Now almost eight months into things, the conflict in Ukraine has got many people upset. This of course is an understatement, but there are levels of upsetness which bear defining. One major level of upset, of course, are those in the West who believe the entire episode was "unprovoked," and don't remember there was a treaty put in place several administrations ago, with the Russians, in which the USA agreed they would NOT push for Uiraine becoming a part of NATO, and, that basically the West would leave Russia its basic sense of self-identity and security by advocating for a neutral Ukraine.
The interest many Americans seem to have in a country so far from the United States as to be nearly halfway across the world is apparently all based on video games. Youtube is filled with scenes from the war with brave Ukrainians shooting invader orcs out of the sky, and these clips get hundreds if not thousands of clips, meanwhile, nobody considers that, in that plane going down in flames is a human being, some mother's child, someone who probably didn't necessarily even wish to be in that situation, but for orders they received they were bound to follow.
Death comes to all equally, and it hardly behooves civilized people to cheer on when another of our human family meets their end. Whether or not anyone feels the invaders deserve what they get, the entire episode seems to have been conceived from the mind of a leftover pint-sized ex-KGB cop who still feels it was a horrible thing that the Berlin Wall came down, and thousands of his people, and others living under the spell of the Soviet Union, became capable of entertaining freedom of thought for the first time in generations, if not history.
On the other side of the coin is the lionized comedian thrust to the spotlight by circumstances who begs for "preemptive strikes" on his enemy by those outside his borders whom he's already begged and borrowed billions in armaments and other benefits from. It's not enough, apparently, to be an overachieving underdog working against an incompetent foe, but the rest of the world must risk nuclear conflagration by escalation -perhaps only military contributions from NATO will satisfy him. He's doing quite well by the looks of it from the help he's already received, and listening to the calls for mulilateral escalation ought to be cause for trepidation and alarm. But more or less, for any of the American public, they're not. They want more, and to see just how well all those rockets and and air ssystems really perform. Because hey they have a lot of stock dollars riding on them!
In back of the Napoleonic ex-KGB cop you have not the Communist Party, they failed and gave up their part in The Center long ago, but the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by Patriarch War Pig. Resemblances to Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri are easy to see- all of them seek to sanctify spiritual suicide to give their sacrificial cannon fodder blessings in Heaven. Allah be praised, here's another bunch of self-satisfied patriots willing to send their younger generation off to the slaughter. These patterns are easy to see in every military society on earth, but, when it's religious leaders who are making the call to war, their religiosity has obviously been tossed to the winds.
This blog had its second largest audience after the USA in Russia. We've been banned there, and we know why. Voices like ours willing to talk to Russian people without demonizing them, willing to hold to the idea that people are people everywhere, but governments are everybody's real problem, obviously can't be allowed to spread our "lies" to a population their government wishes to keep misinformed. But that's OK. The more ideas like ours get under the skin of the ex-KGB cop and the piano-playing Pericles, the more we feel validated in our efforts. Frankly it wouldn't matter WHO the world leader is, since most of them are socio-psychopaths in the first place, seeking power in order to either apotheosize themselves, or manipulate large masses of other humans, or both. We are equal-opportunity critics, and if we've limited this current post to the two characters making a mess out of Eastern Europe, then its not like we don't also cast an eye to the nutcases running our own nation. It's just that at the moment, those people will have more of their own problems soon, and we'll have enough to say when the other shoe drops.
The threat of nuclear holocaust should drive everyone to call again for peace between all nations. Give up the video console thrill of remote flame and destruction and ask yourself, how would you feel if the large population center you reside near were pulverized in seconds with megaton intensity, and that big grey cloud looming outside the window held nothing but the ashes of hundreds of your countrymen, and possibly, yes, maybe even your own. (And if so, well, bye-bye window). Gone, in an instant, and if anyone even remembers your name it'll be because someone outside the blast zone has records you once existed. Nobody wants to die in a nuclear war, and the people most anxious to see it happen seem to be riding the rail to be the front row cheerleaders.
That is one reason why I say- militarism and religiosity are mutually exclusive. If the preachers preaching Armageddon would back off and allow the world to live (being as it is, we've pretty much set the planet afire with civilization's carbon footprint, already) and the politicians preaching antagonisms and throwing stones would sit down at the table and talk about working things out, just maybe we could all breathe a little easier. Personally, I hope I'm long gone before the world ends, and would prefer not to be part of the audience if and when it does. And I would hope most of the folks who read this blog will feel the same. "People are people everywhere. It's the governments that are fucked."
