Can Europe’s artists embrace the idea of armed pacifism?
And yet “no to militarisation” still feels like an easy answer to a difficult question, because the pacifist consensus that Europe has established since the time of the cold war has relied on US security guarantees and Russian fossil fuels – trade-offs that have started to look increasingly unwise since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and since Trump’s threats of aggression against Greenland
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/28/this-is-europe-european-film-awards-culture-war-pacifism
@balkanika
@balkanika Or can there be a middle way for culture in times of war? When I asked Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s chief culture writer, about this, she pointed me to the Ukrainian photojournalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov’s Bafta-nominated documentary 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a film “which is not so much ‘pro-military’ but ‘pro-soldier’, deeply empathetic towards the men who are sacrificing their lives for inches of Ukrainian soil”