This is a revised transcript of the talk I gave to the St Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural & Archaeological Society back in September 2022. The talk was given without notes and a recording was made. Due to technical problems, the recording is not very clear so I have been asked to write the talk up. In places, I have strayed away from the original talk where the recording and my memory have failed but I hope you will still find it worthwhile and interesting.
The Making of War: Russia and Ukraine
A new book came out in September last year [2021] called, The Story of Russia by the historian Orlando Figes. When the author, at a recent interview about his book, was asked what did he think when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24th Feb this year? He replied, “I was shocked, disgusted and dismayed”. That is exactly how I felt because I had never thought it was going to happen. Just a couple of weeks before the invasion I had lunch with a Russian friend and I asked him about Putin's military maneuvers on the border of Ukraine. Was he going to order an invasion? His reply was, “No, Russia won't invade, this is just a tactic to create some leverage over NATO – to warn the West not to allow Ukraine to join NATO ”. And then Russia invaded Ukraine, sorry, carried out 'a special military operation'.
Part of my background is in anthropology, which is the study of human behaviour, so I wanted to fully understand why the invasion had happened both in the general terms of why war? and in the specific case of Russia and Ukraine. Immediately, literally on the 24th February, I wrote an article that was my attempt to explain what lay behind the motivation to invade Ukraine. So this is what I want to try to explain tonight: both why humans make war and then why this particular war. I will argue that to explain Putin's behaviour we have to understand Russian history and Russian culture.
Back in 1931, Albert Einstein was approached by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, and they said to him, we want you to have a conversation with any other intellectual you would like to choose. It didn't take Einstein long to choose. The person he wanted to talk to was Sigmund Freud. He asked Freud this question “Why war? What is it about the human species that it makes war?” Freud came to the conclusion that human beings are full of hatred and the desire to fight, and we actually have a collective psychosis.
Now. I think it's not quite like that. I do not believe it is collective psychosis but it is something unique to our species, homo sapiens. Now, we know that many animals can be violent. And we understand the evolutionary mechanism of 'fight or flight'. Our cousins, chimpanzees, who have 99%, of the same DNA as humans, can be very violent. They will attack other groups of chimpanzees, they can kill and they are known even to eat other chimpanzees they have killed. However, though they can be very very violent, they don't make war because war is planned, organised, and based on ideas. War comes about through conscious 'devices', whether it's about power, racism, nationalism, or religion. What is it that makes us capable of killing other people and sacrificing our lives for a cause which is not personal? Men and women, mainly young men, give up their lives for an idea. So what is the motivation? Where does that come from?
Some of you will know of the academic, Christopher Coker. He has recently written a book called The Making of War. He comes to the startling conclusion that it is actually quite natural for human beings to make war. It is not an aberration - which we would like it to be. He traces war back to the idea of storytelling because a story can influence our thinking beyond instinctive, reactive behaviour – it is a thought-through process. Coker imagines our pre-historic ancestors, the hunter-gatherers, sitting around a fire telling stories. What are the stories about what? They are about our past. They're about our history, because history is, of course, a story. While anthropologists study our behaviour, historians study events that took place in the past.
When I was a student back in 1969, a book came out that many of you will know. J. H. Plumb's The Death of the Past. What Plumb argued was that every age, group, or tribe (because we are a tribal species) constructs its own history to reinforce its institutions, culture, and its social structure. So the point is that we make our history. So though we study the events of the past we interpret them in the context of our own time and culture. Historians write history for their time and now our age gives its own interpretation of past events with a 21st-century perspective. When I was studying the classical world, someone said to me, how can you say anything new about ancient history, it has been so long ago hasn't everything we can know about the ancient world already been said? But to repeat every age examines, re-examines, and reassesses the past according to the mores of its time.
When I was a child there were books about the British Empire. Most of those books were about what a great job Britain had done - bringing 'civilisation' to the natives! Now think about that in today's context: colonialism is generally now perceived as an abomination – a hideous imposition. So attitudes change, the analysis of the past, and history is reinterpreted. In terms of writing history, what part does that play in making war? Though each era might impose its gloss on the story, the 'war-making story' is still fundamental to most cultures and societies. It is that 'story' that drives and persuades people to go to war and sacrifice their and others' lives. What is it about the story that is so potent: at its heart, it is about tribal survival – framed in competition - and it is the power of the concept of belonging to the 'right tribe' compared to those other tribes who will harm, even destroy, your tribe that drives the violence of war. If that violence is natural, it is Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw".
