Ukraine: Why it Matters (Simplified)

Today, February 24, 2022, marks the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. It is the largest military action in Europe since WWII. Most Americas are likely to ignore this headline or simply think it doesn’t impact them. For right-wing Americans, this news does matter insofar as they are fans of Vladmir Putin. And this is a part of why this invasion matters both globally and for the U.S.

 

Vladmir Putin, a dictator by any measure, is a former Soviet Union-era Kremlin operative who has been seething over the collapse of the Soviet Union since 1991. He blames the collapse on NATO nations; his distain for NATO is no secret. Putin’s goal with Ukraine – as with Crimea and similar former Soviet territories previously – is to ‘put the band back together’ and put NATO on notice what with Poland, a NATO nation, being right next door to Ukraine.  

 

Putin’s pretext for the invasion, which he said he had no intention of in recent weeks, is to destroy Ukraine’s military capability as they supposedly pose a threat to Russia. This is a fanciful justification. But this justification is important as if the invasion is successful despite otherwise ‘severe’ sanctions (Putin has never cared about sanctions) this will provide other authoritarian leaders a reason to invade whomever they want under the pretext of preemptively defending themselves. On a more basic level, this invasion expands the power of an authoritarian leader the world could do without, especially when you consider the currently warm relationship between Russia and China. The world is trending towards more and more authoritarian regimes. Even in the U.S. both the far-left and far-right fringes would love nothing more than absolute power.

 

[Certainly, the far-left will condemn this particular military action because they can’t verbalize their true intentions, but seeing Putin in action is likely to embolden the worst factions of the American far-right. Just a few days ago, Donald Trump praised Putin.]

 

Not only does this military action disrupt stability in Europe, but it further destabilizes politics in the U.S. Already this morning I’ve heard the question, “Why now?” Consider that the mid-term elections are a few months away and if President Biden reacts poorly, a GOP wave of elections is assured. If Biden handles the situation well, there is still time for Russia to aid GOP candidates in some other manner, likely more social media disinformation campaigns.

 

There is an impact to the U.S. economy as well as the only reason any country cares about Russia is – bottom line – Russia’s oil and natural gas exports. U.S. markets opened on news of the invasion to oil jumping over $100 a barrel. Given the intimate relationship between oil and the world’s economies, this is bad news. Putin is aware of this and knows he can hold the world an economic hostage with Russia’s oil and gas.

 

What should be done in response? The international community will slap (more) ineffective sanctions on Russia, which is why I personally favor a full-on military and cyber-attack response since 1) this is the only language Putin understands and 2) to cripple Russia’s military and banking institutions before Russia can strategically withdraw its oil and gas. This would have the added benefit of rattling China. I’m not going to say this wouldn’t be a very dangerous route to pursue, but it is the only option in stopping Putin from terrorizing the world in the future.

 

Of course, that is my opinion. I’m not a foreign policy expert. But then, neither were the last two previous presidents.

Theory Parker: Citizen of the World

I’ve long maintained that one of the worst ideas to ever plague mankind is nationalism. Nationalism, the identification with one’s nation and its interests typically to the detriment of other nations, is a natural outcropping of tribalism which, long ago, used to be on a small enough scale as to not be harmful on a global scale. But, thanks to population growth, the internet, and all the other streams of media that know the value of sowing division, tribalism and nationalism have become so strongly embedded in people’s psyche that they would become virtually rudderless without these identity markers. When the alternative to being rudderless is being a detriment to other members of the human race, I, as a thinking and rational person, would choose to be rudderless. Only I am not; my county is the world. More on that momentarily.

The thing about concepts like tribalism and nationalism is that it divides people along often arbitrary lines. As a citizen of the United States I’m supposed to hate the Chinese for letting COVID-19 out of their country and wreaking havoc across the globe? Last time I checked, viruses didn’t have nationalities, doesn’t care what tribe you belong to, and will potentially kill you regardless. (Funny story – as of this writing the U.S. has more cases than any other. Americans are the ones spreading it more than any other nationality, so, I guess we’re supposed to hate Americans given the preceding logic.) Even within the United States, citizens are often raised to have contempt for their neighboring state because, well, because someone drew a line somewhere.

