By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In response to a question about the year ahead in a recent seminar, I said I had no hope — that we struggle in politics because it’s our moral duty, not because we calculate there might be, or will be,  a greater benefit than cost in the outcome. Counting of that kind is more than foolish, I claimed – it’s dishonourable. Exactly what duty meant to those around the table at the India Foundation in Delhi was left unspoken.   

I was corrected by a French colleague who pointed out that while politically or militarily speaking, it is  possible to give up this hope, in French named espoir, it is much graver now to lack espérance.  

That’s the virtue which in the medieval allegory of Alain Chartier (lead image), he fought with the monsters he called Melancholy and Despair, and by opening a very small window Chartier named Memory, he defeated them.    

Chartier was writing between 1428 and 1430; that was 91 years into the Hundred Years War, and 23 years before it ended; Chartier was dead by then.  

For Russians it is now 108 years since the war with the rest of the world began with the revolution of 1917. The German monster then is fighting still.

He’s not the only one on whom the window of Memory is opened to expose. After the new book-writing of January, we will return to do more of that.  

by Editor - Friday, December 26th, 2025