"The Good War"

The astronauts named their spacecraft Integrity because... 

The name Integrity embodies the foundation of trust, respect, candor, and humility across the crew and the many engineers, technicians, scientists, planners, and dreamers required for mission success. The name is also a nod to the extensive integrated effort – from the more than 300,000 spacecraft components to the thousands of people across the world – that must come together to venture to the Moon and back, inspire the world, and set course for a long-term presence at the Moon. Integrity is rooted in a shared core value of NASA, the agency’s astronaut office, and the CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

OK, corporate speak at its finest but the truth is that in everything they did and said before, during and after their magnificent voyage to the Moon and back, the Artemis II astronauts, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen and Reid Weisman, were exemplars of integrity and in being so as I mentioned in my last post, we Americans and Canadians should be proud of these four brave individuals who represent the best of our two countries. And the entire world can be proud of the integrity shown by the (tens of) thousands of individuals responsible for making the Artemis mission a stellar example of the triumph of the human spirit.

Sadly, their news cycle has already passed, and we Americans are back to witnessing the opposite of integrity, the very worst of our country. Google the phrase "the opposite of integrity" and you will find many words with a variety of meanings, yet each perfectly describing a different aspect of this many faceted administration.

This month, April, 2026, which began so promising with the launch of Artemis II, was a particular doozy.

The other day I had lunch with my friend and we observed how every time we get together, a new low has been reached by the current resident of the White House. The new low since we last met was the following comment posted online:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

Without actually committing it, it's hard to imagine getting any lower than threatening genocide but I have faith that somehow Donald Trump will manage.

He of course was talking about Iran and what he planned to do to that country if they didn't reach a deal with him to end the war that he and Benjamin Netanyahu started at the end of February.

It's remarkable that no matter how low this man goes, his enablers will find a way to justify him.

That comment just shows what a brilliant dealmaker he is, after all, because of that threat, Iran came to the negotiating table...

is but one example. But this threat is no different than your neighbor having a dispute with you and threatening  to burn down your house and murder your children if you don't comply with his wishes. 

You might say: "well that's illegal and I'd have every right to call the police and have that neighbor arrested." Which is true but in the case of geo-politics, there is no international police force capable of arresting the sitting leader of a country. If there were, Vladimir Putin would be behind bars right now.

Former leaders who committed illegal acts while in power are another story which is why Netanyahu is so keen on staying in power by prolonging the conflicts in which he has involved his country and in starting new conflicts. Unfortunately our own president has his own ulterior motives to start wars, not the least of these motives starts with the initials J.E.

Beyond the grave moral implications of that threat, there is the very practical matter of not being taken seriously diplomatically when he doesn't go through with such threats. Don't get me wrong, the entire world should be eternally grateful he didn't carry out this threat. But make a threat enough times and not carry through, and pretty soon no one will take you seriously, as has already happened in the case with this president and his war with Iran.

As I mentioned in previous posts, this president is best defined not by the complicated characters found in the world's  great literature, but by the simpletons found in Aesop's fables which always end with the moral: "don't be like that guy." Here he is playing the role of "the boy who cried wolf."

To underscore this president's simpleton qualities, this month he famously posted an AI generated image of himself dressed as a Christlike figure appearing to heal a sick man as they are surrounded by concerned citizens (all of them white), in front of a backdrop containing a mix of patriotic, religious, and military iconography.

Ah he's just creating a tiff like he always does, trying to get under the skin of his detractors...

said the sycophants.

What they failed to grasp was his detractors were all laughing hysterically at the idiocy of it all, while tens of millions of his Christian supporters felt betrayed by the idolatrous image.

Caught off guard, never having occurred to him that this image would be profoundly offensive to his otherwise faithful minions, the president took the picture down the day he posted it. Interestingly, he never took down the comment about wiping out Persian civilization forever.

Then he picked a fight with the Pope.

In response, perhaps his most devoted public sycophant Sean Hannity went on the air recently "sending a message to Pope Leo." 

In his "message", Hannity said this:

As of today, I no longer consider myself a Catholic.

I'm sure that message left the Pope quaking in his boots.

Lots of folks naturally took that to mean Hannity stopped being a Catholic after Pope Leo XIV made pointed negative references to the current war in Iran. But Hannity in his rant goes on to contradict himself, it turns out he actually left the Church several years ago because of "institutionalized corruption at all levels of the Church", later joining an Evangelical Christian church.

There are precious few times I agree with Sean Hannity but I too left the Church as an active participant for the same reason, although for what it's worth, I still consider myself a Catholic.

Hannity went on to point out the numerous human rights atrocities committed by the Iranian regime ever since taking power in 1979. I agree with that as well.

Then came a favorite strategy of the MAGA faithful, presenting an argument with the fancy Latin name, the "tu quoque fallacy", a tactic more familiar to modern ears as "whataboutism.". Hannity points out that the Pope criticizes the president but he doesn't say anything about Iran. Quite honestly I don't know if the Pope has ever publicly commented on the Iranian government but if he hasn't there is probably a good reason, his comments would likely fall on deaf ears since the extremist Muslim regime there is not likely to take advice from a Christian leader, any more than our current government would take advice from a Muslim cleric.

What really seamed to get Hannity's panties all in a bunch is the Pontiff's having met in the past with two notable Illinois Democrats, David Axelrod and our "ultra left" Governor J.B. Pritzker which prompted the Fox host to say:

Why is the Pope twisting religion to only attack Trump? Is it because he’s a run-of-the-mill Trump-hating Democrat that lacks moral clarity about radical Islam?

It takes a lot of chutzpah for anyone, let alone that beacon of moral clarity Sean Hannity, to accuse a Pope of lacking moral clarity but there you have it.  

Regarding the Pope's comments on the current war, Hannity takes issue with this comment of the Pope's:

God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.

That is simply not biblically accurate says Hannity. He correctly points out the hundreds of times the Bible references war... 

for equally depicting God as authorizing, commanding, (and) intervening in battles.

Hannity summed it all up by saying the president is right, and the Pope is wrong.

His comments were echoed by another member of team MAGA, J.D. Vance, the vice president who at a conference in Tulsa, attended by far fewer people than seats to accommodate them, made the following remarkable head-scratching comment:

I think it's very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.

Later, responding to the Pope's comment about God not blessing conflicts, in what for Vance must have seemed like his brilliant gotcha moment, the VP went on:

Was God on the side of Americans who liberated Holocaust Camps?... I certainly think the answer is yes.

In doing so, the VP and later the current Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson castigated the Pope by invoking the "Just War Doctrine" of the Catholic Church whose origins can be traced in part all the way back to the work of St. Augustine in the fourth century. It should be noted that the current Pope is an Augustinian priest who once led that order. 

Indeed the VP and the Speaker say correctly that our involvement in some wars, like the Second World War, aka "The Good War",* was just.

Now let's assume for a moment that the Augustinian priest, Chicago born Robert Prevost who became Pope Leo XIV last year, knows a thing or two about the Just War Doctrine.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a summary of Catholic teaching, here in their entirety are sections 2308 and 2309 which explain Catholic doctrine on "Just War":

2308 - All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.

2309 - The, strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force (emphasis theirs) require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation of community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain;

-all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. 

The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgement of those who have responsibility for the common good. 

Using these criteria, you be the judge, do the conditions that brought upon the president's war in Iran satisfy ANY of these conditions, let alone all of them? Let's have a look:

Condition One: MAGA might argue that the potential damage of Iran having a nuclear weapon is an existential threat most directly to Israel and only slightly less to the rest of the world. That threat could be potentially lasting, grave and certain. That last point is debatable but the reality is that in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) was signed between the United States, Iran and other nations that severely limited Iran's nuclear capabilities, especially in the direction of creating a nuclear weapon. The current president in his first term, as part of his sweeping efforts to undo all the work of his predecessor, tore up the deal, thereby freeing Iran from all of the constraints of the pact. 

Condition Two: We attacked Iran on February 28 while we were in the middle of negotiations with the country.

Condition Three: The peace terms currently on the table, would create an agreement that is essentially the same as the JCPA, the agreement the current president tore up. 

Condition Four: Through this war, we have inflicted great harm to the people of Iran, many of them children. I suppose only God will know in the end if it was graver or not so grave as the evil intended to be eliminated. One thing is certain, despite killing the head of the Iranian regime, the regime is still intact and will very likely take a harder line than before.

