When I was a child, and forced to live as a boy, I was very firmly taught that pacifism was a beautiful idea, but a completely impractical one.
That there was no alternative to war.
That war was a horrible thing, but a necessary one, and that it also brought out the best in people, and that to be a proper man I had to learn to be good at it.
So I was forced to wear an army uniform on Monday afternoons, and marched up and down, and taught how to handle and to fire a gun.
I was told that history was mostly the story of famous generals; that the British Empire was the greatest achievement the world had ever seen; and that it came into being because we British are very good at war.
And war was about conquest; and manhood was about conquest too. Manhood was about the conquest of the soft and weak and unworthy aspects of oneself.
Of course I was always far more interested in the “soft and the weak and the unworthy” and so suffered greatly from fear and from shame.
But I’m proud now, as I approach the age of 72, that these are precisely the parts of my self that I chose in the end to explore and have made the focus of my identity and of my life and of my work.
Putin is about my age. He has dedicated his life to masculinity and to manhood and to power and to conquest.
The poor man. The suffering he is causing himself. The suffering he is causing the world.
And for what?
One thing that becomes increasingly clear as the years pass is that the old model of the war of conquest is a total and disastrous failure.
It has become incontrovertibly clear from what has happened in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.
And now it is happening all over again in Ukraine.
It keeps happening because it has deep roots, I suppose, in our understanding of what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a man.
But these old models of masculinity and femininity do not work any more.
They are changing faster than we can imagine.
I find myself re-reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s wonderful “Left Hand of Darkness”. It is set on the planet Winter, whose inhabitants are androgynous.
There is conflict on this planet, but there is no war. An observer from another planet imagines this to be the result of an experiment:
“Did they [the experimenters] consider war to be a purely masculine displacement activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped?”
I find myself revisiting a play I wrote in Lisbon in 1994, when British theatre had decided it had had enough of me and no longer commissioned new work from me.
And this play, “A Dark Night’s Dawning” , about the wonderful poet Florbela Espanca, was performed, in Portuguese, in Portugal but has never been seen here.
I thought it was no good. But I was wrong. This is what Florbela says to her last husband, Mario, who served as a doctor in the Portuguese army in the First World War:
“You were there. You saw it happen.
You saw the guns. You smelt the gas.
You saw what it did to human bodies.
All those bodies that they sent to you.
Their flesh torn by shrapnel their lungs burnt with gas
That you were supposed to make better.
So they could go back to killing each other again.
You never spoke of this
But I have thought of you.
Thought of you coming back out of that nightmare
And marvelling that there are still streets in the world
And trees and rivers and fields.
And places where you can see children
playing
And can hear birds sing.
Because not even big guns and barbed wire
and bayonets
Not even trenches and poison gas
Can make such things completely disappear
from the world.
But I suppose that what I'm slowly beginning to understand
Is that the war hasn't ended.
There are still trenches in men's minds.
There's still bayonets and barbed wire.
Barbed wire all over men's minds!
And the mud still covers everything.
It's a war of attrition,
A war that just goes on and on.
It has its wounded and its dead
And those whose minds are slowly battered to pieces.
And we women are the enemy you men are fighting
And you offer me a kind of dugout
A little refuge with electricity and a telephone
Because you tell me that's the best the world can offer
While outside the men just keep on fighting
Over the bodies of their mothers
Over their daughters and their wives
Over the body of their mother the earth.”
But the war is ending.
It seems strange to me that I should feel hopeful in the midst of this nightmare.
But I am.
Think of this: Putin has at his command technology that can destroy an apartment building.
And he uses it. Apparently without scruple. In a war my teachers might have considered unavoidable. Or a necessary means to an achievable geopolitical end.
So he destroys the apartment building. He causes huge suffering.
Perhaps he will go on to destroy a city or two.
But this does nothing to advance his cause. This does not give him victory or safety or security.
He is so afraid that he has his police arrest a woman for holding up a blank piece of paper in a public square.
Imagine…