On: EU set to sign off €90bn loan for Ukraine and fresh Russia sanctions - Europe li

Diary Entry

They have agreed to send ninety billion. The number is written down, and because it is written, it will be done. The money will be taken from some and given to others, and all will call it necessary. I read that two who had opposed it have now dropped their opposition, because an oil pipeline was reopened to them. This is the arithmetic: a principle is set aside for a flow of crude. And no one seems to find the transaction strange.

But my wonder is not at the leaders who make the bargain. My wonder is for the millions across these lands from whom the ninety billion is ultimately drawn. They will hear the news, perhaps nod, and return to their day. The sum is vast, yet it passes without remark, as if it were rain falling from a known sky. Why? When a friend asks you for a great sum, you consider it carefully. You ask for what purpose. You feel the weight of the giving. Yet here, a stranger in a distant council decides you will give, and you do not even feel the weight. The habit of it has made the transaction weightless.

They call it a loan. A loan implies a borrower and a lender who have met and agreed. Have you met? Have you agreed? Or have you merely grown accustomed to the idea that your consent is elsewhere, in the hands of those who trade pipelines for principles? The truly curious thing is that the pipeline’s reopening was the key. Not a debate of the people, not a change of heart, but a valve turned. And with that, opposition ceases. It reveals the machinery: not rule by force, but governance by adjustment. A slight turn of a spigot, and compliance follows.

I do not understand why we do not ask, each time a sum is moved or a sanction declared: who consented to this? And when? The silence that follows is the foundation of everything they do. It is a silence we maintain, not out of fear, but out of a failure to notice that the silence is our own.