Answering the criticism leveled at him, the Pope says he is merely preaching the Gospel, not offering up political opinions. While the MAGA crowd searches for anecdotes to justify their cause, and the president threatens genocide while claiming to be "all about the Gospel", the Pope, not interested in debating any them is doing his job, living the Gospel by spending time in Africa, ministering to the growing Catholic Church there, as well as humbling himself by removing his shoes to visit one of the largest mosques in the world, 

And naturally all the while he is calling for Peace.

On the flip side there's Pete Hegseth the bellicose American Secretary of Defense, who likens himself as the Secretary of War. He got egg all over his face this month when at what was labeled a prayer session at the Pentagon, he read what he called a prayer that was used by the Sandy Hook One Combat Search and Rescue Team who rescued the two US pilots shot down over Iran this month. The "prayer" which he said was meant to resemble a passage from the Old Testament, (Ezekiel 25:17), turned out to be nearly a word-for-word reenactment of a scene from the movie Pulp Fiction. He's right that the words resemble the Bible passage, however the spirit is anything but. 

In the movie, a hit man played by Samuel L. Jackson recites the quasi-biblical passage to one of his victims before he executes him. 

Here you can see a clip of the SoD's "prayer", intercut with the scene from the movie.

 And here's the real Ezekiel 25:17:

And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.

Note that in the real verse, which is more accurately reflected in the scene from the movie than in the SoD's version, the one executing vengeance is God, not a human being.

Since they like and refer to the Old Testament so much, the SoD, and all the religious warmongers in this administration should take heed of another verse, this one Deuteronomy 32:35:

It is mine to avenge; I will repay.
In due time their foot will slip;
their day of disaster is near
and their doom rushes upon them.

Again, this is God doing the avenging saying in no uncertain terms that vengeance is His job.

Hannity is right, in the Old Testament there is indeed a lot of bloodshed, vengeance and warmongering going on, with God "authorizing, commanding, (and) intervening in battles."

But the essential part is this: according to the Bible it is to be God's will to do these things, not ours.

The warmongers of today like the SoD would argue that the war against Iran is also the will of God, therefore righteous. And that the SoD, the military, and by extension we the American people, whether we want to be or not, are servants following God's will.

Now I have a message to the bible-thumping American warmongers like the SoD starting with this question: 

How do you know that this war is the will of God?

I know this is going to rub a lot of you the wrong way, but it is the truth. The people you folks refer to as "radical Islam" believe the same thing, that God is on their side. Therefore, according to them, each act of violence they commit, sometimes directed at innocent people, what we would call terrorism, is justified. 

How do they know that?

Because they found snippets of text from their Holy Book that back them up.

Just like you.

---

In this remarkable month we have seen two radically different visions of the world.

One vision is the big picture, the view from outer space where our tiny planet, as Buckminster Fuller called it, Spaceship Earth, floats alone in a vast sea of nothingness. All the people alive and all who have ever lived are aboard that spaceship, together as astronaut Christina Koch so beautifully put it, as one crew.

From a religious point of view promoted by Pope Leo, we are all God's children which is precisely why he chose to visit the Grand Mosque of Algiers where he said this:

To seek God is also to recognize the image of God in every creature, in the children of God, in every man and woman created in God’s image and likeness. For us, this means that it is very important to learn to live together with respect for the dignity of every human person.

In this world view, both the religious and the secular agree that while conflict and war are sometimes unavoidable, peace is always preferable and it is our duty as human beings to do everything in our power to promote peace over war.

It is a world view that recognizes that while the resources of our Spaceship Earth are abundant, they are not infinite and we must do everything in our power to protect our planet home for our children, their children and for the generations to come. 

In this vision of the world, people of good will, whether they follow the Pope or not, believe equally that the human race is far stronger when we act together than when we are apart.

In the other world view, division reigns supreme. It is a view that divides the world between the winners and the losers, friends and enemies, the familiar versus the foreign, the nice versus the shithole countries, and us versus them. 

It's a view that promotes fear over trust, that believes the threat to our environment is a hoax. and claims that our God is better than their God.

It is a world ruled (mostly) by men, interested only in acquiring ungodly amounts of power and wealth for themselves and their families, who gain the world but lose their soul by promoting anger, greed, and hatred.

One view values integrity, while the other promotes corruption, deceit, treachery, injustice and all the other terms in that glossary of words that represent the opposite in integrity.

While we still have the power to do so, we are faced with the opportunity to choose the world view we want to guide us into the future, the first or the second.

In my book it's not a difficult choice.

* The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two is the title of a Pulitzer Prize winning book written in 1984 by Studs Terkel, where he interviews a wide range of individuals about their personal experiences surrounding the most devastating war to date in history.

Running Out of Other Hands

There's lots of blame to go around, that much is certain. What is also certain is there is not a single justification for what took place in Israel, across the border from Gaza on October 7, 2023.

None whatsoever. 

They call it Israel's 9/11 which is really saying something about a country whose entire existence has been defined by war and terror. In my opinion, in the scope of sheer depravity if not body count, 10/7 was worse. 

On that dreadful day, at this writing, three weeks ago, members of the terrorist organization Hamas, standing eye-to-eye with their victims, mostly ordinary Israeli citizens, tortured, raped, and butchered close to 1,500 people. Some were intentionally burned alive while hiding in their homes. Others were beheaded. Bodies of victims were desecrated. Many who were not killed were taken hostage. No one was spared, not the elderly, not the infirm, not children.

I'm not going to go into all the horrific details because information on that is everywhere. 

All I will say is that it takes a special kind of monster to kill parents in front of their children, not to mention all the other atrocities that took place that day.

Almost as disturbing were the scores of public acts around the world including the U.S., where people who support the Palestinian cause (a just cause in my opinion), openly celebrated the 10/7 attacks, claiming they were a legitimate response to Israeli policies.

If torture, rape and slaughter of innocent people, and cheering it all on aren't bad enough, for author/neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris, there is another atrocity that trumps them all, the use of human shields. In his words:

I’m talking about people who will strategically put their own noncombatants, their own women and children, into the line of fire so that they can inflict further violence upon their enemies, knowing that their enemies have a more civilized moral code that will render them reluctant to shoot back, for fear of killing or maiming innocent noncombatants.

This is taken from a transcript of Harris's recent podcast on the 10/7 attacks titled: The Sin of Moral Equivalence.  In the podcast, he notes that while ethics and morality take on different forms depending upon one's culture and religion, human civilization has advanced to the point where there are certain fundamental moral laws in our day an age, that nearly everyone accepts. It is generally agreed for example that it is wrong to kill (unless absolutely unavoidable), or to rape (in any circumstance), or to torture, or to take hostages, or to revel in such acts. And it is beyond wrong to use innocent people as shields to protect oneself from committing these crimes.

Therefore according to Harris, there is not any moral equivalence between the violent acts of Hamas, and the violent acts of Israel, who is merely attempting to defend itself. In his words: "Intentions count." 

I agree.

But he raises a few eyebrows with the following:

In the West, we have advanced to a point where the killing of noncombatants, however unavoidable it becomes once wars start, is inadvertent and unwanted and regrettable and even scandalous. Yes, there are still war crimes. And I won’t be surprised if some Israelis commit war crimes in Gaza now. But, if they do, these will be exceptions that prove the rule—which is that Israel remains a lonely outpost of civilized ethics in the absolute moral wasteland that is the Middle East.

To deny that the government of Israel (with all of its flaws) is better than Hamas, to deny that Israeli culture (with all of its flaws) is better than Palestinian culture­ in its attitude toward violence, is to deny that moral progress itself is possible.

The problem is we could argue all day about whose culture is the morally superior, but in the end, we're still left with the question of what to do about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. 

I'm sure it makes little difference to the victims of the 10/7 attack, or the Israeli response to it, (over 5,000 people killed in Gaza at this writing), whether their or their loved one's killer was morally superior or inferior to the killers on the other side.

We can pick sides and argue until we're blue in the face as to who's cause is more valid, which side is responsible for more atrocities, and what group is more entitled to call the small patch of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, home.

Or we can go back and forth justifying the actions of both sides until we run out of other hands, as I certainly have after the 10/7 attack.

But in the end, there are only two realities that matter: 

Israel is here to stay and so are the Palestinians. We can either go on as we have for 75 years living with an unending cycle of violence and death, or somehow, someway come up with a solution for the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to live together in relative peace.

