WelcomeMcCormick, Bradford <brm2017@tc.columbia.edu> 12:07 AM [12 March 2022] (13 minutes ago) to yam [Yale Alumni Magazine]
It may be time to remember something. I graduated Yale College in the Class of 1968. Like today, it was the time of a contentious war, in that case, the Vietnam War.
I did not sit on a folding wood chair in the Old Campus. I stood at the gate next to the Post Office in my cap and gown and collected donations for Quaker War Relief. At the end of the morning my collection can had $130 in donations from the attendees.
Here we go again! Why is the American government all hyper about getting Ukraine into NATO and out of the clutches of the Evil Empire (Putainia, aka: The Russian Federation)? Why are the American people being fed endless exciting reportage about how Mr. Putin is invading Ukraine, instead of sober information why is Mr. Putin upset in the first place about our having already moved NATO up against much of the rest of his Western border? A great way to keep the American people from THINKing about the causes of the conflict is to get them all maudlin about the effects, i.e.: all the human suffering Mr. Putin is causing the the Ukranian people [because of what we have done to Mr. Putin's country but nobody notices that of course because they are busy being fed pictures of all the human suffering which we have caused Mr. Putin to cause, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori....]....
Why aren't the American people being told that, of course Mr. Putin wants us out of Ukraine, like we didn't want Soviet missiles in Cuba? Surely for the entirely altruistic purpose of protecting the human rights of The Ukrainian people, including the pro-Russians in the Donbass area who want to be part of Russia, and to allow Ukraine as a country to be free by having to be propped up by American military support for the indefinite future. And, as always, of course, God is on our side because we are always ideologically right even when we are objectively wrong. And our enemies are by assumption wrong because they do not agree with us that they are wrong.
Let us grant that America's interest in Ukraine if purely altruistic to help the Ukrainian people, not for any benefit to us except to spend a lot of money and maybe lose a lot of American lives there to help the Ukrainian people, including as said, those who want to be part of Russia but we won't let them have their self-determination to have what they want. Let's airlift all the unhappy Ukrainians to freedom in the depopulated American Midwest, where they could be productive workers to help prop up America's ponzi scheme economy which always needs more workers to fund Social Security because America's women are not doing their patriotic duty to produce lots of babies (Dulce et decorum est pro patria copulare, ladies! You country's battle casualties need to be replaced!).
Wouldn't filling up middle America with refugees seeking a better life than Putin oppression be a win-win for everybody? Mr. Putin could have a Ukraine without dissidents, and we could have a lot of new loyal American workers building America back better. Yes, some people would mope that they would be able to die on their mothersoil, but you can't always have everything you want in this vale of tears, can you? Anybody who was more psychologically attached to their birth soil than to living on this side of it would just have to pay the price. Boo, hoo.
+2022.02.26. So we now do have the war in Ukraine. The Russians have invaded. President Zelensky has forbidden males between the ages of 18 and 60 to leave the country. He urges all Ukrainians to be very patriotic, including even making Molotov cocktails to throw at the Russians. He is asking the Ukrainian people to be very brave or maybe it's he is saying they are very brave. Because the Russian forces are obviously overwhelmingly more powerful than Ukraine, what he is asking is for a lot of Ukrainians to die, and to take as many Russians with them as they can, for a lost cause. Dead heroes who would live if they had not been asked to waste their lives to be heroic for no good reason except to make Mr. Putin suffer for invading their country. But Mr. Putin will not suffer; only a lot of Russian soldiers will die, along with the Ukrainian soldiers who will die trying to kill them. Patriotic waste. