War is not without its historic context, nor can we escape its clutches

 

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy? (Mahatma Gandi)

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. (Leo Tolstoy)

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. (Martin Luther King)

In times of war, the law falls silent. (Cicero)

If we don’t end war, war will end us. (H.G. Wells)

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. (John F. Kennedy)

Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate. (Alice Walker)

Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause. (Chris Hedges)

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. (Henry Kissinger)

There are so many people who have penned their thoughts, cogently, succinctly and penetratingly about war….and yet, war leaves us all gaping, speechless, confused, and desperate, seemingly hopeless and also angry.

Being taken for granted, ignored, silenced, patronized, condescended to, and writhing in the pain of loneliness, alienation and despair are feelings and experiences every human being knows intimately. And when a leader of a country takes it upon himself to define the emotions of his nation using those emotions, and to assume and to presume that, in order to continue to lead that country, to earn and to sustain the trust of his people, he must go to war to repair those national feelings of ‘nothingness’ and abject humiliation, he makes himself something he can never be, a legitimate symbol of and for his country. Humiliation, sadly, even tragically, can only be real for those who have succumbed to its erosion.

Russian humiliation, tragically, and even ironically, is embedded in the mask of wealth, power, opulence, tyranny and autocracy that has taken over the agent of that humiliation. And the Russian people, now in the streets in some numbers, just as any self-respecting people anywhere, know the difference between the puffery n nand the ‘huffery’ of a hollow, straw-filled man and his words, and do not want their country to be seduced by the delusion. Rounding up those who protest, just as firing missiles through the night into Kiyv, is another act of desperation. And it is always, inevitably and predictably the most desperate who have to do both: wage an unprovoked war and then imprison those who speak out against such a war.

Cornered, rabid animals in their own kind of ‘white heat’ not only are unpredictable, they are lethal. They know not what they are doing, or what they are going to do. They are like a diseased, emaciated, desperate dog that has no friends, has had no food for a prolonged period and who is ‘fighting for his life’ as only he can see the situation. While anesthetizing the four-legged kind, to put them out of their misery is a method and gift of mercy, occasionally, such animals have be silenced permanently.

Mr. Putin, while not precisely a rabid, desperate and diseased animal, is behaving in ways that bring such images to mind. And, predictably, when words and face-to-face talking are no longer tolerated, some form of violence erupts. It is, however, not the failure of language, it is the failure to recognize and to acknowledge a broader range of options than killing, pillaging, lying and robbing others of their dignity, their honour and their self-respect in order to fill the vacuum of a frozen-solid heart.

Man has always had a deep and profound need for instruments, tools and weapons that, he has argued for centuries, “protect” him and his clan from the dangers of the ‘outside’ world. And the larger the arsenal of the most lethal weapons, ironically and even pathetically, the more confident and protected and more self-assured such men seem to be. Neither Russia nor the United States has, as yet, been unshackled from such a false premise, belief and near religious dogma. The manufacture, design and refinements of hard power, as a defining trait of those seeking to be and to remain the ‘top dog’ paint a path that has been used to portray confidence and safety and security in the glib vernacular of practical sense, to borrow from Frye.
yesterday Admiral Stavridis, former supreme commander of NATO, noted on MSNBC that NATO outspends Russia, out-mans Russia, and therefore will be able to protect and defend those countries that are members of NATO, should Putin extend his military reach beyond Ukraine. We have all know, forever, that the United States has had, and continues to have the largest military arsenal in history, funded by the largest military budget in history, and filled with the most sophisticated weaponry known to man.

Putin himself, is now threatening to use weapons the world have never seen before, and whether that denotes advanced design or nuclear weapons, no one is quite sure. War, once declared, is like an oath to the man who declares it. There is absolutely nothing that such a man will not do to fulfil the demands of such an oath. It is now the defining aspect of his being for the simply reason that his whole life is now framed in that lens. Victory is his only purpose and goal. The means and the strategy and the tactics and the specific targets are just the mind-games of that absolute necessity, victory.

Anyone who torques the facts on the ground, in this case that Ukraine is a danger to Russia, as a way of contorting his own mind, and then commands his underlings to follow orders based on such torquing, is no longer in control of the balance and the cognition and the emotions of his person.  He has succumbed to the most effective and lethal seduction of all, self-seduction.

In Paradise Lost, John Milton writes these memorable words:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

The mind’s capacity to distort to such an extreme degree, is, of course, a human capacity. And for many of us, it is the moment when we come to the conclusion that ‘how’ we see things now as unlikely to change, if those conditions are unacceptable to us, that we make what we call life-decisions. Many of those decisions are based on somewhat extravagant hopes and visions of happiness and warmth; others are made on the basis of avoiding, withdrawing from situations in which we find the dynamics to be dysfunctional and not open to change.

While there is some superficial legitimacy to the argument that NATO has indeed expanded closer to the Russian border, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, two things militate against that fact as helping to neutralize its threat to Russia and to Putin. First, NATO is avowedly a defensive organization, determined to protect its members. And, whether or not one believes that argument, is an open question. All steps to develop military weapons, strategy and tactics, war games, are allegedly conducted and created as “defensive” measures, certainly not to be used in an offensive manner. So, inherent in the whole military establishment is the notion that ‘defense’ is a somewhat flimsy justification, given the archives of history are replete with stories of war.