Yes I know, that sounds very kumbaya of me but in all honesty, short of the mass eviction or genocide of one or both of the groups that call that land (whatever you want to call it) home, can you think of any other scenario?

No, I'm not presumptuous enough to claim to have an answer to this conflict. All I know is that it is not as some suggest a struggle between right and wrong, between good and evil. If it were, it would be an easy choice for those of us who haven't a personal stake in the issue to pick sides, like the other war we're dealing with in Ukraine. Nevertheless, many do pick sides without giving the other side the benefit of at least trying to walk in their shoes, even for a brief moment. 

To be sure there are very bad, perhaps evil actors involved in the current struggle in the Middle East, but the truth is that both sides have legitimate arguments that need to be listened to and respected, especially by each other.

In all his wisdom, Sam Harris makes no bones about which side he's on, which is certainly his prerogative. But in doing so, he illustrates much of the disconnect we have going on right now on both sides regarding this issue. 

While denying moral equivalence between the 10/7 attacks and Israel's response, Harris pays lip service to some of the issues Palestinians have, mentioning the:

the growth of (Israeli) settlements, (and) the daily humiliation of living under occupation.

 But then he adds:

Incidentally, there has been no occupation of Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory unilaterally, forcibly removing 9000 of its own citizens, and literally digging up Jewish graves. The Israelis have been out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. And yet they have been attacked from Gaza ever since.

This is a half-truth. While it's true that previous to the 10/7 attacks, Israeli forces were not occupying Gaza from the inside, Israel has blockaded the region, walled it off, controlling its air and maritime space, six of seven of its land borders, and as we've seen during this conflict, complete control of Gaza's utilities including water, electricity and telecommunications.

Harris's comments dismiss the dreadful conditions people have lived through in Gaza leading some to declare it, an "open air prison." And that was before Israel's current air bombardment and impending ground invasion, which have made it a living hell on earth. 

In all fairness it must be stated that a great deal of the suffering of the people of Gaza has been exacerbated by Hamas who has been the governing body there since 2007, and has been using the territory to launch missile strikes against Israel.

Sam Harris is not alone in his selective reading of history, In virtually all the assessments of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I've read on both sides of the issue, the authors use charged language consisting of half-truths, false equivalences, conflation and other rhetorical devices crafted for the purpose of minimizing the suffering of and dehumanizing the other side.  

Folks taking the Palestinian side for example like to use provocative terms charging Israel with "imperialism" "settler colonialism", "racism", "occupation", "ethnic cleansing", "apartheid" and even "fascism". These are fighting words, terms designed to ring a bell by conflating Israel's treatment of the Palestinians with familiar grievous atrocities that have taken place throughout history such as the European conquest of the Americas, Apartheid South Africa, the brutal war in the Balkans in the nineties, and the quintessential symbol of evil, Nazi Germany.

Like Sam Hariis's occupation remark, while not entirely off the mark, these are half-truths that tell only part of the story. Israel is indeed guilty of committing grievous atrocities against the Palestinian people. What the folks who use these terms conveniently leave out, are the grievous atrocities carried out against Israelis by terrorist organizations acting, or so they claim, in the name of the Palestinian people.

Also conveniently not mentioned is the terrible history of racism and oppression against the Jewish people, culminating in the Holocaust which was the final straw that made the establishment of the State of Israel, a fait accompli.

On the other side, in a 1969 interview, then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said this: "There was no such thing as Palestinians."  She went on:

When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist. (Emphasis mine)

What she says here with the exception of the last sentence, is not entirely without merit. Before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the territory of Palestine had been under the control of the colonial powers of Great Britain, the Ottoman Turks, several other Muslim groups broken up for a brief period by European Crusaders, the Byzantine Empire, the Romans, (with brief interludes of Jewish rule), the Greeks, the Babylonians and the Persians. That takes us back to about 600 B.C.E. when the Hebrews still ruled over much of the area when the Egyptians weren't calling the shots. In none of that time was there a Palestinian state governed by a people called the Palestinians.   

According to Meir's framework, the people who came to be known as Palestinians, were simply Arabs who happened to live in Palestine. As such they were subjects of the imperial powers mentioned above and were referred to as Palestinian Arabs. Golda Meir compares these people to the Jews like her, who lived in Palestine before 1948, and were referred to as Palestinian Jews. 

So she's right in that there was never a Palestinian state. Other commentators point out that even the word Palestine is a Greek, not an Arab word. 

Golda Meir spent years backpedaling her remark but the idea of a lack of a true Palestinian identity has been picked up by many hardline defenders of Israel and has been the foundation of their argument that the people who identify themselves as Palestinians have no legitimate case. In their view, they are simply Arabs who should live with other Arabs in places like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. 

The germ of that argument may be factually true, but in its entirety the argument can be refuted in two words: so what? 

Before World War I, about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs lived in the region as had their ancestors before them for millennia. There was no mass migration of Arab people into Palestine, no one date when we can say the Arabs arrived in Palestine. Modern day Palestinians can legitimately trace at least part of their ancestry to the region back to the time of Abraham and before.

As can the Jews.

The Arabs of Palestine had their own towns, farms and way of life. They bonded as a community. They had developed their own culture and language, one of the many dialects of Arabic. And they lived in peace with members of the Jewish minority who had remained after the mass exodus during the first century C.E. after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. 

That all changed after World War I as the massive immigration of Jewish people into Palestine, made possible by Great Britain with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which declared British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the region, which completely changed the demographics of Palestine. 

Tens of thousands of Arab Palestinians were evicted from their homes and forced into exile, communities were destroyed, olive trees that provided Palestinian families their sustenance for centuries were uprooted, and entire towns were leveled. One incident was so horrific, The Deir Yessin Massacre, the obliteration of an Arab town near Jerusalem by radical Israeli terrorists, that it bears resemblance to what happened three weeks ago outside of Gaza, again if not in body count, in terms of sheer depravity. Remember as Sam Harris pointed out, intentions count. 

Today, Jewish people from every corner of the planet who have never set foot in the place are welcome to move to Israel upon which they automatically become citizens, yet Arab people who were born there and have since left for whatever reason, are denied that right.

I could go on forever describing sins of the past and present but what's the point?

The question of the day is where do we go from here?

Among the people making the rounds on the interview circuit in the past month is the Israeli author and historian Yuval Noah Harrari, who has friends and family members in Kibbutz Be-eri who were victims of the 10/7 massacre.

Harrari has been a strong critic of the current government in Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Harrari is a populist, conspiracy theory driven strongman with aims to divide Israelis in order to shore up his own power. (sound familiar?). Harrari directly attributes the "success" of the Hamas 10/7 assault to the distraction caused by Israeli political infighting which led to a breakdown of security forces and Israeli intelligence resulting in letting their guard down, enabling the Hamas terrorists to cross the heavily defended border virtually unencumbered. 

 

Harrari also finds Israel's response to the attack unacceptable. While he agrees that Hamas must be dealt with severely, he doesn't agree with the hard liners' stance that the terrorist group must be annihilated. 

Beyond the obvious moral ramifications of killing thousands of innocent Palestinians in order to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, there are strong tactical points that should be considered using Harrari's logic. 

Hamas knew exactly what Israel's response would be to their 10/7 attack, and Israel is playing right into their hands. Hamas on its own has no chance to stand up militarily to the mighty Israeli armed forces. But they know that thousands of dead Palestinians at the hands of Israel will further harden the hearts of the remaining Palestinians to the thought of a negotiated peace, and turn much of the world against Israel. In this sense, every dead Palestinian at the hands of Israel is a victory for Hamas, whose stated goal is the replacement of Israel by an Islamic state. 

Annihilating Hamas, if that is even remotely possible, would inevitably result in the deaths of several more tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and the displacement of millions. With Hamas gone at the cost of all those lives, something will inevitably arise to take its place. Something that is, that will probably be much worse. 

Demanding justice is a normal, fundamental human desire. But Yuval Harrari poses this question: what is more important, justice or peace? There will never be traditional eye-for-eye justice for the 10/7 attack, just as there will never be justice for 9/11, Deir Yessin, or the Holocaust. 

The only real justice for the victims of these atrocities is to do everything in our power to ensure they never happen again. 

Justice in the form of retribution only leads to more retribution, an unending cycle, just as we've had in the past 75 years. 

