Ukraine: Absurdity, Tragedy, and Impotence
When Will We Ever Learn?
If history is illustrative of anything, it is that when facing down a bully one must show equal or superior force to avoid trouble. I have learned this personally a time or two, and recent history — that of the past hundred years — has revealed the cruciality of this logic.
You don’t gain the respect of a bully with a fig leaf. Offer him one and he’ll steal your lunch. The same holds true on the world stage, except in this case hundreds or even thousands of lives will be stolen.
Idle threats have no impact, either. A bully fears no repercussions, and lacks that most vital of human traits, empathy, which might otherwise dissuade him from his onerous and destructive actions. Threats serve no one, neither the bully nor the bullied, and certainly not those doing the threatening. Once the damage is done, there is nothing anyone can do to erase his actions from the conscious of the oppressed.
The minute Vladimir Putin started doing his Sudetenland shuffle along the Russian border with Ukraine, there was only one course of action that could’ve stopped the bloodshed, the death, the tears, the destitution and displacement that has ensued: tanks and troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine.
The US and NATO should’ve lined the border with Belarus and Russia with a force equal to or twice that of Putin’s, standing alongside our friendly Ukrainian brothers and sisters. NATO jets, led by the US, should’ve been patrolling the air over that border daring Putin to flinch. Faced with such a force, Putin would’ve had no choice but to negotiate a peaceful resolution, one that would inevitably end favorably for Ukraine and the EU.
Instead, NATO has once again been rendered nothing more than a toothless barking dog running along the “fence line” in the green, green, grass on the Polish border, while the leading members of the alliance delivered one vicious slap on the wrist and ultimatum after another to an increasingly emboldened Kremlin.
In the US, the dog-wagging tail of the press relished the ratings-bumping rattle of sabers, and the bravery and compassion of the comedian-president turned hero as he pleaded with us to help him save his country and his people. News anchors and pundits play war games drawing circles and arrows on touchscreens. Truth, faith, trust, be damned. War is good for business.
There is nothing “magical” about your wall. There is no magic that will restore the lives, the conscience, or the collective memory of this moment. The spirit looms large, and the spirit of this moment, of our failure to act, our utter impotence, will resonate for decades, even centuries, to come in the hearts and minds of those we’ve failed to protect from this tyranny.
And who was leading this ignoble charge into the futile abyss we now find ourselves?
President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken.
No, these are not the names of two of Santa’s lost reindeer, although they are lost in a sea of ignorance, ineptitude and incompetence. I can’t think of two more aptly named individuals to have presided over our failure at this pivotal moment in history, when the world had a chance to learn the lessons of history and stand up to a tyrant before he made his move. From the embarrassment of Afghanistan to the broken dreams of the people of Ukraine, these two are a feeble-minded duo for the record books.
Day after day, news conference after news conference, there they are Biden time the Ukrainian people don’t have and Blinken in the face of every danger like two timid teenagers at the prom while people are fighting and dying for a cause that is truly worth fighting and dying for: the right to choose their own fate. In all my years as a citizen of this country, I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed than I am at this moment.
These two might’ve listened to the voices of history like that of former Secretary of State, George Schultz — who during the Reagan administration resided over causes I found distasteful, even underhanded — but whose words nevertheless resound in truth:
“Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”
Truer words have seldom been spoken and heeded in this situation would surely have led us to a peaceful settlement of our differences with the so-called Russian leader. Instead, it’s 1938 all over again: a smaller country invaded by forces controlled by a brutal dictator while the world looks on and what, worries?
Except, this isn’t 1938. The UK and France aren’t still reeling from the economic and structural devastation of a previous world conflict. Germany is now a friendly world power. No, Vladimir Putin isn’t Adolf Hitler. Does it really matter? People are suffering. People are dying.
Absurdities abound in this morass:
“Putin doesn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because he doesn’t want NATO and the UN encroaching on his territory.”
Forgetting the fact that Ukraine has been a UN partner since 1991, and more recently a NATO partner in all but title, we must ask if the Russian leader doesn’t want NATO on his western border, why then would he want to invade and takeover Ukraine? The result of Russia’s annexing Ukraine is to put NATO directly on his doorstep! Surely someone in the circle around Secretary Blinken and President Nod saw this ridiculously obvious conclusion, right?
Don’t hold back, Ron. Tell us how you really feel. Okay, don’t mind if I do!
