North Korea's Kim reaffirms support for Russia's 'sacred' Ukraine war

I have read the dispatch from the far east, and it sits with me now, like a heavy meal that will not digest. Kim Jong Un pledges his support for Russia’s “sacred” war. The word itself - sacred - applied to the grinding of cities and the scattering of families, gives me pause. It is a word for altars, not for artillery parks. I find myself, as I so often do, caught between two true things: the first is that all alliances are marriages of convenience, and have been since Caesar crossed the Rubicon; the second is that there is a particular flavor of cynicism in this one that turns the stomach.

It calls to mind, not for the first time, the nature of solitude. Here are two leaders, each in his own way isolated from the common current of the world, one by choice and ideology, the other by force of his own actions. And in that isolation, they find a mirror in each other. One provides the old shells, the other provides the fresh bodies - or is it the other way around? The commerce of despair. I am put in mind of two sick men in a hospital, each assuring the other that his fever is a sign of robust health, and agreeing to trade each other’s medicines, which are, in fact, poisons.

What unsettles me most, I think, is not the fact of the alliance - power has always sought its own kind - but the language that clothes it. To declare a war of conquest “sacred” is to remove it from the realm of human judgment. It becomes a matter of faith, where to question is to blaspheme. This is a dangerous alchemy, turning leaden ambition into golden dogma. I have seen this before, in our own wars of religion. Once a cause is holy, every atrocity becomes a sacrament.

And so I am left with a familiar, weary feeling. The strong do what they can, Thucydides told us, and the weak suffer what they must. This has not changed. But I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that we might have progressed enough to at least call things by their proper names. It seems we have not. We have only become more adept at gilding the chain.

June 17th

Having spent the better part of the morning in a losing skirmish with a recalcitrant jar of marmalade - a vessel whose hermetic seal suggested it had been engineered by the same minds behind the vaults at Fort Knox - I turned for relief to the day’s bulletins. There I encountered the spectacle of the Supreme Leader of North Korea, a gentleman whose wardrobe appears to have been pilfered from a community theatre production of The King and I, pledging his nation’s full-throated support for Russia’s “sacred” war. The adjective gave me pause, I confess. One is accustomed to hearing the term applied to, say, a pilgrimage or a vow of silence, not to the systematic reduction of cities to gravel. It put me in mind of a particularly oleaginous used-car salesman describing a dilapidated sedan as “previously cherished.”

Here we have a tableau of two potentates, one wrestling with the logistical nightmare of a stalled offensive across the steppes, the other presiding over a kingdom where the electrical grid is a philosophical concept, finding common cause in a sacred struggle. It is the sort of partnership that makes one reassess the entire notion of synergy, rather like a collaboration between a tone-deaf bard and a drummer with one arm. Kim vows to help Moscow achieve victory, a pledge which, given the DPRK’s own staggering triumphs in the fields of famine management and lightbulb manufacture, must have sent a frisson of pure terror through the corridors of the Kremlin. I picture the Russian generals receiving this news, their faces assuming the expression of a man who, having ordered a vintage Bordeaux, is presented with a lukewarm bottle of prune juice. The whole affair has the distinct aroma of a transaction between two patrons in a shadowy bazaar, each convinced he has pawned a glass jewel and received a diamond in return. I shall now return to my marmalade, which, for all its obstinacy, at least makes no claim to a sacred mission.

The dispatch from Pyongyang speaks of a “sacred” war. The term “sacred” implies a divine mandate, a righteousness beyond question, a justification that transcends mere human calculation. Yet, the evidence for such a mandate is conspicuously absent. One searches in vain for the celestial decree, the unambiguous sign that elevates this particular conflict above the common brutality of armed struggle.

To declare a war sacred is to remove it from the realm of rational discourse. It is to assert that its ends are unimpeachable, its means therefore justified by definition. By this standard, any conflict, however rapacious or destructive, could be cloaked in sanctity. One might as well declare a game of chess “sacred” and then insist that every move is divinely ordained. The logical consequence of such a premise is the nullification of all moral inquiry. If all is sacred, then nothing is.

The support offered by one autocrat to another, framed in such terms, reveals not a shared moral vision, but a shared utility in rhetorical obfuscation. The language serves to insulate actions from scrutiny, to replace argument with assertion. It is a familiar tactic: when the facts are inconvenient, elevate the discussion to a plane where facts are deemed irrelevant. This does not, however, alter the facts themselves. The war remains a war, its character determined by its conduct, not by the adjectives appended to it.