I Won't Give Up My Father

Why don’t you do the same song again from the perspective of a Russian deserter …,

someone commented on YouTube. I had considered that too, before the song „Ich aus Ukraine kommen“ came into being.

Amy Winehouse once said, in essence, that one should only write about things one has experienced oneself. I try to take that advice reasonably to heart. The true kernel of the story in the song is based on an experience during a summer holiday in Bohemia in 2022. The Czech landlord of the holiday flat had put up Ukrainians in his second holiday flat. We only ever saw a young woman, but through the walls we also heard a man. Only once did we catch sight of him, a young, athletic type. Given the exit ban for men of military age, one wonders how a man of a guardsman’s stature could have left Ukraine and why he seems to be hiding out in the Czech Republic. I fantasised an answer for myself and turned it into a song.

I don’t know a single Russian who has fled conscription. But back home in the neighbouring block there now lives a Ukrainian too, whom you can see doing boxing exercises bare-chested in the evenings. Did I take the Russians’ side by singing about a Ukrainian conscientious objector? Well, first of all one has to say that a not inconsiderable share of the soldiers on the Russian side are, from the West’s official point of view, likewise Ukrainians, because they come from Donetsk, Luhansk or Crimea. It would be only logical for conscientious objectors from there to flee to the West. That there are now problems in western Ukraine with army personnel and with mobilisation is something we even learn from the political-media complex in Germany. There is a shortage of men. First, because apparently many are already dead and maimed. Second, because too many have no appetite for war and death and evade being caught.

Should the Ukrainian refugees simply be deported to the front for the good cause?

And besides: if the Russian is to be defeated on the battlefield, then olive-green rediscovers it: toxic masculinity. Then people also applaud national pride, folklore, cheers of salvation, and speeches about homeland and fatherland. As long as it isn’t German. And the shaven-headed Ukros — the gentlemen for the rough work — are needed too, since the weapons blessed by the green clerics are unfortunately not yet so artificially intelligent that they kill in a climate-neutral way all by themselves. And so one need not look too closely at whom and what the new friends there revere, and which symbols are tattooed on their skin. For after all they are fighting, for example, for LGBTQ+ rights in the East.

Speaking of which: Germany must become capable of war again, and therefore one ought to be clear about one’s sex at the latest two months before conscription — otherwise a biological man is, according to the Self-Determination Act, a man and thus fit for the front. Now one would only need to sort out what happens to the children of gay fathers if both are drafted, or rather whether that is even possible, and if so, which father then does not have to go to war.

And it is above all the modern man as a family father that the song is about. According to the current understanding, he is supposed to be there for the family and not remain stuck in the old role model. No objection — neither from me nor from the many other fathers who live it that way nowadays and thereby really do make the world a little better. But a father who thinks of his family first finds the „fatherland sickening“ when he is supposed to go to the front and to his death for its sake. That throws sand into the war machinery.

It is not only deviation from the male norm, the troublemaking, and a strong bond to the family that hinder mobilisation, but also pure egoism and hedonism. In principle everything that also got in the way of, for example, the collective fight against the epidemic — that is, whenever someone partied, poured drinks, or demonstrated regardless.

An individualistic society is hard to get to the front; that has to be kept in mind amid the current German efforts to make the country war-capable again. And it is — you just have to take foreigners then.

The Vietnam War ended because the WASPs — that is, the American white middle and upper class — did not want to give up their sons. And the rich Ukrainians these days buy their way out, so the rumour goes. How it is in Russia, I don’t know.

Everyone who evades military service, for however ignoble a reason, is one fewer who shoots and one fewer who can be shot.

„This war makes no sense,“ says Igor (in Ukrainian actually: Ihor). A pure-blooded pacifist would say that no war whatsoever makes sense. But the Ukraine party would counter that surely one would have to put the question of sense to the Russians, because they forced the Ukrainians to defend their homeland — which from their point of view makes sense. Well — how sensible the decision was, to fight against a superpower rather than, despite the invasion, to negotiate over the future of a Ukraine already engaged in civil war and utterly torn apart, we shall see — not to say: we have seen up to now.

The next question is how sensible it is to place hope in moralising friends from the value-West. As things now stand, hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have died without even the beginnings of a peaceful solution advantageous to Kyiv emerging. On the contrary. Admittedly: the only thing that could still salvage the sense for the decision-makers now would be a third world war. For the reasons stated, I am cautiously optimistic that the West will recognise its man-problem and will have to leave it at sabre-rattling.