“Provoking Russia could start World War III.”
This is one of Biden’s favorite talking points as he tries to temper the increasingly seething brow of the American public. His patronizing, didactic tone gets more irritating as this conflict goes on. World War III, huh? Let me see, now, where have I heard this before?
Now let me tell you something, President Biden: no good has ever come from kowtowing to a brutal, authoritarian megalomaniacal, warmongering dictator. PERIOD. FULL STOP. You, of all people, should know this by now.
But more to the point, Biden and the other world leaders “brazenly” threaten that any attack on a NATO country would be met with severe consequences: meaning counterattack. Because, what else would it mean?
So, if the US and NATO are willing to go to war with Russia anyway, what was stopping us from threatening the same before Putin ever got started? Furthermore, if we believed Putin wouldn’t be so bold as to attack NATO — ostensibly because he knows that’s a conflict he can’t win — why was the threat of war too great for us to come to the aid of a sovereign nation from moment one? You know, before people started suffering and dying and losing their homes, their lives and their loved ones on both sides?
“We don’t want American troops in harm’s way.”
Again, we stand willing if Putin makes further incursions into NATO territories. After all of the conflicts “We” have started unnecessarily since WWII: Vietnam, Korea, Falkland Islands, Nicaragua, Iraq (the list goes on and on), why are we suddenly so trepidatious? Why now, when there is actually a just cause, do we cower? Russia is no match for even America’s military, let alone the combined NATO alliance, and he knows it.
There are people I care about who would be fighting for this very just and righteous cause, and I wouldn’t want them to get hurt, of course. But do we really think any of our fighting men and women would hesitate if we asked them to do it? Of course not. This is a good reason to fight, and Americans are dying in Ukraine right now, anyway!
Oh, right, the nuclear threat. That little absurd nonstarter…
There is no nuclear threat. Which is to say that the same nuclear threat exists for all interested parties. Which is to say, everyone. In the 1950s, when we were building bomb shelters and school children were ducking under their desks during air raid drills, the world had two nuclear powers: the US and Russia.
Today the world has ten thousand times as many nuclear warheads. So why, then, aren’t we all living in state-of-the-art market ready, fully furnished, nuclear fallout shelters? The answer is simple: The nuclear threat is the bomb shelter.
I will make two further points to quash this ridiculous argument.
One is that Putin isn’t stupid and to paraphrase Salvador Dalí, the only difference between him and a madman is: he is not mad. No one wins the nuclear cat’s game, and no one knows that better than Putin, a veteran of the Cold War. His only real endgame is to maintain power until the moment he dies, peacefully in his bed, with the watery eyes of an adoring nation holding vigil.
But that’s not what he threatens us with. No! To us he portrays a man with the codes to his entire nuclear arsenal wired to the little red button on his PlayStation. This is another fallacy of the moment. Putin has no more singular control over his nuclear arsenal than any other world leader, including North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. The stakes are just too high.
Still, he threatens, and we go running off into the woods with our hair on fire and a broomstick up our collective ass.
The second is the same point I made earlier. If we’re willing to go to war with Russia if it attacks NATO directly, in effect risking nuclear conflict, then what the hell are we waiting for: sanctions? Sanctions are meaningless when people are being displaced and dying.
To take this argument one step farther, if the reason you draw the line at Ukraine’s western border with Poland is that you don’t believe Putin has the gall to actually take on NATO, then it stands to reason he wasn’t going to try to take on the alliance if it were staged 800 miles farther east. Right?
Stop. Don’t even whisper the name, China. That country isn’t getting involved. If you believe otherwise, you simply don’t understand China.
The right thing to do was to approach Putin with a force so big and so overwhelming, in the name of what is right, and force him to reconsider this disastrous and ill-conceived decision. But that’s not the world we’re living in. That world is one in which the bank accounts of television stakeholders and retired generals and political parties are more important than the lives of people we don’t even know. Human dignity? What’s that?
Children are fighting. Brothers, sons, fathers, are fighting and dying. Ukrainian and Russian alike are dying, all on the whim and fancy of an old school dictator who’s pulled his Cold War playbook out of mothballs, dusted it off and found that, sure enough, the same old rules still apply.
And we’re letting it happen. School children, pregnant mothers, families are being brutalized, torn apart, murdered, because we failed, once again, to act.
For shame. When will we ever learn?
