I Feel Unsafe

November 15^th, 2024 | Hua Hin, Thailand

I awoke to the sound of a violent explosion earlier than I had wanted that morning. The walls, windows, and furniture vibrated. A cruise missile had struck a warehouse owned by a national supermarket chain, roughly a kilometre from the hotel I was staying in. The russians had fired it – targeting civilian infrastructure as they regularly do – perhaps a dozen minutes earlier. It was June 24th, 2024. The time was 07:03.

Plume of smoke from russian cruise missile attack on civilian infrastructure. — Plume of smoke from a russian cruise missile hitting a supermarket warehouse, shot from the window of my hotel room in Odesa, Ukraine.

This was hardly my first rodeo. Cruise missiles regularly flew over the apartment I was renting in Odesa. The local air defence would light up the sky when attacks came at night; as they often did. One attack in 2022 saw an apartment building struck a few streets behind mine, killing a young woman and her two children. Her husband wasn’t in the building at the time, and distraught by the slaughter of his entire family, he joined his country’s defence on the front line. Ultimately, he died too.

Smoke trail from an air defence missile after destroying an incoming Shahed drone. — Trail from an air defence missile, and the smoke from a successfully destroyed Shahed drone, shot from the kitchen window of my rental apartment in Odesa, October 2022.

With my British passport, I have the luxury of leaving any time living in an active war zone begins to take its toll. My closest friends however, enjoy no such luxury. The russians came to rape, torture, and kill. Neither women nor children are spared. Countless invaders have admitted to the brutality, at times recounting that even small children are executed with a bullet in the brain at point blank range. The Ukrainians have no choice but to stay and fight.

I attended NixCon a few weeks ago in Berlin. Overall I enjoyed the experience; it feels a little less like a conference, and a little more like a get together for the relatively small NixOS community. About half way through the conference, the organisers announced that one attendee had been asked to leave. They were alleged to have made another attendee “feel unsafe”.

I don’t know specifically what happened, beyond someone being made to “feel unsafe”, nor do I have any reason to doubt the accusation (and I’m glad the moderators took the complaint seriously and acted upon it).

What sticks in my mind is the phrase “feel unsafe”. In my experience, I’ve only ever heard this phrase said by people who hold political views radically more left-wing than my own (and for the avoidance of doubt, I’m a bit of a leftie). NixCon – and perhaps the NixOS community more broadly – appears to have an atypically high concentration of people who would describe themselves as Marxists, or Communists, or Anarchists, etc.

Indeed, walking around the conference venue, I spotted at least two dozen Nix hackers with radical left-wing political symbols and slogans emblazoned across their laptops. In the heart of Berlin, the hammer and sickle is apparently fine and reasonable.

My heritage is Polish. I have good memory of my great-grandmother. Her husband, I never met. He died as a slave in a Nazi concentration camp. That side of my family has always lived on the West side of Poland. If they had lived as far East as they do West, then no doubt my great-grandfather would have died at the hands of the Soviets. The Nazis and the Soviets were allied at the start of The Second World War, so to me — and to millions of other Poles no doubt — the hammer and sickle and the swastika are essentially interchangeable.

And the discomfort I experience seeing these political symbols and slogans is not so abstract. The commonly held position among people who describe themselves as Communist today is that Ukraine should not be given the lethal aid they need to defend themselves from a genocide that, to date, by some estimates has seen about a million casualties.

Campaign material from a Danish revolutionary communist organisation saying 'Books, not Bombs'. — Campaign material from the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ in Denmark, who are explicitly against arming Ukraine.

The reasoning I have been able to discern for this position is:

Guns and bombs are bad and kill people, so the West shouldn’t make them or send them to Ukraine.
Naziism is bad, and the Communists defeated the Nazis, therefore Communism is good (conveniently forgetting the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).

The reason why my closest friends in Odesa are not dead today is because hundreds of thousands of brave Ukrainian men and women have been successfully defending their country from terrorists and barbarians with the use of Western weapons.

To say that Ukraine should not be given weapons is tantamount to saying that all of my friends should be dead. And, I suppose, that I should be dead too. It’s only blind luck that neither cruise missiles nor Shahed drones have struck a building that I was staying in. Although come to think of it, a Shahed drone did indeed hit a building where I used to live. Possibly even the same floor of that building. There have been so many attacks that I don’t perfectly recall.

And yet, I’ll bet that if I were to use the same phrase at that conference — if I were to say that I “feel unsafe” — I somehow doubt that my complaint would be taken seriously. I am — superficially anyway — not a part of the persecuted class, so violence against me is fine.