European cities have always fascinated me not so much for their art, music or literature though these are impressive testament to the heights of civilised culture. Not even the intellectual vivacity of the Europeans, who can be as pedantic and pretentious as any other urban people around the world.
No. The one thing that resounded in my soul is the echo of a cathedral, an empty chamber hall, a promenade of columns. Europe in the early 1970s and 1980s had this strange air of melancholy and spiritual depth (or death, if you will). Yet, there was nothing clearly spiritual about modern European art and literature. Therein lies the paradox (like the rich harvest of wheat fields of Van Gogh paintings versus the empty streets of De Chirico’s works).
It was as if God himself or a Messiah had visited the European cities,
stayed for a few nights as an anonymous stranger and then left to never
return. Perhaps, He decided it was better to leave a spiritual vacuum in
Europe with all their existential angst and self-centered, post-modernist
philosophies. That whisper of a spiritual longing, traumatized by centuries of
intra-European wars, may one day turn into a loud cry of desperation.
I know. As an ethnic Chinese student, I stayed in Europe for a decade
split between the 1970s and 1980s: mostly London and Paris, cities of many
beautiful streets, squares, and palaces. What the Chinese-American architect,
I.M. Pei, said about buildings as the mirror of life—“the presence of the past,
the spirit of a place”—is ironically true of Europe.[1] The
vast spaces and confluence of Baroque and iconic buildings stand as silent
witnesses to the tragic experience of Europeans in the horrendous two world wars
of the twentieth century.
And if one is quietly alert, you can almost hear something like an echo of an inner longing for a time lost, un temps perdu. The most evocative description of that echo resonates in some of the classical music of the Baroque period. Listening to Bach/Marcello’s Adagio from Oboe Concerto in D Minor (second movement) in its various forms (piano, violin, guitar), one can grasp the weight of lost longing.
A New Crisis
at Europe’s Doorstep
That cry for a
long-lost teacher, a spiritual guide, a Renaissance man or woman has never been
more desperate in times of crises such as the present war rumblings in Ukraine.
For the first time since the Second World War ended in 1945, a major European
nation has been attacked and invaded by a foreign superpower. The
reverberations of the new war are being felt across the world especially in
Southeast Asia where I reside. Economically, rising fuel and food prices had
already spiked up before the war and will continue to hit our living costs.
But geopolitically, the Russian invasion of a sovereign country may be a
dark harbinger of what might soon happen to Taiwan and to the stability of
Southeast Asian countries (at the outset, only two members of the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations, Singapore and Indonesia, condemned the Russian
invasion but as the conflict intensified, a total of eight Asean member states
voted for a UN resolution condemning it). But there is more than meets the eye.
On the one hand, the globalist Great Reset elite of Europe in alliance
with some of their American peers, are planning a new world order, politically,
economically, and militarily. That new world order is modeled after the
European Union, a concept that is politically flawed as it subsumes the
sovereignty of nations under its umbrella to the laws of the EU state.
(Incidentally, the insight into this flaw was revealed to me in a conversation
with the theoretical founder of the Euro, the late Canadian economist Robert
Mundell, who said: “The currency union would work perfectly on the assumption
of free labor mobility.”[2] In
simple terms, it assumes a jobless Spanish factory worker can move to Germany
to find a similar job there. The cultural and social differences are simply too
stark for this ideal state to ever be achieved.)
On the other hand, Russia’s nationalist President Vladimir Putin is clearly looking to achieve his life-long goal to rebuild the Soviet empire while China’s president-for-life is also eyeing Taiwan. The Cold War between the liberal Western democracies and the autocratic communist regimes in the East never ended in December 1991. It simply went into hibernation and infiltrated American universities and Congress through ideological subversion, a process clearly described by former KGB propaganda agent Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970.[3]
How to resolve the war in Ukraine? Ukraine, on its own, a nation with a surprisingly small GDP of US$165 billion despite its vast natural resources, does not matter as much to the Western European nations as it does strategically to Putin. As a tactical move to de-escalate tensions between Russia and Ukraine at its borders, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation could just as well have told Putin that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO for the “time being” in lieu of rescinding the NATO 2008 Bucharest declaration which promised to accept Ukraine and Georgia into the military alliance. (We can recall what happened shortly after that declaration: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008). But strangely, this de-escalating chess move was never put on the table of diplomatic negotiations before the invasion on February 24, 2022. Now, the world and most acutely the Ukrainians are suffering for that tactical mistake, which may have been intentionally made for reasons only the globalist elite may know.
If European politicians and the stumbling Biden administration have made
a Faustian bargain to trade a pragmatic peace for an ideological clash of
civilizations, then there is nothing we, citizens of the world, can do but pray
and speak out against the plans of the warmongers. By all accounts, Russia’s
Putin is clearly the aggressor, and we shall see if he has the wisdom to just
de-weaponize Ukraine as he claims, and hopefully leave the ravaged country to
rebuild itself on its own prerogative as a neutral sovereign state.
Post-war restoration is perhaps a distant future. Yet, one can’t help but notice the swift change in mainstream media’s focus from the Covid-19 variant to the war. Just when the black swan of the pandemic was near its end, another black swan swept into view like a Greek tragedy. This is why to keep our hearts and minds from the media’ gloom and doom lens, a quiet meditation on ancient art, faith and silent spaces is a refreshing balm to the soul. One recalls that amazing scene in the movie The English Patient, where the war-weary nurse Hanna is pulled up in a rope by her friend Kirpal Singh to admire with a torch the frescoed murals of an Italian cathedral; it is those quiet moments of joy that restores our sanity.
The nurse Hana in the film, The English Patient. https://sikhchic.com/books/another_look_at_the_english_patient_the_book_the_film
[1] I.M. Pei, “For Changing the World, One Building at
a Time, Lifetime Achievement Award,” Asia Society,
https://asiasociety.org/asia-game-changers/im-pei.
[2] Author interview with Robert Mundell, “An Asian Common
Currency: The Case For and Against,” Smart Investor, September 2000.
[3] Ankit Kumar, “Use of Deception in Warfare: Case of
Russia,” Centre for Land Warfare Studies, July 10, 2019, https://www.claws.in/use-of-deception-in-warfare-case-of-russia/.
