War and the absence of war

My generation was born in the shadow of war. It affected our parents in their youth terribly. It was a common topic of conversation among our elders - the 1960s were as close to WW2 as we are today to the mid-1990s.

My childhood was immersed in the memorabilia of war - war comics like Commando, War Picture Library - Airfix Spitfires, Lancasters and Sherman tanks, toy soldiers in 1/76th and 1/32nd scale - photo albums of the Warsaw Uprising, books borrowed from the library about D-Day, El Alamein, Stalingrad; books about those same tanks and planes and battleships that I stuck together in miniature form. Even today I can tell you from memory the horsepower of the Mk I Hurricane, the bomb load carried by a Vickers Wellington, the guns on the ORP Błyskawica, the calibre of a Lee Enfield rifle. All useless information for a boy growing up in West London, but I soaked it up nevertheless.

A boy who grew up into a man who - unlike his father, his grandfather, or indeed a long line of ancestors - never knew war.

The notion that someone could point a rifle or load a mortar with the intention of putting a piece of metal into the body of another human being to sort out differences between nations and ideologies, has  here in Europe become defunct.

Is war the natural condition for mankind? Are we doomed to engage in armed conflict with one another because such is our biology?

For the whole of my life there has been no war in the core European countries. Yes, the Balkans saw a dreadful conflict that they have not totally gotten over. And yes, there's a war going on in eastern Ukraine, stoked by Russia, fought by Russian troops, killing Ukrainians with bullets and shells and rockets. But between the Atlantic and the Dnieper - peace has prevailed.

For four and half of those seven decades, the Cold War meant the risk of bullets and shrapnel was high. But the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction kept war away from the North Atlantic. In 1990, we felt it was all over, history had been won by the good guys and that was that.

As I wrote last month, there are today ever fewer people who remember what it was like to have seen combat in WW2. You'd have to be over 91 today to have been called up to the His Majesty's Armed Forces on your 18th birthday some time in early 1945. If you are in your late 70s today, you'd remember the war from your childhood. But if you are 72 or younger - WW2 would not have affected you. Of course, there was Korea (1950-53); Americans had Vietnam. These conflicts affected drafted men as well as volunteers.

I've spent my entire life in peace, no one shooting at me like the German soldiers who shot at my father, no one rounding me up at gunpoint into a cattle-truck as the Russians did to my mother exactly 78 years ago today. Sixty years old and I've not been to war - how rare is that in the perspective of history? I'm too old to bear arms now - though I'd still willingly volunteer to do so should Polish soil ever be invaded. Would today's young do so?

Across the border, our neighbour Ukraine is being invaded - a seeping pustulent war concocted by Putin as a 'frozen conflict' that's to fester on, unresolved. Young Ukrainians are faced with the dilemma of staying to fight or moving west to find work in the labour-hungry economies of the EU.

Does the fact that Europe has experienced peace for so long mean that it is about to come to an end - or are we in the fragile infancy of a new era where shooting wars have become consigned to history? If Putin can see that investing in troll farms, cyber warriors and state-sponsored hackers is more beneficial - and far less risky - than invading Estonia or Latvia - maybe he'll stick to that. The European Union can be split asunder by stoking the differences inherent in Western society. We should all be aware of that risk and guard against it.

This time two years ago:
Sensitivity to spiritual evolution

This time three years ago:
'Peak car' - in Western Europe, at least 

This time five years ago:
Pavement for Karczunkowska NOW!
[We still don't have one... I walk home in fear of my life.]

This time six years ago:
Until the Vistula freezes over 

This time seven years ago:
Of sunshine, birdsong and wet socks

This time ten years ago:
Dziadzio Tadeusz at 90