“True patriotism springs from a belief in the dignity of the individual, freedom and equality not only for Americans but for all people on earth……….” said Eleanor Roosevelt. True. Americans, having paid a high cost over centuries in blood, treasure and tears, have purchased that freedom at an extremely high price.
We must go on doing so, using the cyber web, politics of negotiation, measured debates and application of settled law at home and at the UN, while keeping a strong, well equipped military for which we are admired, envied and hated in cultures dominated solely by fear or passivity. North Korea doesn’t like us. Neither does Iran.
In countries such as these, the presence of would-be strong men and their cohorts, motivated by a veneer of religious hatred masking the sheer will to dominate, steal, torture and rape at will: for money, power and control of a people, as has obtained far back into pre-history. The way of the sword, bayonet, club and firearm is thousands if not millions of years old.
We are long, long out of the Garden and cannot get back. Wars are old news on earth. Weapons are much bigger now, killing more, and quicker Recently, Ukrainian soldiers dusted 400 hapless Russian men in one battle, next, as many in a single strike.
Many of the unwilling enemy, demoralized and terrified, are shooting one another: casualty totals for those who serve in Putin’s war now top 100,000. He admits to 6,000. Intelligent people in Moscow and the heartlands have begun to realize they have acceded to a totalitarian state in which citizens become objects, not seen as human – to be used and discarded when destroyed and dead.
This doesn’t make the western news, but in Russian homeland cities these days, protesters have screamed defiance in the streets and attacked military recruitment centers, while numerous “escapees” avoiding arrest, are headed fast out of the country or cowering in hiding.
“We have met the enemy, and it is us!” is no longer amusing, cartoonish humor. Neither are the ludicrously laughable lies which Putin and his henchmen plead for the world to believe, and which nobody including themselves believes.
The Kremlin junta has decided to raise a million draftees into active service, unblinking at the lies and threats to commandeer them all, to lose their lives and buy zero strategic gains in Ukraine. In a prison, men may be easily duped into exchanging one hell for another – from rats and sour bread in the gulag to real blood on the ground in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin does not do this alone. He has a revolving chorus line of generals and sycophants and these, pushed to achieve the impossible, fail, thinking: What will happen to us and our families, if riots escalate into civil war??
Across European Russia, just over a century ago, vengeful Bolsheviki destroyed anyone deemed an imperialist, proving that desperate people, long oppressed, may explode into inhuman slaughter, gunning down and bayonetting 4 girls, a little boy who was the Tsarevitch, and their parents, the hereditary Russian Tsar and Tsarina, with no conscience nor regret. President Grant’s beloved granddaughter, now the Princess Cantacuzene, packed her silks and escaped with her life just in time.
This was predictable and cyclic, if no less horridly tragic – as in ultra-civilized France, 230 years past. “Down with the Bourgeoisie! Death to the King!” Hapless Louis XVI and his pretty Queen Marie Antoinette stood no chance after attempting escape to the Austrian border. Once, I stood at the tall window of the Queen’s bedroom suite at Versailles, gazing out at the topiary trees, thinking: “This was the last sight that poor woman saw before being dragged to prison and killed.” It may have been so. After their capture, the French royals were tried, beheaded, or dismembered in the street like the Princess de Lamballe.
The young Dauphin, France’s crown prince, was left to die of disease in a prison cell, with no playmates, friends nor compassion from his jailers. The repeated point in every revolution……when those who feel they are wronged by others at the top of a society reach critical mass in numbers, all of hell erupts to reverse social order. Dispatching their last Bourbon king, the French ricocheted for decades between republic, monarchy, imperialism, and finally into a stable pattern of civil life.
The cycle is drastic but predictable and still active, as we mourn with innocent civilians caught up in the Ukrainian deluge in which President Zelensky’s soldiers grasp every hold they can to stop the Russian invasion at Bakhmut.
None of this is funny to them. Satire is forgotten except for cruel jokes men make in war: “Willy and Joe”, a Stars & Stripes cartoon by Bill Mauldin in WW II which printed for Allied troops in Europe featured two disheveled, unshaven “grunts” hunched in foxholes, as one remarked to the other: “The hell this ain’t the most important foxhole in the war I’m in it!”
As so many of the Russ’ and Ukrainians, ancient Slavic kin, debate with firefights who will prevail. They are all “in it.” In profound concern and active assistance to the assaulted nation, so are we.
Despite respites, Russian history has always been a tale of conquest and destruction. As Putin vows to preserve the best of the former Communist state; turns out there never was a “best” – just another brutal way of controling a vast, rural populace and cowering subject states by fear and terror. Hitler had his gas chambers. Putin has his KGB/FSB and his prisoner-draftees…………as these crumble, all he will shortly have left – is his nuclear arsenal.……….if we do not stop him, now..….Thank the Lord, Zelensky has his heroes and keeps asking the US President for longer-range firepower and merciful God, PLANES.
Let us back this small, immensely brave man and his soldiers with more than promises, and help the Ukrainians to put an end to the horror of war.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