Harrari proposes a rekindling of the peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia that were looking very promising up until 10/7, in fact he speculates their very existence was one of the prime motivations for the attacks. The last thing Hamas, a jihadist organization wants is peace with Israel.

Then in Harrari's words, with a 

coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.

With a rebuilt Gaza, and assurances from Israel to keep their hands off, maybe, just maybe there will be some hope for the future among Palestinians and the possibility that one day they will be able to live with dignity. And if that happens, maybe just maybe, Hamas and other similar groups will be seen for the truly needless destruction they cause and will be rendered irrelevant.

Yes it's farfetched but it's an infinitely better scenario then simply blasting Gaza to kingdom come, which is what we are experiencing now. 

But peace won't come unless attitudes on both sides change. 

Moshe Dayan was a formidable Israeli military leader and politician from the state's founding until his death in 1981. In 1956, he delivered the eulogy of a fallen comrade killed outside his kibbutz near Gaza by Palestinian fedayeen. Defining the reality and the terrible moral compromise forged with the establishment of the State of Israel, Dayan's words are resolute, yet filled with self-reflection and anguish:

Let us not condemn the murderers. What do we know of their fierce hatred for us? For eight years they have been living in the refugee camps of Gaza, while right before their eyes we have been turning the land and the villages, in which they and their forefathers lived, into our land.

Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty. Have we forgotten that this small band of youths, settled in Nahal Oz, carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces — has this been forgotten? For we know that if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be, morning and evening, armed and ready.

Imagine that kind of honesty coming out of the mouth of ANY politician today, let alone one involved in the Israel/Palestine crisis.

Compare Dayan's words to these words addressed to the Palestinians, of Israel's current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich:

you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister) didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out.

Clearly we not only need to disarm organizations like Hamas, but we also need to encourage the Israeli and the Palestinian people to stop choosing religious-zealot-extremists to lead them, as leadership on both sides has tragically failed its people.

As I said above, Israel and the Palestinian people are here to stay, despite the rantings of sociopathic lunatics.

We need to tone down the rhetoric and be willing to listen to different voices to try to understand our adversaries, instead of demonizing or dehumanizing them. 

Most of all, rather than declaring ourselves on the side of the Palestinians or the Israelis, all people of good will should declare ourselves to be on the side of peace.

I'm not at all optimistic peace will come, but what other choice do we have?

Putin's War

We are talking about a radical, complete transformation of education to mobilize Russian youth for war, Right now education has two functions—propaganda and basic military training.

This is the ominous warning of Russian sociologist, political scientist and newly minted dissident, Grigory Yudin. One year ago, Yudin predicted that Russia, specifically its dictator Vladimir Putin was "about to start the most senseless war in history."

Indeed he did.

I distinctly remember the discussion last February during the massive buildup of Russian forces along its border with Ukraine, that there was no way Putin would be foolish enough to invade a sovereign nation. I agreed. True, with the "mighty" Russian military behind him I thought, he might be able to overtake Ukraine fairly quickly with a minimum of bloodshed, but winning the peace would be infinitely more difficult.

Boy were we wrong, we in the West that is, at least with the first two points. The people in the East, closer to the action, namely in the countries formerly under the iron fist of the USSR, knew better.

Today, February 24, 2023, marks the first anniversary of yet another day of infamy, the day Russia invaded Ukraine marking the beginning of the most senseless war in history.

It's hard to get into the head of a sociopathic dictator but I think it is safe to assume that Putin could not have imagined last February that one year later he would still be fighting his war, continuing to send tens of thousands of his nation's young people to their deaths in his futile (at least up until now) attempt to occupy Ukraine. That doesn't even mention the murder, rape and plunder that his military is inflicting upon the innocent people of that sovereign nation.  It's certainly not what he was telling his subjects a year ago, back when you could get thrown in jail for calling Putin's incursion a war rather than simply a "military operation". I'm guessing that still is true. 

There seems to be a majority of Russians who continue to support Putin's war but of course, conducting an accurate poll in Russia is about as unlikely as the proverbial herding of cats. Despite Grigory Yudin's words at the top of this post, it's a little hard for me, to imagine the Russian people, at least intelligent Russians with any sense of history, being swayed by attempts to indoctrinate them into going along with Putin's nonsense about the "de-nazification of a region that is and has always been in every way, an integral part of Russia."

On the other hand as we've been seeing in our own country over the last several years, there is no shortage of people who have no problem going along with anyone who tells them what they want to hear, facts be damned. 

Vladimir Putin, as has been laid bare for the world to see, leads a paper tiger of a military, fraught with massive corruption that goes all the way to the top. Its soldiers are mal-treated, ill-prepared, and above all at least in this case, have been lied to about the purpose of their mission. They are fighting against people many of whom share a similar language, culture, faith, and even ancestry. In short, there is little incentive for Russian soldiers to fight this war, other than the fear of punishment from their superiors. This is what necessitates all the nonsense propaganda about fighting Nazis. 

Consequently, up until now, the Russian military has been no match for the Ukrainians who have the support of the wealth and weaponry if not soldiers, from NATO members and other countries. What's more, they are hands down winning the battle in the court of public opinion all over the world. Far greater powers than Russia have learned from time immemorial that fighting against a well-funded, highly motivated army with international support, defending their home, in their home, is a very tall order at best, and more often than not, doomed to failure. 

But Putin has two things on his side right now, numbers, and his own depravity. As someone who has proven time and again that he believes the only life in Russia worth protecting is his own, Putin has no qualms about sending his country's children to their slaughter in order to fight his war.  Russia has a lot of children of fighting age. If this war drags on for years as many in Russia's military brass predict, every year will see more children become fighting age, able to go to Ukraine and die for Putin as well. 

Which is fine with him. 

His latest exercise in sociopathic behavior is conscripting prisoners, offering them deals of a get-out-of-jail-free card in exchange for serving in his war. As people in jail are of even less value to Putin than ordinary soldiers, with a minimum of training, ex-cons have been put on the front lines to serve as cannon fodder, while more experienced professional solders behind them, wait for the enemy to exhaust their ammunition as they slaughter the first waves of troops. 

With the vast number of "expendable" young Russians available to Putin, and many more to come, this senseless war could drag on for years. 

So what could put an end to it?

Total victory for one side or the other:

For Russia that would mean completely occupying Ukraine, even if it means doing what they did in Chechnya, nearly annihilate the country. That is probably what it would take for the Ukrainians to surrender as there would be nothing left to defend. 

Total victory for Ukraine would mean a complete withdrawal of Russia from their country, preferably followed by stiff reparations and Nuremburg style war crime tribunals leading all the way up to Putin. In order for that to happen, in the words of one military analyst I heard over the weekend: "Ukraine would have to take Moscow." Not a likely scenario. 

A negotiated peace:

Russia coming to the table would mean concessions from the Ukrainians who would almost certainly be forced to give up territory in the east such as the Donbass, in exchange for peace. The Ukrainians are unlikely to go for that as they have no interest in seeing their country torn apart but mostly because there would no guarantee there would be no more invasions in the future. 

Putin drops dead.

That would certainly be the most appealing scenario, although as an old Russian friend who lived there during the time of the Soviet Union always told me, "There will always be someone waiting to replace him..." Then in classic Russian fatalism he would add, "...probably someone worse."

In other words, be careful what you wish for.

For Putin's part, this past Tuesday he delivered a rambling speech to his country, the Russian version of the State of the Union Address. He brought up the usual same ol' same ol', about how the West is the real aggressor in this conflict, how we started the war, how our "liberal totalitarianism" is really the culprit, yadda yadda yadda. Then he brought up another evil that I wasn't aware of: how the Church of England is now advocating for... are you ready for this?... a gender-neutral God.

 

Shocking.

 

More importantly, Putin made it abundantly clear that all these things are worth fighting against and being the valiant culture warrior he is, he has no intention of giving up before he is finished ridding his nation of all those nasty threats and influences. 

Now I don't know much about the gender of gods but apparently Putin's god has a penis.

I would beg to differ about the other stuff however. As Joe Biden correctly said in a speech from Poland, just hours after Putin delivered his speech, the West has no intention, nor did it ever, of invading Russia. That would certainly be foolhardy. 

Perhaps the best summation of Putin's war is the following, found on a poster in Ukraine and recently repeated by U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at a meeting of the UN Security Council last September:

If Russia stops fighting, there will be no war.

If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine. 

