The Reckoning Is Yet to Come
In addition to fear and horror, the war in Ukraine during its first weeks awakened a strange feeling of self-confidence in Europe. “Solidarity with Ukraine makes democracy cool again,” the Serbian activist Srdja Popovic told the French newspaper Liberation on March 23. Vladimir Putin, through his rhetoric, indiscriminate bombing, and civilian massacres, has taken on a role much bigger than that of an old-fashioned tyrant: that of an openly fascist stateman. At last, after decades of false alarms, the first real one of his kind in Europe in 80 years. And somehow, perhaps because we’d been expecting a leader like him for so long, it also sounded to some like reinvigorating news.
During the Balkan War of the early ’90s, Popovic opposed the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević with what he called “laughtivism,” using mockery against power. He stood in a tradition of the weak fighting against the strong, the dreamers riding against the men of action, as Leonard Cohen used to sing during that same decade—a tradition that Václav Havel called, in his essay condemning Communist totalitarianism, “the power of the powerless.”
This tradition seems to have been taken up by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who now defies the brutal force of Russia. Half consciously, half irrationally, Zelensky’s Jewishness adds to the sense that he stands within a whole tradition of satire, fueled by the most anarchic tendencies of Yiddishkeit. He is practicing the art honed by Kafka, Chaplin, and Brecht, and taken up by Kundera, Norman Manea, and the ones we once called the dissidents.