Let's look at the history of Russia and see how its 'story' has led to the invasion of Ukraine. What were the motives that took Putin to war? Of course, it is dangerous to oversimplify and there can be many complex reasons for how events play out but I want to argue that 'his story' is key to understanding the present invasion. Last July [2021] Putin wrote, an article (you can read what he says: it is on the internet) in which he talks about the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. And it's a 'wonderful' piece of history because he guides us right the way through the story of Ukraine from the Rus dynasty, the rulers of Kiev (or Kyiv, as we would now say), the Princes of Moscow and Novgorod to the present day Russians. His aim is to demonstrate, to prove, there is no difference between the Russian and Ukrainian people, and furthermore, the idea of a separate Ukrainian nation is 'total nonsense'.
For the start of his, this story, let's go back to 988 CE when Vladimir (Volodymyr) the Great -the Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev (Kyiv) - adopted Christianity. This was a key moment for Russia because the adoption was not just about a religion it was about a culture, it was the Orthodox Christian culture. The importance of this culture was reinforced by the Orthodox Christian disaster of 1453, which was the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. It was virtually the termination of the Byzantine Empire and the end of how the Byzantines saw themselves. The term Byzantium is a modern nomenclature, the people of the Empire saw themselves as Romans. Though they spoke Greek they perceived their culture as a continuation of the Roman Empire, the Christian Roman Empire - they called themselves 'Romaioi'. Suddenly that empire, that inheritance, had all come to an end.
The Byzantine Empire historically ceased with the conquest of Constantinople by a Muslim power but, of course, it was not the end of the Orthodox culture. The Russians because they had adopted the Orthodox Church saw themselves as a continuation of Byzantium. They were the 'Third Rome'. The Russian Empire was not to be based on a nation-state, it was based on a culture, on an idea, a story. The story of the Orthodox Christian Church, whose roots were in the Ancient Roman Empire, had developed in the Byzantine Empire and is now sustained in the Russian Empire.
In 1547 Ivan IV, remembered as Ivan the Terrible, took the title of Tsar, which is the Latin name, Caesar. He was Tsar not of Russia but 'Tsar of all the Russias'. Russia was perceived like Byzantium as an empire, not just a nation-state. So you can see where this is leading to in Putin's thinking: Russia isn't to be confined by nationalism. The Russian Empire is a whole culture, a way of life. It is the Orthodox way of life, the Orthodox culture. Ukraine is part of that culture and is referred to as 'the Ukraine', which just means the border area of Russia. It is often thought of by Russians as 'Little Russia.' Ukrainians are little Russians. They are all part of this fully embracing, massive empire. Tsar Ivan was in the mould of a Byzantine emperor, and there was a straight connection with the Byzantine Empire because Ivan III, Ivan IV's father, was married to Sophia Palaiologos, the niece of the last Emperor of Byzantium, Constantine Palaiologos XI. So, the connection between Byzantium and Russia is crucial and the idea of Russia being the Third Rome - the Roman Empire goes on.
The Byzantine concept of empire doesn't come to an end with the fall of Constantinople it is imbued within Russian history. Following the example of the Byzantine emperor, the Tsar was the father of the people: his rule was that of paternalistic autocracy. The Tsar even had to sign all marriage certificates of his subjects. His autocratic power was not just secular. He was the head of the Orthodox Church. It's not that he had any great understanding of theology - the Tsar exercised the same authority as Constantine the Great who, though he was not part of the clergy, was the first head of the Christian Church, as demonstrated at the Council of Nicaea (CE 325), – the Byzantine emperors were God's Vicar on Earth. So it was not their understanding of theology which gave them power over the Church but it was the fact that the emperor made all the senior Church appointments and in particular the Patriarchs. This is the case with Putin who controls the present Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Kirill is, therefore, unsurprisingly, a strong ally of Putin and entirely supports the war against Ukraine.