There you have it; that's why the Ukrainians fight, and that's why we support them.

 

It doesn't get much simpler than that.

We Will Never Forget, or have we already?

Today as I begin writing this, just to give you the reader a sense of how long it takes to write these blasted posts, it is May 4. I mention that also to point out that today, May 4, is Star Wars Day. 

May the Fourth be with you, get it? 

And I mention that to say while listening to the radio this morning as is a part of my normal routine, Morning Addition on NPR to be exact, I came in on a bizarre piece on the movie Star Wars, where the reporter talked about the movie in a strange, robotic voice. Come to think of it I thought, maybe it was an actual robot, it's kind of hard to tell these days.

As I missed the intro to the piece, to answer that burning question, I went to the Morning Addition page of the NPR website, and discovered the piece was actually the original NPR review of the original 1977 Star Wars movie (or Star Wars IV: A New Hope, if like my children, you were born during or after the prequel era), made by their film critic at the time, Tom Shayles.

The web page reminded me of some of the other stories I heard this morning. One was about the late American artist Jean-Michele Basquiat, and another about NASA planning to return Mars rocks to earth and the possibility of bringing alien life back with them. On the web page I discovered other stories I missed, or at least didn't pay attention to, one about a Stradivarius violin up for auction that is about to bring in beaucoups bucks, and another about a Nebraska family who called the police "after they heard a noise upstairs." Haven't the slightest idea.

If you happen to be reading this in the distant future, that is to say, after the current news cycle, the big story of today is the leaked majority opinion of Justice Samuel Alito, probably signaling the Supreme Court's overturning of the landmark Roe vs Wade decision of 1973. Overturning precedent and taking away established rights that people have enjoyed for almost a half century is no small deal, not to mention the chaos that will follow in the ruling's wake. The issue reasonably dominated the airwaves today as it no doubt will for quite a while.

I dealt with the issue of abortion in this space after the appointment of Justice Amy Comey Barrett in 2020.

What I found strange about today's Morning Edition page is that you had to dig deep through the lineup of stories they covered today to find anything about the war in Ukraine when just a few days ago, this war all but dominated the airwaves, as well as the print and cyber media.

That discovery left me with even more questions about it than I had just yesterday. One of them is why should I be appalled that we were subject to news about Star Wars and things that go bump in the night in Nebraska rather than the war? The other question is that of all the hideous acts of inhumanity happening all over the world all the time, what exactly is it about Ukraine that seems to touch our hearts so much in the West more than the others?

I can answer the last question, at least for myself in one word: Bucha.

Like Oak Park or Evanston, Illinois, Bucha is, or was, a suburb of a major metropolis (Kyiv). I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois and currently live a couple blocks from Evanston. Up until a couple months ago, the people of Bucha were going about their lives just as we do here, going to work, taking their kids to dance class, walking their dogs, doing the grocery shopping, in short, all the mundane things we do every day and take for granted. 

The tragedy of Bucha has been so widely covered, I don't need to describe the unspeakable barbarism that has taken place in that town since Putin's criminal war started to go bad for the dictator's much over-rated army. In fact, I wouldn't know where to begin or think I could even bring myself to write about it. But in case you need a reminder, here's one.

I look at stories like this, then look at my family and think to myself, that could be us.

Chicago has a large Ukrainian community, even a neighborhood called Ukrainian Village. I have Ukrainian friends and while I've never been to Ukraine, I have been to Russia, three times. My father was Czech and his daughter, my half-sister Eva is currently living amongst Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic. There is quite a bit of familiarity for me with that part of the world. 

For those of us in the West, the tragedy of Ukraine hits home in many ways.

In other words, we can relate.

It grieves me to say that because atrocities like the one that took place in Bucha and the rest of Ukraine are not unique or even rare. Yet we hardly give most of them the time of day because they happen in what for us are remote places that in our minds, see the pain, hardship and suffering of war on a regular basis. And it's that constant reminder of pain and suffering around the world that forces us to take a break from it every once in a while, just as we're apparently doing with Ukraine now.

Perhaps it is right then, to step back from this war if just for a moment, and reflect upon and grieve for the people of Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Sudan, The West Bank and Gaza, and all the other parts of the world too numerous to mention here, that bear witness to war crimes and depravity of all sorts on a daily basis. 

Which brings me to my next question: what inspires soldiers to commit horrendous atrocities against civilian non-combatants including the elderly, small children and their mothers?

Russian soldiers have a long, well-deserved reputation for doing just that. It is speculated that the bad behavior of Russian soldiers throughout the ages stems from historically incompetent and corrupt leadership in their military. It is said that rank and file members of the Russian military are treated like cattle by commanders, little more than cannon fodder. If that is true, and I suspect it is, it stands to reason that if soldiers are treated like animals, they will behave like animals. It's also speculated that the Russian people themselves have for so long been mistreated and abused by their leaders, that an almost pathological acquiescence to authority has become part of the national psyche. The following is from an article on the war crimes committed by the Russians in Ukraine found on a website devoted to the American Military:

The blind obedience of Russians is evident not only in the Russian military but also their population at large. It has been pounded into them since birth, producing a compliant and docile bio-robot that does as ordered, regardless of whether it is immoral or illegal.

Perhaps there might be something to that. 

OK what then explains the My Lai Massacre? I'm old enough to remember the aftermath of the most horrific incident that took place during the Vietnam War that was ever made public.

On March 16, 1968, an American infantry company was led into an assault of a Vietnamese village, Song My, a place suspected of harboring, aiding and abetting enemy combatants (the Viet-Cong). One of the small communities within Song My was a hamlet named My Lai. The order given by commanders was to destroy the village and everything inside it. 

When the American soldiers came upon the hamlet, they found no trace of Viet-Cong fighters, hardly any weapons, nor any men of fighting age, just elderly people, young women and their children. Among the soldiers, there was some disagreement over the interpretation of their orders, but the order was clear as a bell to the lieutenant who led them into the town. He commanded his men to kill everyone in the village. It was no simple execution; many of the victims were raped and tortured before they were killed. The systematic violation and killing of the inhabitants of My Lai went on for several hours; there are even reports that in the middle of it all, the soldiers, members of Charlie Company, took a break for lunch before resuming their orgy of rape, torture and murder.

In case you don't remember My Lai, think I am exaggerating or even relaying fake news, here is an account of the My Lai Massacre from a website devoted to preserving and defending the culture of the United States Army, which pulls no punches in describing the atrocity.

And here is the account of one of the few heroes of My Lai, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson who was piloting a helicopter above the hamlet when he witnessed the slaughter first hand. Thompson landed his craft between living villagers among the corpses of their family members and neighbors in a ditch, and the U.S. servicemen hoping to finish them off. He got out of his craft to tend to the survivors and ordered his men to fire upon their fellow servicemen if they tried to interfere. Thompson, his crew and the crews of a couple other helicopters summoned by Thompson, managed to fly out a handful of survivors of the massacre to safety. 

No one knows exactly how many Vietnamese civilians were raped, tortured and murdered in cold blood by the Americans that day, but estimates range somewhere between 300 and 500, comparable to the number of residents of Bucha raped, tortured and murdered by the Russians.

Officer Thompson immediately reported the actions of his fellow servicemen to his superiors, and they to theirs. Every step of the way up the chain of command, officers, including a 31 year old Major Colin Powell, did everything in their power to whitewash the report. 

It would take the efforts of another helicopter crewman, gunner Ronald Ridenhour who after his tour of duty, began a letter writing campaign to President Nixon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several U.S. congressmen, detailing the carnage he observed (he was not present at the time of the massacre), and personal interviews he conducted with witnesses and participants in the event. Most of those letters as well proved fruitless. Only three legislators, Mo Udall and Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Edward Brooks of Massachusetts, paid heed to them. 

Udall brought the issue to the attention of the House Armed Services Committee, who passed it on the the Pentagon.

Once the news became public, nearly two years after the event, the Army backpedaled and court-marshaled 14 officers and enlisted men, most of the officers being charged with the coverup. Only one conviction resulted out of all that, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., the officer mentioned above who took the command from his direct superior to mean kill all those present. Calley was sentenced to life in prison but that sentence was reduced after then President Nixon ordered a re-opening of his case. He ended up serving four years of house arrest before being paroled. Calley at this writing is still alive. Despite apologizing and expressing sorrow for the fate of his victims, many of whom he personally killed, to this day he refuses to take full responsibility, claiming he was just following orders. To anyone with a sense of history, those words should send a chill up the spine. 