Tribalism and nationalism strictly ignore what binds people everywhere together – the fact that we’re all people where by ‘people’ we mean human beings. Undoubtedly it is difficult for nations to fight a wars if their troops think of the animals they’re fighting as anything more than that. Here, I’m reminded of a line from the movie Saving Private Ryan (I think) where one or the troops asks another, “Why are we fighting the Germans if we’re probably going to be friends 30 years from now?” (I’m paraphrasing). People everywhere have more in common than they think such as the need for food, clean air and water, shelter, friendship, intimacy, and a sense of belonging (e.g. tribalism). Of course there are nuances to these concepts but the point is people often have to conceptually go out of their way to dehumanize others in order to get a sense of any self-worth. Why should this be the case?

This shouldn’t be the case because it is clear that throughout history cooperation between people has been more productive than going to war or worse, committing to genocide. Squabbling over irrelevant things like which side of an egg to crack open accomplishes nothing and wastes time, though to be sure, people have killed each other for less, such as being a woman. What’s really at stake when people commit wholeheartedly to tribalism or nationalism is power, that goddamn exertion of power human beings are so bad at getting over. Certainly, Nietzsche’s Will to Power is more or less in the nature of all human beings, but it can be nurtured out of a person as easily as its flames are fanned by manipulative forces. Or, the Will to Power can be overcome by introspection. I overcame it through self-analysis when I realized (fortunately early enough) that I didn’t like people telling me what to do, especially when they didn’t have good reasons for wanting me to do what they wanted. This allowed me to examine the world through consecutively larger lenses.

And so I came to a point where I realized it’s irrelevant that I happen to be American by an accident of birth. (I find it repugnant when people do this, are proud of something they had no choice in being.) I could go so far as to say that I have so little in common – value wise –  with my countrymen and women that I’m actually not American. I’m a simple human being, much the same as any other, and if I owe allegiance to any group – which I don’t – it would be the human race whether that person is red, white, blue, or black. It doesn’t matter which country’s ideology one subscribes to, one is still part of the whole. We should then act accordingly because the differences one makes along ideological lines are less than the lines drawn between species (though, even at that point, we’re all still living things). The more one sees the bigger picture, the closer we can become. Divisions we’re supposed to prescribe to are typically driven by the rich and powerful. Recognize this and the less likely we are to be coerced to kill for them in wars. The only way I could possibly find myself fighting for my country of birth is if the entire world was at risk, such as in World War II. The ‘War on Terrorism,’ a situation the U.S. helped create, not so much. I’m sure I would fight for my own preservation, but until that’s required of me I have better things to do.

There are still many countries to visit and many cultures to experience. I find it fascinating to do so because one never knows when they’re going to come across a situation where they find people doing things better than they were doing within their own culture. And this is the value of experiencing other cultures; it allows you to see problems in a new light and therefore possibly solve them with different thinking. In the supposed words of Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created them,” which he apparently said upon musing about a post-nationalist, post-militaristic world. It is clear no one culture is superior to another in successfully propagating the human race or in securing its future, so why is the idea so widely subscribed to? We already know and we already know that it’s false.

I owe allegiance to no country because no country has demonstrated it is superior to any other. (Proponents of American exceptionalism are easily defeated and will not be entertained here.) My allegiances are made on a case by case basis. My judgements are cast on a case by case basis. The world is too rich, too ripe for exploration to remain within one’s shell for too long. For it’s a myth that the shell offers protection. It does provide insulation, where being too cozy with one’s own ideas for too long leads to mental weakness, inflexibility, and worst of all, controllability. These are not a good things. If humanity as a whole would only recognize themselves as such, as human, the fewer robots there would be hell-bent on destroying it all.

Remembering The Great Desk Caper

In order not to offend the vewy delicate sensibilities of my fellow Americans, I waited until after Memorial Day to post this. 

