Goodbye 2022

A Battered World Deserved a Better Year

Writing about the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus, the cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin famously compared History to the image of ‘an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating’. In Benjamin’s metaphor, the face of this ‘the angel of history’ is always ‘turned toward the past’ so that ‘where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’

As much as I like that striking image, I want to offer a variation for our own particular ‘chain of events’. Imagine that the History we are living through has a face like the Mona Lisa. She wouldn’t necessarily be as beautiful - if you look around the world right now it’s possible to draw very different conclusions.

But she would wear the same enigmatic, inscrutable close-mouthed smile. She would be looking not at you, but somewhere past you or through you, towards a future that you can’t see, perhaps because she doesn’t actually see anything, or because that gaze really does contain secrets, designs and patterns that you can’t read, but can only speculate about.

This isn’t an agreeable position to find yourself in, when you try to think how your short life fits into all this. It would be comforting to imagine things differently, to believe that our complicated and chaotic present is moving towards some desired and desirable point. History is filled with the wrecked dreams and aspirations of people who once believed that the future favoured them.

This is an entirely understandable human impulse, but it is often based on a great deal of illusion and self-deception, because it is impossible to say that the world will be a better place tomorrow than it is today. It might be even be a lot worse.

We have no idea whether good will triumph and evil will be defeated, even if we like to believe it. We don’t know if justice will prevail. As smart as we are, we can’t predict that intelligence and rationality will one day vanquish stupidity and irrationality and make us wiser. We don’t whether some transcendent notion of the common good will eventually overcome the insane inequalities and brutal political divisions of the present and enable us to solve the many problems - on a small and large scale - that humanity is struggling to overcome right now.

We don’t know whether the world can be saved, or whether it can be healed and repaired. We might try and learn ‘lessons from History’ to guide us towards the future, but History won’t necessarily reward us for paying attention to it. History doesn’t grant holidays or truces or even weekends in Centre Parcs.

If it did, we wouldn’t have had a year like the one that is coming to an end. Because if there was ever a year when the world needed History to be on its side or at least lighten up a little, it was 2022. After two years of a lethal pandemic which has - to date - killed nearly 7 million people and infected some 658 million, the world needed time to catch its breath, to take stock and build resilience, to learn positive lessons, or just have some time out from the cascade of crises that just keeps on coming.

Instead the year had barely begun when it found itself facing the prospect of a world war - a nuclear war - when the tyrant Putin plunged Ukraine into a conflagration whose consequences he had clearly not anticipated or planned for, and which very few governments around the world had anticipated or planned for.

That war shows no sign of abating, after nine months of devastating violence, in which the Russian army has displayed all the vices of the Red Army and none of its virtues, to the point when it has been deliberately destroying Ukraine’s national grid and plunging millions of people into cold and darkness in order to compensate for its multiple failures on the battlefield.

As the world knows well, the economic fallout from the Ukraine war has pushed national economies already strained by the pandemic towards into recession, simultaneously exacerbating a global energy crisis whose consequences - as always - have fallen most heavily on those least able to bear them.

Other wars have been even more destructive in terms of the loss of human life, without attracting the same level of political and media attention. In Yemen a ceasefire in October brought a month-long respite from an eight-year civil war. In August a five- month ceasefire between Ethiopian and Tigrayan forces broke down, and in November another ceasefire was signed, which may or may not bring an end to a two-year war in which as many as 600,000 people may have died.

None of these conflicts has had the same global impact as Ukraine, where NATO and the European Union have been waging what is in effect a proxy war against the Russian invaders. To call it a proxy war doesn’t mean that Ukrainians are mere pawns in a geopolitical game. For Ukraine this is a war of national self-defence, a war for their right to exist as a people, and they have fought it with admirable skill and bravery.

But that doesn’t mean that the war is anything less than a catastrophe, because war is always a catastrophe, and this one has come at a particularly inauspicious time. In the country that I live in, the war has enabled a corrupt, degraded and incompetent government to blame its failures on Putin, while also distracting from its ruinous Brexit, and the moral failings of a man who became the first Prime Minister to be forced out of office, essentially, because he broke the laws that he himself made and then lied about it afterwards.

