When catastrophic world events take place, each person interprets them through their own filter and every person’s experience and opinion exerts a certain influence on the world.
Looking at it objectively, as someone living in California, I have little to do with the current war in Ukraine. However, I lived the first half of my life under the influence of the Cold War and remember well the feeling that ‘something could always happen’ - that something being a nuclear war.
It was different back then. No internet, no smartphones, only newspapers and the same nightly news on TV that everyone watched because there were no other choices. The internet may seem like a crazy avalanche of unsolicited opinions most days, but I would take that any day over the dearth of choices we had back then.
What is happening in Ukraine, beginning with the Ukrainians themselves, is a tragedy, but huge groups of other people are also affected. The Russian conscripts fighting this unjust war and the Russian people who are being crushed by overwhelming sanctions. The former Soviet bloc nations in Eastern Europe. My own nation, the United States.
The macro filters further down through the micro. The Countryballs community has been riven by this war. Though Countryballs has a worldwide following, the majority of fans are in Europe and include Russians and Ukrainians.
One teenaged Countryballs video creator, Murfety, had to shelter with his family in a basement in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city located near the Russian border. He’s now a refugee. And my favorite mapping video maker, Cherepashka Shusha, who is Russian, posted this on his You Tube page:
The Greek Countryballs artist Icariaball posted a new video about the war.
Icariaball is one of my favorite Countryballs video makers. He hand-draws the balls, which gives them a particularly cute squishy look.
Mr. Spherical has also made a video about the war. His videos are usually zany and comedic, but this one is dead serious.
In the past year, between becoming a Countryballs fan and rewatching Hetalia, I’ve been focusing more than usual on world history. Americans are forward-thinking people. I think it’s one of our strengths. I mean, not that we should be ignorant of history obviously, but we like to look to the future rather than mull over or get stuck in the past.
In Hetalia, Russia is the most mysterious of the five WWII allies. England is blunt and irascible, America is an obnoxious but lovable idiot, China is cheerful and industrious, and France is an absurd romantic. But Russia is an enigma.
He’s basically bi-polar. He has brain damage from living for centuries under horrible rulers. Most of the time he’s a gentle giant, dreaming of sitting in the warm sunshine and gazing at sunflowers. But other times he shows casual cruelty like a child pulling the wings off a fly, unconscious as to what he’s doing. His face darkens and he yells “KolKolKol” and is terrifying to deal with.
In Hidekaz Himaruya’s Hetalia universe, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are siblings. Ukraine is the motherly eldest sister and Russia and Belarus are her younger brother and sister. Of course, since it’s Hetalia, it’s played for comedic effect, as Belarus is psychotic and has an obsessive incestuous crush on Russia, who is scared of her.
Here, North and South Italy are terrified of Russia, while crazy Belarus gives the brothers a death stare from the side.
Of course it’s Hetalia, so I’m not suggesting that the real Russia or Russians can be casually summed up in these psychological terms. Himaruya typically takes a couple of facts about a nation and then spins them wildly for effect, but it’s true that the Russian people have suffered for centuries under one terrible form of government after another, and it has affected them.
Someone once said to me: “First conflict, then meaning.” Change doesn’t normally happen without some kind of dissonance - a conflict - taking place first. Inertia and the status quo are too strong in most people’s lives and the people of a nation are the same way. I think Vladimir Putin will get his regime change, but not in the country he intended. It will take time - and further bloodshed. But I like to imagine Russia free and sitting in the warm sunshine with his sunflowers. It can happen. Let’s send light to all the dark corners of this conflict and give change a chance.
