A French astronaut tweeted a very nice picture with a very charming sentiment.
Kyiv en 2017 depuis l’ISS… la vue doit être bien différente ajd. Petit rappel à toutes fins utiles que les frontières sont invisibles de l’espace, tout simplement parce qu’elles sont des inventions arbitraires des humains. pic.twitter.com/uY82THPCVs
— Thomas Pesquet (@Thom_astro) March 21, 2022
Translation: “Kyiv in 2017 from the International Space Station … the view must be quite different today. Small reminder for all intents and purposes that borders are invisible from space, simply because they are arbitrary human inventions.”
The astronaut, Thomas Pesquet, is attempting the secular version of the true statement that in God’s eyes, all men are the same and that our differences are minuscule.
But imagining Ukraine without national borders today is not exactly the uplifting sentiment I imagine Monsieur Pesquet intended.
You could almost see his comments as an echo of this statement last month: “Let me emphasize once again that Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space.”
That’s Vladimir Putin talking there. Putin’s whole argument is that the border between Russia and Ukraine is an arbitrary human invention that doesn’t reflect any social or historical truth.
“There is no Ukraine,” Putin’s intellectual adviser Vladislav Surkov recently said. “There is Ukrainian-ness. That is, a specific disorder of the mind. An astonishing enthusiasm for ethnography, driven to the extreme … But there is no nation.”
Obviously, our astronaut friend isn’t saying this. Neither are the people currently singing John Lennon’s lyrics, “Imagine there’s no countries.” They are making calls for peace, and peace is exactly what we should all be calling for.
But peace today doesn’t mean “let’s pretend there are no nations.” The opposite is more true. Peace today means “Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and Vladimir Putin is an evil aggressor whose army must be beaten until they leave Ukraine alone.”
Everyone flying a Ukrainian flag today, from their house, their coffee shop, or their Twitter avatar, is taking a stand for nations and national borders. Get back to your side of the border is, in effect, the command the world community is issuing to Putin.
The world community is joining together, but not to say there are no differences between nations. Instead, we are saying that we stand with Ukraine’s right to be Ukraine — to be independent, sovereign, and definitely not Russia.
Put another way, vive la différence!
