Aternative Editorial: Taking Ukraine's Stand
How are you today? What is foremost in your mind? How are you feeling about your present, your past, your future?
These may seem like inappropriate questions to ask from the editorial space of a global news platform. And yet today, in the battle for the mind-space of every citizen on the planet, it is a crucial check-in for every reader of news articles. To know where you stand yourself, before you read what is offered to you. To move into observational mode when you listen to the facts presented, noticing how they move you.
Certainly as writers ourselves, it makes a difference to know that readers would not simply be reacting to our news, making it wrong or right. We hope they’re considering what we are offering for the value it brings, or not.
When thinking about what is happening in Ukraine at this moment, there is no doubt in our mind that we are witnessing atrocity. Through stories and images shared in multiple media forms, we observe the suffering of children, women and men as Russian tanks and planes destroy an independent country - and it causes us grief, anger, frustration.
What can we do - those of us with enough bandwidth to read at times like this - to address this activity which is wrong at every level? Wrong for the impact on citizens – those in the direct line of fire in Ukraine – and on those now dressed in uniform to protect them. Wrong for the perpetrators, caught in a view of history and the mistaken idea that violence is the only way to have agency. Wrong for the citizens of both countries that have no choice other than to move with or move against the actions of their leaders.
Imagine for a moment that we had the technology today to establish a complex deliberation by the people of both countries, in a moment of crisis. What would the question be? From what we have observed so far, none of the leaders are claiming that this is a battle of superior races as it was in 1939 (so let’s stop comparing them to Nazis). Putin himself seems to be selling it to his own people as a necessary battle for security and the ability for an ancient culture to continue thriving.
Imagine if every citizen over a period of three months had the chance to think through the question: How should the people of Ukraine and Russia achieve ongoing security for their daily lives and culture? Maybe this could be pursued through a number of Citizens Assemblies, ensuring the most deeply informed deliberation. The process of that inquiry would be shared with community agency networks (CANs), inviting diverse voices at city, town and village level. And maybe all of that activity could be further enhanced and made more accessible through pol.is questionnaires, designed to have a light touch.
For some, it would be a moment of deep diving into the historic and global perspectives. For others, an easy conversation around a round table set up in the town square. But these processes would have the likelihood of conflict transformation – getting beyond the immediate crisis into a shared vision of the future – fully present. And military action would be barely on the table. After thinking the issues through, would the people – women, men, young people, every gender and age – choose to disrupt their lives and murder others?
Of course this is our fantasy, in the present moment, for Ukraine and Russia. However, it is not a fantasy in other parts of the world where such technology and practice exists, or where people are already living in communities that discuss and decide stuff together.
Taiwan is the radical example of a whole national polity with access to such deliberative tools. Where any citizen can take part in decision making on such diverse topics as whether or not Uber retains its license, or how to control the spread of Covid. These are not simple Yes / No referenda, but far more subtle forms of questioning: they reveal the complexity of different mind-sets across the island, which nevertheless eventually leads to a shared decision.
In other community agency networks (CANs), different forms of decision making are constantly developing. From Mondragon to municipalities like Barcelona to Transition Towns – anywhere where there is enough connection between people living in community on the ground. Where the technology is grounded in face to face gathering as well as connected to others doing the same cosmolocally. In each case, these initiatives were built by independent citizens in the face of local and national authorities who said it could not be done
Even as we think about how it is not possible for Ukraine today, we can live in the possibility of that being available in the future for everyone. That’s the mind-set of Planet A – not a future fantasy, but a ground of possibility. A place to stand and invest your attention and energy, to ensure history is moving resolutely in the right direction.
This is not a good versus bad scenario but a systemic approach to our development as a global society. If we were once unable to connect to each other sufficiently or get access to bigger picture information, let alone tools for non-violent practices… well, that explains the past. But, with the birth of the internet 30 years ago—enabling education, organising and innovating across society—that cannot excuse the present.
In a Buddhist parable, a practioner of non-violence was asked by a soldier, what would you do if you turned a corner and someone was facing you with a knife? The practitioner answers, I would never be turning that corner.
It looks like an evasion of the question, but on deeper inquiry, the practitioner is reflecting back to the soldier how reality appears to him differently. The soldier experiences a system that is always preparing for violence and the evil behaviour of others. The practitioner experiences a system that organises for conflicts to be addressed by culture and practice, before they ever rise to the surface as uncontrollable acts of violence. The soldier cannot imagine an alternative to the one he occupies with his mind and body. The non-violence practitioner can, and lives his life that way, changing his own behaviour through constant practice.
Such ability to self-organise as capacious, wise societies is long overdue. While our political leaders committed themselves in 1945 to never going to war again they have lacked the organisational skill that gives citizens the options, or the ability, to hold them accountable. If anything they have gone further down the road of ‘always preparing for the violence of others’ by investing in nuclear bombs – the greatest paean to civilisational ignorance imaginable. Instead of investing in the deeper capacities of humans to overcome their differences, they spend our money on threatening annihilation to constructed enemies.
Stepping back from the Ukraine, this is true of the political response to every crisis facing us today. Where are the tools to help people become self-sufficent in terms of energy and food, when the likelihood of supply chains collapsing is getting closer by the day? With war in the Ukraine we will face critical shortages in wheat and oil. Instead of resting assured that we will be able to cope, we are threatened with extreme scarcity that guarantees wealthy people will survive and poor people may die.
Within CANs those challenges are already being faced (for example in ecovillages). At the heart of these movements is the I-We-World axis that links the health of the individual directly to the health of the planet, via the flourishing of communities of action. People leading the way by becoming less reliant on fossil fuels and on non-local food, increasing their reliance on plants they can grow with free energy from wind, sun and water.
For those reading who are still hooked on the party political system, asking yourselves how do we shift people away from their consumerist addictions, unable to come up with effective top-down or nudge-like solutions: pay attention. All over the world, CANs are autonomously prefiguring a future that is not only capable of surviving, but reconnecting to nature and using technology to develop. What’s more, these communities are not wearing hair shirts, denying themselves life’s pleasures or frustrated. They are oases of belonging, meaning and purpose, where joy and creativity are the currency.
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Strangely, this phenomenon finds itself linking together movements that are portrayed as polarised in the public media sphere. Extinction Rebellion finds common ground with Brexiteers in the drive to become more locally resilient Freedom fighters of all kinds (often consigned to ‘the right’ by party politics) realise their autonomy in organised local enterprise. Those previously excluded from conversations about how to enhance the community – because of the narrow framing of the conversation – brought in by technology such as pol.is.
This is the world of Planet A – focused on the future arising. To apply this framing is not to betray the people of Ukraine, who need our support in their flight from terror. Let’s welcome them with open arms and continue to do all we can to stop what is happening through economic means or creative soft power, that shapes outcomes more effectively than bombs.
But let’s not forget the future they themselves were - and are still - standing for: the right of the Ukrainian people to choose their own way of identifying in the world without resorting to violence. Let’s use our outrage at what is happening, to wage not war, but peace. Let’s recruit each other in the battle to save the planet. To build new systems for human agency of all kinds. If this is where you stand, feeling your feet firmly on this ground, you’re a resident on Planet A.