After war comes not peace, but victory. War violence in Ukraine and social violence in France agree on this fundamental difference. Victory defines the present much more than peace. It is an instant gratification, a euphoria faithful to the aesthetics of combat. The incendiary trail of Grad rockets and burning cars, the Donbass and Nanterre fires, offers a captivating spectacle. Violence is beautiful, even heroic, when seen on television or encapsulated in a photo, and what is beautiful cannot be evil. Beauty justifies violence, the idea that war is a reasonable option.
The aspiration of victory keeps us in the fight, that is, in life. As long as we believe it is within our reach, morality will not decay. This is why persuasion is so important in this new age of security. It helps to prolong the war, to make the use of the most destructive weapons more and more tolerable.
The first act of persuasion consists in identifying the grievance by which the homeland, the race and the social class are saved.
The common ingredient in almost any grievance is disrespect. The oppressed citizen in the cities of France may complain that subsidies and social services are lacking, that gardens and bike paths do not prevent drug trafficking, but what he will surely complain about is lack of respect, of the mistreatment he suffers in a xenophobic police system that excludes and suspects him.
Social injustice is inherent in the system, whether socialist or capitalist. It has historical roots and an economic trunk. Branches tend to be psychological and almost all of us live in them.
Social injustice mobilized the yellow vests, just as it has now set fire to the suburbs of France.
Vladimir Putin also believes that he was a victim of social injustice as the son of a single mother in Soviet Leningrad and as a counterintelligence agent in Dresden. The collapse of the USSR forced him to destroy secret documents and survive as a taxi driver. He was poor again and from this grievance he built a messianic ideology to return Russia to its lost greatness.
The megalomania of the invader of Ukraine has as much an emotional basis as the frustration of the young man trapped in the city. Pride and resentment condition the thinking of both.
The head of state, the supreme commander of the Russian armed forces, does not think from military logic, from the relationship between the cost and benefit of the war, but from the humiliation that the collapse of the soviet union The invasion of Ukraine has an unbearable cost in human lives, but the emotion, the longing for victory, prevents him from seeking peace.
Ukraine is Russia’s Vietnam and the suburbs are France’s. The descendants of Algeria and West Africa, of unresolved colonialism, aggravated even by the overbearing Francophonie, are not so far from the Ukrainians whom the Kremlin denies their existence. Putin tells them that they are an invented people, that their only reason is to be the cradle of Russia.
What have presidents like Macron and Sarkozy told them, time and time again, to the backward young people of peripheral France? That they have wasted their opportunities, that they could find work just by crossing the street, the same that the State will later clean with the pressure hoses of the security.
Any military strategist knows that it is very difficult to fight on terrain that has already been fought over. The human cost is ever higher and the positions barely move. It is a great lesson from the First World War, from the battle of Verdun, for example, in which between February and December 1916 about 300,000 French and German soldiers died.
The Donbass has been combat territory since 2014 and the cities since the sixties. Both have separated from reality, as happened with Verdun.
What happens there loses importance. The victory does not come and the aesthetics of the combat become anodyne. General disinterest creates the fiction of appeasement. The pent-up conflict becomes invisible until a new fire ignites it, a riot in Russia, a missile against a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, a 17-year-old killed in a police checkpoint in Nanterre.
Then, the crowd roars again and victory regains its breath. There is a party and there is war, a new fire that forces the peacemaker to interrupt his vacation in Miami. The one that rises to ask for peace is not the voice of the president, nor the bishop, nor the imam, nor the intellectual, but that of the footballer Kylian Mbappé, son of the periphery and captain of France.
The ethics on the sports fields, the knee on the floor of the American football players who denounced racism in the USA, contrasts with the violence of a stand that only believes in victory.
Victory, however, as Mbappé knows, is not the exit to war. It cannot be because the victor who raises his arms finds it difficult to be magnanimous and the defeated who observes finds it difficult to accept defeat.
Victory stops the violence on many, but it does not solve life because it is not enough to achieve peace. The good news for Ukraine is that all wars end, but the bad news for cities is that violence will be the recurring response to innate social inequality.
