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This is a reply to a comment I got on Mastodon. It’s here instead of there because Mastodon caps posts at 500 characters, and this runs well past that. Mastodon and this site are both public spaces, and nothing here is meant to discredit the person I replied to, only to lay out context they were missing. For the record, she’s right that war is horror. There’s no romance, glory, or honor in it.
There’s a 1970 anti-war poster making the rounds: the US flag, stripes as rifles, stars as bombers. I left one comment on it, purely about the design:
If it’s inverted, it actually reads more like a call to war (revolution). The flag is shown upside down. Rotated 180° to its normal position, the rifles would be folded, but as displayed, inverted, they appear ready to fire, suggesting a call to take up arms.
The reply I got:
Do not forget the context. It was horrifying. I will never forget the photo of the burning child running screaming.
Response
My great-grandfather served as a scout in the Soviet army. After a machine-gun ambush, he was severely wounded, but fortunately not fatally. A month later, a doctor who happened to check his barely beating pulse sent him to a hospital, hoping he could still be saved. After the war ended, he came back with an amputated leg and a bullet-shattered arm. Whenever I asked my grandmother about him, she always said two things: that he worked for three men with one leg, and that he never talked about the war, hoping that we, his children (and grandchildren), would never learn its horrors.
Unfortunately, his hopes didn’t come true, and with the start of the war in Ukraine, I got a small taste of its grief myself. I’m currently in Belgium, for which I’m grateful to the EU, despite how hard migration has been. But before that, I hid in a basement every day, listening to shells exploding a couple of kilometers away. There’s one day I’ll remember for the rest of my life: at 2 a.m. I heard a sharp whistle right above my head, and a second and a half later, an explosion. I woke up the whole family and we ran to the basement, where another shot immediately rang out — whistle, explosion. This went on for half an hour, but what scared me most wasn’t the explosions a couple hundred meters away, those, in a way, brought relief, a sign that you were still alive, but the shot and the whistle of the incoming shell, which sounded like it was right there in the pit of my stomach, as if it were aimed straight at you and about to tear through those concrete walls, taking you and your family in a flash.
I’m not writing this to complain about my hard fate. Many people had it far worse, especially during the war (think of Mariupol, or Stalingrad). I’m writing it to point out a simple rule: don’t lecture someone you don’t know. Well-meaning advice like that often lands not as a kind gesture but as unwanted help, which immediately creates roles nobody asked for. In my comment, I wasn’t taking a position on war, or making fun of the poster — I was just trying to express an opinion about the inverted US flag.
If something isn’t clear, feel free to ask or discuss it with me directly, that’s a much better starting point than assuming. But please don’t read into my words things that were never said.
P.S.
As Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot, Prince Myshkin retells the story of a man reprieved at the last moment before execution: with five minutes left to live, it seemed to him he would live so many lives in those five minutes. That’s what the whistle before the explosion was. Not the impact, the wait.
A few films worth watching: Come and See (1985), directed by Elem Klimov, for the horror of WWII. Liberation (1968–1971), directed by Yuri Ozerov, for the war in general, done with authenticity. When my great-grandfather watched one of Liberation’s episodes, he said all of it was true.