If Calley is to be believed, who then is responsible? I'm not a veteran, much less a veteran of combat. As disgusted and appalled as I am by all this, I find it difficult to pass judgement on soldier-perpetrators of war crimes. Please hear me out. My question is this: are war criminals average human beings who commit deplorable, evil acts after they themselves have been witness to and victims of the horrors of war, or are they simply deplorable, evil human beings who use war as a pretext to commit those acts? 

I reckon those questions can only be answered by these men themselves and their maker. If they belong to the first group, that is to say, those with consciences, the ones lucky or perhaps, unlucky enough to have survived the war, have to account for their actions as long as they live. For the others well, I suppose they'll just have to hope for the best when they die. 

The real perpetrators of war crimes, are those who wage war in the first place, the proverbial old men who send young men off to kill and die in their wars.

My last question of the day (as you can probably guess, not the same day as the day I started writing this piece), is why do we as a people keep supporting these old men who send our children into war? We know that Vladimir Putin has no time for a free press and has done his utmost to ban all news in the slightest bit critical of him in his country. Instead, the Russian people are treated to a barrage of articles like this one fully expressing the party line titled appropriately enough: "What Should Russia Do With Ukraine?" The article answers that question by urging more of what we saw in Bucha, expanding Putin's brand of terrorism to all parts of Ukraine. If you're interested, here is the article in its original Russian without the extra commentary. 

But is the lack of an objective press an excuse for ignorance?

As I pointed out in my last post, it's impossible to have any idea of how many Russians (if any) truly support Putin's war. I think one might safely assume that a good number of Russians have enough critical judgement to reject articles like this one outright as pure rubbish. One hint is the fact that in an attempt to portray Ukrainians as Nazis, in an article running about 2,500 words, the word "Nazi" appears either alone or embedded in another word 89 times. One could read an entire history of World War II and not encounter the word that many times. Not to mention that the article has a rather suspect interpretation of history that could be refuted by an eight-year old child.

It wouldn't be far-fetched to assume that a good number of Russians do support Putin and his war, despite knowing full well his public explanations for it are unadulterated bullshit. Look at this country. In the November 2020 election, more people cast votes for Donald Trump than for any other candidate in the history of American presidential elections, with the exception of course of Joe Biden that same election. They voted for Trump despite knowing that he pledged during his presidency his unending loyalty and allegiance to Putin and his regime. They did it despite his attempts at extorting Volodymyr Zelenski, threatening the Ukrainian president by tying the sale of much needed arms to Ukraine in exchange for his obtaining dirt on Biden. When he was impeached for that undeniably brazen and illegal act, his supporters claimed it was merely a political "witch hunt" to discredit their man.

Then more than a year after the election, a good number of his supporters still cling to the belief without a single shred of evidence, that Trump actually won the 2020 election. And they continue to support him despite the fact that he tried to overthrow our government by leading an insurrection in a desperate attempt to remain in power.

Unlike Russians, we Americans cannot use the excuse, at least not yet, of not having access to all sides of the story. 

The moral of all this is that people will believe anything they want to believe.

That is the scariest part of all.

Inconvenient Facts

This is a continuation of my previous post, if you haven't read that yet, you can find it here if you like.

Or if you don't like, I'll sum it up for you.

That post was about a story centered around the American singer Pete Seeger that has been circulating around the web for a bit. The story has Seeger defying the authorities in Francisco Franco's Spain in the early seventies when they demanded he not sing a number of his songs at a concert planned for Barcelona in front of an audience of over 100,000. So he didn't sing any of those songs. Instead he invited the crowd to sing (as the authorities never mentioned anyone else singing them), while he accompanied them on his banjo.  

It would be a terrific story if only it were true. 

I so wanted it to be true that for a while I ignored my original doubts about its credibility, namely that Seeger, a long-time critic of the Franco regime, would have been allowed to perform in a massive venue during the regime in Spain in the first place. But those doubts got the better of me and I found out from reliable sources that could be backed up, that Seeger did perform in Spain during that period, only to much smaller crowds. And not in Barcelona where his performance there, planned for a small college, not a soccer stadium as the story claims, was shut down by the police. 

After the death of Franco and his totalitarian regime, Pete Seeger returned to Barcelona where he did perform in front of many tens of thousands of people. 

And it's very likely that he did at some point in his career, in defiance of some authority or other, invite his audience to sing his banned songs instead of him. 

So the story while itself not true, was woven together with bits of pieces of actual facts. 

Then I summed it all up by saying in the big picture, at this late date it hardly matters. No harm, no foul, the story only contributes to the legend of a remarkable man. 

I ended the post with this bit of a cliff hanger: "on the other hand..." 

END OF SUMMARY,

Here is the other hand:

Our world is coming apart at the seams helped in great part by false narratives, misinformation, and outright lies. The cause of the criminal insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year was the outright lie of a president who insisted without evidence, that an election was stolen from him. More devastating, Vladimir Putin has the support of much of the Russian people because of the lie he created surrounding his invasion of Ukraine. 

Much like the Pete Seeger story, Putin's lie weaves together disparate facts in order to create a false narrative. Here are some indisputable facts:

• Ukraine was once part of Russia and later, the Soviet Union.
• Ukraine has shown great interest in joining the European Union and NATO.
  
• There are Russians living in Ukraine.
• There are Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine.
• The United States supports Ukraine in its current struggle against Russia.

And here is Vladimir Putin's narrative based upon these facts which he is selling quite successfully it would seem, to the Russian people:

• Ukraine is not a legitimate independent nation with a culture of its own, but a historic, integral part of Russia.
• As a member of NATO, Ukraine, bordering Russia, would be a threat to the security that country.
  
• The minority Russian population living in Ukraine is oppressed by the "so called" Ukrainians.
• Ukraine is under the rule of Nazis.
• Since The United States supports the government of Ukraine, it follows that the United States is supporting Nazism.

Therefore, Putin's war, (not "special military operation" as he insists on calling it), according to this reasoning, is not an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, but a mission to first, give back to Russia what is rightfully theirs, second, to remove a direct threat to the national security of Russia, and third, to liberate the oppressed Russians living in Ukraine from U.S. backed Nazis. Depending upon whom Putin is talking to, not necessarily in that order.

If you buy into that argument, you might have a credible case for Russia's grievances, if not the war, and certainly not the barbaric actions of its soldiers that we've seen in the recent weeks. 

However the first two bullet points I listed of Putin's can only be called pure nonsense, I dealt with them in a previous post. And to the best of my knowledge, there is no credible evidence of point number three, that the Russian minority living in Ukraine is in any way oppressed.

Much of the world is scratching its head in incredulousness over point four. 

Volodymyr Zelensky the president of Ukraine is Jewish, therefore how can Ukraine be led be Nazis? 

While also not true, this is where it gets a little tricky.

My guess is that like my original skepticism over the Pete Seeger story, this paradox is not an obstacle so much as a rhetorical speed-bump in the minds of most Russian people. 

I don't think it's too much of a reach to say that if the average non-Jewish Russian today thinks about The Holocaust at all, he or she would put it in context of the Russians' own suffering. In other words, the number of Jews who died during the Holocaust, roughly six million people, is less than one quarter the number of Russians who died during World War II. One may argue that the Russian casualties are not quite the same as they were casualties of war and not the result of a deliberate act of genocide. This is a naive argument. Hitler had a "final solution" in mind for the Slavic people of Eastern Europe as well, he just never had the opportunity to carry it out. 

Small wonder the Russians call World War II, "The Great Patriotic War."

Given that, it should come as no surprise that the accusation of "Nazi", is particularly triggering to the Russian people, just as it is to the Jewish people.

Ukraine's relationship with the Nazis is more complicated. Ukraine which had been under the hegemony of various countries for centuries, became a part of the Soviet Union in 1922. In the thirties, a great famine, known as the Holodomor, spread through the Soviet Union, and Ukraine was hit particularly hard, losing up to five million people due to starvation. To this day there is not a consensus among historians as to whether that disaster was caused by a combination of bad weather and horrendous decision making in regards to food distribution by the higher ups in Moscow, OR a deliberate attempt by Joseph Stalin to eradicate the troublesome Ukrainians. If the latter is true, which it may very well be, then it would be counted as one of the gravest acts of genocide in history.

