This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

What say ye now? Now that the shooting has started, and people are dying. Still think Vladimir Putin is a great guy? Do you still think that was a beauty move? Naked aggression in pursuit of naked paranoid ambition. War in Europe. A war with Russia in Europe.

Putin is high stakes gambling; it costs a lot of rubles and a lot of political support to do what he is doing. He’s not a king and this isn’t his idea alone. The Japanese planners feared a war with the west but rationalized that it was either now or never. Maybe Putin feels the same way, or maybe he is attempting distract the home crowd from some other troubling issue.

I said it in jest but its serious; Putin decided to go to war after Twump lost the election. Putin would not need to go to war, if Twump hadn’t lost the election. He would have cover and fear not any serious sanctions or serious consequences.

The Republicans have been playing this name calling rock throwing, chicken stealing, Area 51 crap for so long now. That they no longer take anything seriously. Attacking a President in the middle of a national security crisis. Offering a Quisling’s support for an adversary of their own nation. Laughing and joking their way right into World War 3.  With an adversary who is counting on Republican dumb assery to assist him in his aggression. He can count on the Republicans to obfuscate the issue and spread his propaganda, and somehow still manage to bring Hillary Clinton into it. Isn’t that right Tokyo Tucker?

No matter what Joe Biden does the Republicans will bitch and complain, because it’s easy to rattle a saber when someone else is wearing it. There was a time in this country, when congressional leaders would meet at the White House behind closed doors. To be filled in on what was really going on in a crisis. But today? You couldn’t tell the Republicans anything you wouldn’t want to see on Faux News tonight. “Our top story! Top secret Biden Administration plans for dealing with Russia revealed!” It’s almost like they don’t believe that this is real, and could spiral out of control and go horribly wrong.

Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the map of Europe at the point of a gun incrementally. In a similar fashion resembling a famous leader from the Twentieth Century with a curious moustache, who shall remain nameless. There is a mugging going on, on the train. It shouldn’t matter that it’s at the other end of the car. If he will shoot at others, if he wants to. He’ll shoot at you, if he wants to.  How does a show down with a nuclear power affect you in your day-to-day life?

Does it bother you when the strong bludgeon the weak and take their shit?

Not that anyone would bare their nukes in the first few days. But if it were to become a prolonged Vietnam style proxy war, bleeding out the Russian economy in men and treasure. Someone could get frustrated and do something they might regret later, to break the siege at Khe Sanh. Nobody plans it that way, it just happens. Someone torpedoes an ocean liner or shoots an Archduke. The only time its possible to control a war is before it starts.

I bet the Republicans could even fund raise for reelection, off of this! To be the party of Confederate flag waving insurrectionists. Cheering for a thug condemned by the rest of the world, against their own democratically elected leaders. “Let’s go Brandon!” It’s a proud day to be a Republican. Offering appeasement and it’s none our business politics. But to those of us who are old enough to know what “Peace in our time” really means. Understand it means anything, but peace in our time.

Estimates say 70 to 80% of the Russian active-duty forces are involved in the Ukraine exercise. That’s not a skirmish, that’s a large-scale expensive operation. So, it must be mighty important for someone to achieve these goals and rest assured, if they get away with it. This won’t be the last one.

The historical irony as former Russian client states that rushed to join NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, because they feared the return of Russian tanks. And now Russian tanks are rolling because they fear NATO. A military alliance with no one else as an adversary because no one else in Europe, uses tanks to get what they want. “They don’t like us because they fear us, and they fear us because they remember the last time.”

History is a cruel mistress and though it might seem as distant as King Arthur, it wasn’t so long ago. Not so remote as the pages of the history book might make it appear. This generation doesn’t appreciate the price paid to build the foundations of the modern world, because they didn’t have to pay for it. As far as they are concerned, It just happened that way and was always there, all along. But the modern world was built on the wreckage of the last. Built with folly and treasure and blood and avoidance of things that were really going on.

Churchill was derided as war monger, trying to use his dislike of the Nazi Party to get himself elected back into office. But when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, with the army stranded on the beaches of Dunkerque. The critics were silent, and the fun and games and appeasement were over. Painted into a corner the critics were now silent, because no one knew what might happen next. Now that it’s all too real and not just idle speculation or headlines the news. Now, that they’re dropping real bombs and not just leaflets.

“Yesterday a sand snake crawled by just outside my tent door, and for the first time in my life I looked upon a snake not with a creeping phobia but with a sudden and surprising feeling of compassion. Somehow, I pitied him, because he was a snake instead of a man. And I don’t know why I felt that way, for I feel pity for all men too, because they are men.

It may be that the war has changed me, along with the rest. It is hard for anyone to analyze himself. I know that I find more and more that I wish to be alone, and yet contradictorily I believe I have a new patience with humanity that I’ve never had before. When you’ve lived with the unnatural mass cruelty that mankind is capable of inflicting upon itself, you find yourself dispossessed of the faculty for blaming one poor man for the triviality of his faults. I don’t see how any survivor of war can ever be cruel to anything, ever again.”
― Ernie Pyle