It was a year or two ago one of my uncles sent me a chain email about honoring veterans. The story and its moral goes something like this [lifted from Snopes.com which designates the story as true]…

Back in September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a social studies school teacher at Robinson High School in Little Rock, did something not to be forgotten. On the first day of school, with permission of the school superintendent, the principal and the building supervisor, she took all of the desks out of the classroom.

The kids came into first period, they walked in, there were no desks. They obviously looked around and said, "Ms. Cothren, where's our desk?" And she said, "You can't have a desk until you tell me how you earn them."

They thought, "Well, maybe it's our grades."

"No," she said. "Maybe it's our behavior."

And she told them, "No, it's not even your behavior."

And so they came and went in the first period, still no desks in the classroom. Second period, same thing. Third period. By early afternoon television news crews had gathered in Ms. Cothren's class to find out about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of the classroom.

The last period of the day, Martha Cothren gathered her class. They were at this time sitting on the floor around the sides of the room. And she says, "Throughout the day no one has really understood how you earn the desks that sit in this classroom ordinarily." She said, "Now I'm going to tell you."
Martha Cothren went over to the door of her classroom and opened it, and as she did 27 U.S. veterans , wearing their uniforms, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a school desk. And they placed those school desks in rows, and then they stood along the wall. And by the time they had finished placing those desks, those kids for the first time I think perhaps in their lives understood how they earned those desks.

Martha said, "You don't have to earn those desks. These guys did it for you. They put them out there for you, but it's up to you to sit here responsibly to learn, to be good students and good citizens, because they paid a price for you to have that desk, and don't ever forget it."

Even though I am a veteran – I’m a fucking Renaissance man like that – when I first read this story I laughed pretty hard. I could just imagine myself as a student in that class chiming in – because I’m a dick like that – “Sooooo, because these guys killed people in other countries, some of whom the U.S. are friends with now, I’m expected to be a good student? Isn’t the point of fighting for freedom to give people the option of not giving a shit if someone fought for their freedom?” As a veteran, I have on occasion been slightly offended by people not seeming to care that I fought for their liberties, but then again, that’s exactly one of the liberties they should have precisely because of my service in the military. Moreover, imagine this story taking place in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia or some such. You’d better be a good little Nazi youth officer! These men are out there killing Jews so that you don’t have to earn your desks! Just because so one fights for ideas that you share or benefit from doesn’t mean you should thank them.

Don’t get me wrong (too late) I support standing up for and defending some (very few) ideas but I’m not sure killing is the best way to show that support. (Meanwhile, I am all for defending one’s self with deadly force when one is aggressed.) It’s quite arguable that dropping nukes on Hiroshima AND Nagasaki was necessary and if a strong case can be made for not dropping at least one of those bombs, American veterans of that war are on the hook for the murder of civilians. Oh, that’s right, most soldiers just take orders. Hmm, that didn’t work for the Nazi’s after they lost WWII, did it? But I guess since America always wins we’re just supposed to say, “Team America! Fuck yeah!”

I regard what the teacher did as a waste of the student’s time. If what she wanted to do was instill a sense of respect for veterans in the children, she should have had them campaign the government to show some respect for their veterans’ lives by asking the government not to slash veteran benefits. You think the Average Joe doesn’t show enough respect for veterans? The Average Joe has nothing on the U.S. government that sends mostly-the-poor off to war. Without body armor.

Fortunately, I am a veteran and I can say these things without repercussion since I’ve earned free speech for myself. And just for the record, I sat on the floor and wrote this.

George W. Bush: Terrorist? No, Idiot.

“George W. Bush: Terrorist.”

I’ve seen you, you pseudo-intellectual college students and aging hipsters of the “Free Love” generation, wearing one of those witty t-shirts in recent years. Those t-shirts are without doubt so clever they induce in your conservative Republican opponents a sort of quasi-introspective trace, don’t they? “George W. Bush is a terrorist? I never thought of it that way. Perhaps I should,” they’ll tell themselves.

