”I have lived in a world of threats all my life”
As a child I feared WW3.
I even hade plans to fill a suitcase and put it under my bed, in case the war would come.
The reality I saw was the cold war, the iron curtain through Europe, and the lack of freedom people living behind the iron curtain had.
Early memories. Soviet troops enters Czechoslovakia and kills the Prague-spring 1968. I am nine years old and devastated. Martin Luther King is murdered. Robert Kennedy, running for president in the US is murdered. The people I hink stands for liberty and freedom are being killed. It feels dark and heavy.
Way much later. I remember how women fought agains nuclear missils at Greenham common in England 1982. I remember how they used their bodies to fight a possible war with nuclear weapon in Europe. And the missils were, of course, turned towards east. I thought theses women were brave. I remember watching a tv-documentary about these women who chose to really live close to the nuclear threat.
Something in me couldn’t cope with. I didn’t have the strength to think of the risk of a big war in Europe. I tried not to notice the arms race. I didn’t want to even think about the threat. I didn’t even think a lot about the hot line between Kreml and The White House. I wanted peace and peace of mind. I almost closed my eyes.
August 1984. I have just married and I am pregnant with our first child. My husband and I was planning to go with he Trans-Siberian Railway to Beijing. I remember taking the Silja line ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. And then we took the train from Helsinki to Moscow. When we were passing the Soviet border a bunch of soldiers came aboard to check all passengers. I was shit scared. I was a journalist, but didn’t travel to work. We hade a good tape recorder with us and I was afraid it would cause us trouble. It felt like entering an empire where we was hardly welcomed.
We lived in the absolute center of Moscow for three nights. And the Kremlin was at walking distance. The hotel we lived in might have been the Metropol, today a luxury hotel. We were wandering the streets of Moscow and it was like a grey haze over it all. Being pregnant I was more sensitive to smell. To me Moscow came to be associated with three smells: Coal, cabbage and urin.
Our freedom om movement was really restricted, and I could feel, in my bones, how bad I liked this dictatorship, from my simple grassroots perspective. At the time I thought that the Soviet union would be there for ever. And it terrified me to see poor people, gray uniforms and many weapons.
When we were back in Sweden, the little life took over. I got my first two kids in the 1980s. For some years I shaded my fear. I loved my children from their first breath and I wanted them to live in a free and loving world.
Already in the middle of the 1970s my parents had started to be interested in organic farming. My dad was fighting about nuclear power. We talked a lot about the environment at the time. In the mid 1980s I went to basement storages to buy biodynamic food. I used diapers made of cloth for my babies, and feed them with homemade, and when possible organic food.
Somewhere there I started to worry about how we humans take care of our planet. When I started to see visible signs that man affected the climate I was saddened. Well, not just saddened. I tried to do at least something . I refrained from buy stuff from multinational companies, I found toilet paper that wasn't chlorine bleached. Small things I know, but it felt at least like I did something.
Simultaneously it was like I couldn’t handle to take in all the distress I noticed. To be able to take care of my little life, with my small children, I turned my gaze toward them and toward the ground.
I remember the joy I felt as the Berlin wall was falling apart. The unthinkable had happened. The wall started to be torn down and people could stream in from East-Berlin, without being shot at. And then the Soviet union slowly collapses, little by little. It gave me a hope of a freer and more peaceful world. And something in me relaxed.
It really felt better for a while. It felt like Europe wouldn’t become the battleground where the super-powers at the time would fight for world domination. I didn’t ever pack the suitcase under my bed.
Today. I haven’t been very attentive to what the Russian leader has been doing. I have heard him rumble the last fifteen years. I have noticed that he has changed to constitution to consolidate his power position. But it’s not until now that I realize that he lives the dream of recreating a Great Russia. And it shared the shit out of me.
To see the picture from the Ukraine hurts a lot. To watch the shattered country. People fleeing. The sorrow. The agony. The destruction. The megalomania. The crazy idea to start a war. The terrible idea to keep the Russian population in ignorance, well, even brainwashing them. Russian media is strictly censored, and can only report what the ledar says. Russian journalists mentioning the word ”War” risk 15 years in jail! At times, it feels like walking into George Orwells dystopian novel 1984.
When looking back it, it’s a bit weird that we were traveling through the Soviet union in 1984. I felt the presence of Big Brother all the time - even if they couldn't control us in the same way as nowadays, with all the digitals possibilities. I remember the novel vaguely , and as I remembered people couldn’t talk like thet wanted to, and that one sort of defined away, that which they wanted to hide.
I look it up in Wikipedia:
”Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In the novel, the Party created Newspeak[1]: 309 to meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania. Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will.[2] Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.[3][4]
In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning.”
It’s a bit like 1984 is back, in a new packade. It’s frightening. I can feel the fear in my heart. And now I understand what many has seen coming. I have perceived that Putin aimed at an ever-increasing power base, and I have foreboded his expansion plans, but I haven’t grasped the breadth of it. I am probably not the only one that has been naive in relation to Putin.
I think my naivety is partly about that I think war is outdated and unworthy. How can a man be prepared to demonstrate his power while uninhibitedly and indiscriminately invade, bomb and shoot at a sister nation who are not prepared to be crushed? How could anyone think that being a smart strategy?
To me war is the saddest among the saddest. And I think it’s strange that someone, in our time, when so much is happening to our planet, is willing to destroy even more. It has no rhyme and reason.
How can we meet the world with love? With gratitude I watch all who wants to contribute to helping the people being exposed to war. And I wonder how it is to be a Russian soldier? How many of them would like to desert? How many really likes to ruin a sister nation? And how is it ti be Russian today?
I see the complexity. I see many people being deceived. And I hope that we very very soon start to build peace. If we want humanity to be more then one of the shortest parenthesis in the history of the planet, something better happen soon.
Couldn’t we just fill everybody up with love, and they wake up, and the weapons are transformed to flowers?
Charlotte Cronquist is a warrior of love
Love is the answer