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Why did I not spot Mr. Zelensky as the sleazy con artist he is, in the first place, when his smiling doltish face appeared with POTUS №45 Donald Trump on CNN and he was trying to get $400 million out of America for his selfish war against the Donbass separatists to deny them freedom to choose? Part of it was being distracted by Mr. Trump, who was up to all sorts of bad things of immediate concern. But another part of it was I think we had been propagandized by CNN (and the American government?) that Mr. Z, a former comedian, was fighting against corruption in Ukraine. That sounded good. Also good and consistent with fighting corruption, that he refused to do a witch hunt of Hunter Biden to feed Mr. Trump's megalomania. But why did he need $400 million in weapons? Why didn't he say flat out: "I am fighting a selfish war against my fellow Ukrainians who want secede from the country I have got to be President of and become part of Russia, from having freedom, and I want to be propped up by American military and economic welfare so I can be part of NATO because I think I'll get a better deal that way than from the Russians. My inflated self-image being promoted from television actor to Chief of State of a real life nation state is growing out of all bounds. My greed for weapons is limitless. Gimme! Gimme1 Gimme!"? I should have distilled my visceral response to his blank visage like there's nothing behind it, turning the wine of fighting corruption into the everclear of a rabid self-promoting "patriot" who was trying to make Ukraine great again (MUGA, like MAGA)? I am almost as easily duped by propaganda as most people, but with the difference that I am at least a little even if too late suspicious, whereas most people don't even think maybe something is being done to them → With Mr. Z, however, as of +2022.04.07, I now read off his propaganda like The Allies reading messages from Nazi U-boats after they had cracked the Enigma code. Mr. Z is no longer an Enigma to me: He is the most dangerous man in the world today (+2022.04.07), largely because everybody ideates he is good and so they just keep adding fuel – more weapons – to his fire, instead of cutting off the weapons to help put his fire out when he runs thru the stocks he already has grubbed. A forest fire burns itself out when there are no more trees left; Mr. Zelensky's slaughter will end if he has no more weapons.
What's the worst that can happen to you? That you get killed? No, because then you are either nowhere or some place else: Heaven, Purgatory or Hell. The worst is you get wounded in a way that leaves you to live 40 more years in chronic pain and disability, maybe with an ostomy bag and being fed through a tube and paralyzed from the neck down and blind and get the picture? Oh, maybe "Ukraine" wins after all? As my parents used to like to tell me: It's no big deal, Brad.
Mr. Zelensky needs to read and take heed of a certain short story which I have written with him first of all in mind, although it is much more widely applicable.
Even the very name of this man's political party shows he is out to sucker dupes: "Servant of the people". Of course the people always want their government to serve them, so isn't making the very name you give to your sectarian organization be what they want a great come-on, when your aim is to just use them all as hostages? I have figured out why I detest Mr. Zelensky in a more personally threatened way than Donald Trump: Liberal Americans were against Mr. Trump, so there were a lot of people opposing, albeit impotently, the harm he was doing. But all the liberals are on board with Mr. Zelensky, so nobody is pushing back against the harm he is doing.
Mr. Zelensky trots along like a dog behind anybody he thinks might throw him some more weapons for his selfish war. But Mr. Zelensky is not a dog: He is the tail wagging the dog: United States President, Joe Biden. As with Donald John Trump, Mr. Zelensky is not the problem: The problem is his enablers. Take away his weapons and take away his access to the media and he could not cause any more trouble.
Just about everybody in The United Staes of America sees Mr. Zelensky as a heroic fighter for the democratic freedom of his country, bravely standing up against the Big Bully Vladimir Putin and his repressive authoritarian even fascist government. I do not like Mr. Putin. But I see Mr Zelensky as a petty opportunist who is trying to make hay while the sun shines to realize in actuality a television role that has gone to his head, and the greatest danger to civilization perhaps since Atilla the Hun. America's President idolizes Mr. Z; I think he should do the decent thing and kill himself. Which is Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy? Hero for democracy or selfish sleazebag? Check here!
Dare you use your 1st amendment right to free speech while you still have it to listen to a recorded lecture by University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer on Youtube? Click here. Update: Click here. The only sane story in The New York Times as of +2022.04.04: Realism Must Guide Our Reaction to Russia's Invasion.[1] ~ Read also: The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame (Christopher Caldwell, +2022.05.31; also: here). And: Are We Sure America Is Not at War in Ukraine? (Bonnie Kristian, NYT, +2022.06.20).
The problem with Ukraine may be that there are a lot of people who wouild like to live in a country we might call Zelenskia → whatever they would like Zelenskia to be. These people include American armchair anti-communists who are still fighting The Evil Empire and will not be happy until the last red is dead
.