As some say: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," so it's probably not surprising that when the Germans marched into Ukraine in 1941, they were met by many of the locals as liberators. 

This from a 1981 New York Times article on the German invasion of the Soviet Union:

Across the years, German soldiers recall those first weeks of the invasion as a halcyon time  ...when villagers in the Ukraine - an intensely nationalist, even separatist, region - came out with bread and salt in the traditional Slavic welcome.

It was on the outskirts of Kyiv days after its capture by the Germans in September of 1941, where one the most horrific single atrocities of the war, (that's really saying something), took place. It is known as the Babi Yar Massacre.

Shortly after the Germans took Kyiv, Soviet secret police bombed several buildings occupied by the Germans in the city. The Nazis used that act as a pretext to slaughter the Jews of Kyiv. The executions took place in a ravine just outside of the city, called Babi Yar. Nearly 34,000 Jews were shot and buried there over a period of two days. Once the Jews of Kyiv were gone, those killing fields continued to be put into service for the disposal of people with mental handicaps, the city's Roma population, Russian prisoners of war, and other human beings the Nazis declared undesirable. After the Russians retook Kyiv from the Nazis, they estimated the total number of people killed at Babi Yar to be 100,000. 

If you can stomach it, here is a detailed account of the massacre of Babi Yar.

To be sure, the massacre was the act of the Nazis, but its horrific efficiency could never have been accomplished without the cooperation of numerous Ukrainian collaborators. The same can be said unfortunately about similar atrocities that took place in other countries occupied by the Nazis.

The most inconvenient truth of all is that hardly any country in the world, including the United States, (who built its own concentration camps to deal with some of its citizens), has clean hands in regards to grievous abuses of human rights committed during those terrible times. 

Much of the three quarters of a century that followed World War II has been devoted to a reckoning of what was done and what was not done during that conflagration, and every nation involved in that struggle has had to come to terms with its own acts of commission, omission, or both. 

Along with the fervent chant of "never again" heard out of the mouths of the civilized world, the term "Nazi" has for good reason, come to symbolize the absolute worst the human race has to offer. 

Some people disagree.

In my life, there have always been Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the United States. Until recently however, they were considered fringe groups and often the butt of jokes including this one, a clip from the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers. 

Consequently, most Americans of that particular mindset, kept it to themselves, lest they be the subject of derision and worse, ridicule.

But the last administration declared open season on the public display of hatred and racism, and since then a significant number of individuals came out of the woodwork to publicly proclaim their devotion to Adolph Hitler and his degenerate cause. Symbols of hate groups such as the Nazis and the KKK began to pop up regularly in the United States, and people were no longer laughing. 

The Ukrainians have not been laughing at neo-Nazis for much longer. The ultra-nationalist, populist right wing party Svoboda (Their official name in Ukrainian: Всеукраїнське об'єднання «Свобода») was founded in 1995, not long after the breakup of the Soviet Union. They are against immigration, free trade, globalism, and a slew of other issues close to the hearts right wing extremists across the globe. Recruitment of skin heads and their use of Nazi iconography early in the group's history led many to rationally surmise that the party was neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic to the core. Although of late there have been attempts to soften the group around the edges by kicking out avowed Nazis, Svoboda (which means "freedom" in most Slavic languages) still espouses extremist right wing-nationalist views.

As does the Azov Battalion which to this day does little to hide its ideology, including their official symbol which bears an unmistakable resemblance to that of the Waffen SS. The ultra-nationalist Azovs came to the forefront in 2014, the beginning of the current hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, fighting against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. The group has been financed in part by Ukrainian oligarchs, including some of Jewish descent. As quite the effective fighting force, the Azov brigade has been controversially integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. 

Until Putin's most recent invasion, Svoboda, the Azov Battalion and other groups of a similar mindset, had been most conspicuous during the celebrations of the birthday of Stepan Bandera, one of the most controversial figures in Ukrainian history. Bandera was a staunch nationalist and leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a terrorist group that collaborated with the Germans against the Soviets at the outset of the Nazi occupation of the USSR. In addition to being sympathetic to the German invasion as a means to liberate Ukraine from the Soviet Union, the OUN under Bandera's influence also shared the Nazis' views on the Jewish people as the prime instigators of Bolshevism, and were active participants in the persecution and murder of the Jews of Western Ukraine. 

The group hoped to set up a German-friendly, independent Ukrainian state with Bandera as its leader, something along the lines of the Vichy government of France. But the Germans had no interest in an independent Ukraine and when the OUN's usefulness waned after the Jews had been wiped out, they arrested Bandera, sending him for a brief time to a concentration camp, only to release him in 1944, hoping that by doing so they could again garner support from the Ukrainians as they were retreating from their massive defeat at the hands of the Soviets.

Bandera survived the War and settled in Munich where he continued his work against the Soviet regime including working for a time with British intelligence. He was assassinated by the Soviets in 1959.

In Ukraine, Bandera in some circles is celebrated as a great patriot and national hero, while in others, denounced as a fascist war criminal. The parades that celebrate his birthday where celebrants display their full regalia of Nazi inspired paraphernalia, have been condemned the world over, as well as by President Zelensky.

They also provide fodder for Putin and pro-Putin commentators, including those on the extreme American right, to prove the influence of Nazis in Ukraine.

Another inconvenient fact, while ultra-right-white supremacist groups represent the views of a small portion of the Ukrainian population, they are nonetheless on the front lines, currently fighting to save their country along-side their countrymen who find their views repugnant.

So why would President Zelensky condone the presence of these groups in positions of power in his country?

Well think of it this way, if your house was on fire, would you weed out firemen who arrive at your doorstep based upon their political ideology?

Putting it another way, virulent ultra-nationalists who are willing to kick ass and even die for their cause are kind of good to have around when your country is being ruthlessly attacked. Perhaps in the future when the war is over, everybody can get together and work out their differences, or not. But in Ukraine, there may be no such future. There is only the present.

If it weren't all so tragic, it would be laughable that Putin and people like his valuable American mouthpiece Tucker Carlson are denouncing neo-Nazis in Ukraine while Putin's army is currently committing acts of depravity against Ukrainian civilians that would make real Nazis quake in their boots.

But the tragedy of Putin's criminal war doesn't stop at the Russian-Ukrainian border. Look at this photograph:

Leonid Savin with his family. Photo provided to the New York Times by his brother.

Countless photos like this exist everywhere in the world, documenting a family sending one of their own into military service and an uncertain fate. As such these families are filled with pride that their loved one will be bravely serving their country, yet trepidation that they may never see him or her again. You can see all those emotions in the faces of Leonid Savin and his family in the picture. This particular family probably had less trepidation than most as their son and brother who was conscripted into service, was to serve on the biggest, baddest ship afloat in the Russian Navy, its flagship, the invincible missile cruiser Moscow, or if you prefer, Москва, (Moscva).

If you remember, the Moscow was involved in one of the first salvos of the war. On the first day of the invasion, February 24, the Moscow and a patrol boat attacked Ukrainian territory, tiny Snake Island on the Black Sea, population 30, protected by 13 border guards.

Russian sailors aboard the Moscow radioed the guards demanding they surrender in return for their safety. 

Silence.

Again, from the Moscow in what sounds like a quite literal translation:

Snake Island, I, Russian warship, repeat offer: put down your arms and surrender, or you will be bombed. Have you understood me? Do you copy?

To which the response, in a more liberal translation was:

Russian warship, go fuck yourself!

True to their word the Moscow opened fire on the island. It was originally reported that the guards were all killed in the strike, but it has since been revealed that they survived the attack, (putting to rest more misinformation), captured, then later returned in a prisoner exchange. 

But the phrase, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself", has become the mantra and rallying cry for the Ukrainian people in their time of anguish.* Ukraine even issued a postage stamp with the image of the Moscow at sea in the background, while in the foreground, a solitary soldier gives the ship the one finger salute.

Another bit of joyous news to everyone who like me is on the side of Ukraine in this most stupid of wars: today, the mighty Moscow, pride of the Russian Navy, sits at the bottom of the Black Sea, most likely the victim of a Ukrainian missile attack. 

On the flip side, and there is always a flip side in war, Leonid Savin and an unknown number of his crewmates went down with that ill-fated ship.

