Is there anything more Christmas than a call for peace? I have to admit that I’m a little suspicious of Christmas’s message of peace. I remember exactly where I was – seven years old, unsuspectingly leafing through my childhood Bible – when I first realized that the baby born at Christmas would be the same person who would be tortured to death by a crotch. Christmas has had a strange aftertaste ever since. A baby that brings peace is nice, but do you know what will happen to him? Peace through brute force, that’s how I secretly understand the true message of Christmas.
Since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, I have developed a strange relationship with the word peace. Over the past year, I have been extremely irritated by Western calls for peace negotiations. So much so that my friends started joking that I “hate peace.” That’s going a bit far, but it’s true that I don’t really know what to do with the word anymore.
With sardonic pleasure, the same friends pressed peace cards from the Singel Church in Amsterdam under my nose a few days ago. Children from that church community had given their vision of peace on those cards. “Peace is sending this card,” it said, for example. “Peace begins with the word hello.” (That is, with all due respect, nonsense: genocide starts just as well with the word ‘hello’ as in ‘Hello, open the door, you are now being transported.’) It is all meant to be terribly sweet, but I pulled it’s bad. The pure, innocent child: we will ask him what peace is.
Those maps suffer from exactly the same problem as the calls for peace from countries that have long forgotten what war is. I don’t hate peace, but I do hate the peace talk of people who have never experienced war. It is arrogant to ask for peace from our armchair out of ‘war weariness’, when it is not our cities that are being occupied.
2024 does not look good for Ukraine. The solidarity with the country that once seemed so self-evident is under severe pressure. Biden can no longer get his support packages through Congress, Orbán is bothering Europe, and the PVV wants to declare the support controversial.
When I was in Kyiv last month, I saw how the large-scale war had left its mark on people I knew from (gradually) more peaceful times. The uncertainty, the stress, the fear, the anger. Peace is the least you wish for the Ukrainians, the country has enough problems without an entire generation of men disappearing into the trenches. I would never tell Ukrainians to keep fighting at all costs, for their or our freedom.
But no one I spoke to saw any benefit in peace negotiations at the moment. The suggestion mainly provoked anger. What was there to negotiate? Who would give guarantees that Russia would not regroup and move on later? Do the people under occupation in Mariupol live in peace?
Perhaps when it comes to peace, we should not listen to children or adults who do not know what war is, but to the people who experience the consequences of it every day.
In that respect, one of the cards from the Singelkerk children was unexpectedly striking. “Peace is voluntary,” it said. A brainteaser. I don’t think it means that peace is always a choice. The Ukrainians did not ask for this war, Russia is doing this to them. But an imposed agreement is not peace. Peace, I have to hand it to the children who wrote this card, is voluntary.
That is why the Ukrainians I spoke to this Christmas are not toasting peace, but rather victory. Less Christmassy? In a bitter way, it fits in perfectly with the dormant violence that, for the good listener, has always been inherent in the Christmas celebration.
Eva Peek is NRC editor.