The huge number of Ukraine refugees from the current war should make the problem much worse because émigreé tend obsess about the "plight" of their relatives back home and badger everybody to sacrifice everything else to liberate them and to wreak vengeance on the brutal aggressors who drove them out of Eden in the first place. That the old country was not Edenic is irreleant since, from the safety of their new home then can hallucinate about where they imagine they came from
. As I heard one Finnish politician assert: Every country has the right to self-determination. It's like when I asked my manager at work for an assignment that would be both productive for the company and intellectually growing for me. He replied:
"If wishes were horses then beggars would ride." (Jay Unger)
If Russia would just stop trying to assert itself as an independent country (NATO in Ukraine being for Russia like Derek Chauvin's knee on George Floyd's neck...), the war in Ukraine would end on terms acceptable to the Zelensky lovers who would then have to find somethig else to get upset about or retreat to watching Monday nite NFL on the tele. I'd like the Zelensky lovers to fess up and say something like:
"We don't care about what those armchair pacifist intellectuals call truth and history: They're all Putin propagandists and everything they say is wrong because everything about Putin is wrong. And even if Russia is right that's their problem. We believe in free speech for everything we believe in. We believe in liberty and jutice for all to agree with us. We want what we want and we have the power to get it, thanks to our good friend Joe Biden. Ukraine is a free country, and by the way: Help keep Ukraine beautiful, get a haircut, like our President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, the greatest protector of freedom who ever lived. Crimea? Everybody knows Crimea has always been part of Ukraine! Of course the people in the Donbas shouldn't be allowed to speak Russian, because this is Ukraine and everybody is free here to be Ukrainian, like our great President, Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy: The servant of the people! Slava Ukraini! ...."
Footnotes
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Bradford McCormick | New York | date: Apr 28, 2022, 9:56 AM [See also: here]
subject: Your Comment on What the Inventor of the Word 'Genocide' Might Have Said About Putin's War | Call it what one wants, "Zelensky's Adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, confirms that a full-scale war with Russia was pre-planned and desired by the Ukrainian regime for the purpose of joining NATO as far back as in 2019" (https://twitter.com/MasssoudH/status/1515765460154920960) Mr. Putin is doing bad things: in reaction to Mr. Zelensky's selfish scheme to subject Ukraine and its people to mass slaughter and destruction of property. We need to broker an unconditional surrender and realpolitik solution to the slaughter, not abet Mr. Zenensky's selfish scheme. Let's also remember The Cuban Missile Crisis where John Kennedy was in Putin's role and Cuba was in Ukraine's role. The Soviet Union backed off there. Why haven't we backed off here? - ↑ At the end of director Jean Renoir's great anti-war film, La Grande Illusion, a German patrol opens fire on two escaped French prisoners of war. One German soldier shouts to another, Stop shooting! They're in Switzerland! So much the better for them! is the reply. I have often thought of this exchange in the context of the present debate on a treaty of neutrality for Ukraine. This is not just as an essential and unavoidable part of any agreement to end the present Russian invasion but one that may have prevented the invasion happening (since it was first on Russia's list of demands). A declaration of neutrality has generally been treated, both in the West and in Ukraine itself, as a colossal and dangerous sacrifice by Ukraine. But modern European history does not altogether bear this out. Being drawn into great-power rivalry may not be such a wonderful thing as the U.S. foreign and security establishment—safely isolated from any resulting horrors—tends to imagine. And if sufficient guarantees are in place, neutrality can be a great boon for a nation. The essential guarantee is that the country concerned should be free to develop as a market democracy. This is exemplified by the experience of Finland and Austria during the Cold War. By treaty, these countries could join neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact; I visited both countries during the last decade of the Cold War, and there was absolutely nothing to distinguish them from other prosperous Western democracies. Indeed, both countries have always scored close to the top of global indexes for quality of life. ("The Meaning of Ukraine's Coming Neutrality: History offers clear examples of what neutral status means—and what it doesn't.", By Anatol Lieven, Foreign Policy, APRIL 4, 2022)
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