The Kremlin reported that the entire crew of the Moscow successfully abandoned ship before it sank. But families of the crew, desperately awaiting news of the fate of their loved ones, were given conflicting information. According to the New York Times article I linked to above, in the case of Savin's family, a crewmate originally contacted Leonid's mother and told her that he saw her son perish as he was helping another crewmate escape the flames. The same crewmate later changed his story and said Leonid was caught in an explosion. A third communication came from the sailor who, said, never mind, no one knows what happened to Leonid, he's just missing. 

Like all pathological liars, Vladimir Putin instinctively lies, even when it is not necessary and does not serve his purposes. The official Kremlin explanation for the loss of the Moscow was that a fire aboard the ship ignited an ammunition magazine, setting off several explosions. They denied that the ship was hit by Ukrainian missiles, a vastly more likely scenario. Now I suppose admitting a successful enemy missile strike would expose a vulnerability in the Russian Navy's defense capabilities. But claiming the catastrophe was self-induced, exposes a much more serious vulnerability, gross incompetence and negligence on the part of their commanders, and a grave failure of the fundamental operational and architectural design of their fleet.

We've been told the reason why so many Russian people are behind this war is because they have been force-fed misinformation, false narratives, and outright lies coming out of the Kremlin, while having all news from outside sources blocked from them. The truth is there's no way of knowing how many Russians support the war or indeed if any of them do. Imagine living in a country where you can be sent to prison by simply suggesting that Mr. Putin's "special operation" is a war. Then you get a call out of the blue from a stranger who says he's "conducting a poll" on people's opinion of the situation in Ukraine. Need I say more?

The Russian people are nothing if not suspicious, skeptical and cynical by circumstance, and given that many Russians are publicly livid, demanding revenge on Ukraine for sinking their battleship, it's pretty clear they're not buying all of Putin's lies, just the ones they choose to believe.

Meanwhile the families of the crew of the Moscow are still looking for answers as are the families of the estimated 40,000, (40,000!) Russian service members who have been killed, injured, captured or are MIA in Putin's latest war. 

Every one of those casualties of course has a story to tell like Leonid Savin, who for his part didn't believe in this war and in his last letter to his family, expressed deep concern for the palm tree he planted in his family's garden before setting off on his final journey. 

Those soldiers, sailors and their families deserve a full account of what happened to them and why. Obviously, so too do the people of Ukraine whose country has been raped, pillaged and plundered by Russia under Putin. But Putin has neither the will, the balls, nor the decency to be accountable to his own people, not even to those whose loved ones gave up their lives in his name, let alone to the people of Ukraine. 

Which makes me grateful to live in a society where our leaders are held accountable for their actions, at the very least every four years at the ballot box. 

As Winston Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." We may or may not be willing to fight and die for our democracy, but if we care about it, the least we can do is completely reject misinformation, false narratives and lies, even, check that, especially the ones that appeal to us, as they are the enemy of democracy.

Furthermore we must do our utmost to stick to reason, good judgement, critical thinking and especially facts, even if they happen to be inconvenient ones, as they are the mortal enemy of so called "strongman" dictators like Putin and all those who want to be like him.

Most likely, accountability for Vladimir Putin won't come until the day someone, perhaps he himself, puts a bullet through his head. 

Our system is better. 

Sorry to be so blunt. 

But goddamnit, Leonid Savin was only twenty years old, a year younger than my son whose face I see every time I look at that picture of the young sailor. 

So yeah, it's kind of personal.

 

* After publishing this I learned that the phrase "Russian Warship, go fuck yourself" has been adopted by Russians as well. I learned this from the latest episode of the NPR program "This American Life", created, produced and hosted by Ira Glass. You can listen to the episode here.  The portion in question is "Act Three: Alyona and Oleg" but I highly recommend listening to the whole episode.

And So It Goes...

Nearly six years ago, on September 3rd, 2009, I wrote this post observing the 70th anniversary of the declaration of war against Germany by France and Great Britain, marking the beginning of the greatest human-initiated calamity in history. In what seems to be the blink of an eye, we are now about to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which officially took place on September 2, 1945 when officials of the Imperial Government of Japan signed the documents of surrender to Allied officials aboard the battleship USS Missouri.

The defeat of Germany in April of that year meant the eventual defeat of Japan seemed inevitable by the summer of '45. Just how eventual was anybody's guess at the time. On August 6th and August 9th of that year, the United States dropped two atomic bombs, one over the city of Hiroshima, the other over Nagasaki. Nobody knows for sure but most likely around 130,000 human beings perished either as a direct result of the blasts, or because of disease caused by nuclear fallout, something that was not completely understood at the time. Facing the prospect of the annihilation of their country, the Japanese government, still with their Emperor at the helm, agreed to the Allied terms of surrender.

The only thought more horrible than the devastation resulting from those two weapons of mass destruction, is the contemplation of what most likely would have happened had the bombs not been dropped. In the works was a massive invasion of Japan by Allied forces who freed from the conflict in Europe, could now concentrate their efforts in the Pacific. By August of 1945, the list of Allied nations ready and willing to participate in the invasion included the Soviet Union who had just reneged on their non-aggression pact with Japan. Conservative military assessments of the operation, anticipated the loss of one to two hundred thousand Allied personnel in the invasion. Less optimistic planners put the number closer to one million. For the defense of their island home from an attack they knew was coming, the Japanese were in the process of assembling a civilian militia to augment their military which had been severely depleted in the war. Estimates of civilian losses by the Japanese government in the event of an invasion, were in the neighborhood of twenty million.

Given the carnage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it may seem trite, even cruel to suggest that those two attacks actually saved lives, but the numbers are difficult to ignore. In the years that followed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world became fixated on the horrific fate of the victims of the nuclear attacks. While it is entirely appropriate to remember the appalling destruction of the two Japanese cities and their people, those attacks must be looked at within the broader context of the war. Many cities in Japan and Germany had already been bombed with Allied incendiary devices which set off massive, horrifying fire storms. Literally hell on earth, those fire storms consumed everything in their path, including people seeking shelter in air raid shelters, burning them alive. In Tokyo alone, 100,000 people perished in these attacks. Had the United States not developed the atomic bomb, and perhaps more significantly, displayed the will to use it, death by incineration would have been the fate of several more Japanese cities and millions of their inhabitants.

There are many alternate scenarios that critics of the bombings believe might have ended the war without reverting to the use of the deadliest, most indiscriminate weapon to date. Some argue that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war would have been enough of an incentive for the Japanese to surrender. Some suggest that deploying the bomb over a non-populated area would have been enough to convince the Japanese to throw in the towel. Others say that while the first attack on Hiroshima may have been justified, the second on Nagaski was entirely unnecessary and amounted to nothing more than premeditated, cold blooded, mass murder. These are all justifiable arguments based upon speculation, but little evidence.

After the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan remained resolute in dictating the terms of its own surrender. These included no foreign occupation of Japan, Korea or Formosa, and Japanese control of their own disarmament, demobilization, and prosecution of war criminals. Not surprisingly, the terms were not accepted by the Allies.

We can speculate until kingdom come but by the beginning of August, 1945, it was obvious to everyone that the cost of ending the war, whatever it would be, was going to be appalling. What everyone does agree upon is that after the United States dropped the bomb, the world was never the same. We may have won the war in the most efficient way possible in terms of loss of life, but it may have come at the cost of our moral credibility. The United States remains the only nation that has used an atomic weapon against human beings.

In the years following the war, weapons became more deadly and indiscriminate. Soon the richest nations of the world, at least those on the winning side of WWII, all developed their own nuclear weapons. Former allies became enemies, each equipped with the means to destroy the other. Some felt, erroneously of course, that this nuclear stalemate would mean the end to all war as the threat of mutual annihilation would encourage negotiation at all costs over hostility. In reality all it meant is that the superpowers neutralized each other while smaller nations, breakaway republics or even renegade groups of radicals without a nation, learned how to subvert traditional rules of warfare, undermining the big powers who were understandably loathe to use their most lethal weapons. This happened to the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and to the United States again in Iraq.

Unfortunately, with our sophisticated technology we still haven't been able to make war obsolete. Ironically, the more sophisticated the weapons became, the less effective they were. As we have seen recently, our most effective and terrifying adversaries are people whose weapons could have been found in the Middle Ages or earlier. They are people who are willing to violate all sense of human decency, are wholeheartedly devoted to their cause, are not afraid to die.

And all of our superior technology and firepower is powerless to stop them.

So what  have we learned from the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Not much I'm afraid.