The end of the Age of Fragility

It is not the most pressing question to emerge from Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine, but I have nonetheless found myself wondering – what will happen with the word ‘erasure’ following this war? Ukraine’s heroic president Volodymyr Zelensky used the e-word last week. Russia, he said, is out to ‘erase our history’. The Putin regime and its marauding forces want to ‘erase our country, erase us all’, Zelensky cried, aptly, given the vigour and bigotry with which Putin has mocked and violently undermined Ukrainian sovereignty. Putin clearly sees Ukraine as a joke nation that can casually be erased from the map.

Zelensky’s impassioned, existential words got me thinking: which woke warrior here in the mercifully war-free West will dare to misuse the word ‘erasure’ now? ‘Erasure’ is a key buzzword in the PC lexicon. There’s trans erasure, LGBT erasure, the erasure of black women with ‘kinky hair’. Only erasure here doesn’t mean ‘the removal of all traces of something’. It certainly doesn’t mean a foreign power using brute force to extinguish your most basic rights. No, it means a gender-critical feminist turning up to your campus and saying ‘If you have a penis, you are a man’. It means EastEnders not having enough bisexual characters. It means being asked ‘Can I touch your hair?’. It means attending a museum or some other public institution and seeing that its Pride flag doesn’t include the shade that represents your femme-boy demisexual identity. All of this is very seriously described as ‘erasure’. Even as bombs fall on Kharkiv and Kyiv, threatening to erase people and infrastructure, designed to erase a nation’s identity, still time-rich, experience-poor activists in the West seriously believe they are being erased by mean tweets and differing opinions.

It remains to be seen which woke midwit will be the first to say out loud that having to walk past a statue of a long-dead Brit with iffy beliefs feels ‘erasing’ at the same time as statues and buildings and people in Ukraine are being erased by Russian bombs.

Read here