I can understand why someone might want to think of President Bush as a terrorist. Let’s assume for a moment the culturally sensitive perspective of a foreigner whose country has been invaded by US forces and has seen fellow civilians killed or harmed by the US military. Why wouldn’t they think of the American Commander-In-Chief as a terrorist? After all, he is using force to achieve political or ideological objectives while he wears the “disguise” of a civilian. Though, I don’t know how much of a disguise a business suit is. Maybe it’s the inflammatory red ties he always wears.

While I am no fan of rednecks, ah, red neckties, calling George W. Bush a terrorist broadens what it means to be such a radical, perhaps to the point of even cheapening the word “terrorist” (at least they don’t try to avoid their duty). Perhaps such name-calling is to be expected though from people who merely wish to pray for world peace instead of taking action as means to achieve their visions of utopia. And while these same opponents of President Bush call for his impeachment (its all the rage these days for American presidents), they cannot do so on the grounds that George W. Bush is a terrorist. The President may be many things—and we can be unfriendly about that—but he is not a terrorist. Breath.

Now that any liberal rage you may have had has passed, let’s think about what defines a terrorist.

We’ll begin with the kind of actions that are to be reasonably expected from someone who is called a terrorist; in other words, they terrorize. Now, causing another person great harm can be either mental or physical in nature. However, a terrorist’s method-of-operation is specifically and primarily physical in nature, and typically targets civilians. If terrorist attacks were instead psychological in nature (instead of an expected result of the primary physical attack), then it would be reasonable to expect to find Catholic and Jewish grandmothers imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

The purpose of this physical violence against civilian populations is to install fear in a target populace as a method of coercing a population to meet the political or religious demands of the terrorist or the organization they represent. If the population does not give into the coercion, is expected that terrorist attacks will continue. In this way, the acts of terrorists follow a systematic pattern with which to weave a quilt of destruction.

Moreover, a terrorist characteristically masquerades as a member of the society in which they wish to attack. This tactic is designed to avoid capture by either military or civilian police opposition. This disguise technique causes a target population further concern, because they do not know who the enemy is, much less when and where the unknown assailant(s) will attack. Thus, in an attempt to gain security, a society might lobby their government to give into terrorist demands, such as was the case with the Madrid, Spain train bombings in March 2004. Who knows where they read it, but terrorists certainly make abuse of the phrase, “Better safe than sorry.”

So does President Bush fir the bill of a terrorist? In sending US troops to invade Iraq, the President did not call for specific civilian targets to be engaged. Though civilians might be killed as a matter of collateral damage, they are not the primary focus of any intended violence. In fact, the term “collateral damage” is applied to civilian casualties during military operations exactly because they would be spared any harm if it could be avoided, ideally speaking. If a government’s military intended to kill civilians, they would just go ahead and do it (though it would perhaps be wise to kill all the local reporters as well). Because the US military does not go out of it’s way to kill civilians, their Commander-In-Chief is spared the label of “terrorist.”

It is also exactly because George w. Bush is recognized worldwide as The United States’ Commander-In-Chief that he is not a terrorist. Regardless then of whether he is dressed in a suit and tie or a flight suit stuffed to the nines, he cannot be considered a terrorist because he has explicit ties to the military. Terrorists rarely if ever are connected to a country’s military or governing body, and even when they are, it is not known or disclosed who these people might be.

In order to clear President Bush of any further accusations of being a terrorist, allow me to paraphrase terrorism expert A.P. Schmid who in 1992 defined to the UN what terrorism is: “Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by clandestine individuals/groups, for religious or political ideals, whereby… the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The victims of violence are chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (symbolic targets) to serve as a message generator.” If we use the Iraq War as an example, President Bush commanded the US military to engage non-random, practical military targets, not civilians. Furthermore, George W. Bush can hardly be considered a clandestine individual.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but George W. Bush is emphatically not a terrorist. He doesn’t fulfill any of the qualifications used to define what a terrorist is. Call him what you want (I prefer the term “Errorist”), but he is not a terrorist.

So yeah, about those t-shirts with The President’s picture on them, branding him a terrorist? Feel free to go ahead and put those unsightly little t-shirts away. You wouldn’t want to be accused of terrorizing the fashion industry, now would you?