“May the Force Be With You”: A Ukraine Air Alert
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Every so often, at odd hours, or in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable day, it interrupts: an air alert from Ukraine. A reminder that somewhere, people are moving to shelter, pausing conversations, recalibrating their sense of time around the possibility of impact.
And then after a while, just as abruptly, another message:
The first time I heard it, I paused, not because of the alert itself, but because of that final line. A reference to Star Wars, delivered not as irony or humour, but as part of a civil defence system. It felt, briefly, out of place. Almost jarring.
Only later did I realise it wasn’t out of place at all.
War has always drawn on culture to make itself legible. What changes is the medium, not the instinct. Today, references that once belonged to cinema or literature are folded directly into the infrastructure of survival.
In Ukraine, Russian soldiers are often referred to as “Orcs”, a term drawn from The Lord of the Rings. The metaphor is not subtle. It casts the enemy as a destructive, faceless horde—violent, invasive, and fundamentally other. Russian-controlled areas are sometimes called “Mordor.” Ukrainian defenders, in contrast, are occasionally framed as “Elves.”
Elsewhere, the term “Avatar” appears, borrowed from Avatar, used to describe soldiers who are drunk, disoriented, or undisciplined. Again, the reference is doing work: it reduces, categorises, and communicates quickly, with a shared cultural shorthand.
None of this is accidental.
These are not throwaway metaphors. They are tools.
At one level, they are entirely understandable.
War demands clarity. It compresses complexity into something graspable, something that can be shared across a population under stress. References like these do several things at once: they build cohesion, reinforce identity, and provide a language that is emotionally accessible. They offer a way of processing fear, sometimes even a moment of levity, without diminishing the seriousness of the situation.
That line, “may the force be with you”, is not just a cultural nod. It is a small psychological release after the tension of an air raid. A signal that, for now, you are safe.
It is also a positioning. A quiet assertion of who is who within the conflict. Good and evil. Resistance and empire. Survival and threat. These are powerful frames, and they travel easily. But they do not disappear when the war ends. This is where the unease begins to settle in. Because while these references are effective in the immediacy of conflict, they also shape how that conflict is remembered. They embed themselves into the cultural memory of the war, carrying with them simplified narratives and emotional certainties that are much harder to unpick later.
To call an enemy an “Orc” is not just to insult them, it is to remove them from the realm of the human. To place them in a category where violence feels not only justified, but inevitable. Over time, these framings accumulate. They become part of how a society explains the past to itself.
And that matters.
Because peacebuilding, in its most difficult form, often begins where these narratives have settled most deeply.
There is a tension here that is difficult to resolve.
On one hand, these cultural references are part of how people endure war. They help individuals and communities make sense of chaos, maintain morale, and assert a form of control in situations where very little feels controllable. To criticise them outright would be to misunderstand the conditions in which they emerge.
On the other hand, they leave traces. They shape perception. They harden boundaries. They create emotional shorthand that persists long after the immediate need for it has passed. And when the time comes to move, however slowly, towards dialogue, reconciliation, or even just coexistence, those inherited narratives can become obstacles. Not always visible, but present nonetheless.
What struck me, in the end, was not that Ukraine uses these references. It was that I was surprised by it.
As if this were new. As if wars had not always drawn on the cultural language available to them. As if storytelling, myth, and metaphor had not always been part of how violence is understood, justified, and remembered.
The difference now is proximity.
The voice is in my pocket. The reference is immediate. The distance between a Hollywood script and a real-world air raid has collapsed into a single notification.
And that, perhaps, is what lingers.
Not a critique, exactly. Not even a conclusion. Just a recognition that the language of war is never neutral, even when it feels familiar. And that the things which help people survive a conflict are not always the same things that help them move beyond it.
