russia wholeheartedly. When talking about the war, they describe it as "Russia versus the West". Although this may be false propaganda, it also uncovered the portraits of Chinese pro-Russian people to a certain extent. NHK also recently interviewed those young Russians who support Putin. They think this is a great opportunity for Russia to develop independently, and those who successfully do patriotic business are smiling and proud in front of the camera. The rebirth of Nazism In the two countries that were once the opposite of the Nazis and suffered from the war, the peace period was extremely short, but the desire for war still activated the desire for self-destruction and mutual killing.

In some other seemingly innocuous news, Russia awarded the "Dostoevsky Medal" to the Chinese, and the people in the photo are fine if they don't smile, they look like executioners when they smile, although they didn't go to war-but Perhaps it is because they are not on the battlefield, giving orders or obeying behind the scenes, which makes them appear all the more evil.

So we can see that even if Russia today commits such a crime, which runs counter to Dostoyevsky and has nothing to do with it, it can shamelessly make it into a medal for conspiracy and to send to an equally evil ally.

The empire never failed its poets and its literature. "The insanity of one man and his loyal accomplices is ruling the fate of an entire country. Pain, fear, shame — that's how it feels today," Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya wrote last year. Ukraine Poet Sersi Zadan said: "If Russia wins, there will be no literature, no culture, no nothing."

And what else is there in Russia? Under the background of extremely suppressed anti-war voices, the Russian people were asked whether they were affected by the war. It turned out to be an engineer from a Russian company. But there seemed to be more complex emotions on his face, far above his own painful life, perhaps as an ordinary person's conscience, he was ashamed of the war, and believed that the country should be responsible for causing this kind of harm to the Ukrainian people and all mankind. bear the obvious responsibility for a situation of great catastrophe.

"When they bombed other people's houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them, but still / not enough.  … We were in the land of great money, and we (forgive us) / were happy during the war life," wrote poet Ilya Kaminsky from his 2019 book DEAF REPUBLIC, which imagines a politically turbulent foreign-occupied country as a group of soldiers When Petya, a deaf boy, was shot to disperse a mass protest, those gunshots became the last sounds people in the country heard as they became deaf and could only use sign language to express dissent.

Poets have an ancient and powerful language, and seem to have a certain keen foreknowledge of the future—but they must be more reluctant than anyone to see the day come true.

But unfortunately, war still happened, even in the 21st century today, civilization can not stop it, and it keeps exposing more barbarism, all kinds of barbarism. The world is set on fire, the carnage continues, and we become bystanders.

During this process, we can call for peace, support Ukraine, freedom, bravery, and victory, but we have all gone through the dry blood, those numbers that are difficult to accurately record, and what has been lost can no longer be restored. The world cannot be restored... …

We wanted an answer to exonerate the bystanders, but the truth is there isn't. Our onlookers - no matter what position we take, are no different from participating in a war. We are forever remorseful, forever ashamed, for the moral disability of all humanity.

February 24, 2023