Although Ukraine has different Christian movements (for example, the Western part has a Catholic population as it used to be part of Poland), the majority of Ukrainians are Orthodox. Last year the Orthodox Church of Ukraine broke away from the Patriarchate of Moscow, which for centuries controlled the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Granted autocephaly by the Patriarch of Constantinople (who still resides in Istanbul), this breakaway from the Russian Orthodox Church caused mighty ructions that are ongoing as there are still adherents in Ukraine who look to Moscow for authority in the Orthodox Church. This move away from Moscow infuriated Putin and became another source of resentment against Ukraine.
Putin's rhetoric consistently blames the West and the fascists for stirring up Ukraine against the Kremlin, and he also blames the failure of communism for the loss of the Russian Empire and for what he considers an attack on the Orthodox culture. Though he behaves like a communist leader, he is not a communist but he is an autocrat with unlimited powers ('a strong man', an alpha male), as if he was a Tsar of all the Russias. He believes it is his right to rule over all the peoples of Russia and that includes Ukraine.
The Western press may talk about a variety of reasons for the war: from NATO threatening The Russian Federation to neo-Nazis running the Ukrainian government. However, I suggest that Putin's arguments are deeply cultural: the Ukrainians don't have their own language but it is just a dialect of Russian; Ukrainians are really just Russians; the territory of Ukraine has always been part of the Russias and it has no real history of independence: Ukraine's neo-fascist government has been seduced by the West and has turned against its motherland; the West is an enemy that wants to destroy Russia. This is Putin's paranoia which is both an aggressive posture but also a means of holding power against any rivals. You could compare it to the palace politics of Tsarist Russia.
Autocrats and totalitarian governments, and Russian leaders have been no different, tend to use the threat of an external enemy to deflect criticism from their own regime's political, economic and social failures. Putin is trying to galvanise the Russian people against a perceived common enemy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, along with the incompetent government of the comical President Yeltsin, many Russians felt their country's pride had been severely damaged: they lost that sense of being a great empire, a superpower. Russia had lost face and the West, especially the USA, seemed to be gloating over Russia's weakness. Putin has been steadily developing the Russian Federation's vast resources to recover that undermined status of world power and he openly mourns the loss of the past Soviet satellites, which were once part of the Russian Empire.
In the West, I believe, we have been blind to Putin's ambition. I recognise there are very good reasons why. The last thing democratic countries want is war and so avoiding confrontation is often the main driver of foreign policy. After the First World War, the Western democracies prevaricated and did nothing when Hilter's troops marched into the Rhineland. Then, despite much hand-ringing, the Nazis were allowed to move into the Sudetenland and control Czechoslovakia. The allied powers of World War I were hesitant to take any military action against Hilter. It is perfectly understandable. There were concerns over the fairness of the Versailles Treaty, which had stripped Germany of territory, so some concessions could be tolerated. However, more importantly, the western nations were terrified of repeating the carnage of the First World War. Democracies generally want peace. They don't spend on defence because their political agendas are economic and social: the accumulation and redistribution of wealth to the benefit of their citizens. Democratic governments want to raise the living standards of their people as their tenure in power depends upon satisfying their voters. As James Carville said to Bill Clinton in 1992, “It's the economy stupid” that wins elections.
Where governments are not democratically answerable to an electorate, as in totalitarian states the case is very different. The focus is on maintaining power not the well-being of the people. In order to avoid criticism of the regime, conflict and war have been seen by autocrats and juntas as a solution to the problem of opposition to their unjust and repressive rule. A national conflict against an alien people is a means of binding the population together and those who dissent can be categorised as traitors and criminals. The West could observe Putin's approach to dissent when he ordered the total destruction of Grozny in the war against Chechnya. The Western democracies were appalled at the level of violence but it was perceived as an internal matter and there was little they could or wanted to do. When Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, the Kremlin called it a "peace enforcement" operation and Western democracies were not united in their condemnation or response. After all, it could be argued that the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, had provoked Putin's government by wanting to join NATO and Saakashvili had sent the Georgian troops into South Ossetia, ironically given Putin's stance on Ukraine, as it was claimed as a historic part of Georgia. Putin, as means of controlling Georgian Western ambitions, backed a South Ossetian separatist movement. The ethnic cleansing of Georgians from Abkhazia and South Ossetia that followed was all part of the normal Kremlin policy from the time of the Tsars to the Soviets, which we can now see in those parts of Ukrainian that have become under Russian control.