This welcome outcome was followed by a wasted summer in which the Tory Party planted its tattered, moth-eaten flag on a crumbling mound of ideological manure, only to find itself touching the void once more, when Liz Truss and her equally absurd co-conspirator Kwasi Kwarteng clambered onto the summit to take a selfie only to find themselves toppling into a crater of their own making.

Today, as 2022 gives its final croak, we remain in the grip of an anaemic Tory technocracy, in which not being Liz Truss has become a qualification - perhaps the only qualification the Tory Party has left - to rule a country with a government-of-dunces.

Meanwhile bewildered and rudderless country is watching its health service, its education system and its railways teetering on the brink and wondering why nothing seems to work. For the first time in history, nurses have gone on strike, alongside railway workers, lawyers, postmen and women and ambulance drivers, in a desperate attempt to get the fair wages that they should have been given without having to ask for them, and also to save a National Health Service that now faces the greatest crisis in its history.

Today, 1 in 4 junior doctors are planning to leave the NHS, an incredible figure that represents a threat to millions of lives and a moral, societal and political failure on an epic scale. None of this has anything to do with Putin or Ukraine, or boat crossings in the Channel, even if this malignant, glassy-eyed zombie government and its troglodyte backbench minions would like you to believe otherwise.

That said, this is not a government that has any reason to feel positive about its own future. The Tory Party is in deep crisis, and that is something that all those who want this country to be better than it is, and live up to the best of what it is, can only celebrate - however tentatively, because the beast is not dead yet.

The same can be said of other countries that have fallen victim to the national-populist disease. In the US the forward march of MAGA was halted in the midterms, and the machinery of justice is clanking inexorably towards the Orange Mussolini. In Brazil, Bolsonaro lost.

So you might think History is winking at you at this point, but the defeat of Trump does not mean that Trumpism has been defeated, let alone that the good - or at least the better - guys will win. In Brazil, the defeat of Bolsonaro was far narrower than a government with such an appalling record should ever have achieved. In Italy, an actual fascist party was voted into government. In the Philippines, voters replaced the murderous thug Rodrigo Duterte with ‘Bongbong’ Marcos - the son of a dictator who was once removed from power in a popular uprising - while the magnificent Maria Ressa faces the prospect of years in jail.

These alarming reversals of fortune are not just a Filipino problem. Across the world, too many democracies look frayed and fagged out and, and so do the rights and freedoms attached to them.

Anyone who thinks these rights don’t matter should consider what happened to the Russians who protested the war, or the young men and women who have confronted the Iranian security forces in the streets day in day out for the last few months.

Democracies will remain in peril until governments can show their citizens that governments are there to help them and do things for them, beyond building ‘walls’ or sending refugees to Rwanda or bussing migrants to the vice president’s house.

So by all means let us take comfort from the fact that some of these movements failed to achieve their objectives;that degenerate politicians like Johnson and Trump may not return to power; that the polls suggest a massive Tory defeat.

If the nationalist-populist tide really is ebbing we should do everything we can to drain it further. We should not allow ourselves to be sucked into meaningless culture wars by the endless parade of grifters who these movements have thrown up. We should not be distracted by idiotic conspiracy theorists propagated by malignant clowns. Nor should we despair that so many clowns exist.

We don’t know yet whether the grim events of the last few years have been an aberration or whether they may yet produce even more disastrous and disturbing outcomes than we have seen already. We don’t know what is coming, and we can’t know, and it’s because we don’t know that we can still put our shoulders to the wheel in whatever way we can, and try, always, to make this world better than it is, and as good as we want it to be.

We can think about the kind of world we want to see. We can dream and we can find ways to put our dreams into practice. We can re-imagine the kind of societies we want to see, and find ways to work towards them. The world might be salvageable or it might not. The future might be better than the present or it might be worse. But it’s precisely because we don’t know these outcomes that we can rouse ourselves to work for the ones we want.

History may not be smiling at us, and sometimes it is most definitely laughing at us. But we can still look towards the future as a place to begin again, or put bad things right, hoping for the best while all the time knowing that the worst is also possible.

Because whatever you might think of History, and whatever it thinks of you, it’s only when shrug your shoulders and walk away from it that you guarantee that the bastards will win, and that you have no chance of saving anything or putting anything right.