Essays in Idleness

The Red Chinese have accused Ukraine of meddling in Hong Kong.

This did not happen yesterday, I should explain, but some months ago. How did those clever Ukrainians do this, my reader may ask, naïvely. They did it by secular inspiration, when they uttered the phrase, “Slava Ukraini!” — which they had been doing in their own nationalist cause since the nineteenth century — and more aggressively since they fought for independence from the Leninist regime of the Soviet Union, during 1917–21.

Since 2014, the phrase has been in the air again, just as truck horns are in the air here in the Canadas. The Hong Kongois, who tend to be well-informed to a fault, picked up on it by 2019. They began to declare, “Glory to Hong Kong!” in multiple languages, from Cantonese to English; or rather, to sing it, for this phrase and its variants are often set to music, wherever it is used. (The Canadian truckers’ “Honk Honk” makes its own music.)

Wi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and little Justin Trudeau, all get quite offended by the use of such phrases; and all have gone to the trouble of manufacturing bare-faced lies to resist the respective sovereignty movements. Readers will gather that I am unsympathetic with any of these dictators, or Mr Would-Be.

Because I (or more exactly, my father) was also unfavourably inclined to the dictatorship of Mr Adolf Hitler, it may be incumbent upon me to specify of what my disapproval consists. For granted, Hitler was a nationalist of a sort. I have long been an enemy of nationalism, when it is rudely proclaimed, though with mysterious moments of enthusiasm for nationalisms of other sorts.

A nation, to my mind, and also in fact, includes all those who hold the citizenship, and may dwell legally within its territories. This, as opposed to people of a peculiar culture, or race, on whose behalf airy claims are made.

In Christian terms, nations may certainly exist, with or without this settled definition, under the rule of a Caesar. But the followers of Christ simply live where they live, and the amount of respect they owe to the local Caesar is ultimately zero. When Caesar (however elected or installed) is himself obeying and perhaps imposing just and reasonable laws, they will respect his temporal authority; but if he goes rogue, or mental, this respect diminishes.

Therefore, the persons who speak the Russian language, or were Russian ancestrally for whatever number of centuries or minutes, if they became citizens of Ukraine in 1994 (when the borders were most recently agreed by all parties), or were since born into that situation, remain citizens today. The same goes for ethnic Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars, Tatarlars, Scythians, Tauric Chersonese, &c. By challenging this sensible order of things, and physically invading the lands governed from Kiev, Mr Putin makes himself indisputably a war criminal; one who now has accumulated many counts of murder.

We must take him to The Hague to stand trial. …