The writing was on the wall with regard to future Kremlin policy - it had not changed from Soviet or Tsarist days. It seemed the West had learned little from the internal repression of Chechnya where separatists wanted their own state, to the invasion of Georgia: an example of the Kremlin attacking an independent state. Above all, it demonstrated Putin's willingness to use military force to attain his political objectives. Then in 2014 Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine and at the same time armed and supported Russian separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Sadly, once more the West was slow to react. Yes, sanctions were imposed but were half-hearted at best.
Putin's actual invasion this year again seemed to take the West by surprise. Despite the military exercises on the border of Ukraine, his martial display was generally played down as saber-rattling. Putin with the annexation of Crimea and the military support of the Donbas separatists had provoked the West in 2014 but received little retribution. The scale and the horror of the Russian military tactics in Ukraine, however, have now jolted the West into action. NATO, which was described by Donald Trump as "obsolete" has woken up. The fear is now openly expressed that Putin, if successful in Ukraine, won't stop there and will attempt to claw back other ex-Russian satellites from Estonia to Poland.
There is, of course, another terrifying dimension to the conflict in Ukraine and that is the threatened use of nuclear weapons. These weapons by their very nature - weapons of mass destruction - would embroil the whole of Europe and beyond, devasting human civilisation. Where does that leave democratic societies: we are all living under a huge amount of stress. Apart from the nuclear threat and leaving aside the impact of the Covid pandemic, we are having to cope with our fear for the Ukrainian people while the brutality of the fighting is posted on our TV screens. We watch with bated breath. Anxious not to provoke a third world war, the West, especially NATO counties, tentatively helps arm the Ukrainians.
The Russian army, however, is proving to be, despite its advantages in numbers and equipment, fairly shambolic. Of course, the West must be careful not to necessarily believe its own propaganda but the fact that Putin's forces failed to take Kyiv and have lost ground, retreating from Kherson and being driven from the Kharkiv region, gives hope that this Kremlin bully will not only be stopped in his tracks but possibly lose power altogether.
If Putin is forced from office, who would replace him and would the new leader espouse the same war-like cultural attitudes and ideology? The story might well be the same 'the greatness of the Russian people and their Empire' and the regaining of Ukraine. Putin likes to compare himself to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great (though we might think of him as more like Stalin), imperialistic role models who expanded the Russian Empire. That Empire was in competition with the imperialist ambitions of Western Europe and many Russians still see Russia in competition with the West. It is not just Putin's rhetoric but other senior members of the Kremlin constantly lambast the West. Among a considerable portion of the Russian people (older generations rather than the young}, the West has become a scapegoat for all that has gone wrong in Russia.
There is continuity in Russian politics. I would argue that the political culture of Russia, developed since the time of Ivan the Terrible hasn't really changed. Even the immense political turmoil of the Russian Revolution in 1917 merely replaced one set of totalitarian rulers with another. The underlying centralised and controlling structure remained the same. In Tsarist Russia there was the autocrat supported by an elite aristocracy, repressing the people and peasants; in the Communist Soviets, there was the despotic Politburo, with the apparatchiks, the bureaucracy, repressing the people. With Putin you have an autocrat destroying freedom, the oligarchs exploiting the system, and the people, as ever, suffering both socially and economically. If things went wrong in Tsarist Russia, as well as external enemies there were internal foes: it was the nobility's fault or the Jews: in the Soviet Union, the apparatchiks, the bureaucracy, or the class enemies who could be blamed; under Putin's regime (he is 'doing his best for the people'), apart from the threat of the West, it is the oligarchs who are the problem and must be brought to heel. There is another constant: the thread of corruption runs all through the culture. When there is no just system of government, there is discrimination, bribery and violence - underpinned by a violent criminal class, the 'Russia mafia'. It is possible to argue nothing has changed since Dostoyevsky's world.
I used to travel to Russia quite a bit for the universities I worked for. One time, I think it was at the Moscow State University, I came out of the entrance with my Russian colleague and he pointed at a building nearby and told me that was where Putin's accountants and prosecutors worked. Their job is to make sure the oligarchs contributed to Putin's purse otherwise they would find themselves prosecuted and even worse - you will remember what happened to Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky. Other oligarchs, who have fled Russia, sometimes to London, seem to have mysterious deaths like Boris Berezovsky; falling out of windows, like Ravil Maganov, seems a real hazard*: and any opposition to Putin becomes a lethal target for assassination whether it is by being poisoned, like Navalny or just being shot, like Nemtsov, And certainly, those who have 'betrayed' the motherland like Litvinenko or the Skripals were targets for elimination.