Second, however, to the defensive argument defining NATO, is the more significant argument that undermines the motives and the urgency of the Putin war: that human beings are and will continue to be much more attracted to, motivated by and loyal to a system of governance that respects the individual, that respects the collective will of the people and that works openly and authentically to serve This other way of organizing a country and  the people within the nation is far more abstract, somewhat ethereal, somewhat ambiguous than tyranny. It is also certainly an argument and a way of life that is subject to many interpretations that demand vigorous debate, the even more assiduous gathering and curating of information, and the need for a fourth estate that serves as a bridge between the people in power and their decisions and the people in the streets and their attitudes.

The notion, however, that democracy will never be imposed at the end of a missile or a knife, remains one of the more elusive and yet cogent and compelling features of its inherent value. Persuasion, support, understanding and both empathy and compassion are just some of the instruments of political dialogue that are obviously considered unneeded and unwarranted by Putin and his ilk. And it is their total and abject rejection of those ‘soft-power’ instruments, and their clinging to hard power, including their absolute authority and control of everything within their grasp that paradoxically and tragically impales them on their own character. That observation may not be rocket-science; it is however, worthy of being tapped into the keypad on this blizzardy Friday morning at the end of February 2022.

 

There is something inherently despicable, abhorrent, and heinous about arresting protesters in the streets of some 50 different Russian cities yesterday, just as there is something unconscionable about firing missiles and rockets into Chernobyl’s nuclear site, including its waste storage facilities, that, if not protected, could and would spray radioactive dust far and wide these many years after the original melt-down. There is also something so tragically abhorrent about a threat to use nuclear weapons, should any western power threaten to, or actually impede the determined goals of this new Russian czar. None of these actions is tolerable to a human community of nations, nor are they commensurate with a decent, mutually collaborative world culture, in which pandemics, rising temperatures, and glaring abuse of both wealth and political power by narcissistic tyrants is a growing trendline that threatens to individually as well as taken as a gestalt the very existence of humanity itself.

Call that hyperbolic and apocalyptic if you like. It is long past time that the language of moderation, mediation, tip-toeing through the minefields of polite diplomacy, when the terrain and the political culture requires a more muscular and confident language and tone.

Exposing the oligarchs including Putin himself, by naming them and by seizing their assets and their access to their assets, as Hillary Clinton advocated publicly this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, may well be a preferred starting point. And while it may begin to take the head of the ‘snake’ off its body, such an approach will not neutralize a transactional, commercialized and greed-based-and-fed conventional modus operandi of so many in all countries where money and its pursuit and acquisition carry with it the power and influence of men and women who otherwise would converse modestly, fitting into their neighbourhoods and their office and factory associates with both ease and finesse.

Lies, the incubation of more lies, and the dissemination of those lies is literally a new industry. It is born in the hearts and minds of men and women who refuse to acknowledge their own shame, and their responsibility for generating and for spreading those lies. No politically correct, or euphemistic camouflage can or will remove this cancer from the body politic. No laws will neutralize their lethal toxicity. No law enforcement will even begin to ensnare either the lies themselves or their perpetrators in either confessions or even acknowledgements of their prevarication.

And, as the recently deceased Canadian comedian, Norm Crosby, put it in one of his gigs about Bill Cosby, “I keep hearing that Cosby’s greatest failing is his hypocrisy. But, I have to think that rape and drugging the person to be raped rank higher on the totem pole of failures…don’t they?” Diplomatic language that swims in metaphors of world order, and ideologies, and size of state economies, and numbers of incarcerations for political protest, and even numbers of COVID cases, deaths and hospitalizations, while useful for those who study such matters does not get to the point of the criminality of so much of recent political actions, attitudes, utterances and human impacts.

We have witnessed, appallingly, and disheartedly, four-plus years of criminal chicanery from the former U.S. president, from the human rights abuses in China, from the burning of the Amazon forest for private developers, from the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and from the intransigence of rich political bag-men like the Koch’s in America who pour truck-loads of cash into the coffers of coal companies, and political candidates who will dance to the strings of their puppeteer.

And there have also been nearly one million deaths from COVID in the United States, many of those deaths preventable, had there been a competent, ethical, and legitimate occupant of the Oval Office in charge, instead of a saloon huckster who cares more for his own skin and reputation and self-aggrandizement than for the lives of ordinary mortals. And yet, just as in the two impeachment trials, this man was not convicted. And the drum-beat of lies, fed by greed and hyperbolic personal insecurity, nationalistic hubris, and an exaggeration even of the Gatsby’s hollow attempt to purchase history with ill-gotten riches, marches through Kyiv and who knows where else?

One has to wonder when the penny will drop, everywhere, that rings a note that removes all doubt that we are ALL literally, metaphorically, medically, politically and militarily, environmentally IN THIS TOGETHER?