My point is that you can change the name on the door but Russian political culture is exactly the same as it has been for centuries. It is about centralised control, it is about autocracy, it is about paternalistic infallibility, discrimination, lack of freedom and it's about brutality. Russia also has, not just under Putin, systematically used war to achieve its political ends. The military has been a key tool in furthering its regime's political ambitions. Some of you may have been surprised by the sheer level of violence and destruction that has taken place in Ukraine. However, it is part of a pattern: the devastation of Cherchyna, the tactics in Georgia, and the bombing in Syria and now the total destruction and butchery in Ukraine; from the destruction of Mariupol to the killing of innocent civilians in Bucha.
Putin's regime is not interested in winning over the population of Ukraine to his way of thinking. His war is about punishment for not adhering to his ideology. Ukrainians are either Neo-Nazis or puppets of the West. Whereas military strategy in the West tends to be subordinate to the aim of gaining the support of the population for a political agenda whether it is against undemocratic enemy regimes or terrorism. The Russian military strategy, however, is about winning at any cost: resulting in war crimes, from killing civilians to deportations and indiscriminate, total destruction. The Russian military, as we have seen, is even prepared to recruit criminals and mercenaries, often no strangers to appalling violence, as troops to bolster its forces.
If I return to the theme of 'making war', what are my conclusions as to why war is made for some, what I would call 'half-true' stories that affirm some irrational values about nationhood, religion and ideology? Humans, certainly throughout history (since literacy) have created normality about organised violence. However, looking at humanity's positive achievements we have learned to cooperate in a way that makes us unique among all species. We have language that has given us more than just the gift of communication with other humans. It has given us the ability to have ideas, imagine, and exercise rational judgment, and above all empathise with the 'other'. As far as we know other animals do not imagine but live for the moment, while we can plan, be anxious about the future and even worry about the past. We are by comparison an advanced species yet we are still driven by evolutionary forces that are focussed on survival through competition and violence.
When it comes to war, whole generations have sacrificed their lives for ideas. As I argued before, Freud believed our devotion to organised violence to be pathological, Coker has argued it is part of 'natural behaviour'. That violent behaviour has been seen as the driver that sought new technology, especially weapons, which led to the advance of civilisation from the Bronze to the Anthropocene Age. This idea has an anthropological pedigree. Many of you will know Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001 a Space Odyssey. There is a scene in the film just after the beginning which is based on the popular anthropological writing of Robert Ardrey. Ardrey was influenced in his books by the Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart, who discovered in a South African cave an early ancestor of humans, an australopithecine species, Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to homo sapiens. Dart discovered among the fossils a skull of an animal that had, he believed, been killed by a weapon wielded by a hominin. In Kubrick's scene, there are two rival groups of 'ape men', screaming and threatening each other. One 'ape man' picks up a bone, obviously to use as a weapon, and tosses it into the air. The next shot switches to the mysterious alien monolith, which is found on the Moon and starts the space flight to Jupiter- part of the Arthur C Clark story of 2001 which he wrote with Kubrick. Dart's interpretation of his find and the message of the film is that human advancement has been brought about through the technology of violence.
Of course, there are many anthropologists that do not accept Dart's thesis and I remember discussing the cause of human evolution with the anthropologist Richard Leakey, who sadly died last year. Leakey believed it is language and the human ability to share and cooperate that was the source of the development of homo sapiens consciousness and all that has followed from that. However, our species is essentially tribal: tribal unity and cohesiveness have been based upon those stories Coke describes being told around the hunter-gathers fire. They are stories of superiority, of shared foes and heroic sacrifices for the common good. Those stories are a form of propaganda, binding the individual into a community. These stories are also about history, the noble or ignoble past, not just creating a shared ideology but also a motive for action. Maybe, Dart was not so wrong in that organised violence inflicted on others not only demands the dehumanising of the recipients, 'the other', but is also a means of evolving society to cooperate by putting aside selfish individual concerns to act for the good of the tribe through sacrifice - which could mean losing your own life for a cause.
Outrage at a common enemy is a powerful tool for creating cooperation. I remember the historian A.J.P.Taylor when talking about World War II, stating that Britain got what it deserved and needed in Churchill, who in his speeches was constantly referring to a 'mythical' past where Britain could never be defeated (the story) and at the same time denigrating Hitler and the Nazi regime (even the way he annunciated the word Nazi was derogatory) - dehumanising the enemy. Nations create these stories about themselves in the same way that we now create slogans to demand loyalty to an idea or a tribe. In the past, I used to teach quite often in Northern Ireland as a visiting lecturer, and travelling through Belfast I would see the slogans of the opposing communities - everywhere there were murals depicting historical roots and violent aspirations from King Billy to masked gunmen. Powerful visual images, reminding the communities of their loyalty and a calling them to arms. Call it propaganda, national pride, or patriotism, these are instruments for the 'making of war'.
You could perceive the way I have portrayed Putin as demonising and you could also have thought I have implicitly linked him to the Russian people which is also part of a process of dehumanising that is so often crucial to warmongering. We must not forget the many Russian moderates who are desperate to move towards a more open and democratic society. However, if there is one thing I have learnt as an anthropologist is that culture takes a long time to change. It has taken homo sapiens ages to reach the point when it talks about human rights and there are still many societies that persecute outsiders, whether it be because of their race, gender, or sexuality.
We also know when it comes to this particular conflict there are in Ukraine fascist-style nationalists and political extremists. There is plenty of corruption in the country which is hard for the Ukrainian government to deal with. There is often an anti-Russian sentiment which you will find in many eastern European states that were under the Soviets and subject to Tsarist and Communist Russian immigration and ethnic cleansing of national groups. The assertion of nationalism has, ironically, been heightened by the global village (the inter-connected world), which I have talked about elsewhere, from the USA (Trump's distortions of a golden age that should be recovered) to our own nations in the UK where there are demands for Scottish, Welsh or even Cornish independence.
Human beings across the world are buying into the myths of their past whether it is the historical inaccuracies of the film Braveheart or the endemic hatred of religious faith that legitimises the slaughter of non-believers. Putin uses the classic tactic of blaming outsiders for the woes of his country and at the same time argues the West is out to destroy Russia. The story, myths and lies are controlled by an autocratic government, from the control of the media to the content of school textbooks.
At the core of the making of war, there is a drive of competition for resources and survival and it is often not rational behavior but based on raw emotion. However rational we think we are as human beings, we are actually driven by our irrational emotions. Some of you will know about Daniel Kahneman, a Jewish-American economist, who won the Nobel Prize for economics because he was able to demonstrate how economics was influenced by emotions and irrational behavior. Most people would equate the money markets, stock exchanges, with sound financial principles based on hard-headed decision-making. However, Kahneman blew that myth away and proved most financial decisions were based on irrational sentiments based around evolutionary behaviours and culture. Of course, the whole idea of money is based on a concept rather than a reality in the same way money does not really exist neither do nations - they are an idea, a story, often based on a false narrative.
I can claim that Putin is waging war based on a set of dubious ideas and stories about nationality and culture, Orthodox culture, and behind those motivations, one might argue it is also about his own survival in power. To make war happen he has been able to harness the emotional and irrational beliefs that exist, not only within the Russian people but within all humanity. The political culture of Russia cannot be expected to change overnight and the evolutionary mindset that is behind the making of war, whether explicitly for economic gain, or political or religious ideologies cannot be easily overcome.
I hope I have been able to give some anthropological insight into the making of war and in particular, the cultural driving force behind Putin's thinking and the launching of this despicable Russian invasion of Ukraine. I have claimed it is hard to change human behaviour and culture but human beings can change their thinking and behaviour: we tend not to burn heretics these days - though we still have a long way to go in securing human rights and dignity for all people, It is not impossible that we will cease making war in the future but meanwhile but we should strive to undermine those who believe it achieves some economic, political or religious desire.
*Since I gave this talk "Pavel Antov's death is among a series of other deaths of Russian oligarchs who have criticised the Vladimir Putin-led administration's war with Ukraine" (National Herald, Digital, 27 Dec 2022).
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